The Flying Saucer - Il Disco Volante

I am a fan of Bad Movies.  But only of a certain type.  I have little tolerance for hackneyed plot lines, cardboard characters and so forth.  No, for a movie to really capture my imagination it has to be Inexplicably Bad.  So Bad it is surreal, leaving you to wonder if the film makers were totally clueless or were playing some 3 dimensional chess and going full meta with a message far beyond the peculiar things happening on screen.

Bad Movie fandom is pretty common.  In the old days (forget the modern revival version) Mystery Science Theater 3000 stood at the forefront of this entertainment subculture.  Now the best place to enjoy it is Red Letter Media, although they do indulge in the vulgarity of modern culture just a bit too much for my tastes.

This is all by way of introducing you to what I have always considered the Worst Movie I have ever seen, a strange creation called Il Disco Volante....The Flying Saucer in the original Italian.  Recently I had an unexpected reminder of it and in the process of following up on it I learned some things that now - disappointingly? - help make sense of it.

It was some time in the late 1960's or at most early 70's.  There was still this thing called "television" where you had multiple channels.  You switched between them using a device you grasped with your hand and turned.  For you young kids this was called a "dial".  Then as now various channels had their formats.  One liked to run B or C grade movies in the early afternoons on Saturdays.  My guess is that it was in a programming sense a dead spot that had to be filled with anything that could be acquired on the cheap.  Just cue it up.  The station is being run by Bud, he's in the back keeping an eye on the gauges and needles, answering the phone when it rings on rare occasions.  Everyone else was home on the weekends.  Bud had a lonely job, but sat there all day doing it.  In the evening he handed things off to an even lower functionary.  This guy probably drank bourbon during his shift and nobody cared.

One afternoon the offering was an odd black and white movie called The Flying Saucer.  It is the soundtrack that sticks with me.  The most powerful "earworm" my nervous system has yet encountered, roughly half the auditory output of this.....thing...was a repetitive bit of music that sounded like a vaguely Spanish, bull fighting vibe of a march.  It played all the time especially when the troop of Italian policemen tramped about the countryside trying to find people who had seen the reported "flying saucer".  As to the actual plot I can remember only a few details.  The police chief seemed very perplexed.  There was an oversexed Contessa who had one of the aliens at her villa for a while then had her servants throw him down a well just as she had done with the Resistance fighters back in the war years.  The alien was humanoid, dressed up in what would be a poor Halloween robot costume and capable, despite clearly advanced technology, of only feebly waving its arms and legs.  I got the sense that something else was going on......................but what?

Here's a clip I found on Youtube.  It does contain the hypnotic marching music so I suggest you mute it unless you want your brain to also retain it for the next fifty years!

As I said I've done a bit of research now.  The movie was made in 1964.  The original running time was 94 minutes so I don't think what I saw had been weirdly edited down.  It features an Italian comedic actor named Alberto Sordi who actually - a la Peter Sellers - played four different roles.  It was made in the same year as the most famous example of this cinematic form, Dr. Strangelove.  Sellers incidentally made something of a career of doing this.  He certainly did not swipe the idea from the Italians.

The Flying Saucer was meant to be a satire of contemporary Italian society.  The four roles played by Sordi were a dim witted policeman, a miserly accountant, an alcoholic priest, and a decadent nobleman.  Other than the first this all went way over my head.  Even viewing the clip above and now knowing rudimentary Italian it makes no sense.

And I like that.  Despite understanding what the director was going for here I still understand almost nothing else and that is just as it should be.  

Il disco Volante came to my attention after all this time when I learned that Monica Vitti who played the depraved Contessa,  passed away on February 2nd at age 90. She died of Alzheimers and I sincerely hope that the soundtrack of Il Disco Volante was not one of her last persisting memories.