For reasons I cannot fully articulate, even to myself, one of my favorite things ever in life is the (relatively) little-known 1965 French-Italian film, The 10th Victim (La decima vittima) starring Ursula Andress and Marcello Mastroianni and directed by Elio Petri. I have movie posters, lobby cards and various pulp paperback books with different great covers (Part of my fascination with the film, obviously, has to do with Ursula Andress—at the absolute height of her considerable beauty here—that much I do know…)
 

 
The plot (clearly the “inspiration” for The Running Man) revolves around the reality show assassins of “The Big Hunt,” a wildly popular futuristic TV spectacle sponsored by the Ming Tea Company of Japan. For five hunts you are the killer, for five hunts the victim.
 

 
To win the tournament, the assassins must complete ten kills, but they never know if they are the hunter or the victim. The Andress character’s kills are elaborate—one of them was even ripped-off for an Austin Powers movie—and she becomes the most popular of the contestants. Her kills are used as TV advertisements for the Ming Tea Company and she wants her tenth killer to be a spectacular one.
 

 
Next up is Mastroianni’s character, Polletti… or is he? You can’t kill the wrong victim, you see, or else you lose.
 

 
You can’t kill the wrong killer in preemptive self-defense, either, or else you lose. What if she is to be his victim? Neither of them know for sure, so of course they have an affair!
 

 
The SpyVibe blog calls The 10th Victim a “cocktail of groovy music, op art, pop art, space-age fashion, and modern design.” It’s not even that The 10th Victim is all that good of a film (say, a “six” out of a possible “ten”) but man does it LOOK GREAT. If you’re into things like Danger Diabolik, Fathom, Modesty Blaise or the “Matt Helm” or “Flint” movies, this might be for you. Although not an over the top “funny ha ha” kind of comedy, The 10th Victim is a fun, campy feast for the eyes that was a decades-before-its-time satire of reality TV and our violence-obsessed mass media.

You could also see it was an elaborate metaphor for male-female relationships and the battle of the sexes. I’m pretty sure that part was intentional, especially when Marcello’s mistress helps Ursula’s character—who is fucking him—to stalk her philandering lover. How dare he three-time her!
 

 
The soundtrack to The 10th Victim was one of my “Holy Grail” records for many years before I was generously gifted with a copy by Pizzicato 5‘s Yasuharu Konishi when I was visiting Tokyo back in 1994. The score by Piero Piccioni is one of my favorite film scores of all time, consisting as it does of an incessantly repeated loopy organ motif and “la la la la” scat singing by the great Italian singer Mina. Piccioni thought this would sound like jazz in the future. I think the maestro was right:
 

 

 
Below, the original trailer for The 10th Victim.
 

 
The entire film is online at Daily Motion. Blue Underground have released The 10th Victim on Blu-ray which is the way you really want to want this puppy…
 

 
Here’s my short piece for Boing Boing’s Mind Blowing Movies series:

After reading over the other entries in Boing Boing’s Mind Blowing Movies series, I couldn’t help feeling a little embarrassed that I was unable to think of even a single film that I felt had truly blown my mind. Works of art, music, weird science, books of philosophy, sure, ideas have blown my mind, but when I try to mentally flip though the catalog of my favorite films, or ones that I quote from the most often, or what have you (Female Trouble, Valley of the Dolls, Putney Swope, Ken Russell’s Isadora Duncan: Biggest Dancer in the World, Head, Richard Lester’s criminally underrated Petulia) I still wouldn’t file any of them as particularly “mind blowing,” just as movies that I happen to really, really like.

When Mark sent out the invite to contribute, I confess that I immediately drew a cinematic blank, but there was one film that that didn’t necessarily “blow my mind,” per se, in the same way that the other participants here have expressed it in their posts, but it did fundamentally alter my mind, or at least it did something to immediately change my perception of the world around me, in the sense that there was a before & after aspect when I watched it. Accordingly my anecdote will be short and sweet.

When I was a 7-year-old kid in 1973, What’s New Pussycat? the quintessential sexy 60s comedy “romp,” aired on ABC’s Movie of the Week and I watched it in the basement of my parent’s house on a cheap black and white TV set with a rabbit-ears antenna with balls of tin foil crunched at the tip of each branch. The picture quality was comparable to a security camera. Why I was watching What’s New Pussycat? sitting alone in a damp, crappy basement or even interested in this particular film in the first place at that age, I couldn’t tell you, but I am guessing I wanted to watch it because I liked the theme song, sung by Tom Jones (I owned the 45rpm on Parrot Records) or else simply because Peter Sellers was in it.

In any case, the pivotal moment for me happens at about 120 minutes into the film when Swiss bombshell Ursula Andress suddenly drops from the sky and parachutes into Peter O’Tootle’s convertible. I can vividly recall my eyes growing wider and wider and feeling what you might call a “stirring” in my loins as I stared in utter amazement at the most gorgeous creature I had ever seen in my short life. I was completely astonished and transfixed by how beautiful she was. I had never before seen a woman who looked quite like that and the sight of this blonde goddess strongly implied to me that there was something that I might be missing out on…

It was at that precise moment the proverbial light-bulb went on over my head about what the whole “big deal” with girls must be all about. That such a creature as Ursula Andress existed indicated that there were more of them out there. Suddenly there was meaning in my life and something to aspire to. I made a mental note to move to Switzerland as soon as I grew up.

By the end of the film—which being a comedy made in 1965 only hinted at the things that were going on offscreen—the mechanics of procreation seemed rather obvious to me.

After that brief “Aha!” moment, the world around me started to make a whole lot more sense…

Mind Blowing Movies (Boing Boing)

In the clip, Ursula Andress drops from the sky to tempt soon-to-be-married Peter O’Toole in What’s New Pussycat? to the tune of Dionna Warwick singing “Here I Am.”
 

 
For reasons I cannot fully articulate, even to myself, one of my favorite things ever in life is the (relatively) little known 1965 Italian film, The 10th Victim starring Ursula Andress and Marcello Mastroianni. I have movie posters, lobby cards and various pulp paperback books with different great covers (Part of it has to do with Ursula Andress, that much I do know…)
 

 
The plot (clearly the “inspiration” for The Running Man) revolves around the reality show assassins of “The Big Hunt,” a wildly popular futuristic TV spectacle sponsored by the Ming Tea Company of Japan. For five hunts you are the killer, for five hunts the victim.
 

 

To win the tournament, the assassins must complete ten kills, but they never know if they are the hunter or the victim. The Andress character’s kills are spectacular (one of them was even ripped off for an Austin Powers movie) and she becomes the most popular of the contestants. Next up is Mastroianni’s character, Polletti… or is he? You can’t kill the wrong victim, you see, or else you lose.

Or is she his tenth victim? Neither of them know. So of course they have an affair! It’s not even that it’s that good (it’s really not) but man it LOOKS GREAT and the soundtrack was one of my “Holy Grail” records for years and years before I was generously gifted with a copy by Pizzicato 5‘s Yasuharu Konishi when I was visiting Tokyo in 1994. The soundtrack by Piero Piccioni is one of my favorite film scores of all time, consisting as it does of a single, incessantly repeated loopy organ motif and “la la la la” scat singing by the legendary Mina. Piccioni thought this would sound like jazz in the future. I think he was right.

Below, the trailer for The 10th Victim. If you speak Italian, the entire film is online at YouTube. Blue Underground have released The 10th Victim on Blu-ray DVD.