Tutti i colori del buio / All the Colours of the Dark

Following a traumatic car accident in which she lost her unborn child, Jane (Edwige Fenech) and has been plagued by exceptionally vivid – read cinematic – nightmares, invariably featuring a stalker with piercing blue eyes.












Images from the nightmare sequence; note the mechanical doll like qualities of the figure in the third image and the use of "any-space whatevers" without the anchoring points of classical-era / movement-image cinema.

Jane's partner Richard (George Hilton) and sister Barbara (Susan Scott / Nieves Navarro) offer alternative therapies. Barbara favours a therapy and arranges for Jane to see Dr Burton (Jorge Rigaud). Richard, who was driving the car at the time of the accident and thus may have his own issues to contend with, dismisses the psychiatrist as a “quack” and offers Jane medication instead, with Barbara in turn countering by reminding him that he is only a sales representative for a pharmaceutical company and not in any way a qualified professional.




A Suspicion or Notorious style drink?


The Woman in the Window


The sisters; I like the way how Fenech is later done up to look more like Navarro as she decides to visit the sabbat:



On her way home from a visit to Dr Burton, Jane encounters the blue eyed man of her nightmares in the street. Panicked, she bumps into her new next-door neighbour, Mary (Marina Malfatti) and is invited in for a calming cup of tea – a nice touch in terms in making the characters seem as English as the locales – and chat. Jane, however, is keen to get back to prepare Richard's dinner, but does agree to meet up with Mary the next morning.

Jane then receives a phone call from a lawyer, Clay (Luciano Pigozzi), who wishes to see her the following afternoon but fails to provide any other information. Then, glancing outside, Jane thinks she sees her stalker. Cautiously venturing into the stairwell, Jane finds herself locked out, with someone advancing. Thankfully – or suspiciously, depending on your perception of how events are proceeding thus far – Richard emerges from the elevator at just the right moment.

The following morning Jane confides in Mary, who proposed a third, decidedly more unorthodox solution, that Jane should visit a witches sabbat. Despite not knowing what one is nor what it will entail, beyond Mary's explanation that “it's a certain kind of black magic ritual,” Jane is by now desperate enough to try anything and thus agrees to rendezvous with Mary following her visit to the lawyers.

As it turns out, Jane doesn't get very far there anyway: the blue eyed man is there, waiting, and attacks her with an axe. This encounter and the ensuing chase does not, however, prevent Jane meeting Mary (albeit an hour late; “it's not like a cinema when one can walk in any time,” admonishes Mary in a neat little self-reflexive remark) and attending the sabbat thereafter. There is she is disturbed by the animal sacrifice, but nevertheless participates in drinking its blood and in the orgy that ensues as the cultists welcome their new member.







Seamlessly the action shifts back to home, with Jane and Richard in bed:

Darling, no more bad dreams.
Everything's back to normal, isn't it Jane?
Yes, but I feel strange, Richard. I don't feel real

It seems that Mary's cure has indeed worked – after a fashion. But with the neighbour soon thereafter admitting to her own motives for involving Jane with the cult; a book about black magic appearing among Richard's possessions, and an apparent conspiracy between Richard and the blue eyed man, it quickly becomes clear that things are about to get a whole lot worse before they get better.






Note the way the fragmentation of Fenech's image signifies that all is decidedly not well, even immediately after her visit to the sabbat seems to have done its job.

True, the old adage says that it is always darkest before the dawn, but in a context where the dark itself has colours – all of them – that might well be devoid of assurance...

Reuniting the main cast and crew of The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh and Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, this 1972 giallo blends typical filone themes – a traumatic past event; conspiracy; female neurosis etc. – with more overtly supernatural horror themed Rosemary's Baby styled material, to good overall effect.

The screenplay, co-authored by Ernesto Gastaldi and Sauro Scavolini from a story by Santiago Moncada, provides a solid starting point, keeping the viewer guessing as to the nature of the conspiracy throughout and giving director Sergio Martino and his all-star ensemble enough to work with.

Martino handles the suspense and action sequences with typical aplomb, while the assorted nightmare scenes afford him and his team the chance to experiment with unusual angles, kaleidoscopic lenses and jarring edits. It may not be particularly subtle – there is little ambiguity in what the components of the nightmares mean, for instance, especially in comparison with something like Lucio Fulci's not too dissimilar Lizard in a Woman's Skin – but it is effective and appropriate in the context of Mikel Koven's “vernacular cinema”.

Hilton plays Richard with the right level of creepiness, not sufficient to make him an obvious villain, but enough to induce a degree of uncertainty; as when he and Scott are discussing Jane's condition and apportioning blame to one another.

As was often the case, Rassimov has an inherently less interesting role, though never fails to impart the required aura of menace to his appearances.

Of all the performers, however, this is Fenech's film. Though undoubtedly cast primarily on account of family connections as the then-partner of Sergio Martino's producer brother Luciano and for being a stunning beauty with a willingness to display her assets, her dramatic abilities really shine through as the increasingly paranoid and unstable Jane. Indeed, again one feels sorry for the actress and others like her in the Euro-cult world for never being recognised for anything other than their looks; personally I find her performance here more than equal to that of Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby. (Again, before we dismiss the film as simply ripping-off an – admittedly excellent – original, it is worth remembering that the filmmakers have, as with much filone cinema, introduced their own twists, in that Jane lost her baby before any worries about what it might turn out to be, Rosemary's Baby style, could ever arise.)

Elsewhere, Bruno Nicolai's score is another plus. Suggesting Rosemary's Baby early on via a lullaby theme, he elsewhere offers a winning combination of suspenseful and psychedelic themes, the latter again somewhat reminiscent of his work for Jess Franco at times. Whatever the mood to be set, he gets it; a seemingly incongruous lounge piece immediately after Jane's initial visit to the sabbat explicable in relation to Jane's momentarily lighter mood.

Not, however, that All the Colours of the Dark is an unqualified masterpiece.

For starters, the coven plot fails to really convince. Though Jane is presented as desperate, the ease with which she goes off to a sabbat with a neighbour she's only just met is too convenient, as is the timing of that sabbat the vert next afternoon – no waiting until the stars are right for these cultists!

Martino also fails to play fair with the viewer on one important occasion. Whereas the second time viewer can notice the vital detail protagonist Marc Daly does not in Dario Argento's Deep Red, the director having sufficient confidence in his abilities to misdirect the first time viewer by sleight of hand, here a key signifier is simply concealed from our eyes. Then again, it is worth remembering that neither The Bird with the Crystal Plumage nor Four Flies on Grey Velvet exactly plays a fair game – if Martino was not ahead of his rival cineaste at this time, he was not appreciably far behind either.

Another thing that hurts the film, albeit to a lesser extent, are the voices given some of the supporting characters, which come straight from the Dick Van Dyke / Eliza Doolittle school of Cockney elocution and thus serve to break the otherwise convincing sense of Londonicity – to pretentiously appropriate a concept from Roland Barthes – accomplished elsewhere.


Kenilworth Court, SW15 as it appears in the film


... and today

Still, in the final analysis these are relatively minor issues in what otherwise emerges as an enjoyable, effective blend of giallo and horror that sees everyone concerned – Fenech above all – at or near the top of their respective games.

Cold Eyes of Fear / Gli Occhi freddi della paura

Respectable lawyer Peter Flower (Gianni Garko) picks up Italian prostitute Anna (Giovanna Ralli) at a London nightclub and takes her back to his uncle's town-house. They soon discover the body of butler Hawkings – who was supposed to have left, Peter having telephoned to inform him of wanting to be left alone – and worse. For a gunman, Quill (Julian Mateos), is waiting.

Peter's Uncle, Judge Baddell (Fernando Rey), telephones about a case they are working on, affording the younger man the opportunity to attempt to convey the danger of the situation in a coded form.

When a policeman turns up at the door shortly afterwards with a note, Peter thinks that he and Anna are saved. But the policeman, Welt (Frank Wolff) is in fact, bogus and in league with Quill, whom he has convinced the house contains a safe filled with valuables. Welt himself, meanwhile, is motivated by a desire for revenge on Baddell, whom he blames for his 15-year prison sentence...

Also known as Desperate Moments – a title that (over)emphasises the Desperate Hours like nature of the piece – this Italian-Spanish co-production is the kind of giallo that raises interesting questions of the generic label. While undoubtedly qualifying in the broader, literary sense of the term by virtue of being a thriller, it lacks many of the typical characteristics of the giallo film.


The on-screen title of Desperate Moments

The opening sequence, in which a scantily clad woman is menaced by a knife-wielding attacker, then seems to consent to his advances, then manages to get the knife at stab him, is instructive in this regard, as the camera pulls back to then reveal the presence of an audience and the status of the piece as a nightclub act.






Does the absence of black gloves and white sleeve already indicate that nothing is quite as it seems here?

Be on your guard; do not trust what you are seeing is thus the emphatic message even before characters like the fake cop are introduced as such; this message enhanced by Castellari's distinctively cinematic approach here and elsewhere, with a emphasis upon dramatic angles; jarring edits; zooms; tight close-ups; slow motion; rack focus; cross-cutting and other devices to counterbalance the element of theatricality otherwise inherent to any piece with limited locations and characters.


Is that a J&B I see before me? Early on, Peter comments that his uncle must be Scottish because he hides the whisky. But it soon appears...












Though the production design is generally quite subdued - and thereby perhaps better in conveying the conservative good taste of the judge and his nephew - there does seem a subtle element of yellow running through many of the sets and set-ups.

At the same time a slight over-abundance of fist-fights as the film progresses – most notably an otherwise unrelated gang brawl that prevents a patrol car from calling on the house two-thirds of the way through – also gives the sense that the director would have been more comfortable dealing with straightforward action fare of the western or cop types that make up the majority of his filmography. (Castellari was, after all, also the man first offered directorial duties on Zombie, which he declined in favour of Fulci, at that time just coming off the disappointment of the supernatual giallo Sette note in nero.)


One of Castellari's most striking shots in a film full of them


A reminder that this is the man who did The Big Racket and The Bronx Warriors


"He's just a poor boy, from a poor family" - Julian Mateos in Freddie Mercury mode


Another part of the same psychedelic nightmare sequence

There are also some basic continuity problems with the exteriors, which sometimes switch haphazardly between night and day, as if the filmmakers did not not manage to grab enough location footage on their London sojourn before returning to Cinecittà.

Wolff, Ralli and Garko deliver quality performances. It is harder to evaluate Mateos's contribution on account of the unconvincing Mockney accent his English dubber has saddled him with, while Rey seems a touch underused, being literally allowed to telephone in his lines for much of the film

The cast also benefit from a finely crafted screenplay, credited on screen to Castellari and Tito Carpi but to Leila Buongiorno and José María Nunes's on the IMDB entry. Whoever is responsible - the IMDB can be unreliable with films like this, whose credits in turn are not always to be trusted - they have given the characters more convincing motivations and complex personalities than those found in the typical Italian-Spanish co-production.

Thus, for example, Welt's desire for revenge is overlaid with a strong sense of being made the fall guy on account of his lowly class position, whilst Quill's relationship with his co-conspirator is complicated by his homosexual desires towards him. Consequently, even if the viewer is not necessarily invited to identify with them, he or she at least gets a sense of their reality and complexity. This is all the more so when it comes to Anna, presented as a refreshing antithesis to the conventional tart stereotypes and, arguably, the strongest character in the film.

Here it is also interesting to note some of the parallels between Cold Eyes of Fear and Ruggero Deodato's better-known, nastier - yet ultimately perhaps less effective, precisely because its excesses do not always convince - House on the Edge of the Park. Tracing things through, we find that Buongiorno later collaborated with Park co-writer Gianfranco Clerici on Marino Girolami's Italia a mano armata – Marino being Enzo's father – and was subsequently reunited with both Nunes and Castellari on Sensitività, suggestively retitled in English as The House by the Edge of the Lake and The Last House Near the Lake. (As ever, more information on when the film was released in English under each title and by whom etc. would be instructive.)

Ennio Morricone's partially improvised, free jazz style score is another of Cold Eyes of Fear's plusses. It is not the sort of thing you would necessarily want to listen to for pleasure – tellingly during some early scene setting as Peter and Anna take in the London nightlife the Belinda May theme is used, as the score lacks any lounge or bossa nova cues – but in this context serves to rack up the tension.

The Hardest Working (Wo)man in (Italian 1970s) Showbusiness?

Scanning the credits of many Italian films of the 1970s you are likely to see the name Carla Mancini C.S.C crop up. According to her IMDB entry she appeared in 191 films between 1970 and 77, with no fewer than 51 in 1972 alone.

Yet just try actually identifying who she is, putting a face to the name and initials. It is very difficult, precisely because often as not she is a face in the crowd, or likely appeared in scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor or were never even shot in the first instance.

The key to this lies in those three letters C.S.C. For at the time Italian films were supposed to employ a certain number of centro sperimentale cinematografia graduates and got financial breaks for they did so. If Mancini's credits are anything to go by, it must have been a nice little earner to be in on...


Carla Mancini C.S.C in The Perfume of the Woman in Black, apparently...

Slaughter Hotel

At an isolated clinic in the country, festooned with medieval weaponry and torture implements, a black-clad figure skulks along the corridor before entering the room of a writing, naked patient, Cheryl Hume. But before the figure can strike, she rings the service bell...

Come morning and a new patient is being driven the clinic by her husband. It is for her own good, he assures; a place where she can get the help she needs for her suicidal tendencies.

Meantime, nymphomaniac Anne Palmieri, eyes up the scythe-wielding handyman, while nurse Hilde makes lesbian advances towards the agarophobic Claire and sinister Dr Clay – cynics might say that being played by Klaus Kinski has the effect of making any character sinister – does his daily rounds.

Night falls and Anne sneaks out to a rendezvous with the handyman, narrowly missing a scythe -wielding assassins who then decapitates one of the assassins. Oblivious, Anne takes a shower...

Thus it continues until the presence of a murderer in their midst is belatedly realised and the culprit unmasked shortly afterwards, precipitating a final killing spree that doubles the body count in the space of a few minutes and allowed for some typically opportunistic and tasteless marketing that drew comparisons with the real-life case of Richard Speck.

As a conventional giallo Slaughter Hotel can only be considered a failure. There is not really anyone for the spectator to identify with while the traditional detective element is pretty much non-existent. Indeed the plot synopsis above is instructive in this regard, paradoxically telling you everything yet nothing.

Nor is there any particular motive provided for the crimes. Here it is worth noting that this Slaughter Hotel edit is only one of many, other versions including the English dubbed Asylum Erotica and the French Les Insatisfaites Poupes Erotiques du Docteur Hichcock, suggestive of a line of descent from Spellbound through Freda, perhaps.

