This all-too little-known Italian genre film – is there even a “cult” out there for this sort of thing? – is a dizzying and dazzling gem (yes, there’s a pun in there). The curiously-titled A Hyena in the Safe, a literal translation of the film’s original Italian title, Una jena in cassaforte, is bursting with Pop art eye candy and bristles as a high-camp crime-thriller masterpiece that outclasses such bloated fare of the period as Candy (1968) and Myra Breckinridge (1970).
I first saw Hyena on YouTube (long since taken down), and it garnered my immediate attention and affection. I ended up picking up a grainy grey-market version of the film that looks like a TV grab. On my copy – where the opening nighttime carnival scenes are pretty hard to make out – the film’s trailer looks many times better and sharper than the actual film itself.
The film so bewitched me that I wrote about it, years ago, begging or challenging those who might rescue such a treasure (another pun) – Arrow? Vinegar Syndrome? Synapse? 88 Films? Kino Lorber? – to consider tracking down an original copy of the film and offer more viewers a chance to catch this wild ride of cinematic glory.
It turned out that none of these beloved purveyors of European cult cinema wound up bagging the Hyena.
Rather, it was a relative newcomer to the physical-media home-video market that took up the challenge, Celluloid Dreams. Launched in 2023 by film preservationist Lukas Henkel, Celluloid Dreams had already released stunning 4K Ultra HD editions of Giuliano Carnimeo’s The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972) and Aldo Lado’s Short Night of the Glass Dolls (1971).
(They say they’re currently at work on a highly-anticipated high-definition transfer of Paolo Cavara’s masterful 1971 giallo The Black Belly of the Tarantula.)
The California-based company is obviously not set up to flood the market with sought-after cult releases. “Our goal is entirely quality-focused,” said Henkel at the label’s inception. Their selection of films suggest not only that they care about what they do, but that they care about how they do it.
In addition to the richly vibrant and superb transfers from the original film negatives, Celluloid Dreams offers classy and attractive packaging, a diverse set of extras, including interviews with both the filmmakers and film experts and – to this viewer’s exceeding appreciation – terrifically compelling commentary by Lukas’s dad, the German-American video game designer Guido Henkel.
While A Hyena in the Safe is not being presented as a 4K Ultra HD, for some reason, it is a very welcome as a Blu-ray disc, featuring a new, fully restored high-definition transfer of the film from a studio-supplied master.
After stealing a cache of diamonds from Amsterdam eleven months earlier, a group of thieves gathers at an Italian villa – during Carnival, for some reason – to each retrieve their share of the loot. The diamonds are stored in a safe (submerged under water, for some reason) that can only be opened by each of the thieves’ keys – which were presumably exchanged for their cut of the jewels…for some reason.
When one of the thieves fails to produce his key, discord, mistrust and murder ensue. At that point, about thirty minutes in, the film’s plot kicks into high (camp) gear. So does the body count.
Imagine a post-heist Modesty Blaise (1966) or Topkapi (1964) type thriller that combines the comic-book touches of Mario Bava’s fumetti Danger: Diabolik (1968) with the murderous impulses of Bava’s later Agatha Christie-inspired giallo Five Dolls for an August Moon (1969). That pretty much sums up the plot of Hyena – but tells nothing of the style and presentation of this wacky, yet hypnotic adventure.
Slick and sometimes just plain silly, Hyena even beats the baroque animal-themed Italian film titles spurred by the popularity of Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970). But Hyena is closer in spirit, or ambition, to those Italian films of the period that upped the ante with an arty, even experimental edge, such as Guido Questi’s Death Laid an Egg (1968), Elio Petri’s A Quiet Place in the Country (1968), Federico Fellini’s “Toby Dammit” segment of Spirits of the Dead (1968) and Piero Schivazappa’s The Laughing Woman (1969).
