A few things

First off, apologies to those whose emails I have not answered yet and for the paucity of updates over the past few days; things have been unusually hectic.

Second, and of more interest to those who are not particularly concerned with the ins and outs of my schedule, a couple of recent additions to the library.



The first of these is Bernard Joisten's recently published book on Argento, Crime Designer. I have not got all the way through it and my French is admittedly limited, but there are nevertheless enough names and reference points to make it a worthwhile read for any Argento fan.

While some of the intertextual connections such as the painters De Chirico and Magritte were familiar others, like fashion photographer / fellow “crime designer” Guy Bourdin were new. Maitland McDonagh does refer to Bourdin's Vogue colleague Helmut Newton in passing at one point in reference to an Argento murder scene (“Pics by Helmut Newton.”) but does not really explore the theme as Joisten does. (And Argento did, after all, stage a catwalk show inspired by the opening moments of Suspiria, so the connection is not just the critic angling for obscure reference points; see also some of the Bourdin wallpapers on his website.)


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The second is another back issue of the late lamented European Trash Cinema, the interview issue with Steve Bissette Cannibal cover. I got a laugh when I opened this, as it was wrapped in some pages of The Daily Mail. To explain for younger and / or non-UK readers The Daily Mail is the mouthpiece of right-wing little England that was instrumental in mounting the moral panic that led to the banning of Tenebre amongst others and, albeit indirectly, gave the films and the culture around them a significant fillip.

>As far as the magazine itself goes, while the Barbara Bouchet profile covers similar ground to the one in Giallo Pages, it was the first to be published and – an argument I would say also pertains to the interviews with the likes of Antonio Margheriti and Sergio Stivaletti – the more the merrier. Besides the sheer value of the information within them, it is also the way they work as time capsule, whether Margheriti lamenting the state of the Italian film industry or Stivaletti talking about Trauma, then in pre-production.

I am sure I am not alone in wishing there was some way to get all this material back in print, that we lived in a world where an English-language Argento on Argento, Fulci on Fulci or Freda on Freda was viable. Unfortunately as it is we do not even have the full version of Spaghetti Nightmares...

Lang / Reinl / Argento - some observations on The Invisible Dr Mabuse

Metropol(e|is)

The theatre featured in German-set The Invisible Dr Mabuse is called the Metropole, allowing Reinl to allude to Lang's Metropolis. On the Argento side of things the re-opened cinema in the Berlin-set Demons is also the Metropole.





This Metropole is currently showing what is described as an “operetta,” set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, though it also involves ballet and “Grand Guignol”, the latter again being explictly referred to within the diegesis.

Here it is worth remembering here how the (Italian) Grand Guignol was an important influence on the development of the horror films of Bava, Freda and company, whilst the French Revolutionary setting allows for a connection to Trauma specifically, through the “moving guillotine” and credit sequence / nursery room imagery.


Compare to the divas in Argento's Opera and Phantom of the Opera


His master's voice – the shadowy but not invisible Dr Mabuse

The star / diva of the show has attracted the attentions of an invisible admirer. While he sneaks into her dressing room to better observe her, significantly he declines to speak or identify him presence. This silence helps establish that he is almost certainly not Mabuse, whose defining qualities, as per Michel Chion's notion of the acousmetre, are the voice we hear coupled with the face and mouth we do not see.

It also distinguishes him from Argento's phantoms of Opera and ... the Opera, where the acousmetric qualities of omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience are once more foregrounded.


Bobo / Haghi / Mabuse

Among Mabuse's underlings is a clown, Bobo, who seems to function as a way for Reinl to allude to Lang's Spione, whose master spy, Haghi, is a Mabuse in all but name with his plethora of identities and disguises.


Codename EDGAR

The director also has fun when the FBI agent makes contact with the local agents, whose cover is as an opticians – i.e. precisely something concerned with vision; extending to the investigator hero's ability to see through illusion to reality – and identifies himself by (mis)reading the letters off the chart, as EDGAR, as in Wallace.

Curiously the pseudo-scientific explanation behind the film's invisibility device does not seem all that removed from the James Bond film Die Another Day, reminding us of the long pre-history of Bond and the often unacknowledged traditions going all the way back to Fantômas ("who is Fantômas?") and beyond that Bond, Mabuse and countless others tap into.

Rings of Fear / Enigma Rosso

The body of a girl, Angela Russo, from the exclusive St Teresa's School for Girls is found in the river, wrapped in plastic like Twin Peaks' Laura Palmer.


One of many Twin Peaks-isms in the film, others including a secret diary and repeated references to coffee

Detective Di Salvo (Fabio Testi) is assigned the case, but finds the investigation going slowly until the dead girl's younger sister Emily indicates that he should focus his attentions on Angela's friends Franca, Paola and Virginia, the remaining three-quarters of a group collectively known as the Inseparables (“if anybody knows what Angela was up to, it's them”) and gives him the dead girl's purse, containing clues in the form a surprisingly large sum of money and a secret diary in which the Saturdays are marked with a stylised cat.

It is less than clear what the figure means, however, until a convenient roadside billboard reveals it as the logo of brand of designer jeans sold at a boutique in town.

Further investigation soon reveals that the Inseparables were regular visitors to the place and that it is the hub for a schoolgirl prostitution ring. Unfortunately the ringleaders have friends in high places who will do whatever it takes to protect themselves, including murder.








De Salvi meets some of the the staff of St Teresa's School for Girls; comparing this to the equivalent scene in What Have You Done to Solange the influence of Massimo Dallamano is evident

Meanwhile Franca, Paola and Angela find themselves being terrorised by figure identifying themselves only as Nemesis. (“Run towards the black shadow. Death will come to meet you and your deepest desires will then come true. Nemesis.”)




The Inseparables in the shower and under observation, perhaps by Il Gatto dagli occhi di giada?

With no fewer than six writers working on the script for Rings of Fear, it is not surprising that the end results are somewhat confused at times, most notably in the handling of Di Salvo's relationship with his kleptomaniac partner Christina; fed up with his devotion to the job, she announces that if he leaves she will not be there when he returns and follows through on the threat – with no obvious effect upon him or the subsequent narrative.

Nevertheless, anyone who has seen What Have You Done to Solange or What Have They Done to Your Daughters will have no difficulty in picking out the dominant contribution of Massimo Dallamano – whose accidental death in 1976 robbed him the chance to complete the trilogy – through the private Catholic girls' school environs, complete with shower-room peeping tom and line-up of the teachers / suspects; backstreet abortions gone wrong; sex and drug orgies, all the way down to a vague fairground motif as Di Salvo drags one suspect (played by Jess Franco regular Jack Taylor) onto a roller-coaster to facilitate extracting the information he needs.




Il gatto a nove code?

Unfortunately the film also shows a distinct case of diminishing returns, with director Alberto Negrin – whose sole film this seems to have been, the rest of his career having been spent in television – failing to achieve the same degree of critical distance from the exploitative material as did his predecessor. Thus, for instance, while he cuts in close-ups of the shower-room voyeur's eye, the broader theme is not really integrated into the proceedings in a way that makes the viewer think about his own responses to the scene.




Yet another fall from a great height

The casting of Testi as police investigator makes for some fascinating contrasts and comparisons with Solange, the actor having played the amateur investigator / suspect there, with the differences in attitude between the early 1970s giallo-krimi and the late poliziotto-giallo seemingly encapsulated by the poliziotto directness of Di Salvo's approach (“Somebody with a cock this big raped Angela Russo and threw her in the river!”) against the krimi restraint and discretion shown by the Scotland Yard man.

As with Daughters, meanwhile, the film testifies to the widespread sense of social malaise prevalent as the anni di piombo wore on, whether the headmistress of the school – at times perhaps recalling a real-world version of Suspiria's Tanzacademie – who is is most concerned with preserving its reputation, yet does not care about the sometimes dubious family circumstances of her pupils so long as their fees are forthcoming; the consistent thwarting of good cops by their superiors (“Rich, influential men pay well for teenage favours,” indeed); or even such minor details as the boutique shop assistant closely scrutinising the bill used to pay for a pair of jeans.

Another site well worth a visit

Italian Soundtracks - http://www.italiansoundtracks.com/

Loads of useful information and cover images from original releases by CAM, Gemelli and company, with listings by label, composer and so on.

So Sweet, So Dead / Rivelazioni di un maniaco sessuale al capo della squadra mobile

A maniac is murdering the unfaithful wives of prominent citizens. He leaves incriminating photographs of the women and their lovers, but removes the men's faces to protect / conceal their identities.


Being naked playing dead - the maniac's first victim

Inspector Capuano (a dubbed Farley Granger) is assigned the case. While pathologist Professor Casali (Chris Avram) offers useful information as to the killer's modus operandi and motivation, Capuano finds his investigations otherwise stalled at every turn by his superiors' insistence that he focus on the usual suspects and take a softly-softly approach in dealing with the lovers and husbands of the victims.