Most intriguing, however, is a credit given Heinz Konsalik, a popular German author of medical themed thriller and war novels. While unfortunately I know nothing of his work in general nor Das Schloss der blauen Vögel specifically, they do seem to suggest a stronger raison d'etre for the clinic as a place where rich men can get rid of troublesome wives and a reason for all those implements of death conveniently zuhanden.

What we do get are a procession of sex and murder scenes, interspersed with rather too many flashbacks that singularly fail to advance the narrative but do pad out the running time. The mix-and-match exploitation aspect, meanwhile, is made all the more evident by the way in which the pudenda on display during some of the masturbation inserts here are all too obviously not those of the performers listed in the credits. As Tim Lucas has pointed out Rosalba Neri, who plays the nymphomaniac, has an operation scar visible on her stomach in one scene which is then conspicuously absent from the other lower body on display in the harder material.

Such moments also remind us of how easy it can be to over-analyse the cult films. One could well imagine a reading of this fragmentation of the female body into a succession of parts here as being all about male fetishism, disavowal, castration anxiety and so on, to which a putatively feminist full body erotics would then be contrasted. What such a reading – and I freely admit it has something of the straw (wo|hu)man about it – omits is the purely pragmatic aspect, of filmmakers pre-empting the need to edit material like Neri's body double's antics in or out.

This also makes it all the more difficult to fairly evaluate a Slaughter Hotel, as you do not know what was intended by the film-makers – or, less kindly, whether they even had any aspirations beyond endeavouring to deliver something for everyone.

Nonetheless, I would tend to lean towards the latter position in this case, in accord with director and co-writer Fernando Di Leo's refreshingly candid remarks on the interview contained among the extras on Shriek Show's DVD.

For despite having all that sleaze and splatter and a quality cast going for it, I find the film curiously unengaged and unengaging, especially when compared to something like Renato Poselli's Delirium as a film that occupies the same territory yet nevertheless emerges as something that could only really have emerged from the fervid mind of its unmistakable auteur.

The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave / The Red Queen Kills Seven Times

One of the giallo highlights of the year has to be Noshame's Emilio P. Miraglia box-set, comprising the films The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave and The Red Queen Kills Seven Times; an extensive set of interviews, trailers and other extras; a collectible figurine of the Red Queen; a couple of mini-poster reproductions, and a booklet with informative pieces about the films along with their casts and crews by Chris D. and Richard Harland-Smith.

While the films themselves are not quite enough to convince me that Miraglia is an unheralded master of the form, they come damnably close and certainly make one regret his limited output. Likewise, the close thematic and stylistic similarities between the two films, Red Queen being almost a distaff revisioning of Evelyn at times, would seem to support a broadly auteurist reading; a less charitable interpretation, of course, simply that they showcase a lack of imagination and a lazy reuse of the same formula.

The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave

Despite psychiatric treatment, Lord Alan Cunningham remains obsessed by the memory of his dead wife, Evelyn. First, he picks up prostitute who reminds him of Evelyn, takes her back to his castle and, after a spot of whipping, kills her.




Cunningham's premeditation in switching the number plates makes him a less sympathetic protagonist




Miraglia likes framing shots through objects


He also likes using "auratic" paintings - Walter Benjamin meets Laura, as it were


Venus in Furs is waiting...


"Great art can have great power" as Alan sees Evelyn

Following an attempt to contact Evelyn's spirit through a séance – Cunningham sees her, but the other members of the circle of family and associates do not – he decides to get away from the estate and spend some time in London instead.

Visiting a club recommended to him by his cousin George, Cunningham sees a stripper – her act begins with her emerging from a coffin, like something out of a Jess Franco film; a sense enhanced by some of Bruno Nicolai's musical cues actually seeming to stem directly from his work for the Spaniard – whose red hair makes her look like Evelyn.




Vampyros Lesbos a la Erica Blanc?

Accordingly he pays the woman to return to the castle with him – the previous scenario looking likely to play itself out again. But as Cunningham chases the woman through the grounds the pursuit takes them to the family tomb, where he is overcome and faints. By the time he comes to the woman is nowhere to be seen...


Femina ridens...


... but not for long

Meeting the beautiful Gladys at a party, Cunningham finds himself able to finally put Evelyn's memory behind him and, following a night of passion, engaged and swiftly married.

Then strange things start happening. Has Evelyn returned?




Another through object composition / association


Whose fashions are worse; and could the symbolism in the centre be much more blatant?


The "Addicted to Love" maids


Is that the Red Queen's cloak in Evelyn?


The same use of red / blue colour associations


Something she threw on, and nearly missed with...

The Red Queen Kills Seven Times

As children Kitty and Evelyn Wildenbruck were told the story of the family curse by their elderly grandfather: every century two sisters have re-enacted the story of their rival ancestors; it being easy to see from the girls' contrasting natures which will fulfill the Red Queen's murderous role and the Black Queen's victim one.


Yet more art holding a power...


"Off with her heads" said the Red Queen; note the broken doll imagery once more

But with “wicked sister” Evelyn then dying in an accident it seems that the curse have failed this time.






"Blood, like a crimson highway..." - Kitty's Twist of Cain

Then 100 years to the day since the last appearance of the Red Queen, Grandfather Wildenbruck is found dead in his bed, a manic laugh being heard and a red-cloaked figure sighted fleeing across the castle bridge. Has the Red Queen returned once more? It certainly seems that way as she kills again and Kitty – now a fashion photographer – finds herself being menaced...


Another composition through an object, here abstracted


Again, Marina Malfatti throws on something...


Miraglia also likes using multiple, distorted and dutch-angled images in both films




La Dolce Vita, circa 1973; at times Bouchet and Malfatti seem to be competing to see who can have the most costume changes alloted them


The Red Queen herself?

Critique

What we have here, then, are two films that while consciously avoid urban Italian settings for other European locales – Red Queen being set in Austria – otherwise concern themselves with that familiar world of sophisticated, privileged types haunted by past traumas; their family curses and crumbling ancestral piles allowing for a more fantastical Gothic horror atmosphere than can generally prevails within the more familiar Turin or Rome locales.

A key strength or weakness of each – it depends on your perspective – is perhaps their lack of a strong central protagonist with whom one can whole-heartedly sympathise, although Kitty's sustained childhood victimisation and subsequent contrition at her involvement in Evelyn's accidental death certainly make her easier to identify with than the prostitute-killing Cunningham.; of course, the other obvious difference here is that Cunningham is played by Anthony Steffen, again better than many would give him credit for, but still likely not a match for the ever-beautiful Barbara Bouchet as Kitty in the typical fan calculation (Another film that might be considered here is Bava's The Whip and the Body, where Nevenka's complicitly again seems more excusable in terms of stereotypical feminine passivity and victimhood; at times Cunningham seems like a present-day, male revisioning of Daliah Lavi's character.)

Unsurprisingly both films are also better on style – of which, in line with the various image grabs, there is too much to really itemise; both films being a visual treat in both their general design and mise-en-scene, but also crucially showing strong signs of having been genuinely thought through in these regard – atmosphere – Nicolai's multi-faceted scores a real boon here – and set-pieces than in terms of narrative coherence and convincing, well-rounded characters. (Or, as far as conventional narrative goes – there are frequently less linear and straightforward associational relations at play here.)

But, again, to criticise this kind of giallo for using stock characters such as the greedy groundsman and sinister wheelchair-bound aunt in Evelyn or the shady businessman with cashflow problems and a madwoman in the attic (well, asylum) type ex-wife in Red Queen seems besides the point. They are, after all, archetypal figures who are there precisely because audiences can immediately recognise what they mean; the modern-day equivalents of commedia dell'arte figures like Arlecchino, Brighella or Columbina.

Here, it is also worth remembering that another filone broadly contemporaneous with the giallo was the Decamerotic, and that filmmakers such as Sergio Martino and performers like Edwige Fenech made significant contributions to the slightly later sex comedy cycle; plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose, indeed...

Similar kinds of argument might be made regarding one area where Evelyn in particular perhaps seems weak when re-viewed in a more analytic frame of mind: trick scenes in which a conspirator acts as if they do not know what is really going on for the audience, despite being diegetically alone and not needing to perform. It comes back, again, to Hitchcock's distinction between “suspense” and “surprise” and the typical giallo filmmaker's different set of priorities. (And, to reiterate a point made elsewhere, assumes that Hitchcock would himself always do as he said.)

With there being little to say about the quality of the DVD transfers – both absoutely stunning, in the original aspect ratio and with the choice of English or Italian audio – it is perhaps worth closing with one minor criticism. This is Noshame's apparent failure to recognise the important contribution made to both films by Marina Malfatti; a performer whose work in the genre and talents – amply on display, if you get my drift – invariably seems to be overshadowed by her co-stars.

The Killer Must Kill Again

Philandering playboy Mainardi (George Hilton) has a problem: how can he be rid of wife Nora (Teresa Valasquez) whilst holding onto her family's fortune.


The film's title sequence evokes its original Web of the Spider name; a web in which all involved are ultimately to become fatally ensnared.

Divorce, Italian style is the answer, when Mainardi happens upon a black-clad assassin (Antoine St John) in the act of disposing of a victim and makes him an offer that cannot be refused. If the killer will take care of Nora, making it look like a kidnapping, he can collect $20,000. If not then Mainardi will go to the authorities.




Would you trust someone you had just witnessed disposing of a body to successfully pull of a hit without complications?

The killer accepts and the deed is soon done. But as he returns to the apartment to tidy up fate intervenes. A young couple, Luca and Laura (Alessio Orano and Cristina Galbo) notice the keys in the ignition of his car and drive off.

Thinking fast, the killer hotwires a car and sets off in pursuit, eventually catching up with his quarry – still oblivious to the body in the boot – at an isolated beach-front villa. (Note the similarities here with Cozzi's Door into Darkness episode.)

In the meantime, the car's theft has led Mainardi's neighbours to call the police. Thus he turns home, alibi at the ready, to unxpectedly find a detective waiting with some awkward questions...
Luigi Cozzi presents something of an enigma: how can someone so knowledgeable and so honest in his love for cinema make such bad films as Contamination and Starcrash. On the evidence of The Killer Must Kill Again, one answer is that he was unfortunate to see the fantasy cinema increasingly dominated by big budgets and expensive effects.

For this giallo – completed in 1973 but shelved until 1973, and thereby perhaps missing out on the opportunity to have the boom-period impact it should have – is propelled first and foremost by ideas.

The central one, the challenge that Cozzi has set himself, is whether he can make a giallo – and note here the recurrence of the filone colour – that has no mystery element to it and correspondingly eschews key devices like subjective shots from an unseen killer's perspective, in favour of a transparently obvious narrative, yet still engage the spectator and keep them in suspense.


The Yellow Wallpaper, perhaps


Yellow...


... yellow ...


... everywhere; and a nice nod to The Bird with the Crystal Plumage besides

The answer, felicitously, is a resounding “yes” for a film that could well be understood as the giallo equivalent of Edgar G. Ulmer's noir masterpiece Detour, with which it shares the same perverse Murphy's Law logic and serves as similar object lesson in how to make the most of the resources at one's disposal.

In general Cozzi emerges as classicist to his mentor's modernist, exhibiting a preference for techniques dating back not only to Hitchcock – and here we can note the neatness of the killer's lighter with the initials DA as intertextually referencing Dario Argento via Strangers on a Train, along with a coincidental version of the inverted signifying chain some have detected in that film's Bruno Anthony character's initials against those of Guy Haines – but also D W Griffith, using irising and, above all, cross-cutting to enhance mood and embellish tension.


Initials DA rather than BA or GH


Another strange mannequin-type figure on the right

One moment that stands out in particular in this regard is the director's juxtapositon of rape and sex scenes in a way that makes it all but impossible for the (male) spectator to take pleasure in the latter. (Men are pigs, yeah...) Half-intended it may be, in that the previously unmentioned Femi Benussi is deployed strictly as get naked and die material – Strip Nude for Your Killer, indeed – but it nevertheless raises questions for those who would dismiss a film like this or a filmmaker like Cozzi as beneath them.

It is also about the performances that Cozzi draws from his leads; and here he is perhaps even in advance of his mentor, whose bad experiences with Tony Musante's method antics famously soured himself against the acting profession for many years. Or, perhaps – seeing as Hilton plays the same suave, sophisticated and shifty type he always does in these films and that St John probably could not but be menacing thanks to that distinctive cadaverous, haunted physiognomy – that it is simply a case of Cozzi knowing when he was onto a good thing and consciously not getting in the way.

In terms of my ongoing Cozzi as key Gothic influence on Argento thesis, meanwhile, two things are worth noting. First, the killer carrying out Nora Mainardi's corpse Dracula style. Second, the coincidental mirroring between Mainardi's opting for a killer whose finding in flagrante delicto implies a lack of professionalism – compounded by the viewer's awareness of his psychopathic tendencies – and Baron Frankenstein's use of asylum-patient material that would not have passed muster earlier in his career in Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell. In both films, that is, the plot point grants a certain inevitability to the failure of the protagonists' best laid plans.


The Bride of the Monster?

Mondo Macabro's impressive DVD of the film describes it as “a lost giallo classic”. They are not wrong.

"Naive yet macabre"

Which artists might Berto Consalvi's "naive yet macabre", "mystical period" paintings in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage perhaps be compared to? Marc Chagall is one that comes to mind, but who else?

The glamour of the giallo

One of the recurring environments of the giallo film is the fashion house or model agency. First seen in the seminal Blood and Black Lace, it also occurs in the likes of A Hatchet for the Honeymoon, The Case of the Bloody Iris, The Crimes of the Black Cat, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, Strip Nude for Your Killer and Delirium: Photos of Gioia.

To this we could also add the model protagonists of Death Walks at Midnight – where the name of Susan Scott's character, Valentina, intertextually conjures up images of Crepax's fashion photographer heroine; Scott herself playing a character with this occupation in Death Carries a Cane – Death Steps in the Dark and – admittedly considerably more marginally – The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.

While there are obvious reasons for this apparent genre fixation, in the form of showcasing beautiful women and clothes – the latter of course now also contributing massively to the retro and camp appeal for many fans – there is, I think, something more than it.

Specifically, this fascination is to do with the way in which the giallo characteristically exhibits a more general concern with the what lies behind these attractive surfaces of the world, with what happens when they are penetrated by the assassin's blade or the investigator's (equally penetrating) gaze.

I am thinking of the dirty secrets of The House of Cristian's habitues that are gradually exposed as the bodycount rises; the “red sign of madness” that only the viewer is party to beneath John Harrington's charming façade; the horribly scarred body that motivates The Crimes of the Black Cat's killer against beauty; or the backstreet abortions arranged by the some of the Strip Nude model agency's inhabitants that compel its Killer to seek revenge.

