When I belatedly joined the Facebook generation only last month – after some persistent goading on the part of my female best friend at work, I might add – I soon came across my old Venetian friend (and Jess Franco authority) Francesco Cesari. I still have fond memories of when, in September 2004, my twin brother and I met him on the eve of the 61st Venice Film Festival and, again, at the very end of that unforgettable fortnight when he took us to his house on the mainland. Apart from the inescapable Jess Franco sample, Signor Cesari was kind enough to introduce us to the work of the late Portuguese film-maker Joao Cesar Monteiro, for whom he also expressed great admiration. In the interim, I have managed to acquire two films of the director's via the precious weekly late-night Italian TV programme "After Hours" – RECOLLECTIONS OF THE YELLOW HOUSE (1989) and SNOW WHITE (2000) – but, actually, I have yet to watch either of them. Even so, when I chanced across a "You Tube" link to the 3-minute short under review (on, appropriately enough, Mr. Cesari's "Facebook" page) – where it was described as "one of the best shorts in the history of cinema" no less! – I knew the time had finally come for me to check one of my Italian friend's idols. Of course, apart from the sheer brevity of the thing itself, another significant element that drew me to it now was the titular allusion to Nicholas Ray's 1954 oddball Western classic. Since I am in an anecdotal frame of mind, I guess I should also mention another hyperbolic recollection of mine that involves JOHNNY GUITAR – when, virtually a decade before I actually watched the film, my English teacher in college had named it "the single greatest Western ever made"! But I am digressing here: Monteiro has his silent protagonist walk the streets at night, register into a hotel, enter his room and open a window that looks over another apartment in which a lonely woman is brushing her hair on the bed as the unmistakable voices of Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden blast out at full volume from her TV set. Against this backdrop, the man paces around his hotel room smoking and, before long, day breaks over the horizon. An utterly simple storyline – almost so slight that I considered awarding the film half-a-star less – but, what disarms any potential criticism regarding lack of substance, is that such a heartfelt tribute to a great but doomed American film-maker has been conveyed this effectively in so little time...to cite the Oscar-nominated song from Nicholas Ray's last official Hollywood film, 55 DAYS AT PEKING (1963).
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