Prof. Casali offers his expert opinion as to the killer's method and motive; note the mirror / distortion

As the killer's depredations continue a number of suspects come to the fore, including a morgue attendant with an unhealthy enthusiasm for his work (Luciano Rossi) and lawyer Paolo Santangeli (Silvano Tranquilli).


A parade of the usual suspects; Capuano knows he is looking in the wrong place with them


“No woman is going to marry a man who works at my job, you see. Sooner or later they find out about the corpses, and it's finished before I can get started. ”


“Poor Serena. She may have lacked discretion but she certainly didn't warrant her awful end.”


“Why should we react like you? He only kills unfaithful wives.”

Though losing its way somewhat as it enters its second act, as Capuano's investigation is temporarily sidelined in favour of that undertaken by Santangeli's teenage daughter Bettina, this 1972 giallo redeems itself somewhat with a memorable final act; unfortunately this also makes it difficult to review without spoiling it for the first-time viewer.

What can be said is that the film as a whole operates at the sleazier and trashier end of the giallo spectrum, with the majority of the female roles, including those of Susan Scott and Femi Benussi, pretty much of the thankless get-naked-then-die variety.

Whether the film is actually misogynistic as often claimed is however debatable. I would tend to argue that, like many of its type, it is really more misanthropic, declining to present anyone in a particularly flattering light.

True, this is unlikely to satisfy anyone who feels that the female is more moral than the male, or that by merely reporting on the existence of a sexual double standard but not overtly critiquing it the film-makers were contributing in their own small way to its continuance.

Here, we have to remember that the social / cultural norm in Italy circa 1972 would have been that a man in a prominent position should have both wife and a mistress, and that if he did not then there was quite possibly something wrong with or suspect about him. The reverse of this, meanwhile, was that the the man could not admit to being cuckolded by his wife being another man's mistress.

Though the most obvious example of this within the film is Susan Scott's husband, a failed suicide who succeeded only in crippling himself instead – a symbolic castration if ever there was one – it also seems worth considering whether the fact that the Capuano's marriage is without issue says something about the Inspector's masculine potency – or lack thereof – and / or if his apparent fidelity marks him out as someone too idealistic for his chosen career. Indeed, by extension, we might question whether he is thus being positioned as someone who has more in common with the moralistic avenger than he might care to acknowledge.












Tellingly both the maniac and the police use the same technologies of surveillance

Besides the killer's archetypal garb, a number of other motifs provide points of interest for students of the genre. At one point, for example, the wives / mistresses of some of the local notables discuss the case at their regular visit to the beauty salon, reminding one of the role played by the same location in The Black Belly of the Tarantula and indeed suggesting an alternate blackmail based version of the same “forbidden photos” type scenario. At another Capuano has one of the victims' funerals caught on camera in the hope that catching some detail that will break the case open. Unlike the ill-educated and naïve populace of the southern village in Don't Torture a Duckling, however, these northern urban sophisticates are too clever – or blasé – to reveal themselves in this way.

Roberto Bianchi Montero's direction is the kind of hit-and-miss thing that might be expected from a 60-something film-maker whose undistinguished career had seen him dabble in a succession of filone over the decades, his suspenseful and stylish handling of a murder on the train negated by the laughably inappropriate use of slow-motion in the murder on the beach.


The black-clad moral avenger


The film's titles foreground archetypal giallo imagery and technology – the black gloves, the knife, the telephone etc.

Giorgio Gaslini's score comprises two repeated cues, one playing over the main titles and emotional high points like the funeral aforementioned funeral sequence thereafter and the other accompanying the killer's appearances. While the latter cue uses something similar to the “make a jazz noise here” approach of many of Morricone's contributions to the genre, it arguably functions in a fundamentally different way otherwise, more a leitmotif and less a tension-raising device, precisely because the pervading sense of cynicism prevents us from really caring about the next beautiful woman about to die.

All told, So Sweet, So Dead is a dubiously entertaining giallo whose view of the world might be summed up as through urine-coloured lenses at a half-empty J&B glass.

Die Schlangengrube und das Pende / Castle of the Walking Dead

The obvious question that you might have is why discuss a German horror film in a blog whose masthead proclaims it to be “about the Italian giallo and director Dario Argento in particular". While I am unsure if I can provide a completely satisfactory justification, here are a few points.

First, a case might be made for the film's director, Harald Reinl, as perhaps one of the most important yet unaknowledged figures in Eurocult as a whole, who made important contributions to the western and krimi in particular and, through them, helped lay many of the foundations for the likes of Leone's spaghetti westerns and Argento's gialli.

Second, while Argento has often proclaimed himself more influenced by Lang than Hitchcock, Reinl made his indebtedness to his countryman explicit throughout his ouevre which includes two Dr Mabuse films and a two-part version of Die Nibelungen.

Third, Castle of the Walking Dead itself is heavily indebted to Italian gothics such as Bava's Black Sunday, Ferroni's Mill of the Stone Women and Margheriti's Castle of Blood.

In sum, then, we have a film-maker and a film that intersects with our area of interest in a number of ways.


A storyteller's naive, yet macabre representation of Regula's demise


Mont Elise examines a Bosch-inspired mural

In truth, however, the most important thing is that Die Schlangengrube und das Pende - i.e. the Pit and the Pendulum, though the faithfulness of the film as a Poe adaptation is signalled by the way the English version here describes the short story as a novel - is simply too good a film to ignore, its many virtues coming through even on the Aikman Archive's quite frankly horrible looking Castle of the Walking Dead DVD.

The film opens with an overt nod to Black Sunday as Christopher Lee's Count Regula has a spiked metal mask placed on his face and is sentenced to be quartered for his heinous crimes, too horrible to really describe (at least in this version). He does not seem unduly concerned, however, and instead proclaims that he will have his revenge on the Von Marienberg and Brabant families.

Thirty-five years later Lex Barker's square-jawed hero Roger Mont Elise arrives in town, seeking the whereabouts of Regula's castle and receiving a distinct lack of assistance from the locals in time-honoured gothic horror tradition.

Nevertheless, Roger and a bluff priest manage to determine the location of the castle and even get a coachman, however reluctantly, to take them there.

As the journey continues they take on board Lilian von Brabant (Karin Dor) and her maid Babette, whose own coach has broken down, before things take a distinct turn for the grotesque, with the trees of the mist-enshrouded forest being liberally festooned with human bodies and body parts.

Neither this nor the terrified coachman's demise is sufficient to faze Mont Elise, however, leading him, von Brabant and company directly into the awaiting Regula's trap. For – quelle surprise – Mont Elise is actually a von Marienberg and Brabant the 13th virgin the undead Regula needs to complete the ritual interrupted 35 years before...








A selection of images justifying The Torture Chamber of Dr Sadism and Pit and the Pendulum AKAs for the film

While the film is a collection of cliché moments and the top-billed Lee largely confined to the opening and closing moments, the production design and visuals are truly astonishing even here, making one wonder what it must have been like on the big screen. Interested parties are advised to seek out the new German DVD for an approximation; those who already have the likes of Aikman Archive's version will know that it is a film that warrants a double-dip.

The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle

Lucius Clark has just learned that he is to be made a peer of the realm for services to Queen and Country. His joy is short lived, however, as a masked avenger visits and informs that his life will be made into a living hell until he divulges the whereabouts of some stolen diamonds.

With the avenger murdering one of Clark's servants – and branding a letter M into the dead man's forehead – Scotland Yard, in the form of Inspector Jeff Mitchell and his sidekick Watson (sic), are called in to investigate, their arrival coinciding with those of Lucius's journalist niece, Claridge (Karin Dor), and a rival reporter.

To further complicate things Claridge is about to turn 21, and thereby come into a sizeable inheritance. If Lucius cannot present her with the money then, according to her lawyer Tromby – a sinister figure who has plans of his own – the peerage will be forfeit.

Unfortunately for Lucius when he attempts to send one of his servants to sell some freshly cut gems – butler Anthony is actually a gem-cutter; albeit one whose obsessive desire to prevent his precious masterpieces leaving led to jail and disrepute – to his contacts at the Old Scavenger Inn, the strangler is waiting and decapitates the man, then sends his head back in a hatbox.

The only clue to his identity is that he is missing a finger, but this is not much help when just about everyone except the nine-fingered Lucius habitually wears gloves...




The M allows the seemingly Lang-obsessed Reinl the opportunity to pay hommage to his master, Fritz Lang; Reinl also directed a couple of Dr Mabuse films and a two-part version of Der Nibelungen.