In each case, that is, the double meaning of glamour as something magical or illusory comes into play, allowing the better film-makers to offer commentary on a society of the spectacle or signifiers without referents, and the spectator to gain a certain sadistic glee from the knowledge that a “red telephone” is as sure to succeed a “white” one as a hangover is to follow too much J&B...

Five Dolls for an August Moon Font?

The font Baveuse http://www.1001fonts.com/font_details.html?font_id=804

Murder for Pleasure

One of the more curious giallo-related items I have is a CD entitled Murder for Pleasure: giallo & thriller original soundtrack themes, which I picked up through an Ebay auction a few years back. The CD, which has a nice yellow giallo paperback styled cover using an image from one of the What Have You Done to Solange posters, is credited to Gatto nero records, Rome, and copyrighted 1997.



Most curiously, however, it is marked as being "not for sale" and "promotional use only"; with the 28 tracks featured appearing to have been lifted direct from the films themselves, coming with snatches of dialogue and sound effects (gunshots, screams etc.) and suffering from considerable noise and distortion at times.

One can only assume that it was someone's pet project. But who? No-one is credited on the disc, no further releases ever seem to have came from the label, and internet searches reveal nothing further. As a further measure of the disc's obscurity when I queried it on CDDB I got either nothing or, bizarrely, disc 2 of Méér Dan Het Beste Van Elvis Presley





A decade on, meanwhile, heightened awareness of the giallo and an extensive programme of soundtrack reissues from the likes of Digitmovies, Beat and Easy Tempo mean that better versions of almost all the material featured therein are now available.

So as a vaguely seasonal gift for those who want to hear the originals or the odd track like those from Renato Polselli's Delirium that is still unavailable in an official relase (at least to the best of my knowledge) here is a download. If you are the original rights holder and object please let me know and I'll take the link down.

Tracks are at 192 kbps; scans of cover art are included. The total size is about 85MB.

Get it here: http://rapidshare.com/files/9134116/murder_for_pleasure.zip.html

Delirio caldo / Delirium

Dr Herbert Lyutak, criminal psychologist, has a problem: he is a compulsive killer. Determined to bring his crimes to an end, he sets himself up to be arrested, telling his police colleagues the time and place he believes the killer will next strike. Unfortunately another killer is at work and Lutyak's attempt to frame himself fails when - in a neat variation on the device first introduced to the form via Mario Bava in Blood and Black Lace, in that Lutyak does not know who his 'accomplice' is - a murder he couldn't have committed occurs...

This convoluted giallo wallows in sleaze and perversity and is all the better for it. Though released fully 20 years before Basic Instinct, Renato Polselli's film outdoes Paul Verhoeven's on all counts to more than live up to its title with sex, violence, killer lesbians, psychedelic orgies, sadomasochism, bad fashions and trashy garage/psychedelic rock - you name it, Delirio Caldo has it.

Mickey Hargitay, the Arnold Schwarzenegger of his day, gives an eyeball rolling, over-the top-performance to rival that of Bloody Pit of Horror as Lutyak.

Polselli, credited under his usual Ralph Brown pseudonym, throws in the zooms and wacky camera angles with abandon and draws uninhibited performances from his female leads, including favoured fetish star / muse Rita Calderoni as Lutyak's wife, Marcia.

In sum, they really don't make them like this anymore - more's the pity.

Delirio Caldo is also one of those gialli with an interesting production / distribution history, as made evident via Anchor Bay's highly recommended DVD.

The US, English-language version of the film as Delirium is shorter, running 85 minutes. In what seems a characteristic display of violence being deemed more acceptable than sex there, it removes much of the racier materiala but adds a couple of murders. In addition it attempts to contextualise Lutyak's condition as the consequence of his traumatic experiences in the Vietnam war. Unfortunately any political edge that might have emerged thereby, or from the character's positioning as a Hungarian emigre (much like Hargitay himself), is lost through a it-was-all-a-dream type resolution.

The Italian version, Delirio Caldo runs 102 minutes and unconvincingly locates events in London, with the inclusion of some bobbies in no way compensating for the all-too-Mediterranean environs.

Bondage scenes in Italian film

Thanks to the miracle of teh intarweb, a pretty exhaustive looking list of female bondage scenes in Italian cinema:

http://www.drfatso.org/Cinema/index.htm

What would be most useful, I suppose, would be comparable listings for other places and cinemas - I am sure that compared to Japanese popular cinema, for instance, the list does seem so excessive...

Naked Girl Killed in Park / Ragazza tutta nuda assassinata nel parco

It is a great exploitation title. The problem, as any fan knows, is that it is usually a lot more difficult to make a film that lives up to it. And, alas, Naked Girl Killed in Park / Ragazza tutta nuda assassinata nel parco seems to be one of those cases in point.

While director Al Brescia does deliver what the title promises – though not, it should be emphasised, the actual crime – along with memorable opening and closing sequences set against the backdrop of an amusement park, the majority of what happens in between is of the “old when old was young” varietal. Thus we have a mute muscular handyman upon whom suspicion inevitably falls (cf. Amuck!) and a beautiful but neurotic young woman with a heart condition (cf. Les Diaboliques).

The Italian-Spanish co-production opens with wealthy businessman Johan Wallenberger emerging dead from a ghost train. Two questions soon emerge: what was he doing there and was his death mere hours after taking out a one-million dollar insurance policy something more than coincidence.

Hoping that the latter question will answer the former by way of proving foul play, the insurance company calls in cocky young investigator Chris Buyer, essayed by genre regular Robert Hoffmann. Introduced to one of Wallenberger's daughters at a party – she has just, not coincidentally, been the recipient of a threatening telephone call and is then terrorised in her house – the investigation soon leads the pair to the family home, complete with another, equally beautiful and suspect sister and the not unattractive, recently widowed mother.

The case gets increasingly complicated from here on in, with blackmail, intrigues and double-crosses leading to a few instances of killing as the ultimate simplification of life…

Some subjective camera stalking and a few moments of gratuitous nudity and violence are present, but come across as more a concession to 1970s tastes in what is otherwise an old-fashioned thriller. It is these same touches, however, that are also of interest for the way they again suggest the missing-link qualities of the giallo not just in relation to the American slasher film but also to the later development of the erotic thriller.

Giallo a Venezia / Thrilling in Venice

Widely acknowledged as one of the sleaziest and nastiest films of its type, producer Gabriele Crisanti and director Mario Landi's Giallo a Venezia / Thrilling in Venice lives up to its billing, conjuring up visions of the city as a place of decaying buildings and stinking canals rather than as the home of romantic idylls.

The police, led by the perpetually boiled-egg eating Inspector De Pol (Jeff Blynn, who looks like a Miami Vice prototype and now seems to run a restaurant in Italy) are called in when the bodies of a couple are found and the higher-ups become concerned that it might not be good for the city's image.

The cadavers soon prove the least of the tourist board's worries, however, as De Pol's convoluted investigations reveal a case involving drug addiction; sexual humiliation; blackmail and obsession and – worse - precipitate a chain of gruesome murders as the killer attempts to cover their tracks and tie up any loose ends.

A prostitute is repeatedly stabbed in the groin with a pair of scissors, while one acquaintance of the deceased couple is burned alive and another (Mariangela Giordano) has her leg sawn off.

Curiously, there is perhaps an affinity with the structure of the film and the similarly genre referencing La Ragazza dal pigiama giallo / The Pjyama Girl Case in this regard - even if Flavio Mogherini's film is an an entirely different level of dramatic accomplishment.

For while Landi manages the occasional nice visual touch, like reflecting the action in the killers' mirrored subglasses at one point, his handling is uninspired for the most part, the emphasis squarely on delivering as much softcore sex and hardcore violence as could be gotten away with – although with the sex scenes having potential for inserts, in both senses of that term, one would not be surprised if there was an alternate cut that inverted this emphasis out there somewhere.

Unfortunately the effectiveness of the pice as both porn and splatter is also compromised by the overall attractiveness of the participants and less than convincing splatter effects, especially when compared with the more (in)famous likes of Lucio Fulci's The New York Ripper.

On the plus side Berto Pisano's score, which sounds as though it has been appropriated for another production, is enjoyably inappropriate even as the syrupy romantic and breezy big band lounge themes contribute still more to the “need a shower now" ambience of the whole.

The same can perhaps be said of the grainy, scratchy, pan and scan version I watched, which adds to the illicit aura in a way that a remastered, restored DVD would not. Nevertheless, if any enterprising DVD companies are listening, one would nevertheless be nice, so long as it is not at the expense of the dozens of more worthy titles out there - there is something wrong with the marketing and licensing situation when it is easier to get good quality discs of “Crisanti trash" like Zombie: Nights of Terror and Patrick viva ancora than most of Riccardo Freda's output.

Amuck!

Following the disappearance of her friend Sally Reece – and, as we soon learn lover; got to love that characteristic genre double standard with regard to male and female homosexuality – Greta Franklin (Barbara Bouchet) takes a job as a typist for decadent author Richard Stuart (Farley Granger) and residence in his Venice mansion.

After being drugged and seduced by Richard's partner Eleonora (Rosalba Neri) Greta is invited to one of the couples swinging parties where a porn film featuring Sally as Little Red Riding Hood is only one of the entertainments for the bourgeois couple's party.

But soon it seems that the Stuarts are getting wise to Greta's investigations: The plot of Richard's latest novel presents a covert warning to the girl who would know too much, while an invitation to go duck hunting in the marshes around the mansion almost sees Greta accidentally shot and then nearly sucked under the swamp…

Also known by the more exploitative titles Hot Bed of Sex in the UK and Leather and Whips in the USA, along with the more honest Alla Ricerca del piacere (i.e. In Search / Pursuit of Pleaure) this 1971 giallo from occasional genre contributor Silvio Amadeo is nothing if not sleazy fun.

If, however, one can look beyond the pulchritude on display – a task that is difficult when both the female leads look to have nearly missed when throwing on those outfits, which they also tend to change and / or remove at any opportunity – there are other reasons to appreciate the film.

In particular Amadeo exhibits a good sense of how to build suspense and mystery, smartly exploiting the ambiguities of the image and the intertextual associations of Farley Granger via Hitchcock's Rope and Strangers on a Train through some telling remarks about "the perfect crime".

Unfortunately a pan-and-scan presentation and poor source materials - the real crime here, we might say - means that this release from Eurovista is less easy to recommend, despite some nice supplemental materials in the form of short interviews with the two female stars and a photo gallery.

Birthday greetings

A belated happy birthday to Edwige Fenech, born on 24 December 1948 and the best Christmas present any Euro-trash fan could ever have in my humble opinion.

Though I freely admit that it was Edwige's beauty that was the attraction when I first saw her – in The Case of the Bloody Iris if I remember correctly, where she is introduced at a photoshoot wearing nothing but paint on her top half – it is her often unacknowledged abilities as an actor that have increasingly shone through.

Crucially, however, she's not just the “the giallo queen of psychic discontent [...] whose performances confirm that hysteria is always histrionic when it comes to Italian cinema” as Gary Needham memorably puts it, in reference to films such as The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh and All the Colours of the Dark, but also someone with a flair for comedy and – more surprisingly – straight (melo)drama.

Check out, for example the comedies all'italiana Giovannona Long Thigh – Edwige's Pretty Woman perhaps; would that she had the opportunities to become known to the wider international audience – and Ubalda All Naked and Warm – where the difference in performer styles and abilities is pronounced when one looks at Karin Schubert, attractive but lacking in anything beyond her physical charms – and, especially, the heart-wrenching, tear-jerking Secrets of a Call Girl, all now on DVD from Noshame and featuring interviews with the still beautiful, charming and intelligent Ms Fenech.

Paranoia / Orgasmo

After her tycoon husband dies in an accident Kathryn West (Carroll Baker) retreats to an isolated villa in the Italian countryside to avoid the paparazzi and take stock. Her tranquility is interrupted when a young playboy type by the name of Peter Donovan (Lou Castel) turns up at the villa and charms his way in. Soon Kathryn is infatuated and cannot be without the man, who then reappears with his sister Eva (Colette Descombes) and the clear intent of driving Kathryn to breaking point…

With a straightforward psychological thriller style plot that is lacking many of the more obvious tropes of the giallo – the bodycount stubbornly remains at zero until the final five minutes; the motivations of the villains reassuringly yet disappointingly banal – perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Umberto Lenzi's 1969 giallo is its convoluted history.

Originally known by the Italian language title Orgasmo (i.e. "Orgasm") the film was first given an X-certificate in the US for its amoral plot and some then-shocking full frontal nudity from Baker, who shares a steamy shower scene with Castel.

It was subsequently re-edited for an R-rating and television release, with a completely different ending. By this time, however, Lenzi and Baker had teamed up again for a not dissimilar tale of a menage a trois between a wealthy older woman and a younger couple, confusing titled Paranoia in the original Italian, which was then released as A Quiet Place to Kill in Anglophone territories.

All this makes it is difficult to fully evaluate the film from the version seen here.

Never the most stylish of filmmakers and at his most comfortable with straight-ahead action, it would seem that the writer-director managed to fashion a decent screenplay free from obvious plot holes and to draw the best from his leads.

In this regard Baker is especially impressive as she submits to the indignities of unflattering make-up, following her character's descent into drug and alcohol dependency, that many lesser, vainer actresses - I use the term deliberately, given the gender specific norms at play here - would likely have balked at.

Elsewhere, the normally reliable Piero Umiliani provides an unusually bland and unengaging score. This could also, however, be intentional, insofar as the same pop tune is utilised ad nauseum diegetically as part of Peter and Eva's scheme.

Thinking about Baker's role in films such as this, one wonders how familiar David Fincher was of the giallo when he cast her in The Game, featuring as it does a family plot not dissimilar to Lenzi's later Spasmo.

La Porta sul buio / Door into Darkness

In the early 1970s the giallo film was enjoying unprecedented box-office popularity. It was natural, then, that RAI Television should look to bringing the form to the small screen and specifically to its prime exponent, Dario Argento, as the ideal man for the job.

Yet if this idea was obvious, the tensions inherent in such a collaboration should have been equally so.

Although the name of their production company SeDA Spettacoli – i.e. Salvatore and Dario Argento Shows – did not in itself rule out non-film productions, there was first the question of why a successful young cineaste should want to work in a medium that was not only lesser and a rival but also one likely to necessarily entail diluting his signature style, with its copious violence and frequent sexual “perversity”.

