Just by chance, and on assignment for my various taskmasters, I sat down over the last two days to an unintentional triple-feature of films shot by the late Italian cameraman Riccardo Pallottini.   

Based on a novel by Leslie Edgley (aka Robert Bloomfield), Dog Eat Dog (1964) was produced with West German and Italian money on location in the former Yugoslavia, with American actors Jayne Mansfield and Cameron Mitchell heading an international cast.  Pallottini’s camera work was often marked by a seductive fluidity that rarely called immediate attention to itself but aired out the claustrophobic settings of cash-strapped European B-films.  Pallottini works a charm with this set-bound crime caper, an odd hybrid of Key Largo (1948) and Sunset Blvd. (1950), keeping close to the dramatis personae as their collective greed and paranoia drives them to the brink of double-aught madness.   

War Between the Planets (Il Pianetta Erante, 1964) was the third of director Antonio Marghetiti’s “Gamma I” quartet of space operas filmed for Italian television but released theatrically.  Also known as Planet on the Prowl, the installment is arguably the series’ weakest link, lacking a tangible villain and spending too much time in cramped interstellar quarters.  Nonetheless, Pallottini’s stealthily prowling camera gives the static proceedings a sense of life that greatly augments the trippy, eye-popping visuals.  It was with Margheriti that Pallottini found his most lasting fame.  The pair first worked together on The Fall of Rome (Il Crollo di Roma, 1962), but as the popularity of sword-and-sandal films waned, Margheriti and Pallottini turned their hands to the Gothic horror films patterned after the example of the United Kingdom’s Hammer Studios, the cheap spy knockoffs of the popular James Bond series and the spaghetti westerns made in the wake of the success of Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1963).  The horror films represented the duo’s best work, particularly Castle of Blood (Danza macabra, 1964) and The Long Hair of Death (I Lunghi capelli della morte, 1964), both starring the iconic British expatriate Barbara Steele.  Into the 1970s, Pallottini went where the money was, trekking into the jungle for Deep River Savages (Il paese del sesso selvaggio, 1972) and taking it to the streets for such high caliber poliziotteschi as Steno’s La polizia ringrazia, 1972) with Enrico Maria Salerno and Stelvio Massi’s Convoy Busters (Un poliziotto scomodo, 1977) with Maurizio Merli.   

The Last Hunter (Il ultimo cacciatore, 1978) was Margheriti's answer to the vogue for Vietnam films, purporting to be a sequel to Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1988).  Its success guaranteed a follow-up, for which Margheriti dragged Pallottini back into the Philippine bush.  On the last day of principal photography for Tiger Joe (Fuga dall'archipelago maledetto, 1982), Pallottini was shooting his own second unit photography when the aircraft in which he was a passenger clipped a coconut tree and crashed into a small cemetery near Luzon.  Margheriti mourned the loss of his friend and colleague for twenty years, celebrating a mass each year on Pallottini’s birthday until his own death  in 2002.  Riccardo Pallottini’s passing marked the end of an era and effectively closed the door on the glory that was Italian exploitation filmmaking. 

Dog Eat Dog and War Between the Planets are currently available in handsome DVD transfers from Dark Sky Films, who have announced The Last Hunter as an upcoming title.