Directed by frequent series contributor Harald Reinl from Bryan Edgar rather than Edgar Wallace source material, this 1963 krimi is slightly disadvantaged by the general absence of familiar genre faces – only Reinl's then-wife Dor is really immediately recognisable – but nevertheless otherwise delivers the goods with that reassuring combination of convoluted mystery, quirky characterisation; askew view of London, England; stalwart Scotland Yard investigator; damsel in distress; femme fatale; plentiful red herrings; an old dark house replete with secret passages and hidden chambers, and so on.






Black glove action

Though there is an emphasis on black gloves throughout, their function is a narrative rather than fetish one – whodunnit; who is the nine-fingered man? This in turn indicates a key difference between the typical krimi and giallo, with psychoanalytic approaches fundamentally less appropriate here, where to decapitate is just a convenient murder method, with the strangler also happily using a gun, a knife and even a diamond cutter where convenient, and a cigar – a box of which are used by Lucius in his attempt to transfer the stones – really just a cigar.

This is not, however, to discount that the preponderance of foundlings and illegitimate children and general concern with origins in Edgar Wallace's oeuvre as a whole could be unconsciously related to his own biographical circumstances, nor that in imitating his father's style Bryan Edgar Wallace also perhaps mimicked these subtexts.






The pragmatic Strangler really uses whatever is to hand, including some proto menacing with power tools

Oskar Sala's score is more experimental than those provided by regular krimi composers Martin Bottcher and Peter Thomas elsewhere, foregoing jazzy themes in favour of the weird tonalities of his mixture-trautonium, a synthesiser-type electronic instrument. As with Hitchcock's The Birds, on which Sala also worked around the same time, it is questionable how far one would want to listen to it in its own right but in the context of the film it certainly adds an extra unnerving edge to the proceedings.

The US DVD from Alpha is difficult to recommend, on account of a a washed out, pan and scan and probably cut presentation, evidently prepared for the American market by the reference to a “station wagon” rather than the more British / English term “estate car”.

Spasmo

While out walking Christian Bauman (Robert Hoffman) and his girlfriend Xenia notice a woman's body lying on the beach. Going to investigate, they find the woman, Barbara (Suzy Kendall), had merely passed out from the heat. Then, when their backs are turned she disappears, leaving behind a thermos flask with the word 'Tucania' on it.

Later that evening the couple spot a boat of this name and go on board. Christian finds Barbara again and, with Xenia going home with a (perhaps too convenient) headache, they get talking and wind up (again with remarkable ease) back at her place.








A multitude of broken doll imagery from the start of Spasmo; Hans Bellmer or Trevor Brown might like this film.

Before she will make love to him, Barbara wants Christian to shave. “I'm very suspicious of men with beards,” she explains. While he is doing so a gunman – who we had earlier seen being telephoned about Tucania – sneaks in through the bathroom window and threatens Christian with his silenced pistol. When the gunman is momentarily distracted, Christian manages to disarm him and, in the ensuring struggle, accidentally shoots him, dead.

Barbara suggests that they should flee. Just as they are about to drive off, Barbara's over-possessive friend Alex, from the boat, shows up, announcing that they have something important to talk about. Even more curiously, he seems to know that something is up:

“For God sake Christian what's wrong? You look like you just murdered someone.”
“What the hell do you mean.”
“Exactly what I said”

This makes Christian realise that he has left his distinctive – i.e. incriminating – medallion in Barbara's bathroom and dashes off to retrieve it, only to discover that the body has vanished...
What the hell is going on and what does it have to do with all these mutilated mannequins that are turning up all over the coast...




Some of the compositions re-iterate the theme of being in a world of representations and constructions.

To say much more would likely spoil your enjoyment of this deliberately convoluted and confusing 1974 giallo from Umberto Lenzi.

The key to appreciating it seems to be to recognise it is less “beyond Psycho” as one advertising line claimed as “beyond Vertigo” or “the forerunner to The Game,” as we gradually come to realise – or think we realise – the nature of the “family plot” against Christian who happens to be the major stockholder in his brother Fritz's plastics company; it will perhaps suffice to add that it is all about an inheritance. (As an aside, one wonders if the presence of Caroll Baker in Fincher's film signals his awareness of Lenzi's gialli more generally. Then again, given that Lenzi's self-congratulatory tone in his DVD interviews suggest he would never tire of mentioning this, it is perhaps better that we do not know.)


A blade (or two) in the dark

Understood in this context, as part of the game Lenzi and company are playing, Spasmo's plot contrivances and portentous dialogue emerge as positive strengths. (“You know what? You can keep your lovely beard and leave. It's really a very silly game.” “No in fact it's a beautiful game and I'm not going to leave, even if you kill me.”) One also feels, however, that it is unfortunate that the filmmakers tried to conceal things from us to the extent that they did and that the balance between shock and suspense is weighted too far towards the former, making it harder to really engage with Christian and his predicament (or, for that matter, that of the head of the conspiracy against him).




Stuffed Psycho-style birds are another recurring visual motif in Spasmo

Something similar pertains with regard to Lenzi's direction, where the incessant zooms and close-ups of potentially meaningful details – or, in the case of the dolls, retrospectively meaningful details – serves to overwhelm and tire the viewer when a more subtle and restrained mise-en-scene, allowing for a growing sense of unease / paranoia / horror, would ultimately have been more effective.

This said, the film does look exceptionally good, with nice use of subjective camera; convincing night work contrasted with brightly lit daytime scenes; and even the odd moment of visual poetry, as when Lenzi racks focus from abstracted red shapes against the background of the sea to reveal they are roses. (A moment crucially that is also actually integrated into the whole, in that the key detail within the ensuing sequence revolves around the gardener's scissors as blade / phallic symbol / trigger to memory.)








A rose by any other name; note that the gardening scissors are the same as the bloodied ones above

While not wanting to read too much in, it is this visual that also seems to encapsulates and reiterate the film's failings. What we have with the shift from “red” to “rose” is a situation where there is need for background / foreground contrast to make proper sense of things. But within the film as a whole there is too much that is undifferentiated and pitched at the same level, making it difficult to see the wood for the trees / differentiate signal from noise.

Part of what makes the film worthwhile is thus the impression that Lenzi was actually trying to do too much for a change, not just going through the motions. One suspects the problem is that, with a relative paucity of his stock-in-trade – violence and action – he was concerned whether the story would be enough to hold audience attention and over-compensated in trying to inject more style and visual impact in than was required. A comparison with Fulci's gialli might be instructive in this regard, as he shows an awareness of when to prioritise narrative over visuals and vice-versa and, more importantly, how to bring them together; one can only wonder at what he might have made of Spasmo had he gotten to direct it as originally planned.

The nature of the work obviously makes it difficult to evaluate the performances in conventional terms, as with the exception of Christian – with Hoffmann's role here bearing obvious comparison to the one he played in the La Bambola episode of Door into Darkness – everyone is already playing a role with greater or lesser degrees of conviction and competence and, in a sense, already performing as “the femme fatale”, “the gunman” and so on.

A key moment in this regard, and one which allows for a positive evaluation of Kendall's performances as Barbara, based on her false then true feelings for Christian, is the point when she tells him that she is “not a strong woman” then repeats this same line to herself and the audience after he has left; despite the difficulties we have in figuring our her character at this point, it works at the emotional level and suggests that she was not just a pretty face.

The one aspect of Spasmo that needs no qualification and can be recommended unreservedly its the Ennio Morricone score, in which gentle yet always uneasy listening themes predominate.

Some thoughts on the first two sequences of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage

The impact of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage's gallery sequence is such that commentators often begin their discussion of the film at this point. I would argue, however, that the general excessiveness of the film – an excess which, as we will see, takes a different form from that of the director's later films – means that the two sequences which precede it do more than just introduce the two main characters, the killer and amateur detective Sam Dalmas.

In the first sequence, which plays over the film's credits, the killer prepares for the murder of 'his' next victim, who is also seen being stalked and photographed, neatly signifying the camera as assaultive weapon. The sequence introduces Argento's characteristic emphasis on textures through the shine of the black gloves and raincoat, photographs and knives; a shine that also, by happy coincidence, further foregrounds the director's introduction of a heightened fetish element to the giallo film killer's accoutrements in relation to Freud's famous formulation of fetishism in relation to the “Glanz auf der Nase” or “shine on the nose”. Nevertheless, although agreeing with Needham's assertion that the film sees what was primarily a fashionable disguise in Blood and Black Lace transform into something more replete with fetishistic meanings here, one also feels that his analysis perhaps neglects to consider the longer history of black gloves and raincoats in films such as M, where they are not particularly fetishised, and Death Laid an Egg, where they are.


Le mani sulla citta - the black gloves as normal attire in Fritz Lang's M and within the krimi tradition


The black glove and blade fetish combination in Death Laid an Egg (1967) prefiguring The Bird with the Crystal Plumage by three years.