Various compromises were thus reached. First, RAI had the choice of which of SeDA's scripts would be filmed. According to Luigi Cozzi, however, this was pre-empted by the stratagem of giving RAI seven scripts, three of which were so deliberately over-the-top as to effectively ensure the go-ahead for the four he and Argento actually wanted to make. Second, while Argento would provide a personal introduction to each episode, positioning them as a new kind of giallo that was bold, modern and inventive – which they probably were in the television context, if not the cinematic – he did not have to actually sign any as director. Third, SeDA had the option of reworking the material for the international market into one or two episodic films. Nevertheless, the sense of different and not always convergent agendas remained – as when RAI refused to let the killer in one episode use a “phallic” knife, instead insisting on a hook as somehow less disturbing and suggestive.


The credits - opening and entering the door into darkness


From one of Argento's Hitchcock-style introductions

Il Vicino Di Casa / The Neighbour
Written and directed by Luigi Cozzi, this is perhaps the most overtly Hitchcockian of the four installments, revisioning Rear Window as Upstairs Neighbour.

A young couple, Luca and Stefania, move into their new seafront house with their infant child. While Luca settles down to watch Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man on television, Stefania notices a spreading stain on the ceiling. Going upstairs to investigate the source of this mark – or, in line with the Hitchcock angle, should that be demark? – she discovers a body in their bath. As the couple try to decide what to do next, the neighbour returns...

Though suffering from the usual plot contrivances – why move in late at night, rather than arriving with the removal men in the morning – and some dumb motivation, The Neighbour is otherwise a textbook example of what can be accomplished with a small cast, restricted set of locations and an expert handling of the mechanics of suspense, thereby perhaps representing something of a dry run for the later The Killer Must Kill Again, all the way down to a similarly ironic conclusion.

Interestingly, both also feature overt Gothic horror references. Here Luca settles down to watch Frankenstein versus the Wolfman on television, while there a house is likened to Dracula's castle.

While the Gothic also surfaced in Argento's cinema around this time, as with Andrea's party piece in Four Flies on Grey Velvet about a sexy Frankenstein monster, and the revisionist Frankenstein proposed as a co-production to Hammer – think Flesh for Frankenstein in Nazi Germany, by the sound of it – that Cozzi was his co-writer on both suggests fairly strongly whose obsession it was.

Il Tram / The Tram
Written and directed by Argento, using the pseudonym Sirio Bernadotte for the latter role, this apparently represents a reworking of a sequence originally planned for The Bird with the Crystal Plumage but never filmed – tellingly an extended chase / stalk sequence at the tram depot is strongly reminiscent of its bus depot counterpart there – and presents an intriguing variation on his normal mechanics, the crime and its detection being separated out in the classic ratiocinative manner rather than all mixed up, giallo-style.

A passenger is found dead on a tram, leading Inspector Giordani to question all the other passengers / suspects and reconstruct / replay the fatal journey. An arrest, trial and conviction soon follow but, with barely half the running time having elapsed, it is soon evident to Giordani that he got the The Wrong Man...

Also of interest here are the cast, several of whom appeared in Argento films around this time, including Enzo Ceruciso, co-star of Le Cinque giornate; Fulvio Mingozzi, a longer term fixture in all Argento's films through to Phenomena; Tom Felleghy, also seen in Four Flies on Grey Velvet and Le Cinque giornate; and Maria Tedeschi, the uncredited the old woman who warns Sam Dalmas to “look out behind you” in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.

Testimone oculare / Eyewitness
Though officially credited to Roberto Pariante, Cozzi has confirmed that Argento actually took over the role after being dissatisfied with the way his (soon to be ex-) assistant was handling his and Cozzi's script. There is a sense of Four Flies on Grey Velvet to this, albeit with a distaff protagonist as The Girl Who Saw Too Much.

Driving home late one night Roberta Leoni – played by Marilu Tolo, whom Argento would later cast as the countess in Le Cinque giornate and was briefly in a relationship prior to Daria Nicolodi – has to brake sharply when a young blonde woman runs in front of her, then collapses. Getting out her car to check she did not hit the woman, Roberta discovers that she has been shot, but is forced to flee the scene when a second figure, presumably the gunman, appears on the scene.

Returning later with the police, there is no sign of any body or crime. With both the police and her husband unsure that she really saw anything, Roberta increasingly comes to question her own sanity. Which could, of course, be precisely what the conspirators want as, with no one believing her, the threatening phone calls begin...


Suspicion


One Fly on Grey Velvet?


A black gloved killer making a threatening phone call; a shot from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage at the small screen ratio?

La Bambole / The Doll
Directed by RAI representative Mario Foglietti, this sees a man escape from an asylum and, following the murder of one redhead, suspiciously befriend another...

Again, however, nothing is quite as it seems.

Though this final installment is the least noteworthy in terms of its crew it also has one of the better casts. Robert Hoffmann's character is not too dissimilar from the one he later played in the Umberto Lenzi giallo Spasmo, while the casting of Erika Blanc as the first redhead victim and her occupation as fashion designer suggest Foglietti had done his genre homework.


Crime designer?


Yet more Dolls for an August Moon; the quasi-surrealist obsession of the giallo with masks and mannequins continues, even on the small screen.

Also worth noting is that the underrated Giorgio Gaslini supplied the theme and incidental music for the series which, while decent, perhaps has the misfortune of being not quite as memorable and effective as that of Ennio Morricone on the films that gone before and of Goblin on those that were to follow.

For Argento, meanwhile, the series was most important for establishing his position as the “Italian Hitchcock” with a mass audience in Italy, reaching the millions that his films did not, while in the longer run it can be seen as setting a curious precedent for not only the mid-1980s giallo TV series in Italy, but also the more recent international productions Do You Like Hitchcock and Masters of Horror.

The Sweet Body of Deorah

Back in his hometown of Geneva with new wife Deborah (Caroll Baker), Marcel (Jean Sorel)bumps into an old acquaintance, Philip (Luigi Pistilli), who accuses Marcel of murdering old lover Susanna (Evelyn Stewart / Ida Galli).

Deborah receives a threatening telephone call - but when an engineer comes out to check the line he finds it to be dead; an indication of things to come?

Later, having left for Nice, the newlyweds find themselves coming to the attention of their bohemian neighbour, a painter named Robert (George Hilton), while Susanna's favourite piece of classical music, Tchiakovsky's Sympony Number 6 / The Pathetique keeps on inexplicably playing…

This 1968 entry is one of those gialli that is best described as old-fashioned, with co-producer Luciano Martino and his co-writer Ernesto Gastaldi clearly drawing their primary inspiration from Boileau and Narcejac suspense thrillers such as Les Diaboliques and Vertigo – a fact that is in fact signalled by Susanna sharing the former man's surname.

Where The Sweet Body of Deborah does succeed is in the performances: Pistilli, Hilton, Baker, Sorel and Stewart are the kind of genre stalwarts you can rely upon to deliver the goods, playing their parts with the right levels of untrustworthiness, glamour / sophistication and paranoia; as applicable. It also benefits from some classic late 60s fashions, with Baker's one piece catsuits a particular eye-opener; a typically trashy / classy lounge jazz score from the underrated Nora Orlandi; and Baker's willingness to expose as much flesh as a late 60s production would allow.

Genre afficionados will likely see some similarities between this film and La Baker's first giallo with Umberto Lenzi, 1969's Orgasmo AKA Paranoia in terms of both overall plot mechanics and specific devices, such as the use of recurring diegetic musical motif to drive one of the protagonists over the edge; an early scene with a black dancer performing a 'primitive' / 'native' / 'exotic' dance also appears within the Gastaldi-scripted Case of the Bloody Iris in 1971, albeit with more narrative motivation.

It's somewhat mind-boggling to learn that Ken Loach's frequent 60s collaborator Tony Garnett has a co-production credit on this. Or is this a different Garnett?

The Devil has Seven Faces

Despite having two solid genre leads in Carroll Baker and George Hilton; reliable supporting players including Luciano Pizoggi and a decent Stelvio Cipriani soundtrack with some gorgeous Nora Orlandi vocalism, this old-fashioned, Hitchcockian giallo from 1971 ultimately fails to deliver anything special.

Most of the blame for this can likely to be apportioned director and co-writer Osvaldo Civriani. His direction lacks the required style and instead serves up a surfeit of lame humour and some all-too-obviously speeded up chase sequences.

Unlike the dodgy back projection and other effects work of some of Hitchcock's later films, however, it seems difficult to pass this off as a self-conscious modernist “laying bare the device”.
Civriani and Toni Carvi's writing, meanwhile, manages the unusual distinction of being both too clever and too stupid for its own good, thanks to a combination of more subplots and characters than it is easy to keep a handle on and an all-too-obvious twist ending.

Or, deciding between Hitchcock's “suspense” and “surprise” alternatives, they made the latter, wrong choice.

Baker plays Julie Harrison, an English-born translator now living in Amsterdam, who finds herself being stalked. She goes to see her lawyer, David Barton, and reveals that her near-identical twin Mary – the only difference between them their hair colour, Julie being a blonde and Mary a brunette a la Vertigo – has contacted her from home, saying her life is in danger. Leaving Barton's, Julie is attacked in the street but saved through the interventions of another of Barton's clients, Hilton's racing car driver Tony Shane.

That night they are menaced at Julie's house by two more thugs. As luck would have it, however, a brace of motorcycle cops pull up outside, curious about the poorly parked car outside. A gun battle and chase ensues, affording Julie and Tony the opportunity to escape.

As Pigozzi's insurance company agent gets involved, we learn that Mary – or should that be Marnie or Marion (Crane) – stole a million pound diamond from a maharaja.

Can we say McGuffin...

The Great and the Good #2

Argento's director of photography on the much-maligned The Phantom of the Opera, Ronnie Taylor, indicated that the director gave him a book of Georges de la Tour's paintings for visual inspiration and that, in addition to influencing the look of the film in general through mirrored compositions, candle lights and chiaroscuro, he also worked in some specific references to the artist's Madeline deux flammes.

de la Tour's painting:



Some of Taylor and Argento's images:







This sequence plays, I think, much like a vivant version of the painting.



The masculin deux flammes?



The madeline quartre flammes?

The film as a whole, meanwhile, is replete with references to its artistic milieux - the production of Gounod's Faust, as found in Leroux's novel; the dandies at the bathhouse arguing about the relative merits of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, or the presence of Degas painting the demi-monde.



The artist at work, seen in the mirror...



... and perhaps producing something like La Classe de Danse?

In line with the film's setting, it's also worth noting how the Heath-Robinson type machine devised by the ratcatcher is, as Jean-Baptiste Thoret notes, similar to the Rocket in Melies's Voyage de la lune





Argento and Melies - deux magiciens?

The difficulty as far as making the case for Argento as a serious auteur / auteur worthy of serious consideration is concerned, however, is perhaps that these quotations and references may come across as a pleading to be taken as such and thereby backfire as too-self-conscious demonstrations of cultural capital and taste that are then labelled as kitsch by the critic who feels uncomfortable with the more popular / populist / commercial aspects of the cinema.

The Great and the Good #1

Pablo Picasso famously remarked "Good artists borrow. Great artists steal." With this sentiment in mind, here are some quotations / lifts in relation to Argento.

Argento and Kubrick
Argento has referred to Kubrick as an "amazing filmmaker", so it is of little surprise that he should quote him on occasion:



Alex and his droogs in a Clockwork Orange, with their famous phallic nose masks



Roderick Usher's nightmare in The Black Cat





Unable to move or avert his eyes, Alex undergoes the Ludovico Technique...





... an apparent variant of which is used on Betty in Opera.

I actually find these Opera sequence all the more remarkable because Argento also manages to work in the reflexive Peeping Tom element, as Betty's tormentor holds up a mirror to her so that she can see her own horrified gaze; unfortunately I don't have Michael Powell's film to hand to get the appropriate screengrabs from.

Argento and De Palma
Argento and De Palma have worked with a number of the same collaborators; composer Pino Donaggio, cinematographer Ronnie Taylor and actors Jessica Harper and Piper Laurie. Whereas the Italian has often referred to his American counterpart, De Palma has been curiously reluctant to reciprocate and acknowledge his debts to the giallo in general and its most prominent exponent in particular.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the reveal scene from Tenebre, as it is reworked - to far lesser effect, as far as I am concerned - for Raising Cain's final shock:

Tenebre



Inspector Giermani...



... Peter Neale...



... and Giermani again...

Raising Cain:



Daddy's not here...



... yes he is, with a cross-dressing twist (of Cain) ...



... or is it to be happy ever after?

Lies, damned lies and statistics

One of the most prized books in my cinema collection is Maurizio Baroni's Platea in piedi, 1969-1978. It is one of three volumes of Italian film posters and ephemera, the others covering 1945-58 and 1959-68; unfortunately I don't have them.

What also makes the books great, beyond the hundreds of full-colour reproductions in them, is the invaluable information they contain on every Italian production or co-production made during the period, with domestic release dates; box-office figures, both in original terms and in relation to a constant 1993 baseline; and the certificate awarded each film.

It's this kind of thing that I want to concentrate on here.

While it is impossible to get a complete picture, insofar as these data tell us nothing about longer-term receipts, numbers of admissions, or the international box-office – three areas where a prestigious auteur product and a no-nonsense commercial one could be markedly different – they nevertheless provide a lot of very useful contextual detail for situating specific films and film-makers - in my case Argento and the giallo

1969
The most successful giallo released in 1969 was Lucio Fulci's One on Top of the Other, although it was only the 22nd most successful film of the year and grossed just over a quarter of the amount taken by the film in first place, the comedy Nell'Anno del signore.

Perhaps of more significance, then, for The Bird with the Crystal Plumage's breakthrough the following year were the successes achieved by Argento himself as screenwriter of Metti, una sera a cena, in ninth place, and his female star, Suzy Kendall, who appeared in the 12th placed Fraulein Doktor.

Elsewhere, Visconti's The Damned and Fellini's Satyricon ranked fourth and sixth respectively

1970
Although The Bird with the Crystal Plumage was the highest-grossing giallo of the year, it was only the 24th most successful film overall, with its takings – using the constant 1993 lire baseline – only around 25% more than those of Fulci's film the previous year.

The next most successful giallo was Martino's The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh, whose takings were just over half those of Argento's film, closely followed by Lupo's The Weekend Murders, taking just under half.

At the top of the charts, meanwhile, was Barboni's spaghetti western My Name is Trinity.

The question, then, is why the giallo suddenly became “hot” the following year. One suspects that The Bird with the Crystal Plumage's international success has an important role here, along with its longer-run legs as a sleeper hit (in turn boosted by the positive foreign reception) that was to remain in circulation for years.

