This documentary will show the extremes of human nature. Some of it may well be judged cruel, but it is after all a cruel world and the filmmakers merely present the footage as they find it. They begin in Southern Italy, at a ceremony designed to celebrate the unveiling of a statue dedicated to the silent movie star Rudolph Valentino. The camera seeks out the more sinister faces in the crowd as the statue is revealed and it is a bright blue representation of The Sheik, the star's most famous role. But women are on the look out for Italian lovers all over the world, especially in America...
Cue a staged scene of an Italian man going for a suit fitting and having his clothes torn off by a horde of hysterical American women. As you might expect, Mondo Cane was not as authentic as the filmmakers might have wanted you to believe, although it is still interesting for what it started, probably more than for what it was. We see the effects of this film on television every night, and in the cinemas where the more shocking documentaries are shown, all holding up facets of mankind to criticism or ridicule and the more outlandish then all the better.
Watching the film today, some of it may still be arresting but it drags on for far too long. The title means "a dog's life" and judging by the smarmy narration the scenes where dogs lift their legs on the graves of a pet cemetery pretty much sum up what the attitude here is. That condescending tone is particularly offputting, as if producer Gualtiero Jacopetti had assembled footage from all over the world with the express intention of sneering at it instead of celebrating the rich diversity of the human experience.
And each sequence is taken from diverse sources, with the film jumping around from women chasing men in the tribes of New Guinea to the variety of food (animals, actually) eaten on the streets of Hong Kong to, erm, drunken Germans. Disgusting food is returned to time and again, but we are supposed to judge the supposedly upper class patrons of a Western restaurant serving up ants and beetles as the worst of the lot. The theme, you see, is that we may consider ourselves civilised in Europe and North America yet we are really on a par with the tribesmen of the Third World.
Which is a fair enough point, but there's a freak show aspect to Mondo Cane that overwhelms any pretentions to cultural analysis. All through the film humanity is hypocritical and destructive, claiming to be better than nature while exploiting it. So there are scenes apparently filmed on Bikini Atoll which show the effect on the local wildlife after the infamous nuclear bomb tests where we're supposed to accept that the radiation has made some fish take to the trees and confused turtles laying their eggs, unable to return to the sea. To top it all, after the expected bullfight, we are invited to swallow a tale of African tribesmen building their own airstrip and plane, a "cargo cult" hopelessly corrupted. While some of this is convincing, too much will leave the more cynical modern viewer sceptical. That said, it did gift to the world the song "More", and its huge success has been equally influential on the planet's media, for better or worse.
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