In other regards, however, this sequence is less successful. Whilst the unclear chronology, superimposition of the camera frame, freeze-frames and snapshots of the victim in black-and-white certainly serve to alert audiences to the fact that they are watching an explicit re-presentation of the world; to Argento's strategies; and the idea(l) of becoming alert, active participants, their diegetic meaning remains unclear. Why should the killer chose these particular victims and be compelled to document things in this manner, even going to the lengths of typing away whilst wearing the gloves.

While we could invoke a psychoanalytical rationale, such as the killer's attempting to master their original traumatic event through ritual and repetition, the remainder of the film does not really seem to support this. Though the killer's fourth victim / the film's second is photographed before her murder, the fifth / third is not. One possibility here is that the last victim is murdered by the killer's protector-accomplice, but this is not made explicit. Likewise, no reference is made to the killer's documenting their crimes in the analysts summing up of the case at the end of the film.


Photography or cinematography?


The shine of the photograph and the gloves; the killer touching the surface of the image


The fetishisation of the murder weapon

The obvious questions that then emerge is why they are there and why the sequence does not just show the killer's preparations, then the murder. (Indeed, the minimal representation of the murder here, the screen momentarily going black whilst a single scream rings out, also testifies that Argento's rarely recognised facility for restraint, most evident in his more recent films, was present from the outset.) One answer is that by foregrounding the constructedness of the image in this way Argento was better able to allude to one of his key influences, Antonioni, and specifically Blow-Up.

As such, these images seem to open themselves up to analysis in terms of the Barthesian framework of excess meaning proposed by McDonagh. They are excessive signifiers, or signifiers of excess, that only really make sense in relation to their own systems of meaning. Crucially in this case, this sense is also fundamentally external to the film itself, intertextual rather than intratextual.

This, in turn, is something that distinguishes the intermittent and less controlled excesses of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, which McDonagh downplays, from the more consistent and disciplined excesses of Deep Red, as Argento's most thorough-going working through of the problematic established by Blow-Up, which she emphasises.

In Deep Red the excesses are more multi-layered and thereby better able to meet the requirements of both “readerly” / popular cinema and “writerly” / art cinema approaches, providing a combination of textual, subtextual and intertextual meanings and reference points. Thus, to give one example, the bizarre puppet with which the killer torments and distracts one of her victims functions at the readerly or more surface level to amplify the shock moment and at the writerly or deeper as something associated with – for instance – a characteristic Surrealist motif and, by extension, notions of “convulsive beauty”.

Here, however, what we seem to have is a would-be “writerly” fragment that likely comes across as too self-conscious and mannered to really work in art cinema terms and as too confusing and nonsensical in those of popular cinema. (Though, as Sobchack's deconstruction of the term confusion to emphasise the co-mingling and co-presence of the senses shows, sometimes it is not necessarily a bad thing; the point here is that we seem to have a confusion that hinders rather than helps our understanding and appreciation of the film.)

What has rarely been recognised, however, is thus the importance of certain key sequences in The Bird's much-maligned follow-up, The Cat o' Nine Tails in offering a more successful initial interrogation of Blow-Up's (rhetoric of the) image. Part of the reason for this, one suspects, is that this is also achieved at the cost of being integrated more into film itself, with a concomitant diminution of the apparent scope for the critic to interpret. Put another way, Cat o' Nine Tails is a more classical and readerly film than The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (or, for that matter, the little-seen Four Flies on Grey Velvet).

In Cat o' Nine Tails it is actually a Blow-Up style professional photographer who captures the vital detail that reveals an apparent accident to be a deliberate act of murder. Waiting at the train station to record the arrival of a starlet – a sequence that itself perhaps allowing for a reference to Antonioni's L'Avventura and La Notte alongside the paparazzi of Fellini's La Dolce vita – the photographer happens to catch the hand of the assassin pushing the would-be blackmailer in front of the oncoming train.


The moment of death is captured by the photographer


But after a brief look at the body he remembers why they are there: “Hey, we've forgotten about the starlet – come on.”




Though the death continues to affect him: “That's right – smile, smile. A man is dead!”

Reflecting his inability to truly see – i.e. to see within the framework of the filmmakers' emerging sense logic – he does not, however, notice this until prompted to interrogate the photograph more closely by one of the film's protagonists. It is Arno, the blind ex-newspaperman, the one who sees, who is a seer, that asks the pertinent question of whether the reproduction of the blackmailer's fall (itself another recurring theme in Argento's cinema, as Thoret emphasises) reproduced in the newspaper was perhaps “cropped,” emphasising / framing it at the expense of excluding / deframing the remainder.


The photograph as it appears in the newspaper


And the detail that, working within the framework of an unfortunate accident, no-one sees

The second sequence in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is less excessive – though not totally lacking in this regard – but also more successful. Following the cut to a black screen and scream, the first thing we see is an announcement of the mysterious murder of a young woman, the third in a month. As the camera moves out, we then get more of the detail, that this is an advertising hoarding for Paesa Sera (the newspaper on which Argento himself worked) and that the other headline is a train crash in England, with many dead. Neither event, however, particularly concerns Professor Carlo Dover as he buys a newspaper from the kiosk and scans though its pages – “ah, the same old rubbish” – nor his friend Sam Dalmas – “come on Carlo, or we'll be late.” This indifference will of course prove deeply ironic in the light of the events about to unfold.




From the specific to the general; note the gialli paperbacks on the edicola

The way the scene is constructed, opening on a detail and then moving out to give the wider context, rather than using the more classical approach of providing an establishing shot, then breaking the scene up into smaller details once spatial relationships have been identified, soon emerges as one of the characteristic features of the film. This also, of course, gives it a distinctly modernist edge that distinguishes it from the likes of Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood and Black Lace, if not Questi's lesser-known, more experimental Death Laid an Egg.

As the two men walk along, we learn that Sam is an American ex-patriot writer, who came to Italy in search of inspiration. It has not emerged, however, and he has instead found himself writing a manual on the preservation of rare birds for as a work for hire. Besides introducing the common giallo theme of the foreigner or outsider and representing the first in a long line of Argento's creative figures, Sam's existential situation, his desire to be doing something authentic and meaningful, seems to parallel that of Argento himself at this point in his career. While quickly establishing himself as an in-demand screenwriter and script doctor after Once Upon a Time in the West, Argento had also rapidly become frustrated at the way his work was often treated by directors, his ideas failing to emerge onto the screen in the manner as he had hoped. Indeed, in large part it was his sense that the directors proposed to helm The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, such as Terence Young and Duccio Tessari, would be unable to appreciate its novelties – more, to repeat, in form than content – that led to his decision to direct the film himself. Perhaps surprisingly, however, he has indicated that he did so without any real thoughts of pursuing a career as a director rather than writer.




Portrait of the artist as a young man

Carlo: “Don't you want a copy?” (of the book)
Sam: “Who needs it – I have this!” (the cheque)

What also seems curious here is co-producer Goffredo Lombardo's sense that he had made a mistake in agreeing to part-finance the film with Salvatore and Dario Argento's own company, SeDA Spettacoli. For while one could understand the film's rushes not “making sense” in classical cinema terms by virtue of the more modernist approach Argento was taking, the extensive storyboarding he has indicated he undertook in developing the film might suggest that Lombardo ought to have known what the new director was aiming for.

Narrative / Spectacle

In most film theory, based as it is on the example of Hollywood cinema, the assumption is that there is a narrative which is periodically interrupted by spectacle.

The question is whether this paradigm really fits Italian genre / filone cinema, where it often seems more the narrative that is interrupting the spectacle.

Perhaps it is a distinction that goes back to historical debates in the Italian industry over the labels of film and spettacoli - i.e. spectacle / show.

And perhaps Salvatore and Dario Argento naming their production company SeDA Spetaccoli and not SeDA Film or Cinema thereby tells us more than we might think and further indicates the tensions operating in his work under its auspices.

The Black Belly of the Tarantula / La Tarantola dal ventre nero

Watching this 1971 giallo from Paolo Cavara hot on the heels of Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion makes for an interesting contrast, in that its opening gambit – a husband confronts his (recent ex) wife over some compromising photographs of her with another man – could easily have been the turning point of Luciano Ercoli's film.

The similarities end at this point, however, as Maria Zani (Barbara Bouchet) is brutally murdered shortly afterwards. While we saw her husband Paolo (Silvano Tranquilli) beating her, he seems genuinely shocked and co-operates with Inspector Tellini (Giancarlo Giannini), but also fails to tell the truth as to when he last saw Maria nor reveal that he has the other half of the ripped photograph.

Taking this, Paolo - whose job is that of the ever-suspect insurance salesman - hires a private investigator, the ironically named Speedy. to see if he can find the blackmailer himself.

