Flight Of The Innocent

A boy (Manuel Colao) caught in the crossfire of a Sicilian family feud flees to Rome, where his skirmishes with the Mafia continue. Carlos Carlei’s pretentious and arty American-style thriller, an Italian-French coproduction featuring not many thrills but lots of grandiloquent grandstanding, was understandably dismissed by European critics when it showed at the Venice film festival. But over here it won the director a Hollywood contract. Could the slow-motion, blood-spurting deaths a la Peckinpah be responsible, or is it the burnished gold hue of Raffaele Mertes’s cinematography? Or, better yet, the cackling villains and ethnic-cleansing ambience of compulsive tribalism? As in the case of Lina Wertmuller and Heaven’s Gate, the Europeans appear to be right; with Jacques Perrin. (JR)

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