Mr. Sleeman Is Coming

     The Million

     I sought Jayne Mansfield, I found Jayne Mansfield on Amazon Prime.  Einer frisst den anderen (One Eats the Other) from 1964, a German-Italian-Liechtensteiner co-production; also known, blandly, as When Strangers Meet, and, savagely, as Dog Eat Dog.

     Filmed in South Africa and Yugoslavia, but taking place mostly on some Mediterranean island, the film begins with saxophone, piano, drums, Jayne Mansfield tossing cash into the air, lying and wiggling on a bed in a nightie, laughing and happy, bathing in money of high denominations, licking the bills, kissing them.  Meanwhile, Cameron Mitchell runs for his life, chased by a car driven by Ivor Salter, a laughing maniac, delighting in terrorizing the fleeing man, cornering him repeatedly, showing him his pistol, laughter violent and unhinged from any kind of civilized behavior.  He lets him go, only to chase him down again, threatening with the pistol.

     These three have robbed a bank, Salter has killed a guard, a million dollars meant to be sent back to the United States for destruction is essentially getting fucked by Jayne Mansfield.  

     A hotel manager, Swiss actor Pinkas Braun, who's quite good in the film, deduces the bank robbing identities of Jayne and Ivor.  The pair rent a boat to take them to Turkey.  The manager's sister Sandra stows away on the boat while her brother, the hotel manager, takes his own boat after the robbers, joined by a pissed off Cameron Mitchell, who survived Ivor's shove into the sea from a considerable height.

     They all converge on a villa owned by a weird organ-playing, dying elderly woman.  She's attended to by a meddlesome creep who resembles Donald Pleasance.  Cameron conceals the million in cash in a grand piano, freaks out when the attendant plays, smashes his fingers with the hinged keyboard cover.  

     The group is there long enough for murders to begin.  Ivor gets garroted, the bald attendant gets his own knife in his chest, the hotel manager burns to death on a rocky beach as he tries to escape with the money bag.  Cameron saves the bag but it somehow ends up with the manager's sister, Sandra.  She attaches the packets of bills to her slip, wearing her dress over the million.  

     Cameron goes utterly berserk trying to find the money, ransacking the villa, ripping up a bed in one scene and leaping into it, just his shoulders, neck, and head sticking up.  He looks in places the money couldn't possibly be, like in a coffee cup.  This vandalism exceeds in length and ferocity Charles Foster Kane's ripping up Suzan Alexander's room in Citizen Kane.  It's the greatest cinematic trashing of rooms I've ever seen.  Mitchell's performance, in fact, comes across strikingly.  He doesn't even look like himself for one thing.  Cropped hair, face covered in dried blood from his earlier near fatal encounter with Ivor, he looks like a man who just won't take a shower until the job is done, dammit!  

     His final confrontation with Sandra, who gets his gun, ends with an epic attempt on Cameron's part to get the money, stumbling over rocks, getting shot three or four times, counting out loud and yelling to Sandra the decreasing number of bullets in the gun he loaded.  He struggles with Sandra on a precipice above the sea.  They go over into the water, money fluttering everywhere, prompting a just arrived Jayne Mansfield to wade out, grabbing up money, oblivious to the arrival of cops who have finally tracked down the bank robbers.

     Jayne Mansfield is GORGEOUS in this film.

     Is this a good movie?  It's certainly not wholesome.  Most of the characters are nuts.  They all assume their lives will be fabulous once they've secured the money.  Instead, they go mad.  Five of them die by violence.  That the million dollars was supposed to be destroyed in America adds irony.  Money past its term, expired.  The characters fight over something destined for imminent non-existence, thus worthlessness, their own lives made worthless in their quest.

     One thing occurring to me as I watched: I figured I'd someday watch the film again before it leaves Amazon Prime, where's it's titled Dog Eat Dog.  The quick-moving story causes key details to flash by.  Cameron Mitchell's berserk search for the money makes the film worth watching all by itself.

Vic Neptune