A second murder then occurs with the same modus operandi as the first, the killer paralysing their victim with a poisoned needle, then fatally stabbing them while they are conscious but helpless – apparently akin to the way a wasp might kill the titular spider. Another clue / complicating factor is the discovery of extensive traces of cocaine at the crime scene.

The two investigations continue along their separate lines, then intersect as Paolo arranges a rendezvous with one of the blackmailers only to go for a fatal dive off a roof, following which his contact / assassin is himself run over before he can be questioned.

As Tellini gets closer to the heart of the conspiracy, he and his wife Anna (Stefania Sandrelli) find themselves threatened by the blackmailers...


In a glass darkly


Behind the glass

Along with I Tanto Paura / Plot of Fear, The Black Belly of the Tarantula was one of two gialli directed by Paolo Cavara, a relatively obscure figure about whom one admits to knowing little about.

Starting with contributions to a some of Franco Prosperi and Gualtiero Jacopetti's mondo films he then seems to have reacted against this in The Wild Eye, an anti-mondo film that predates the better known Cannibal Holocaust by more than a decade in its use of the form against itself. (Mark Goodall's book Sweet and Savage contains a good discussion of the film, and is recommended for anyone interested in mondo more generally.)






Some classic giallo imagery, albeit with the unusual feature of the brown surgical gloves

Although his spaghetti westerns remain to be explored, this appears to suggest a seriousness and self-consciousness of approach that – with a few noteworthy exceptions - might well be considered the kiss of death for the giallo. Thankfully, however, this proves not to be the case, as Cavara delivers a film which manages both to deliver as entertainment while also hinting at something more beneath its slickly directed surface, with generally effective use of zooms, whip pans and hand-held camera.

The editing exhibits some nice cuts between scenes, from the hands of the killer to the hands of those investigating, and one almost Eisensteinian moment where a falling dummy is juxtaposed with the killer's descending knife.






The forbidden photo of a lady above suspicion (by dint of being dead)

As befits the nature of the conspiracy, the viewer's voyeurism is also continually being brought into the equation, whether the credits sequence that cuts from figures obscured by distorting glass to the exploitation goods of the naked Bouchet being massaged, or our point-of-view positioning one of the blackmailers covertly filming the Tellinis as they make love.

The plotting is suitably convoluted, with plenty of suspects and red herrings. Though some may feel that the killer's identity is either too obvious or not obvious enough (following the usual filone heuristics that the most and least likely suspects can be ruled out for this reason) the nastiness of the murder method goes some way to offsetting this.

There is also plenty of eye- and ear-candy for the viewer, Ennio Morricone's top notch score with vocalism from the inimitable Edda Dell'Orso helping make up for the brevity of Bouchet's get naked and die near cameo.




Some classic mannequin action in the second murder set-piece

As Tellini, Giancarlo Giannini delivers a performance of considerable sensitivity and depth. While arguably as much a testament to Giannini's acting abilities as anything else it is also worth noting how these characteristics seem to position his character with the giallo against the poliziotto, with its preference for a more talk and less action.

Though Plot of Fear certainly leans more towards the poliziotto side of things, with more emphasis on the crime plot and less on the black gloved killer, it is again characterised by an unusually well-developed police protagonist, possibly hinting at an emergent auteur personality.

Indeed, considering the giallo-poliziotto in relation to the two pure filone (though in truth no filone could ever be called “pure” in the sense that, say, a 1930s Hollywood western is pure) one also wonders if a consideration of matters beyond the nature of the protagonist(s) as private or public investigators is needed, encompassing the investigators' personalities; the nature of the crime; and the methods deployed investigating it.

Making a very broad assertion, I would speculate that the key difference is that the typical poliziotto is more direct in each case. The poliziotto cop - think Maurizio Merli - basically knows who the bad guys are and that if he confronts them directly they will respond in a way that gives him evidence / cause to dispense violent judgement / justice, whereas his giallo counterpart is far less sure.

Speculations aside, The Black Belly of the Tarantula is a quality example of the genre; I know that when finances allow I will be upgrading my pan and scan Alfa Digital disc for Blue Underground's 1.85:1 OAR version that also runs approximately five minutes longer, at 89 minutes.

Tellingly, there are some abrupt transitions in the Alfa release: visiting the boyfriend of the second victim, Tellini discovers some incriminating evidence yet we never see what happens to the character, who disappears thereafter.

Whether Blue Underground's is the definitive version is perhaps another matter, with the IMDB entry – again never the best source of information when it comes to films like this – indicating that the uncut Italian version runs 98 minutes, a difference greater than could be explained away by format conversion; as ever your contributions and clarifications would be welcomed.

Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion / Foto proibite di una signora per bene

Minou is beautiful and devoted to her husband Peter. Yet her tendency to drink too much and a tranquilliser habit suggest some underlying malaise even before, walking along the seafront one night, she is confronted by a mysterious sword-cane wielding sadist.

All but threatening Minou with rape – the phallic symbolism of his weapon hardly needs discussing, with the film as a whole likewise offering (almost too) easy pickings for the psychoanalytically minded – the man calmly informs her that Peter is a fraud and a murderer, then inexplicably departs, allowing Minou to make her way to a nearby bar, call for help and have a few drinks to calm her nerves while awaiting her husband.




The mirror lets the man gaze at the woman gazing at herself

A few days later Minou gets talking with her friend Dominique at a nightclub. In the course of conversation Dominique comments on how one of Peter's creditors was recently found dead, with nitrogen in his bloodstream.

Meeting again the next day, Dominique shows Minou some of the candid photographs she brought back from her recent visit to Copenhagen. (“Are they pornographic photographs?” “Yes, but good ones. Quality is important in every profession.”) One features the man.

A further shock comes from Minou's visit to Peter's business, where one of his colleagues shows her the new decompression chamber, used to simulate different pressure conditions for testing deep-sea diving equipment.

Putting the details together, Minou realises that Peter had motive, method and opportunity to kill the man and make it look like an accident.

In the middle of the night the telephone rings. It is the stranger. He plays Minou a taped conversation implicating Peter in murder and demands a meeting with her the next day.


The Frightened Woman

Hoping to buy the man off, Minou offers him money. He laughs at this, telling Minou that it is her that he wants. Desperate to obtain the tape and save her husband, Minou accedes to his demands.

Unfortunately her situation then gets worse instead of better as the man then starts blackmailing Minou with the photographs he surreptitiously took of their encounter. Worse, he says that Peter did not murder anyone, with the whole story being fabricated as a means of ensnaring Minou herself.

Not sure what do to on her return home, Minou tells Peter that she has been out with Dominique all afternoon – a claim that backfires when Dominique turns out to be there as well...




Interior design by the House of Bava?

Although showcasing the talents of the same team who would later make
Death Walks on High Heels and Death Walks at Midnight – director Luciano Ercoli, screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi and actors Susan Scott / Nieves
Navarro and Simon Andreu – this 1970 giallo from Luciano Ercoli differs
from its successors in one key respect. With Dagmar Lassander taking
the female lead as the “Lady Above Suspicion” of the title, Minou, Scott is
relegated to a supporting role, that of her decidedly more suspect friend, Dominique.

The change has a vital effect on the dynamics of the piece as a whole,
as can be seen if we apply the semiotic “commutation test” and imagine what the film might have been like with Scott in the lead.

The picture that emerges is very different, the no-nonsense persona that Scott conveys in the two Death films (and their companion piece, Predeaux's Death Carries a Cane) being entirely at odds with the neurotic Minou, as someone who is about internalisation and introspection rather than externalisation and action.

Equally, however, it is important to recognise that Scott is in no way miscast. Rather, as with All the Colours of the Dark, she seems to enjoy the opportunity to play a more ambiguous character – a role not too distant, for that matter, those essayed by Simon Andreu opposite her in the other two films, albeit obviously with a more overt masculine danger.

Here Andreu is a more straightforward villain, leaving ambiguity up to Pier Paolo Capponi's Peter. While a relatively bland figure by comparison, one suspects this was something consciously sought by the film-makers, his sheer inoffensiveness providing additional reasons why Minou might have subconsciously sought to get into her predicament as a means of compelling Peter to do / say something. (Undoing the top of her dress at the start of the film - “ Dominique is right. I dress too much like a housewife” – Minou fantasises about telling Peter she has been having an affair to see what his reaction might be.)

Of the four leads, it is Lassander who has the most difficult role but who also, unfortunately, comes across as the least able to meet its demands, as perhaps signalled by the way in which Minou's inner state emerges as much through voice-over; a mise-en-scene that repeatedly emphasises mirrored and other doubled compositions; and thoughtful editing, most notably when a sequence of her making love to Peter is seamlessly intercut with her more S&M tinged encounter with the stranger, making it is difficult to tell who and what she is responding most passionately to.