1971
Although Enzo Barboni continued to reign with Trinity is Still My Name, with Pier-Paolo Pasolini and Sergio Leone also scoring notable hits through Decameron and Duck You Sucker in second and sixth place respectively, this would also appear to have been the year in which Argento made his real breakthrough.

Cat o' Nine Tails, released in January, was seventh most successful film of the year, while Four Flies on Grey Velvet, released in December, was ninth, making him the only filmmaker to place twice in the year's top ten. Moreover, the domestic box-office for each film was around one-third in excess of their predecessor.

The giallo as a whole, however, was less successful. The next genre entry, Fulci's A Lizard in a Woman's Skin, ranked only 38th and took only about 40 per cent as much money as Argento's double whammy. Following quite closely after it, meanwhile, were Tessari's The Bloodstained Butterfly in 44th and Ercoli's Death Walks in High Heels in 50th. Elsewhere in the listings, meanwhile, are the likes of The Case of the Scorpion's Tail, The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave and The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire, testifying to a strong current of giallo production at various levels within the industry.

1972
Again the wider aspect comes to the fore, in that the year's most successful film, Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, had the backing of United Artists and the advantage of being something of an international cause celebre.

Argento, meanwhile, worked on the television series Door into Darkness at this time, thereby boosting his position as the Italian Hitchcock and the pre-eminent giallo director. Against this, however, the relatively poor international box-office for the second and third parts of the Animal Trilogy compared to their predecessor would appear to have to be brought into consideration to also help explain his desire to do something different next.

One also wonders what this might mean for Mikel Koven's vernacular audience thesis: while many gialli would indeed appear to have had little in the way of artistic aspirations and been quite happy to circulate on the terza visione circuit, those of Argento, as its most prominent exemplar, again seem to be a – possibly rule proving – exception.

In terms of those gialli that were released, meanwhile, Fulci again appears to have confirmed his position as Argento's most important imitator / challenger, with Don't Torture a Duckling the year's most successful example of the genre. Equally, however, he again failed to match his rival's figures, the film ranking 35th and still taking less than half the half the money of Cat o' Nine Tails or Four Flies on Grey Velvet.

1973
This year saw Fulci and Argento temporarily reverse their box-office fortunes. Fulci's family-friendly adventure White Fang was the ninth most successful film of the year, coming closer to the second and third parts of the Animal Trilogy in takings and surpassing those of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. Argento's non-giallo Le Cinque giornate, meanwhile, only managed 32nd place and less than half the box-office of Fulci's film.

1975
Argento's Deep Red was the sixth most successful film of the year, though its domestic box-office – again in constant 1993 terms – was still lower than that of Cat o' Nine Tails and Four Flies on Grey Velvet; a clear signal that audience figures were continuing to decline.

The moribund state of the giallo as a whole and the fickle nature of public tastes, meanwhile, were signalled by the fact that the next most successful genre entry, Martino's crossover giallo-poliziotto Suspicious Death of a Minor, made only around one-seventh Deep Red's box-office.

In this instance we can also perhaps discern a reversal of the The Bird with the Crystal Plumage situation, in that Deep Red was only a domestic success, never making it onto the all-important US screens at this time.

1977
With Suspiria Argento achieved his highest ranking position, fifth in the year's top money-makers. Perhaps equally important, however, was that unlike Deep Red this success was paralleled – albeit obviously at a lower level – in the international arena, perhaps offsetting the film's actual box-office only being marginally greater than that of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage at the start of the decade.

The next most successful genre entry was Mogherini's The Pyjama Girl Case, with box-office barely one-third that of Suspiria; the general decline of the industry again being reflected by the fact that Barboni's first-placed Due Stupendi quasi piatti took less than half what Trinity is Still My Name had in 1971.

Cultish Shocking Horrors: (Sur)realism, Sadism and Eroticism, 1950s-1960s

Another Bizarre Sinema series book, Cultish Shocking Horrors: (Sur)realism, Sadism and Eroticism, 1950s-1960s, arrived today. Again, comparatively expensive but once more worth every penny, being profusely illustrated and full of information that isn't really available elsewhere, as when you have someone like Jean-Pierre Bouyxou reminiscing on seeing these films on the Midi-Minuit-Fantastique circuit at the time of their first release.

For the English-language reader the book makes an especially nice companion piece to Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs's Immoral Tales, in that it covers some of the same films – Horror of Spider Island, Mill of the Stone Women and The Awful Dr Orloff – in greater detail and, more importantly, from a different perspective, that of the continental European.

This enables the volume's authors to respond to British films like Blood of the Vampire, Horrors of the Black Museum and Peeping Tom by situating them as part of the same international quasi-movement rather than as aberrations from the Hammer Gothic formula, and – perhaps most interestingly – discuss some little-known Mexican horrors such as El Monstuo Resuscitado.

One little fragment I found particularly intriguing is Leone Frollo's erotic / pornographic re-imagining of the monster from Horror of Spider Island's attack on one of the shipwrecked nubiles, which has certain affinities with these Lucifera and Maghella excerpts at Groovy Age of Horror, again highlighting the broader sense of that overarching cross-media, cross-culture - both in the sense of being an international phenomenon and one that crossing traditional high/low class culture distinctions within the national culture - sensibility.

Recommended.

Argento / Poe / de Quincey / Hitchcock

I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man.
- Dario Argento

Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?" Death–was the obvious reply. "And when," I said, "is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?" From what I have already explained at some length, the answer, here also, is obvious–"When it most closely allies itself to Beauty; the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world – and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.
- from Edgar Allan Poe's Poe essay The Philosophy of Composition

[L]et us treat it [murder] æsthetically, and see if it will turn to account in that way. Such is the logic of a sensible man, and what follows? We dry up our tears, and have the satisfaction, perhaps, to discover that a transaction, which, morally considered, was shocking, and without a leg to stand upon, when tried by principles of Taste, turns out to be a very meritorious performance.
- from Thomas de Quincey's essay On Murder, Considered as one of the Fine Arts

The plot of Patrick Hamilton's play Rope was billed as “sugested by Thomas de Quincey” - Hitchcock enjoyed quoting his Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts – but drew its more obvious inspiration from a notorious American crime of 1924.
Hitchcock had followed the newspaper stories about Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, a pair of reportedly brilliant University of Chicago students and homosexual lovers who were obsessed by the superman theories of Nietzsche. In order to prove their superior intellects, Leopold and Loeb had committed a completely motiveless killing – murdering a young acquaintance just for the thrill of it”
- from Patrick McGilligan's Hitchcock biography Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light

Another giallo-esque krimi poster

A somewhat giallo-esque Italian poster for the krimi The Indian Scarf as The Red Lace; with Klaus Kinski's and Edgar Wallace's names displayed equally prominently above everyone else.

I particularly like how it's a red scarf when the film is in black and white and a succession of scarves are used, one per victim. The killer does wear black leather gloves though.

Nightmare Castle

I watched Mario Caiano's Nightmare Castle yesterday. I had seen it before, but found I got more out of it this time around, thanks to having become more aware of Italian Gothic in the interim.

The story itself is one of those standard combinations of the supernatural and quotidian, as Paul Muller's scientist murders his first wife Muriel and her lover, then marries Muriel's half sister Jenny - both being played by Barbara Steele - and conspires with his mistress to use Jenny for a vampire-style blood transfusion to save his mistress's life.

Thus Steele gets to do her usual good / bad, pain / pleasure, sadistic / masochistic dualisms, here further emphasised by having Jenny being blonde in contrast to the dark Muriel, who also returns from beyond with one side of her face horribly scarred.



This last aspect I found quite Satanik-like, though unlike Satanik's alter-ego, Marny Bannister, whose scraped-back hair makes her disfigurement obvious, here Steele's character hides her scars behind i lungi capelli della morte until the time is right for the shock revelation.



There's also a spot of mask action, as Muller attempts to drive Steele #2 mad by drugging her and setting up weird nightmares. Somewhat Opera:



Also of interest are the little intertextual nods. At one point early on Muller's character announces that he's going to a conference in Edinburgh, recalling the Scottish setting of Riccardo Freda's The Ghost. That film and the director's earlier Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock also seem to be referenced via the original surname of Muriel and Jenny, Hampton - just like Freda's pseudonym of choice.

Cannibal - new book from John Martin

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, John Martin was arguably one of the best genre writers around. The likes of The Seduction of the Gullible, his examination of the British “video nasties” phenomenon, and Giallo Pages, his guide to exploitation all'italiana, occupy a significant place in my bookshelf. So when I saw that he was doing a book on cannibal films, it was very much a must-get, without waiting for reviews or opinions to filter through.

I wish I had, however, for the book unfortunately suffers from what looks like a paucity of new material, with a lot that is either definitely reprinted – the interviews that make up the second main section of the book – or that looks like it might well have been, as when a discussion of the 1966 film Africa Addio comments its representations of apartheid and internecine conflicts in Rwanda from a perspective of 30 rather than 40 years distance.

Following a introduction from Quentin Tarantino, an old acquaintance of Martin's who once talked Italian trash cinema with him in Giallo Pages, suggesting that the idea of doing The Inglorious Bastards has been in his head for a long time, Martin gets down to business with the history of the cannibal film.

He starts, quite rightly, in mondo films like the aforementioned Africa Addio, before charting the seminal contributions of Umberto Lenzi and Ruggero Deodato; various one-offs from other directors; the crossover between the cannibal and the zombie film, and the eventual decline of the filone into the later 1980s and early 1990s.

Unfortunately Martin never really defines his subject matter or scope, also discussing what I would argue are straight zombie films where the flesh eating is – to draw on a distinction implied in Dawn of the Dead's “Are these cannibals?” “The answer is no” exchange – inter- rather than intra-species.

Consequently, his selection of films at times feels like something of a grab-bag of favourites - as perhaps signalled by the composite cover, which grafts a Deodato-style cannibal head onto that shotgunned torso from Margherti's Cannibal Apocalypse and fills in the hole with a Zombie scene from Fulci's film of the same name.

The point of comparison here is Martin's old rival Jay Slater's Eaten Alive, which endeavoured to be an encyclopaedic guide to Italian cannibal and zombie films and thereby included not only the likes of Pier-Paolo Pasolini's Porcile but also Joe D'Amato's Papaya dei Caraibi.

While definitions here are always going to be problematic when you have films like Cannibal Apocalypse, where cannibals behave not unlike zombies, and Zombie Holocaust, where both cannibals and zombies are featured, and although Slater's own attempted definition led to some boundary cases of its own – is Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires a zombie film? - the point is that they would probably have helped.

The second half of the book turns to interviews with John Morghen, Joe D'Amato, Fabrizio de Angelis, Ruggero Deodato, Lucio Fulci, Umberto Lenzi, Antonio Margheriti and Sergio Martino. That D'Amato, Fulci and Margheriti are no longer with us tells you something of their vintage, but given the moribund state of the Italian industry it is debatable whether a more recent interview with a Deodato or Martino would really have added much new material.

A profile of Giannetto de Rossi rounds things off, but unfortunately also comes across as somewhat pointless because, after endeavouring to trace the apparent pseudonyms of Giannetto and establish that Gino de Rossi is one of them, a concluding paragraph notes how the Blue Underground 25th anniversary DVD of Zombie provided photographic evidence that Gino exists in his own right, thereby making the exercise seem a somewhat pointless one.

The book is profusely illustrated throughout with posters, stills, lobby cards, DVD and video artwork and so on, although the occasional image has the look of a second-hand scan rather than being from an original.

Overall, if you've never read FAB Press's director's series volumes on Ruggero Deodato and Lucio Fulci, don't have Eaten Alive or – especially– old issues of Giallo Pages, then Cannibal might, despite all the above criticisms, be a worthwhile addition to your bookshelf. But if you do, then there isn't much new here to really justify the price.

Some thoughts on the giallo and the krimi #2

Anti-clericalism
Both the giallo and the krimi exhibit a broad stream of anti-clericalism. This can be seen in such films as the krimis Dark Eyes of London and The Hunchback of Soho, where the leaders of criminal gangs masquerade as priests; the gialli Don't Torture a Duckling and The Bloodstained Shadow, where psychotic priests murder their erstwhile charges; and the occasional crossover entry like What Have You Done to Solange and Seven Bloodstained Orchids, as gialli based on (Bryan) Edgar Wallace krimi sources.

Weapons
The krimi is much more favourable to the gun than the giallo, insofar as the weapon of choice of most of their policeman and many of his antagonists is a pistol or – more for the bad guys and the rank-and-file officer – machine gun.

While other weapons have a place – e.g. the thugee-style necktie of the Indian Scarf; the bizarre snake-venom firing machinery of The Squealer; the whip of The Sinister Monk, or the straight-razor of Room 13 – they are the gimmicky exceptions to this mundane rule, designed to add an extra frisson and mystery to the proceedings.

In the giallo the range of weapons is broader and sometimes even more bizarre, if we think of the likes of My Dear Killer's decapitation by digger or the poisoned cat claws of The Crimes of the Black Cat. There is, however, a general preference for the blade over the gun, which is just too, well, mundane.

Indeed, guns are rarely used until relatively recent more "realist" examples like The Stendhal Syndrome. Whatever the case, full-scale shoot out between the good and bad guys, blazing away at one another with submachine guns, are conspicuous in their absence.

Modernism and modernity
To paraphrase Fontane's Effi Briest (pretentious, moi?) this is the one that's "too big a subject".

The world evoked by the krimis is, at least in the early days, an anachronistic one that hearkens back to the period in which Wallace was writing, with typewriters; ocean-liners; bowler-hatted, impeccably middle-class gentlemen; aristocrats with dark secrets to hide, and ingénues with inheritances to claim. It is, in a word, a pre-WWII world, perhaps also characterised by a certain nostalgia.

The world of the giallo is, with few exceptions, a contemporary one of the 1960s and 1970s, with reel-to-reel tape recorders; jet-engined planes; casually dressed protagonists; bourgeois with dark secrets to hide, and a comparative lack of innocents and innocence. It is a post-war world, characterised – as Koven says – by an attitude of ambivalence around the economic miracle of the 30 glorious years and all that it has brought with it.

These two worlds are in turn also different in how they relate to their audiences: whereas the krimi consciously distanced the German viewer from Hamburg, 1962 or similar for a neverwhere London, the majority of the gialli were more directly engaged with the lived realities of their audiences in Rome 1972 or suchlike.

Superargo vs Diabolicus

Last night I got round to viewing Superargo vs Diabolicus, which my good friend Matt had copied for me a while back but which had long languished on my to watch pile. Being in a fumetti kind of mood of late, I decided to finally give it a spin.

