MPoricus Cinema Blog (?!): Carnal Circuit AKA Femmine Insaziabili (1969)

Seeing that the fun guys at the Giallo Ciao! Ciao! podcast had put out an episode about the 1969 Italian-German erotic crime thriller that sometimes bears the English title of Carnal Circuit, I decided to watch the movie while doing my various chores about the country estate where I currently reside.  Watching this left-wing attack on the United States and capitalism, an epic on how the power of the market economy--the lure of fame and money--can corrupt even the most stalwart members of the educated and enlightened creative classes, I felt like I was in college again and blocked out an essay on the film in my head, a rough draft of which I have decided to type up here.

(Acquiring a legitimate copy of Femmine Insaziabili or Gli Insaziabili or Mord im schwarzen Cadillac or whatever you want to call it, with English dubbing or subbing, is not necessarily easy, but if you search around you can find such a copy to watch online for free--at least you could a few days ago.  The movie is full of naked attractive women and rough fetishistic sex, at least the print I saw was, which means it has charms as an exploitation flick as well as a Marxist propaganda piece, but you might not want to watch it at work or with the kids.  Oh yeah, my blog here is full of spoilers, so if you haven't seen the film and plan to, and want to enjoy the multiple surprises and twist endings, don't read any more.)

Carnal Circuit centers on two characters, Italian men of--when they were back in Italy!--high character, Giulio the architectural draughtsman and Paolo the reporter.  Giulio is active in the struggle of the labor unions against big business and Julio will do anything for a friend--even for a stranger!  But then Giulio's wife wins a contest put out by a big American manufacturer of soaps and toothpaste and other consumer chemical products.  The prize is a free trip to California!  Wifey doesn't go; instead Giulio does.  Giulio is smart and good-looking, and when he gets wined and dined by the chemical company people, who do a whole publicity campaign around Julio the visitor from Italy, they fall in love with the guy and find that using his irresistible Mediterranean mug* in their advertising has lead to an increase in sales!  So they hire him to be their full-time spokesman!  Demonstrating how America makes immigrants abandon their roots and become fake phony frauds, Julio Anglicizes his name and gets a dumb nickname!  And demonstrating how the advertising world and big business chew people up and spit them out, the full-time spokesman Julio is replacing kills himself!

*I'm sort of kidding here--I think the actor portraying Giulio may be German.

Lefties hate advertising, their theory being that capitalism uses advertising to create demand for products that people don't really need.  Choosing as the evil corporation in their picture a firm that makes toothpaste and soap is appropriate; when I was at Rutgers I had a leftist professor who told us that before the 19th century there was no mass market for products like soap and deodorant, that people were not bothered by how each other smelled, and that via advertising big business introduced to people the idea that they smelled bad and needed to spend money on products like cakes of soap.  (You'll also remember how American socialist Bernie Sanders decried the vast supply of resources being devoted to the manufacture and marketing of deodorant, he suggesting that that energy should be used to help the poor or the environment or something.)  A manufacturer of stuff like toothpaste is doubly appropriate because it demonstrates to the audience how America is a shallow society obsessed with surface appearances.*

*This element of the film is interesting because in grad school in New York City I knew Germans and Scandinavians who had spent time in Italy and they were of the opinion that Italians are more fashion- and image-conscious than Americans. 

Life in America turns good lefty Giulio into an absolute jerk who treats everybody like crap.  He (apparently) dies in a car crash, and Paolo the reporter investigates, thinking that his buddy was murdered by the chemical company or one of its big shareholders.  There is a whole convoluted plot concerning a diary Giulio kept with important information about the company, as well plot threads about how a bunch of different women tried to seduce Giulio or were seduced by Giulio and these same women now want to get their mitts on Paolo.  This is a leftist movie but not a feminist movie--besides all the female nudity and scenes in which men dominate women sexually in one way or another, and all the scenes of grasping and cruel American women manipulating men, the movie suggests that women's lust for money and status is what drives the market economy, is what makes men go along with capitalism.  After all, a bunch of [heterosexual] men hanging around together don't waste their time and money worrying about how white their teeth are and how nice their armpits smell--men take that stuff seriously only in order to impress women.

The narrative is presented all out of order with lots of flashbacks, as Paolo learns about Giulio's American career and change in character.  The climax is an action sequence at Sea World in which we learn that Giulio was not murdered--he murdered some other guy and used the corpse to fake his death so he could steal a pile of money before the chemical company fired him or a jealous woman murdered him or something.  Shots of beautiful and majestic killer whales in tiny pools, performing for the public to make money for a big corporation, symbolize how beautiful and talented Giulio was taken out of his home environment of Italy and used by a big corporation to make money--and Paolo is doomed to the same fate!  After Giulio dies in Sea World, Paolo has the chance to return to Italy and have a healthy relationship with an Italian woman, but instead he opts to get mixed up with the chemical company and the manipulative American women who are its chief shareholders because he thinks they can help him further his career as a writer! 

I don't take Carnal Circuit's attacks on the United States or the market economy very seriously, but the fact that the film has a strong central argument and pushes that argument in multiple ways makes it compelling, and because leftist values are shown to be defeated in the end, lefties shown to be hollow hypocrites with feet of clay, the film has more of the feel of a tragedy than a crude propaganda piece--the people that made this thing really put some thought into it.  All the soap opera relationships and the high volume of exploitative sex and violence also keep the movie from feeling like agitprop.  So, if you are interested in gialli, noirish films with doomed protagonists and femmes fatale, European perspectives on the land of the free and the home of the brave, or would like to see some photography of late 1960s California, Carnal Circuit is worth a look.