Elsewhere the director throws in the odd nod to Cocteau and I Vampiri as the strangers' apartment, formerly festooned with plaster hands, is mysteriously devoid of signs of recent habitation when revisited by Minou with others in tow.

Morricone's score, with the exception of the odd party music cue that is just too far towards kitsch, is another asset, with its beautiful main theme and effective suspense cues.

The most unsatisfying aspect of the film for me was its last minute “surprise” ending. Though not completely deus ex machina, the very fact that it had to be summarised and explained within the diegesis seemed to indicate that the film-makers were really more interested with exploring Minou as a character than in crafting a more routine conspiracy thriller / mystery.

Indeed, in this regard while the film certainly recalls the kind of risqué gialli Lenzi and Baker were making around the same time, it also seems to suggest affinities with 1940s female noirs such as Mildred Pierce and, especially, The Reckless Moment at times.

While certainly willing to put herself in a compromising position to protect her husband (rather than daughter, as is the two 40s films) the thing Minou never contemplates is conspiring with or against her husband; in this respect those conspiring against her, whoever they may be, know her only too well that she is truly a signora per bene.

Yet – and this is perhaps the film's ultimate strength – while Minou may not be a murderous figure akin to Blood and Black Lace's Countess Cristina or A Bay of Blood's Renata, she is thereby also one that viewers can more readily identify and engage with, perversions and all.

The question the film then raises, consciously or otherwise, is what perverse actually means in a context where perversion – or at least specific manifestations of perversity, i.e. Minou's implicit masochism but not Dominique's confident bisexuality – is the social norm.

The Bloodstained Butterfly / Una Farfalla con le ali insanguinate

Following a seemingly insignificant credits sequence that it is worth paying attention to in its own right – I shall say no more, on this, however – this 1970 giallo from Duccio Tessari proceeds to introduce a wide array of characters, identifying their familial and professional relationships and roles:


Marta Clerici


Françoise Pigaut


Sarah Marchi


Maria, Sarah's mother (Ida Galli)


Alessandro, her husband


Giulio Cordaro, lawyer (Günther Stoll)


Giorgio (Helmut Berger)


Eriprando Villarosa Venostra, Giorgio's father


Diamante, Giorgio's mother

Following this, the action shifts to a park in middle of storm. One of a pair of girls, clad in yellow – i.e. giallo – macintoshes and hats, interrupts Françoise's murderer, who flees before the girls' nanny can raise the alarm. Nevertheless the man, clad in a concealing hat and coat, is seen by several eye-witnesses, including a woman in a lover's lane, Gabriella Justi, who later picks television presenter Alessandro out of a police line-up.


Chi l'ha vista morire? – she did

Coupled with Alessandro's lack of an alibi and an array of evidence against him – a distinctive car-seat cover, a muddy raincoat whose cleaning nevertheless fails to remove a singular chemical trace, a bloodstain on his shirt; with the strong emphasis on the forensic, police procedural and legal aspects of the case unusually engaging for a giallo – the case against him is compelling.

His friend and defence counsel, Giulio, nevertheless manages to discredit Gabriella and cast doubt on the relevance of the the scientific evidence. This is still, however, insufficient to definitively save Alessandro. He is thus compelled to reveal that at the time in question he was with his mistress, Marta Clerici, who cut her hand on broken glass, hence the bloodstain.

Unfortunately for Alessandro, Marta cannot be found nor can he satisfactorily explain why he should have hidden the shirt if this was all it was. Thus, he is convicted of Françoise's murder; the case seems over.

At this point, however, we learn that Giulio and Maria have themselves been conducting an affair and so conspired to use events to get Alessandro out the way.

Then, with Alessandro still behind bars, there is another murder in the park, similar enough to that of Françoise to suggest that Alessandro was indeed the wrong man...

Revisiting this 1970 giallo from Duccio Tessari, I was compelled to question my own earlier judgement, that he was a master of the classic giallo.

The first thing to say here – and those not in the mood for some random pseudo-intellectual ramblings might well want to jump to the end – is that it is not in terms of the film being in any way lacking. Writing, direction, performances and most everything else are uniformly accomplished – if I were to single out one thing especially it would have to be Gianni Ferrio's evocative score, with its fusion of Tchaikovsky and lounge/jazz – and combine to make for an enthralling piece of giallo cinema.

Rather, what I found most thought-provoking about the film was its deployment of what would conventionally, too straightforwardly and readily, be identified as flashbacks. For, as with the repeated re-visions of the gallery sequence that Sam Dalmas plays through in his mind and which Argento doubles for us on the screen in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage what we often seem to have here are more like “crystal images” of the type described by Gilles Delezue, “the uniting of an actual image and a virtual image to the point where they can no longer be distinguished,” and which he identifies as a key component of the modernist cinema of the “time-image”.

Thus, as the police construct a version of Françoise's murder and as the various witnesses to it give their evidence, we are not being presented with a true picture of what happened – which is what Dalmas works towards, even if he can only grasp this truth by gradually abandoning his old interpretive frameworks for understanding the world – but rather a demonstration of a kind of Nietzschean perspectivism in which there are not so much facts as interpretations.

Is this image someone's memory or a reconstruction? Is it true or false? Or, as with the likes of a Resnais film, is it ultimately indeterminate and unimportant in relation to what is it perceived and believed to be?

Here we might note, for example, the vaguely Last Year at Marienbad-style conversation between Giorgio – and ambiguous haunting and haunted presence whose status as hero, suspect and / or red herring remains unclear until the end – and Sarah Marchi, an exchange that singularly fails to indicate the truth of their past encounter, possible ulterior motives, and so on; or the cross-cutting between Giorgio's solitary walk down a street in the present and with Françoise in another, possibly imaginary, time. (In relation to the first of, Inspector Morisini's throwaway “haven't we met somewhere before” remark to Giulia in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage seems hopelessly weak by comparison, both unnecessary and unsatisfactory.)


“You had short hair and you were going to the sorority school. You didn't notice at all - it was long. Yes, of course, it was long. And you wore it down to your shoulders, like this. I wore it in braids, always in braids - my mother made me. Anyhow, now we really know each other. Right.”


“Maybe fables become facts under oath.”

Or, in more concrete, less cinematically imaginative terms – although the contrasts between the TV studio and the home, monochrome and colour etc. still show Tessari's desire to do something more than just get the film in the can as efficiently as possible – there are the early exchanges between Alessandro and footballer Giorgio Chinaglia where they debate a players' strike on the sports programme. Is it a case of the big-name stars protecting their own positions, thus prefiguring the kind of self-interest that is later echoed in Giulio and Maria's betrayal of Alessandro? Or is it (also, perhaps) an honest expression of solidarity with the more rank-and-file, in relation to a otherwise random political banner that Giorgio passes and Tessari's camera lingers on later on.






A mediated reality - the reporter, the TV and the 'real' images

Such moments could also, one supposes, again be examined in relation to Nietzche and Deleuze, as exemplars of the “power of the false” whereby what is false may also be the more life-affirming. (Nietzsche: “Memory says, I did that. Pride replies, I could not have done that. Eventually memory yields.”)

While Marta, who was not wearing her glasses at the time she saw Alessandro, and the treacherous Giulio admittedly have somewhat banal reasons for endeavouring to impose their versions of the truth, the character of Giorgio is far more interesting in this regard, precisely because of his existential estrangement from his family, privileged background and world as a whole, and corresponding commitment to his own particular set of values. ("Father, our family motto reads "Born a bastard to become a king." Well, I never got a crack at the king. On the other hand I wasn't lucky enough to be born a bastard.")

Whether his actions in relation to these are seen as affirmative or destructive is another question; all I will say is that The Bloodstained Butterfly's resolution is one of the most morally ambiguous in the entire giallo canon. It answers one question – who killed Françoise – but asks you a whole lot more. (Nietzsche again: “That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil”)

Again, then, one comes back to Argento and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, as a film whose endings – a Psycho-like psychologist summing up the case, in which a man “who loved not wisely but too well” sought to cover for his murderous wife, and the departure of Sam and Giulia for the USA – likewise contrive to be ambiguously, undecideably, modern.

But – and this is the point where we welcome those uninterested in these theoretical digressions back – whether a film is modern or classical, what really matters, following the “two kinds of music” distinction attributed to Kurt Weill, Duke Ellington and others, is whether it is good or bad.

The Bloodstained Butterfly is undoubtedly good and, even based on the version I saw and from which these screen caps come from, well worth seeing; while there are Italian and Spanish DVDs out there unfortunately neither is fully satisfactory from the non-Italian speaker's perspective.

Squadra Gialli / Krimi Corner

Although the internet has been a great boon for fans of cult cinema everywhere, putting us in near instantaneous contact with one another and giving the opportunity to share information, opinions and more, one thing it sometimes gets accused of is leading to a decline in more traditional fan culture activities.