While the best part of it was the pop-art / psychedelic title sequence, it was quite fun in a disposable way, coming across as a Italian-Spanish attempt to combine a lucha libre film with the post-Thunderball superspy action filone.

It starts off much like the former, as our masked hero, a champion wrestler, takes on his friend El Tigro for the right to be the undisputed champion. Superargo accidentally kills El Tigro, throwing him into depression and soul-searching.

Then Diabolicus and his goons steal some nuclear equipment. His diabolikal (groan) plan is to flood the world with gold, cause the economy to collapse and then present himself as saviour-dictator. So the head of the secret service calls for Superargo and sends him in.



Prior to this, however, we get some weird sado-masochistic subtext as Superargo gets the chance to prove how tough he is as he is stabbed to no effect and demonstrates his invulnerability to electricity – which nevertheless causes him pain – by holding on to a metal bar door as thousands of volts of current are passed through it.

He also gets kitted out with a new, bullet-proof version of his costume (Crimson Executioner hued, with black pants, belt, boots, gloves and masks for stylish contrast); some pills that will suspend his vital signs for a while, and a nifty cocktail olive containing a transmitter-cum-Geiger counter.

Informed of Superargo's mission by an informant within the secret service, some of Diabolicus's goons intercept Superargo and leave him for dead, not realising that he's secretly taken one of the aforementioned pills.

Thus, when he arrives on Diabolicus's island base - there is some nice budget-defying underwater cinematography here and some decent cave complex sets along the way - the evil genius does not believe he is Superargo and sets about alternately cooking and freezing our hero to test his mettle, before Superargo escapes to save the free world.... until next time...

While Superargo wears his costume all the time much like El Santo or Blue Demon, the wrestling sequence at the start proves to be the only one, perhaps suggesting it was included more as a way of conveniently marketing the film in Mexico than a more thoroughgoing crossover.



The wrestling mask is also worth commenting on in terms of its key differences from the giallo killer's stocking mask: whereas the wrestling mask generally gives / secures its wearer's identity – Diabolicus's doubts about whether this is the real Superargo notwithstanding – the featureless stocking mask obscures / erases / effaces the identity of its wearer; such that he / she could be anyone.

Another element connected with this is whether the speaking mouth is visible, this being one of the criteria Michel Chion uses to distinguish between the normal voice and the acousmetric one – i.e. the uncanny voice whose source cannot be definitively placed and fixed to a body. Which brings us back to Argento, Hitchcock and Lang, but that is a matter for prolonged discussion another time...

Old fanzine writing about Argento

An old but good article about Bava, Leone and Argento:

http://www.etext.org/Zines/ASCII/Funhouse/funhouse-1.3
http://www.etext.org/Zines/ASCII/Funhouse/funhouse-1.4

Seddok / Lycanthropus

Today I got round to watching a couple of those Internet Archive Italian horrors, Seddok and Lycanthropus. Neither is exactly a lost classic, though both have points of interest and probably suffered from being dubbed and edited for the US market.

Seddok / Atom Age Vampire comes across as very much a Les Yeux sans visage rip-off, albeit more melodramatic and less poetic. There is some especially tasteless use of photos of atomic burn victims, which are also the most horrifying and shocking things in the film, precisely because they are for real. I wondered if the dancer character, half of whose face is disfigured in an accident, and who is then – albeit temporarily – cured through the obligatory mad scientist's interventions was an influence on the fumetti Satanik; certainly there's a nice coincidence with the film's full Italian title, Seddok, l'erede di Satana.

Lycanthropus / Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory was written by Ernesto Gastaldi and has Luciano Pigozzi as one of its various suspects. It's a strange combination of gothic horror and giallo, with assorted conspiracies and a detective subplot as a couple of amateur sleuths – a teacher with a secret of his own to hide, and one of the (reform) school girls – try to work out who is the lycanthrope and who is just a red herring. Substitute the werewolf for a black-clad masked killer and you would probably have something not too different from Antonio Margheriti's School Girl Killer. There is a fair bit of subjective camera, with some nicely energetic chases through the woods, and even some black-gloved menacing going on.

For free, both films are well worth checking out.

Flaneur / Detective / Analyst

One of the topics that Mikel Koven discusses in La Dolce Morte is whether the amateur detective of the giallo might also be considered as a flâneur. Koven suggests that in reading the flâneur as a detective its most influential 20th century theorist, Walter Benjamin, unfortunately tended to move from the metaphorical – the flâneur is like a detective – to the literal – the flaneur is a detective. Moreover, many of those who have subsequently taken up Benjamin's theories have failed to recognise this crucial distinction.

This got me thinking about another favourite – and perhaps more common – comparison, that between the detective and the psychoanalyst, or the detective-as-analyst and the analyst-as-detective, raised by Gary Needham in his giallo primer and deployed in a more thoroughgoing manner by Xavier Mendik in his monograph on Tenebre.

There, seeking to explain hostile critical reactions to Argento's film, Mendik posits that the problems with Dario Argento's film are not so much on the surface, such as its alleged misogyny and spectacular representations of “violence against women”, but more with its deeper structures. Specifically, the film embodies what he terms “deviant detection” by invoking the ratiocinative classical detective model in a giallo world where it ceases to apply, thereby misleading (mainstream) viewers and critics and incurring their hostility.

Mendik's argument is based heavily on psychoanalytic theory, particularly Slavoj Zizek and Jacques Lacan, and the comparisons they have made between the role of the detective and their own as analyst, in their readings of Edgar Allan Poe's The Purloined Letter and Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes in relation to Freud's “Wolf Man” case respectively. As Mendik explains:

“[T]he analyst's adoption of the role of detective, scrutinising the clues that will reconstitute totality and meaning to a scene, is pertinent. Both the detective and the analyst are forced to piece together the truth from a series of fragments or clues which predate the investigation and point to a criminal or transgressive act that has been (unsuccessfully) concealed in the past.”

What seems, to me, to be lacking here is not just an adequate awareness of the recognition that we might be dealing with a metaphoric description rather than a reality, but also – ironically – how the specifics of giallo film detection complicate the detective-analyst analogy.

Though Tenebre foregrounds “deviant detection” to a greater extent than most gialli – although Renato Polselli's Delirium would certainly give it a run for its money, in having three murderers; one of whom, an analyst himself, is actually also aiding the police in their investigations – it is not an isolated case. As the paradigmatic giallo detective is an amateur who finds personally involved with a case that continues to develop as he investigates - i.e. further crimes are committed – Mendik's “deviant” seems more like “the norm”. Put another way, the giallo film seems to have more in common with the hard boiled world of film noir than it does that of classical Poe/Holmes style mysteries.

In the end, somehow one doubts that a figure like Four Flies on Grey Velvet's Roberto Tobias is an ideal self-portrait / mirror image for the detective-analyst. But, of course, in psychoanalytic theory any recognition of oneself in the mirror is also a misrecognition. I just think that's also what's happened with the detective-as-analyst in the Italian giallo...

Some thoughts on the giallo and the krimi #1

Reflexivity
Both krimi and giallo exhibited a high degree of self-reflexivity early on:

In The Girl Who Knew Too Much the protagonist is immediately established as a reader of mysteries and subsequently endeavours to use her generic knowledge to solve the one within which she finds herself embroiled.

In The Indian Scarf the comic ending – which is admittedly somewhat at odds with the proceedings to that point – sees the plot being described as being worthy of Edgar Wallace himself.

In The Squealer the female lead is a thriller writer, the first chapter of whose latest work contains no less than eight murders to top Wallace's own three. ("I am going to give them crime and blood and three murders to the chapter. Such is the insanity of the age that I do not doubt for one moment the success of my venture.")

This distinguishes them from the slasher film, where similar techniques only became commonplace (or at least recognised when we consider something like Saturday the 14th as forerunner of Scary Movie) with Scream and company in the 1990s.

The investigator
The paradigmatic investigator within the krimi is a Scotland Yard detective whose involvement in the case is a professional one; that of the giallo is an amateur who finds him or herself unwittingly involved as witness to a crime or suchlike.

While these are not absolutes, the exceptions to them, such as the giallo What Have You Done to Your Daughters, very much prove the rule.

The location
Although some gialli, such as Who Saw Her Die and Don't Torture a Duckling, depend upon their specific locations, most could be placed within any Italian conurbation, as demonstrated by Argento's using Turin to double for Rome in Deep Red.

Almost every krimi emphasises its location - almost invariably London and its surrounds - to a far greater extent. Shots of the Houses of Parliament, Picadilly Circus, The Tower of London and other signifiers or Londonicity are omnipresent.

The killer
Within gialli the majority of killers are “motivated” by insanity, followed by revenge and financial gain. Within the krimi these propensities are reversed.

As a result of this the krimi would seem to be less susceptible to obvious psychoanalytic interpretation, with this perhaps being one factor that has contributed to its comparative neglect.

The relationship with the literature
Though taking its name from the literary form, the giallo film seems to exist as something separate. Straight adaptations are rare.

In the krimi the Edgar Wallace name and source novel are far more important, signalled by the “Hello this is Edgar Wallace speaking” introductions; the Edgar Wallace credit alongside the title of the film and the cast / crew credits, and the identification of which particular Goldmann's taschenkrimi the film is adapting. (I suspect this is more pronounced in the early 1960s Wallace adaptations than those of his son, Bryan Edgar Wallace, later in the decade, but have not seen enough of the latter to really confirm or refute this hypothesis.)

The joys of making home-brew DVDs

Taking advantage of broadband, I decided to download the mpeg2 versions of Seddok and Lady Frankenstein and try making my own DVDs. With Seddok the procedure went fine, though with Lady Frankenstein it has proved a bit more of an exercise in frustration.

Having downloaded the mpeg2 file, I used AVS Video Converter to create the .VOB files. Though it did so just fine, it crashed before creating the .IFO and .BUP files which most DVD players and software need. I did not know this, however, and since I could play the files fine in VideoLAN tried burning a DVD using Sonic. It didn't like something and complained about a bad disc. I tried another disc, then another - all brand new, purchased that very morning - with no improvement. So then I burned the DVD using Linux. Burning worked, but playing back on anything other than VideoLAN did not. Then I discovered about the need for .IFO and .BUP files, and so downloaded, installed and used IFOEdit to create them. Burning with Sonic still failed; I haven't tried burning on Linux again yet...

The thing that particularly irks me here is how Sonic implies the problem is somewhere else. Maybe it is, but is certainly isn't with the discs I was using, seeing as how the same blanks worked just fine for the Linux burn of Lady Frankenstein and on Sonic itself for Seddok.

The joys of technology...

Understanding comics / understanding Argento

Last night I reread Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. While some of his insights, such as the importance of panel shape, size, position and boundary (or lack thereof) are specific to his medium, making the book something approaching a Lessing-style Laocoon of the medium, others intersect quite nicely with film. His discussion of the possible transitions between frames, for instance, seems to offer something akin to a comics version of Christian Metz's grand syntigmatique, while his subsequent breakdowns of different comics into which of these transitions they appears to have affinities with the kind of neo-formalist analyses of David Bordwell and the so-called Wisconsin School.

So, I hear you ask, what the hell does this have to do with the giallo and Dario Argento, beyond that vague fumetti-gialli connection? On the surface, not a lot - here he goes again, trying to show off his knowledge and instead only proving his sciolistic tendencies - but it got me thinking about some of those stylistic tropes that seem to be general to gialli as a whole against those that are more specific components of individual filmmakers' practices.

Though just about everyone uses subjective camera, for instance, Argento, Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci seem to have different preferred devices for changing out point of emphasis / attention. Argento will often, for example, cut to an object in medium shot then again, almost immediately, to the same object in close-up; whereas Fulci is more likely to edit within the frame by racking focus from foreground to background or vice-versa; and Bava to achieve the same end through a zoom. While these are tendencies rather than absolutes, it would, I think, be very interesting to see a statistical breakdown of who did what, when, on a case-by-case basis.

Anyone up for it :-)

Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow - The Thomas de Quincey piece used in Inferno

Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow (1821)

Oftentimes at Oxford I saw Levana in my dreams. I knew her by her Roman symbols. Who is Levana? Reader, that do not pretend to have much leisure for very much scholarship, you will not be angry with me for telling you. Levana was the Roman goddess that performed for the new - born infant the earliest office of ennobling kindness, - typical, by its mode, of that grandeur which belongs to man everywhere, and of that benignity in powers invisible which even in pagan worlds sometimes descends to sustain it. At the very moment of birth, just as the infant tasted for the first time the atmosphere of our troubled planet, it was laid on the ground. But immediately, lest so grand a creature should grovel there for more than one instant, either the paternal hand, as proxy for the goddess Levana, or some near kinsman, as proxy for the father, raised it upright, bade it look erect as the king of all this world, and presented its forehead to the stars, saying, perhaps, in his heart, "Behold what is greater than yourselves!" This symbolic act represented the function of Levana. And that mysterious lady, who never revealed her face (except to me in dreams), but always acted by delegation, had her name from the Latin verb (as still it is the Italian verb) levare, to raise aloft.

This is the explanation of Levana, and hence it has arisen that some people have understood by Levana the tutelary power that controls the education of the nursery. She, that would not suffer at his birth even a prefigurative or mimic degradation for her awful ward, far less could be supposed to suffer the real degradation attaching to the non - development of his powers. She therefore watches over human education. Now the word educo, with the penultimate short, was derived (by a process often exemplified in the crystallisation of languages) from the word educo, with the penultimate long. Whatever educes, or develops, educates. By the education of Levana, therefore, is meant, - not the poor machinery that moves by spelling - books and grammars, but by that mighty system of central forces hidden in the deep bosom of human life, which by passion, by strife, by temptation, by the energies of resistance, works for ever upon children, - resting not night or day, any more than the mighty wheel of day and night themselves, whose moments, like restless spokes, are glimmering for ever as they revolve.

If, then, these are the ministries by which Levana works, how profoundly must she reverence the agencies of grief. But you, reader! think, - that children are not liable to such grief as mine. There are two senses in the word generally - the sense of Euclid, where it means universally (or in the whole extent of the genus), and in a foolish sense of this word, where it means usually. Now, I am far from saying that children universally are capable of grief like mine. But there are more than you ever heard of who die of grief in this island of ours. I will tell you a common case. The rules of Eton require that a boy on the foundation should be there twelve years: he is superannuated at eighteen, consequently he must come at six. Children torn away from mothers and sisters at that age not unfrequently die. I speak of what I know. The complaint is not entered by the registrar as grief; but that it is. Grief of that sort, and at that age, has killed more than have ever been counted amongst its martyrs.

