Film Screening: Kill!(Kill Kill) @ Library of Congress
August 2, 2008 by Svetlana 
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| August 8, 2008 | ||
| 7:00 pm |
free
http://www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/pickford/pickford-current.html
Friday, August 8 (7:00 pm)
Kill! (Procinex - Este Films - ICAR - Dieter Geissler Film Produktion, France/Spain/Italy/West Germany, 1972). Dir/Wrt Romain Gary. With Stephen Boyd, Jean Seberg, James Mason, Henri Garcin, Luciano Pigozzi, Memphis Slim, Curd Jürgens. (113 min, color, 35mm)
Emily Hamilton (Seberg) is a bored housewife of Interpol agent Alan Hamilton (Mason). That is until the day she becomes entwined in an international conspiracy after finding the trunk of her automobile filled with corpses while in Italy. Frightened and a bit excited, she turns to stranger Brad Killian (Boyd), an unorthodox vigilante, a man who lives only for bloody and brutal deaths of all drug smugglers. Clad in just a matching leather pants and jacket ensemble (a.k.a. shirtless), Brad wanders through Afghanistan and other exotic climates filling drug dealers and porn peddlers with eyefuls of his chest hair and stomachs full of lead. This is much to the chagrin of Emily’s husband, despite the fact that he also has a sanguineous work ethic (the film begins with Alan shooting a man point blank in the face with a shotgun). The attitude is morally corrupt, the violence is gratuitous, the corpses are un-countable, and most other exploitation devices are used in an over the top and absurd manner (10yr heroin addicts from upper-class homes in London, for example).
Kill! (or as it is also known, Kill, Kill, Kill ) is the brainchild of writer-director Romain Gary. Gary, the only person to win the literary Prix Goncourt twice, was the husband of actress Jean Seberg. Gary’s previous film, Birds in Peru (Les Oiseaux vont mourir au Pérou), was the first film to be given an “X-Rating” by the MPAA. The unique cinematography is by Edmond Richard, whose work includes Orson Welles’s The Trial (1962), Marcel Carné’s La Merveilleuse Visite (1974), and Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). Producer Alexander Salkind would go on to produce such classics as The Three Musketeers (1974), Superman (1978), and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Rainbow Thief.
Kill! is a very hard movie to find, let alone see in a theater. The Library of Congress is showing a completely un-cut and beautiful 35mm print. (JS)