Happily it does not have to be a case of one or the other, as a couple of recent “by the fans, for the fans” projects deserving of your support ably illustrate.



The first, by the amiable Jonny Redman of Lovelock and Load is a CD entitled Squadra Gialli, a compilation of choice cuts from 70s gialli and poliziesco themes (plus the odd horror cue, like a cut from Giuliano Sorgini's Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue score that gives Stelvio Cipriani or Franco Micalizzi a run for their money in the funk groove stakes) sequenced into a non-stop 50 minute mix. Great to go with the J&B at your next themed party...

Jonny also has an earlier lovelockandload mix available for download.



The second, by the indefatigable Mirek Lipinski of Latarnia is the first issue of on-going quarterly newsletter dedicated to the German Edgar Wallace krimis. The first issue features a profile of Wallace, checklist of Rialto releases, and an informative and insightful review of the Retromedia DVD of The Monster of London City and The Secret of the Red Orchid.

A little public service announcement

An English-language dub of Giuseppe Vari's 1977 Black Emanuelle film Suor Emanuelle / Sister Emanuelle has been uploaded to Rapidshare by someone.

There are seven RAR files, each around 100MB in size:

http://rapidshare.com/files/9252059/SE__By_St0L3n_.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/9263184/SE__By_St0L3n_.r00
http://rapidshare.com/files/9264844/SE__By_St0L3n_.r01
http://rapidshare.com/files/9254806/SE__By_St0L3n_.r02
http://rapidshare.com/files/9266500/SE__By_St0L3n_.r03
http://rapidshare.com/files/9268080/SE__By_St0L3n_.r04
http://rapidshare.com/files/9261572/SE__By_St0L3n_.r05

The password for the files is: www.crazy-coderz.net

Screenshots are here: http://i115.photobucket.com/albums/n282/StoL3n/th-SisterEmanuelle.jpg

Amazon.com, which has the film for sale - so there might well be copyright infringement issues with the upload depending on the territory you are in etc. - describes it thus:

"Renouncing her "sinful" past, Emanuelle (Laura Gemser) has entered a convent and has dedicated herself to a life of service. Enter Monika (Monica Zanchi), the free-spirited, free-loving daughter of a wealthy Baron. Emanuelle is charged with keeping Monika in line, but when the young girl's wild ways bring back memories of her own sensual past, Emanuelle begins questioning her own religious and sexual identity. Advances from an escaped killer who is hiding in the convent serve to complicate matters further.”

Pretty much the same old thing, then, for you to download or not as the case may be...

The Weekend Murders / Concerto per pistola solista

Released internationally by MGM, this 1970 giallo from the underrated Michele Lupo marks his only contribution to the genre. It is a shame because, while certainly not the most serious example of the form, it is a well-made and thoroughly entertaining film that deserves wider recognition and availability.

Drawing obvious inspiration from Agatha Christie, the plot sees the members of an aristocratic family gather for the reading of Sir Henry's will.

Amongst those assembled are the beautiful, brittle Isabelle (Ida Galli, here credited as Eveline Stewart) who is estranged from her father and recently lost the child she was carrying; the prim and proper Aunt Gladys (Marisa Fabbri; the maid in Four Flies on Grey Velvet) and her emotionally confused, practical-joke playing son, Georgie; and playboy Ted Collins (Giacomo Rossi Stuart), complete with sports car and new wife who, for added scandalousness, also happens to be black.

Following a shooting party that seems to allude to Renoir's The Rules of the Game in its bunny carnage and more general theme that “everyone has their reasons,” the will is read.

With the exceptions of Sir Henry's old friend Sergeant Thorpe (Gaston Moschin), to whom he leaves his prized azaleas, and Barbara Worth (opera singer turned actress Barbara Moffo), who cared for him in his final days and is left pretty much everything else, they are disappointed.

As the family discuss the situation left them by “the damned miserable rotten cheating old bastard,” as Ted puts it, Thorpe discovers the body of the butler in the greenhouse – “For once nobody will be able to say the butler did it!”


The first / third body is found buried in one of the golf-course bunkers


Little visual gimmicks abound in the film

Superintendent Grey from Scotland Yard is called in to investigate, only to prove less effectual than the dim-looking Thorpe when an attempt is made on Barbara's life and Ted is found dead, the victim of a faked suicide...

With a key aspect of the filmmakers' strategy throughout being to draw attention to and play with cliché – we can also note, for instance, the sequence where Georgie, clad in giallo killer black coat and gloves and wearing a stocking mask, stalks the maid only for her to summarily unmask and disarm him – the film The Weekend Murders most obviously resembles is Five Dolls for an August Moon, coincidentally released in the same year.

But while Bava's film is certainly the better-known riff on Christie, I would submit that it is not the better film.




A suicide that isn't


A rabbit gives its life for the sake of the film

Adverse production circumstances combined with Bava's avowed disinterest in the source material and its conventions – the array of suspects and red herrings; the isolated setting; genteel Englishness; the “locked room” situation etc. – resulted in a film that has its moments of brilliance – one thinks of the spilled balls whose roll down the stairs reveals another corpse – but does not hang together terribly well. Here, by contrast, one senses that Lupo had a solid script to start from; a cast and crew he was comfortable with; and sufficient time and resources to realise his vision. Thus, for example, whereas the zooms in Five Dolls... frequently have an element of the purely functional to them, in terms of saving on camera setups or simply trying to keep things visually interesting for the spectator, those here emerge as more of an integral part of the whole, being deployed as conscious rhetorical devices that underscore (or perhaps more critically overstate) key points in the narrative.






The detourment of a typical giallo moment




An impressive ensemble cast is assembled in the film

The same can be said of Francesco De Masi's score here as compared with Piero Umiliani's in Bava's film. Much as I love Umiliani, his work in Five Dolls... is simply there, the vocal refrain of “five dolls” notwithstanding. Here, however, the bizarre rendition of Tchaikovsky's famous Piano Concerto Number One, complete with gunshots referencing the Italian title Concerto per pistola solista / Concerto for a Pistol Soloist, over the in medias res opening sequence, provides a sense of integration from the outset. (Gianni Ferrio's use of the same piece in The Bloodstained Butterfly accomplishes something similar, with its segue from Tchaikovsky's opening bars into an easy listening lounge theme perhaps signifying something of the difference between its tortured pianist protagonist and the more blasé world in which he finds himself.)

All told, an enjoyable way to spend 98 minutes.

The Monster of Venice / The Embalmer

A monster is stalking the canals of Venice, abducting young women, talking them to his subterranean lair and there embalming them to preserve their beauty for all eternity. “How lovely you are. Like alabaster goddesses. No living woman possesses your mysterious fascination or your sweet repose. You will stay with me always. No-one else will have you.” It is the kind of thing that sounds so preposterous that the police would never think of it, leaving it to reporter Andrea Rubis to investigate.




The Embalmer's collection of beauties grows

While standing with Nightmare Castle as one of the last Italian shockers to be filmed in black and white, this 1965 film differs from its Gothic counterpart by situating the action firmly in the contemporary world and eschewing supernatural horror for natural terror.

As ever, issues of plausibility are not that important. You just have to accept that the madman will do madman things and that professionals will be decidedly less effectual than an enthusiastic amateur.

Though this latter aspect is certainly more suggestive of a giallo than krimi film – with Andrea's occupation further connecting him back to the protagonist of I Vampiri and forward to his namesake in The Fifth Cord, Andrea Bild – the German influence is more pronounced elsewhere.

The monster is strongly reminiscent of master-criminal The Shark in Alfred Vohrer's The Inn on the River and The Phantom of Soho in Franz Josef Gottlieb's film of the same name, depending on whether he is wearing his scuba gear or robe and skull mask, while the secret passages and two-way mirrors of the the hotel that hides the monster's lair - an old monastery, long since buried and forgotten - make it seem akin to a Venetian version of the Luxor Hotel housing The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse.

Elsewhere we get a gratuitous dance sequence, again reminiscent of a similar sequence on The Inn on the River, and a bizarre musical number from a guy who emerges from a coffin!


A couple of the tourists get down




It almost looks like it could be from a Jess Franco film...




Until the man in black starts, but is he doing Johnny Cash or Glenn Danzig?

Assuming that the English-language version of the film is a fair representation – admittedly a dangerous assumption – the overall impression one gets is that of a film that has enough in it to be worth watching for the fan or scholar of the genre, with moments that also made me think, oddly enough, of Inferno and Deep Red, but which is in no way a lost classic.








The discovery of a mural behind the plaster, like Deep Red

That neither writer-director Dino Tavella nor his two leads had much of a career subsequently seems indicative of the general quality of the direction, writing and performances; though Tavella was only in his late forties when he died in 1969 this was to his second and last film.