Each member of the cast is pitch perfect in performance – and, of course, their flamboyant cartoonish villainy. We start with “Klaus from Hamburg,” played by Stan O’Gadwin, a menacing Aryan-type that crosses the patented intimidations of Curt Jürgens with Patrick Magee. Then there is “Carina, from Tangiers,” played by Karina Kar, in for Omar, who we are told is “in hiding.” Carina plays, however ineffectually, to the European witchy and bewitching types seen in the Italian films of Barbara Steele.
Afterward, we meet “Steve, from London” (Dmitri Nabakov – who is none other than “Lolita” author Vladimir Nabakov’s son, an erstwhile opera singer, racecar driver and, later, overseer of his father’s legacy) and not “Thomas, Dutch,” who lost his share of the booty in an unseen poker game (cleverly suggesting Ian Fleming’s “Casino Royale”) to “Juan, from Spain” (Ben Salvador, who seems like a cross between such Brits as Oliver Reed and Monty Python’s Terry Jones) – playing to a pervy stereotype of the swarthy predator.
We also meet the dandy playboy drug-addict “Albert, from Marseille” – the handsome Tom Brady-lookalike Sandro Pizzachero, billed here as Alex Morrison – with his supposed “fiancée” Jeanine (Cristina Gaioni), a dead ringer for Monica Vitti in Modesty Blaise. There are many reasons to believe these two are not, as they say, engaged to be married – but it all just goes to show that no one here is to be trusted or believed.
Nothing, however, prepares you for the brilliant Maria Luisa Geisberger as Anna. From the moment she steps (ever so provocatively) into the picture, literally in to a hall of mirrors (recalling the relevant The Lady from Shanghai [1947]), she possesses the film. As Boris’s “widow” – or whoever she is – this femme fatale commands the attention of the cast and viewers alike – from the very moment she (literally) struts on to the stage until the bitter, dizzying end.
Remarkably, Ms. Geisberger and much of the rest of the cast were not regular film actors. A Hyena in the Safe is among these actors’ only credits. (Pizzachero would go on to do a few other Italian cult-classics, including So Sweet, So Dead [1972] and The Teenage Prostitution Racket [1975]). If that suggests hacks or sub-par acting, it shouldn’t. All deliver great – if deliberately over-the-top – performances.
Added to that colorful cast of characters, there is a man in a helicopter calling himself “The Boss,” occasionally circling the villa (the historic Villa Toeplitz in Varese, Lombardy, Italy), loudly demanding – for all the neighbors and partygoers (i.e. witnesses) to hear – “my half” of the loot. And then there is the seemingly kindly old man, Callaghan (Otto Tinard) who mysteriously turns up at the villa – after Albert’s death -acting as sort of the gang’s accountant, or something.
Perhaps the expert performances are a credit to director Cesari Canevari (1927-2012), known elsewhere for directing the first Emmanuelle film in 1969 and later sleaze-fests such as The Gestapo’s Last Orgy (1977) and Killing of the Flesh (1982). Canevari’s direction here is superb. His actors deliver scintillating performances. And even when things slow down (Albert’s drawn-out withdrawal and, later, the garage drowning, for instance), there is an element of style that always comes to the fore.
Canevari co-wrote the dialog-heavy script with Alberto Penna, an obscure writer whose one of two other credits is on a later Canevari film, Il romanzo di un givane povero (1974), also among director Luigi Cozzi’s earliest writing credits. Despite all the patented lies and verbal histrionics, very little of interest is said – although getting rid of three of the main protagonists before the movie even starts is a very clever conceit: no one knows who anyone else is.
What makes Hyena worth seeing, however, is what is on the screen: the outrageous fashions, the outlandish make-up (the diamond faces prefigure one of the bejeweled baddies in the James Bond film Die Another Day [2002]) and the stunning villa, replete with observatory, pool dome and temple fountain. Not to mention the attractive actors – who take up a good deal of screen time.