Therefore it is that Levana often communes with the powers that shake a man's heart: therefore it is that she dotes on grief. "These ladies," said I softly to myself, on seeing the ministers with whom Levana was conversing, "these are the Sorrows; and they are three in number, as the Graces are three, who dress man's life with beauty; the Parcoe are three, who weave the dark arras of man's life in their mysterious loom, always with colours sad in part, sometimes angry with tragic crimson and black; the Furies are three, who visit with retribution called from the other side of the grave offences that walk upon this; and once even the Muses were but three, who fit the harp, the trumpet, or the lute, to the great burdens of man's impassioned creations. These are the Sorrows, all three of whom I know."

The last words I say now; but in Oxford I said, "One of whom I know, and the others too surely I shall know." For already, in my fervent youth, I saw (dimly relieved upon the dark background of my dreams) the imperfect lineaments of the awful sisters. These sisters - by what name shall we call them? If I say simply, "The Sorrows," there will be a chance of mistaking the term; it might be understood of individual sorrow, - separate cases of sorrow, - whereas I want a term expressing the mighty abstractions that incarnate themselves in all individual sufferings of man's heart; and I wish to have these abstractions presented as impersonations, that is, as clothed with human attributes of life, and with functions pointing to flesh. Let us call them, therefore, Our Ladies of Sorrow. I know them thoroughly, and have walked in all their kingdoms. Three sisters they are, of one mysterious household; and their paths are wide apart; but of their dominion there is no end. Them I saw often conversing with Levana, and sometimes about myself. Do they talk, then? O, no! mighty phantoms like these disdain the infirmities of language. They may utter voices through the organs of man when they dwell in human hearts, but amongst themselves there is no voice nor sound; eternal silence reigns in their kingdoms. They spoke not, as they talked with Levana; they whispered not; they sang not; though oftentimes methought they might have sung, for I upon earth had heard their mysteries oftentimes deciphered by harp and timbrel, by dulcimer and organ. Like God, whose servants they are, they utter their pleasure, not by sounds that perish, or by words that go astray, but by signs in heaven, by changes on earth, by pulses in secret rivers, heraldries painted on darkness, and hieroglyphics written on the tablets of the brain. They wheeled in mazes; I spelled the steps. They telegraphed from afar; I read the signals. They conspired together; and on the mirrors of darkness my eye traced the plots. Theirs were the symbols; mine are the words.

What is it the sisters are? What is it that they do? Let me describe their form, and their presence: if form it were that still fluctuated in its outline, or presence it were that for ever advanced to the front, or for ever receded amongst shades.

The eldest of the three is named Mater Lachrymarum, Our Lady of Tears. She it is that night and day raves and moans, calling for vanished faces. She stood in Rama, where a voice was heard of lamentation, - Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted. She it was that stood in Bethlehem on the night when Herod's sword swept its nurseries of Innocents, and the little feet were stiffened for ever, which,heard at times as they tottered along floors overhead, woke pulses of love in household hearts that were not unmarked in heaven.

Her eyes are sweet and subtle, wild and sleepy, by turns; oftentimes rising to the clouds, oftentimes challenging the heavens. She wears a diadem round her head. And I knew by childish memories that she could go abroad upon the winds, when she heard the sobbing of litanies or the thundering of organs, and when she beheld the mustering of summer clouds. This sister, the eldest, it is that carries keys more than papal at her girdle, which open every cottage and every palace. She, to my knowledge, sat all last summer by the bedside of the blind beggar, him that so often and so gladly I talked with, whose pious daughter, eight years old, with the sunny countenance, resisted the temptations of play and village mirth to travel all day long on dusty roads with her afflicted father. For this did God send her a great reward. In the spring - time of the year, and whilst yet her own Spring was budding, he recalled her to himself. But her blind father mourns for ever over her; still he dreams at midnight that the little guiding hand is locked within his own; and still he wakens to a darkness that is now within a second and a deeper darkness. This Mater Lachrymarum has also been sitting all this winter of 1844 - 5 within the bed - chamber of the Czar, bringing before his eyes a daughter (not less pious) that vanished to God not less suddenly, and left behind her a darkness not less profound. By the power of the keys it is that Our Lady of tears glides a ghostly intruder into the chambers of sleepless men, sleepless women, sleepless children, from Ganges to Nile, from Nile to Mississippi. And her, because she is the first - born of her house, and has the widest empire, let us honour with the title of "Madonna!"

The second sister is called Mater Suspiriorum - Our Lady of Sighs. She never scales the clouds, nor walks abroad upon the winds. She wears no diadem. And her eyes, if they were ever seen, leaps. She carries no key; for, though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And her name is Mater Tenebrarum - Our Lady of Darkness.

These were the Semnai Theai, or Sublime Goddesses, these were the Eumenides, or Gracious Ladies (so called by antiquity in shuddering propitiation), of my Oxford dreams. Madonna spoke. She spoke by her mysterious hand. Touching my head, she said to Our Lady of Sighs; and what she spoke, translated out of the signs which (except in dreams) no man reads, was this:

"Lo! here is he, whom in childhood I dedicated to my altars. This is he that once I made my darling. Him I led astray, him I beguiled, and from heaven I stole away his young heart to mine. Through me did he become idolatrous; and through me it was, by languishing desires, that he worshipped the worm, and prayed to the wormy grave. Holy was the grave to him; lovely was its darkness; saintly its corruption. Him, this young idolater, I have seasoned for thee, dear gentle Sister of Sighs! Do thou take him now to thy heart, and season him for our dreadful sister. And thou," - turning to the Mater Tenebrarum, she said, - "wicked sister, that temptest and hatest, do thou take him from her. See that thy sceptre lie heavy on his head. Suffer not woman and her tenderness to sit near him in his darkness. Banish the frailties of hope, wither the relenting of love, scorch the fountain of tears, curse him as only thou canst curse. So shall he be accomplished in the furnace, so shall he see the things that ought not to be seen, sights that are abominable, and secrets that are unutterable. So shall he read elder truths, sad truths, grand truths, fearful truths. So shall he rise again before he dies, and so shall our commission be accomplished which from God we had, - to plague his heart until we had unfolded the capacities of his spirit."

The Sinister Monk / Suspiria / Inferno

Over the past few days I've been watching a fair number of the German Edgar Wallace krimis, looking for similarities with and differences from the Italian giallo.

Two interesting little intertextual connections that came out of The Sinister Monk are however with two of Argento's more horror-oriented ventures, Suspiria and Inferno.

One of the minor characters in The Sinister Monk – otherwise the typical Edgar Wallace heiress in peril plot combined with the kidnapping/white slavery plot and a delightfully bizarre whip-wielding masked monk – is a seemingly harmless, eccentric old artist and pigeon fancier, Alfons Short, whose hobby is making death-masks for the living. (I'm sure we can work Andre Bazin in there as well, then.)

Whether Argento saw The Sinister Monk is, of course, another matter, but I do find it an nice coincidence that Alfons Short should be played by Rudolf Schündler, Professor Milius in Suspiria. Especially seeing as the piece of music he plays on his record player is none other than the chorus of the Hebrew slaves from Verdi's Nabucco – i.e. the same piece Argento uses in Inferno to accompany Marc Elliot's sighting of the Mother of Tears in the conservatory and to choregraph the murder of Sara.

“You've probably heard this before,” indeed.

The Giallo Scrapbook - or, more stuff for you to buy...

These two A5 booklets are from Nigel Burrell and Paul Brown at Midnight Media, the guys behind the excellent Is it Uncut? magazine. More consumer guides than theoretical discussions - and thus nicely counterpointing Mikel Koven's La Dolce Morte - they survey a total of 80 gialli.

The first volume includes the more easily accessible examples of the form, while the second pushes the boat out a bit further to include several not-on-DVD-but-damn-well-should-be titles like Footprints and Four Flies on Grey Velvet along with a number of largely 80s, 90s and 00s vintage entries such as Nightmare Beach and Body Puzzle that I've never had the inclination to track down. (Of the 40 titles in volume one, my current count is 39, whereas I've only seen 29 of the 40 in volume 2; though knowing that Luigi Bazzoni's La Donna del lago or Dino Tavelli's The Embalmer are actually available on DVD should mean that number goes down over the coming weeks. There goes the bank balance...)

A brief synopsis of each film is followed by a commentary / critique, cast / credits and DVD availability, all written in a breezy, easy-to-read style with a careful avoidance of spoilers by Burrell, and nicely laid out by Brown with plenty of stills, DVD covers and posters to enliven things.

While the reader will inevitably disagree with some of what Burrell says - The Stendhal Syndrome is pretty much a masterpiece in my book, for example - there is a consistency to his opinions that should enable anyone with even a passing interest in the genre to quickly work out whether any given unfamiliar gialli is likely to be worth the time and money as far as he or she is concerned.

The latest additions to my library

La Dolce Paura (Sweet Fear) – Sexy horror in Italian movies and popular publications 1959-1966



Psychopathia Sexualis in Italian Sinema – Incredibly strange movie fantasies from “cineromanzi” 1968-1972

These glossy, large-size, dual-language (English / Italian) coffee-table type books, published by Florence-based Glittering Images, are expensive, but well worth it, with hundreds of beautiful illustrations, black and white and colour, and the kind of information on their subject matter that it is difficult to find elsewhere - never mind the title of the first Italian translation of Robert Bloch's Psycho, here is its cover illustration.

The first volume, La Dolce paura, takes its title from a Gothic sequence in Fellini's celebrated La Dolce Vita, and explores the interrelationships between sexy horror films and fotoromanzi in the period 1959-66, when Malia featured photo-novel versions of films like Il Monsto di Venezia / The Monster of Venice and Il Boia scarlatto /Bloody Pit of Horror and the occasional story from KKK – fortunately it has nothing to do with the white sheet guys, instead bearing the subtitle "i classici dell' orrore" – such as the pseudonymous Frank Bog(h)art's La Vergine di Norimberga / The Virgin of Nuremberg was adapted for the screen.

With 1967 mysteriously missing, Psychopathia Sexualis in Italian Sinema picks up the story from 1968-1972, but opts for a more focussed approach. Inspired by Richard Kraft Ebbing's work, it presents ten “case studies” drawn from the films and their fotoromanzi renditions, including Femina ridens / The Frightened Woman, with Dagmar Lassander being menaced by Philippe Leroy; La Verita secondo satana and Delirio Caldo / Delirium, with the authors having a particular enthusiasm for director Renato Polselli and his fetish star Rita Calderoni.

What is maybe missing is much on the fumetti beyond a few pages at the end of La Dolce paura referencing Kriminal and Satanik. I suspect that the third volume in the series, Esotika, Erotika, Psicotika, has more to say on the subject, and probably also looks at the later, more out there 1970s examples of the form.

Perhaps my favourite nugget of information is that number 144 of KKK, written by one Patty North, was titled Il gatto a 9 code like a certain Dario Argento film...

Italian horror films for download

Not strictly giallo or Argento related, but probably of interest

The Internet Archive, archive.org, has some Italian horror films available for download. All are public domain / out of copyright / legal and above board.

Werewolf in a Girl's Dormitory / Lycanthropus
http://www.archive.org/details/Werewolf_In_A_Girls_Dormitory

Nightmare Castle
http://www.archive.org/details/nightmare_castle

Bloody Pit of Horror
http://www.archive.org/details/BloodyPitOfHorror

Lady Frankenstein
http://www.archive.org/details/Lady_Frankenstein

Atom Age Vampire / Seddok
http://www.archive.org/details/AtomAgeVampire

The Last Man on Earth
http://www.archive.org/details/the-last-man-on-earth

Enjoy...

Screengrabs question

Is there any software, preferably free as in both speech and beer, that can be set up to take a burst of screenshots of a number of frames over a couple of seconds? This would be really handy for trying to grab that elusive, fleeting moment, like those below.

Art of Darkness #1

One of the artists referred to by Jean-Baptiste Thoret in his excellent study of Argento, Magicien de la peur, is the Argentinean born, Italian based Arte Povera sculptor and painter Lucio Fontana, especially his Concetto Spaziale series, where Fontana would slash his canvases, thereby drawing attention to the them as something more than just a surface for paint to be applied to:





Now consider the recurrent motif of the Torn Curtain, screen, cloth or even body-as-canvas as found in Inferno, Tenebre and Demons.

Inferno:









Note also here the perhaps-not coincidental triangular formation left by Sara's falling body, given the recurrence of the triangle as a motif for the witches in Suspiria's production design and the use made of the triangular frame/shape in the likes of Giorgio de Chirico's The Enigma of Fatality:



For, as Magdelena Holzhey explains: "De Chirico found support for his attribution of symbolic value to certain geometic figures in the philosophical writings of Otto Weineger, who talked of the unsettling effects of the triangle." (De Chirico, p.35)

Tenebre:



The screen between the victim and the assassin



The rupture



Sotto gli occhi dell'assassino

Demons:



The body-as-screen about to be ruptured



The screen-as-body about to be ruptured



The ruptured bodies...

Definitions of the giallo

In an article on the giallo film, published in the magazine The Dark Side in 1996, John Martin begins with the various definitions offered by a number of other commentators as to what the giallo actually is:

"That's a tricky one. I guess the first thing that springs into my mind is people with big black gloves, with zippers up the side, and big knives, to stick into people... but its more complex than that."
- Richard Stanley

"It describes a genre of mysteries in which the discovery of the criminal's identity is less important than discovering how the crime was done."
- Maitland McDonagh

"You mean Argento, Bava? Those films are blood operas!"
- John McNaughton

"I'm not sure how I'd define it, actually..."
- Mark Kermode

What I want to emphasise here is not the accuracy of these definitions, (nor indeed, that of Martin's alternative to them, that "the essence of the giallo resides in two factors: style and savagery" – a definition which would exclude a film like Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, that has plenty of style yet little savagery) but instead emphasise the different conceptual frameworks that appear to underlie them, what they make possible and what they exclude.

In one sense Mark Kermode's modest uncertainty is the least helpful, but in another it is useful in pointing to the kind of the difficulties that pertain here.

This is paralleled by Richard Stanley's opening admission - “That's a tricky one” - before he then proposes a definition based on iconography in the form of the characteristic black gloves and knives, along with a more specific feature - the zipper up the side - that seems to reference Deep Red in particular.

The admission that “it's more complex than that,” meanwhile, might be best read in relation to the fact that Deep Red is a different, more horror-type, giallo than the majority of those that preceded it, as exemplified by the Animal Trilogy and its imitators.

This leads us onto the more auteur focussed approach implied by John McNaughton via his references to Mario Bava, who founded the genre, and Dario Argento, who reinvigorated it and boosted its popularity with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and its successors, but one also tempered with a sense that these filmmakers can be situated within a distinctive national context – that of the “blood opera”.