All of this is captured by the little-known cinematographer Claudio Catozzo, whose few films were mostly directed by Cesari Canevari. Here, the camera is so busy, it almost serves as another character in the film. Catozzo’s restless eye darts between people and objects like a cat studying the room. Sharp jump cuts and reverse zooms (the opposite of what Bava and Fulci were doing at the time) give the editing a sort of staccato tempo. And the aerial shots give a superb sense of the vultures circling.
Some of Catozzo’s camera work here, though, is terrifically bonkers, like when one character is hidden behind the propped-up feet of another. The person with the feet seems “directed” to separate their feet, so as to reveal the other character. At these moments, it’s as though the camera accidentally goes somewhere it shouldn’t – like in front of a bubbled glass wall that suddenly distorts the people on the other side – but it turns out that’s exactly what Catozzo wanted all along.
Naturally, there is a comic-book sensibility here. But we don’t get the odd camera angles or punchy calibrations of “Batman” or the exquisite compositions and brilliant miniatures of Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik (1968). Here, Catozzo delivers a deliriously dynamic filmic version of a static page brought to life. It’s like a 3-D movie without the 3-D glasses.
Among the film’s best shots, however, are surely Anna’s grand entrance, literally in a hall of mirrors; the camera as it tracks a moving drinks cart (about 21 minutes in); the jeweler Callaghan’s spirit-of-death entrance; a “Get Smart”-styled sequence of Anna going through doors and passage ways (about 45 minutes in); the blue-light bar chat between Klaus and Juan; and Anna’s remarkably lengthy Mata Hari routine (52 minutes in), where the camera eroticizes her every move…without eroticizing her.
Perhaps the most dazzling scene of all is the penultimate scene, where madness becomes a dizzying kaleidoscopic fever dream of diamonds and demons. All of this makes Hyena absolutely watching. But make no mistake; it’s anything but subtle.
A Hyena in the Safe’s score and earworm-y main theme come courtesy of the revered Gian Piero Reverberi (b. 1939), who is best known for “Last Men Standing” (a.k.a. “Nel cimitero di Tucson”) from the soundtrack to Django, Build a Coffin (also 1968), which was also sampled by Gnarls Barkley for their hit “Crazy” – also featured in more than a few films and TV shows.
This film’s main theme, what they call a “shake,” seems at odds with the film’s murder plot, which is, though, not too far away from Piero Umiliani’s equally earwormy “Five Dolls for an August Moon” theme. While the repetitive, wildly-overplayed “Hyena” theme seems to undercut the ominous gathering of thugs, it is, however, playfully perfect for the film’s campy comic-book tone (consider, too, both John Dankworth’s more elegant “Modesty Blaise” and Umiliani’s funkier “Baba Yaga”).
Reverberi provides several nice “tension” cues, one even suggesting the “Get Smart” theme. And there are the clever, though maddening, scenes where a gong – and, later, a manic piano – “break the fourth wall” by going from the apparently non-diegetic (music the viewer hears) to the diegetic (music the film’s cast hears)…for some reason. It’s campy, even cliché, but effective.
Just like the rest of the movie.
The Celluloid Dreams package of A Hyena in the Safe features a new and very welcome high-definition restoration, transferred from the studio-provided (!) master tape and a bevy of exciting extras, including the obligatory commentary by Guido Henkel.
Other extras here include such featurettes as the 51-minute “7 Guests for a Massacre,” capturing interviews with director Cesare Canevari and actor Sandro Pizzochero as well as contemporary fans Ninì Della Misericordia, Adriana Morlacchi and Diego Pisati; the 25-minute “Schrödinger’s Diamonds: The Duplicitous Mystery of Hyena in the Safe,” a video essay by Andy Marshall-Roberts; and the eight-minute “The Mysteries of Villa Toeplitz,” highlighting the remarkable locations where the film was shot.
Whatever your tastes in film or cult cinema, if any of the above captures your curiosity, then A Hyena in the Safe is absolutely worth the effort. It must be seen to be believed!