Maitland McDonagh offers the most confident definition, but thereby also the most problematic. For, as Gary Needham and Mikel Koven have argued – and as McDonagh herself seems to acknowledge elsewhere – the giallo film, as distinct from the literary giallo, is better understood via the framework of the filone rather than genre. McDonagh's emphasis upon mystery and the how- rather than who-dunit, meanwhile, would also seem to have the effect of meaning that such titles as Blood and Black Lace and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, where the killers' modus operandi is straightforwardly there on the screen, are somehow less important or central gialli than the likes of The Black Belly of the Tarantula and The Crimes of the Black Cat.

The giallo / krimi connection #1

[This article contains a spoiler for the film Zimmer 13; you have been warned]

In an article first published in the US magazine Gorezone and later reprinted in The Video Watchdog Book, Tim Lucas explored the world of the West German Edgar Wallace krimi films of the 1960s, emphasising the cross-fertilisation between them and the Italian giallo of a few years later.

Feeling inspired, I decided to stick on Harald Reinl's 1964 krimi Room 13 / Zimmer 13 – one that Lucas didn't discuss; with his and my selections largely failing to intersect. (And, thus, also giving me a bunch of other titles to acquire, but that's another story.)

The first thing we see is a pair of black gloved hands playing with a straight razor, which is then used – albeit in a comparatively restrained fashion, insofar as its so fast we really don't see anything – on a passing woman.





So far, so giallo.

This impression continues as the credits unfold, with a series of brightly tinted still images that are reminiscent of silent cinema tinting – think Expressionist classics like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Nosferatu – the solarised primary colour images of many a giallo trailer and the three pack Technicolor manipulations of Suspiria.









Unfortunately from then on the differences between the worlds of the two forms assert themselves more, through images of a London that looks curiously lost in time – think 1924 rather than 1964 – where the train rather than the plane is the epitome of modern transport and bowler hats instead of fedoras the headgear of choice.

We are then introduced to the curious case of Sir Robert Marney's missing razor and gangster Joe Legge, who threatens Sir Robert's daughter Denise unless he agrees to assist in his planned great train robbery. Understandably fearful, Sir Robert then calls in Johnny Grey for help. He's a private detective, thereby highlighting the distinction between the krimi's professional investigators, and the giallo's amateur sleuths; likewise, in the world of the krimi the gun is the preferred weapon of choice.

The crime / gangster and horror / maniac on the loose elements continue to sit uneasily side-by-side as the film story towards its denouement, though there are some interesting images, like that of the room at the mannequin filled room at the Highland Nightclub where one of the dancers is murdered and a pursuit through a bric-a-brac strewn room that manages to successfully evoke the heritage of M while simultaneously crying out for Blood and Black Lace style colour to push it towards neo-expressionism.









The identity of the killer turns out to be somewhat predictable and shouldn't pose the giallo fan any difficulties, with a curious evocation of the Freudian “primal scene” as explanation / justification for their psychosis. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words...

A few more mondadori titles

A few more intriguing titles and translations from Mondadori's libri gialli:

• P. A. Taylor's The Amulet of Gilt (1938) as Il guanto nero (1948)
• B. and D. Hitchen's One Way Ticket (1956) as Il gatto e il topo (1959)
• E. and G. Little's The Black Gloves (1939) as Occhio di lince (1950)
• D. M. Disney's Look Back on Murder (1951) as Testimone oculare (1953)

Random giallo generator

I'm sure many of you have seen this before, the random giallo generator which gives you a title, director and plot. Some of them sound sufficiently plausible to have come from Cinecitta or De Paolis some time in the 1970s.

The giallo index

There's a very useful index to and listing of the titles published under the various Mondadori i libri gialli series at http://www.lfb.it/fff/giallo/index.htm

Some little tidbits of information:

• A total of 85 different authors were published among the 266 titles of the original 1929-41 series, assuming - and it is a dangerous assumption, admittedly - no pseudonyms.
• By far the most popular author was Edgar Wallace, with no fewer than 54 titles to his credit. Also well represented among the Anglo-American contingent were Agatha Christie with 20, Erle Stanley Gardner with 12, Ellery Queen with 11, S S Van Dine with 10 and Rex Stout with nine. (I don't know about the E D'Errico or A. Varaldo, also in the top-ten but more Italian-sounding.)
  
• One P. Very wrote Le vipere di cristallo (published 1934). Other giallo-film style titles included the Perry Mason series entry Perry Mason e il mistero del gatto grigio (1938) and T. A. Spagnola's La bambola insanguinata (1935).
• Among the later entries is Dorothy L. Sayer's Clouds of Witness (published 1926) as Il gatto dagli occhi verdi (1948 in Italian translation).
  

I'm sure there's lots more...

Argento, De Palma, Hitchcock - reflections on the MFB reviews #2

With Inferno being less well received that its predecessor and poorly distributed internationally, Argento's next film, Tenebre, marked a return to the giallo and, concomitantly, a comparatively conventional narrative. Again, however, the critical reception was decidedly muted, returning once more to Argento's perceived failings in writing plausible situations and well-rounded characters:

""Cut out the boring bits and you've got a best-seller", advises urbane novelist Franciosa, provoking the immediate and easy response to Tenebre that without the boring bits you wouldn't have a film. To do reluctant justice to Argento, it must be admitted that visually the film is seldom boring; the sense of tedium comes partly from its catalogue of explicit blood-lettings in which the camera, and consequently the subjectified spectator, hunts down one covering girl after another, and partly from the daft motivation finally offered - a lurid combination of Dressed to Kill and Tennessee Williams. Not a prolific film-maker, Argento seems to save up his favourite sequences from other directors until he can string them together to justify his own massively convoluted narratives. As many potential victims as possible are assembled so that they can be messily pruned down, and Tenebre is thick with ill-explained, short-lived and oddly indistinguishable characters.

Among its pretensions (and Argento can be relied upon never to film things the simple way), Tenebre offers two major scenes of calculated artifice: the attenuated camera crawl up the side of the building in which two girls are about to be killed, and the sequence in which John Saxon, also about to be killed, sits waiting at a shopping precinct, watching the passers-by. Both sequences contrive to mingle Antonioni (The Eclipse, The Passenger) with Hitchcock (Rear Window) in accordance with Argento's declared allegiances, but they add little to his penny-dreadful participants. One is made all the more aware of the director's inability to match visual flair with anything worth watching."

Again a set of unacknowledged biases are evident. Why should the recognition of any filmmaker's abilities be "reluctant," no matter whether we are discussing Dario Argento, Sergei Eisenstein, Leni Riefenstahl? Can aesthetics be reduced, as implicltly seems to be the case here, to politics, sexual or otherwise? If questions of plausibility are an issue then where does that leave a film like Hitchcock's Vertigo - which the author of this review, Philip Strick, actually ranked as #9 on his all time top ten in the 2002 Sight and Sound poll. And where is the recognition that it could equally be De Palma who was borrowing from gialli such as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and The Case of the Bloody Iris when crafting Dressed to Kill?

Indeed, in is worth also looking at the MFB's review of De Palma's film in this regard, where Richard Combs again uses Hitchcock as the yardstick: "When De Palma wants to fox the audience about his plot, he simply cheats as Hitchcock never would: another split screen sequence shows Dr Elliott watching a TV programme one transsexuals simultaneous with the supposedly blonde-wigged killer spying on the prostitute who has witnessed the murder (at the end it turns out that a policewoman has been got up in the killer's exact costume for purposes of surveillance.)"

What this neglects are those times when Hitchcock himself cheated and took something of a 'a do as I say, not as I do' position on the question of suspense versus shock, or at least implicitly acknowledged that there was something to them which went beyond his formulation. Psycho that provides some of the best examples here, precisely because Hitchcock does not tell us that Norman Bates is his dead Mother until the very end. Early on, when mother and son engage in conversation Mrs Bates's dialogue was provided by several female performers not than Anthony Perkins. Later, as private detective Arbogast investigates Marion Crane's disappearance, his murder is deliberately shot so as to maintain the illusion that the killer is Mrs Bates even as this selfsame construction should not but help draw the attentive viewer - i.e. critical reviewer's - attention to the fact that something is not right. As Hitchcock explained:

"I used a single shot of Arbogast coming up the stairs, and when he got to the top step, I deliberately plced the camera very high for two reasons. The first was so that I could shoot down on top of the mother, because if I'd shown her back, it might have looked as if I was deliberately concealing her face and the audience would have been leery. I used that high angle in order not to give the impression that I was trying to avoid showing her."

Somewhat predictably, however, his interviewer here, Francois Truffaut, did not ask any questions of 'the master' here, instead meekly accepting Hitchcock's explanation that concealing the murderer's identity was merely secondary - "But the main reason for raising the camera so high was to get the contrast between the long shot and the close-up of the big head as the knife came down at him."

Would that the playing field be levelled and all filmmakers be extended the same benefit of the doubt or - insofar as that is probably impossible, as a throwback to old-style romantic auteurism - at least subjected to the same kind of critical criteria, where everyone is treated with the same dis/respect.

Behind the mask

In the 1930s, the American comic strip Dick Tracy featured a villain known as The Blank, who wore a fedora and a featureless white mask, without eyes, nose or mouth, to conceal his real identity as disfigured gangland murderer Frankie Redrum.

While it is difficult to know if Mario Bava ever saw Chester Gould's comic strip, it is within the realm of possibility, the Italian comics magazine Robinson having featured the character alongside Li'l Abner, Prince Valiant and others between 1945-47.

(In the comics world the Blank likely inspired the look of Steve Ditko's superhero The Question (1967) who was in turn reworked as Rorschach in Alan Moore's The Watchmen (1986).)





Two faces of the killer from Mario Bava's seminal Blood and Black Lace; compare to The Blank at http://www.comicspage.com/dicktracy/dick_villain2.html

Forthcoming French book on Argento

I notice that there's a new French book on Argento, Crime Designer - Dario Argento et le Cinema, scheduled for release at the end of January 2007. The authors are listed as Joisten / Bernard. Anyone out there know of them or of what sort of book it is - serious, fan, a bit of both?

The mask

Within The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (1992) Angela Dalle Vacche endeavours to illuminate the national-specific aspects of Italian cinema, relating them to the distinctive historicist orientation of the country's intellectual and cultural life over the course of the 20th century.

Her analysis begins further back in time, however, with Renaissance art, although unusually she does not focus on the discovery of perspective in apparatus theory terms (basically that by replicating quattrocento perspective, the film camera and cinema more generally cannot but also replicate the humanistic worldview embedded within it) but instead emphasises its legacy in other arts:

"From painting to the cinema, body, spectacle and allegory are the three parameters that control how Italian filmmakers depict the national identity and adjust their vision of contemporary life within the these parametric forms. Allegory, spectacle, and body not only characterize Italian Renaissance painting, but influence two art forms that in themselves are important to Italian cinema: opera and the commedia dell'arte.” (4)

Whereas opera focussed on the large scale / spectacular, the commedia dell'arte focussed on the small scale / intimate. Both, however, could still be contrasted with the literary in terms of their universal appeal within an Italy - not yet an Italy "in itself" let alone "for itself", if we can appropriate from Marx's class analysis to a nation based one - divided by region and language even beyond unification in the latter half of the 19th century and then increasingly by class over the course of the 20th.

While the nationalist and fascist projects over the years certainly constructed a more unitary Italian identity through the education system, military service and the mass media, the search for something with sufficiently broad appeal nevertheless remains a hallmark of the Italian cinema.

Consider - for instance - the divergent characteristics of the prima and terza visione circuits and audiences as discussed by Christopher Wagstaff. This, in turn, cannot but affect the type of cinema that is made, what it emphasises and downplays. In this regard Argento is fortunate: having begun his career as a writer and only turning his hand to direction out of fear of what another would do to his The Bird with the Crystal Plumage script, he turned out to have a visual flair. In a similar vein his oft-criticised writing could also be read as a symptom of his nationality and the enduring legacy of the questione della lingua. (Here it is perhaps also worth recalling the frequent failures of language in Argento's cinema, whether the problems the Roman Romolo and Milanese Cainazzo have communicating with one another in Le Cinque giornate in the absence of a completely common lingua, or musicology student Mark Elliot in Inferno being mistaken for a professor of toxicology - perhaps intentionally; the misreading is after all made by the incognito Mother of Darkness.)

Another aspect of Dalle Vacche's discussion here which is relevant is that of the maschere or mask, one of the three key elements of the aforementioned commedia dell'arte alongside pantomime and improvisation. Within the commedia, the role of the mask was to identify particular character types to the audience - i.e. while concealing the identity of the performer, the mask also made the nature of the role he was playing immediately recognisable. This, I think, is highly significant when we turn to the featureless stocking mask of the archetypal giallo killer, as epitomised by Bava's Blood and Black Lace and later codified in the plethora of imitations that followed in the wake of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage's phenomenal box-office success.

For while this mask may identify its wearer qua killer, at least diegetically, it also conceals his or her underlying identity. Anyone could turn out to be the killer when typification fails. Indeed, is is worth remembering how in Blood and Black Lace Max Morlachi has Countess Como don the mask and other accoutrements to commit a murder while he is in police custody in order to equip him with an ironclad alibi, or how in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage Alberto Ranieri does his best to throw the police off his murderous wife's trail by doubling for her and assuming her killer identity himself. In cases like these, then, the masked killer cannot even be pinned down to a single identity. If not quite legion, s/he (and here remembering that, via her misidentification with her attacker, Monica Ranieri could be argued, like many of Argento's characters, to be suffering from a degree of gender confusion) is at least doubled/multiple.

Another thing worth mentioning here is the more painterly heritage behind the giallo killer's mask. Though often most readily associated with the Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte, in works such as The Lovers, a specifically Italian reference point can also be identified in Giorgio de Chirico's pittura metafisica / metaphysical painting, within which blank-faced mannequins are a recurrent feature. (We can also think here of the original credits sequence to Blood and Black Lace, where the characters, many of their number the sei donne per l'assassino, are introduced alongside mannequins.)



Magritte's The Lovers



De Chirico's The Two Sisters

While Dalle Vacche does not refer to Argento within either The Body in the Mirror or her later Cinema and Painting: How Art is Used in Film (1997) a line of influence can nevertheless be traced from De Chirico to Michelangelo Antonioni to Argento. Discussing Antononi's The Red Desert in the latter study, Dalle Vacche notes that "de Chirico's puppetlike intruders in his airless piazze are nothing but the other side of F T Marinetti's mechanical man, whose direct descendant we encounter in the toy robot moving up and down Valerio's room and interrupting Giulia's natural sleep," thereby reminding us - to give only the most obvious example - of the mechanical doll in Deep Red with which Martha terrorises Professor Giordani before murdering him.