The Embalmer - the missing link between death in the seven deadly sins sequence of Metropolis and Inferno?

While the the final 15 minutes see the pace pick up a bit – and also benefit from a surprisingly downbeat ending, that refreshingly does not see hero and heroine reunited in one another's arms – the previous hour manages to go by quite slowly, with a surfeit of tourist footage of Venice particularly unhelpful in this regard.

The Creature with the Blue Hand

Intrigued by the Blood and Black Lace style spiked glove mentioned by Tim Lucas, I decided to seek out this Rialto krimi on DVD, going for the Region One disc from Image Entertainment. It is presents two different versions of the film, the 'original' Creature with the Blue Hand and the alternate The Bloody Dead. With the latter attempting – pretty unsuccessfully, it has to be said – to integrate some new footage that features none of the original cast or locations, the following remarks are based on The Creature with the Blue Hand.

The first thing that strikes one is how the film's distributors, Independent International Pictures Corp, have sought to downplay the Edgar Wallace aspect. When the familiar twelve shots ring out the image freezes before the letters EDGAR WALLACE have a chance to appear in the bullet holes on screen, while the “Hello, this is Edgar Wallace speaking” voice-over is conspicuously absent.


The name Edgar Wallace fails to materialise in the letters

Though likewise lacking the usual establishing shots of London the story is unmistakably Wallace, with country houses replete with dark passages and darker secrets; intrigues among the aristocracy; an inheritance; and an imperilled ingénue in need of rescue by the stalwart Scotland Yard detective.

The story opens in a courtroom, as David Emerson is found guilty of murder, but is sent to the asylum rather than gaol on account of the testimony of Dr Mangrove. David, however, continues to protest that he has been framed.




Kinski as Richard (top) and David (above)

At Mangrove's asylum an unidentified benefactor then gives him the key to his cell and a rope ladder over the wall.

We also get some nice blue and orange lighting effects, suggesting that director Alfred Vohrer had doubly learnt from Bava's Blood and Black Lace and that the krimi's change from monochrome to colour was not all for the worst.




A Man Escaped

David makes his way to the family mansion – conveniently located a mere four miles from the asylum – and disguises himself as his identical twin brother, Richard. Needless to say, from this point on the plot gets hopelessly convoluted; so much so that there is really no point in trying to summarise it except to say that little is as it seems. (“You can't always tell a murderer just by his looks, Sir John,” as Dr Mangrove remarks during a tour of the asylum.)






Director Vohrer can be relied upon to provide something of visual interest

The lack of a strong representative of Scotland Yard hurts the film somewhat, with Harld Leipnitz failing to convey the authority of a Joachim Fuchsberger or Heinz Drache and also generating little chemistry with Diana Körner as the vague love-interest figure.

It could also be argued, however, that this is not really the fault of Leipnitz and Körner and instead down more to the dual role given Kinsk, with the inevitable consequence of letting him dominate the film more than usual; not in itself necessarily a bad thing, but certainly one that gives the film a different dynamic to krimis in which he only has a cameo role.






The Hooded Claw

The versatile Martin Bottcher, whose work on both the Winnetou westerns and the krimi suggests him to be something akin to the German Ennio Morricone, provides an effective, if comparatively light and breezy score; the sense that nothing is to be taken too seriously suggested by the title theme opening to Bach's Tocatta and Fugue before segueing into a crime-jazz beat.




What Sir John saw: the most gratuitous randomly inserted strip routine ever?




The film also features some doll and mannequin motifs


The Cabinet of Dr Mangrove?


Image have clearly put considerable effort into this disc with a commentary on The Bloody Dead amongst other things. It is just a shame that most of it seems to have gone into the 'wrong' version of the film from the krimi fan's perspective, with the Creature version both panned and scanned and the worse looking.

Una Lucertola con la pelle di donna / A Lizard in a Woman's Skin

Carol Hammond (Florinda Bolkan), the daughter of a prominent lawyer and aspirant politician Edmund Brighton (Leo Genn), is plagued by a nightmare in which she seduces and murders her next door neighbour, Julia Durer (Anita Strindberg; very much cast for her looks here, in that we do not ever see her speak any lines).


The red blob perhaps relates to the drug vision that gives the film its title - "Under the effect of acid I look at you here and all I see is a red blob" / "I remember that night seeing a Lizard in a Woman's Skin"

Her analyst Dr Kerr (George Rigaud) produces a perfectly rational explanation and orthodox interpretation, that the nightmare is an expression of Carol's conflicting feelings towards Julia's hedonistic lifestyle:

"In your dreams you always see her as a prostitute or a striptease artist. In fact for you that woman represents degredation. The flat next door is a symbol of vice. You've referred to this woman before as someone who is not quite respectable."

"No, she certainly isn't."

"That's it. Your conscience forces you to disapprove of that woman's way of life. But at the same time her freedom excites your curiosity and you feel attracted. This conflict, which is responsible for your actual state of anxiety explains the recurrence of your dream."




In Carol's nightmare / fantasy the crowded train carriage mutates into a madhouse orgy; the white passage here also looks similar to that in the clinic later on, whether by design or not.


Carol falls into the void


Where Julia awaits






It is not the lesbian who is perverse, but the situation she finds herself in, perhaps


Carol awakens from her dream, in a scene either cheats or destabilisies temporality and alerts one to questions of the truth value of the image, depending on your perspective

Then Julia is found dead. Carol's distinctive paper knife, scarf and fur coat are at the scene, which is also exactly as she had described it to Dr Kerr on her last visit if decidedly more tangible:

"You killed Julia Durer. By killing Julia you killed a part of yourself, a part attracted to degredation and vice. The conflict has been resolved by an act of violence. A firm decision. All of which shows exclusively that we're dealing exclusively with a liberating dream. Even our appearances in the paintings surrounding you and your house have a specific meaning of liberation"

Is someone trying to frame Carol, perhaps to get at her father? Or did she murder Julia? If so, was it a conscious act? Might then her nightmare be understood as a calculated attempt at preparing an insanity defence?

Inspector Corvin (Stanley Baker) of Scotland Yard is called in to investigate the case and soon uncovers a morass of blackmail, drugs and illicit affairs.

While perhaps not quite ranking with Don't Torture a Duckling as a giallo masterpiece, Una Lucertola con la pelle di donna / Lizard in a Woman's Skin is undoubtedly one of Lucio Fulci's most accomplished films and confirms his status as one of the best directors to work in the form.

The first 20 minutes in particular are a truly dazzling display of technique - jagged edits, void spaces, slow motion, split screen, whip pans, frenetic handheld movements, dramatic angles, distorted images etc - but also, crucially, serve to present the viewer with a plethora of clues and symbols to try to interpret and put into some sort of order.


Split screen contrasts the staid life of the Hammonds with Durer's wild parties


But Carol's stepdaughter Joan's foot-tapping to the freak beat signals that things are going on beneath the surface here as well

While things do settle down somewhat subsequently, the viewer remains engaged throughout. Besides the assured performances from the leads, with the battles of wills and wits between Baker, Genn and Bolkan a joy to watch, and Fulci's evident eye for location and detail – note for instance the visual inspiration given Carol's nightmare visions of her dead father, husband and daughter-in-law by the Francis Bacon painting that hangs on one of the walls – the thing that really stands out is how well the shocks and set-pieces are integrated into the overall design, most notably two suspenseful stalk-and-chase scene through the evocative environs of a strangely deserted hospital and the then-abandoned Alexandra Palace.


The painting in the style of Francis Bacon's Three Studies from the Painting of Innocent X by Velázquez


And its inspiration in turn for Carol's visions


Vaginal imagery is another recurring motif in the film, seen here in the design on the walls of Julia's apartment and also in the painting of the Swan that features in another of Carol's nightmares


The eyes and ears of the analyst's recording Carol's sessions


An allusion to Psycho; Fulci would reprise the same pay (no) attention to the knife-wielding man behind the curtain in The Beyond

Given these the film's weak spots, most notably a tendency to overuse the zoom lens and thereby dilute its power and the odd unconvincing effect – though taken as a whole here Carlo Rambaldi's work here must rank among the best of his Italian productions – are easily forgiven.




Some of the found locations in the film are particularly impressive

Thematically, besides the well-worn notion of woman as mystery and conflations between the detective and the analyst, the film is of interest for its examination of generational fault lines. Unfortunately like others of his generation – Lenzi with Un Posto ideale per uccidere is another example – Fulci comes across as someone who did not quite know how to respond to the changes wrought by the 1960s. (It is also perhaps worth remembering in this regard that Fulci had earlier dealt with the decidedly tamer youth rebellion of the 1950s with 1959's Ragazzi del Juke-Box, co-incidentally featuring a young Antonio De Teffè / Anthony Steffen.)

While Fulci's anti-fascism comes through in such incidental details as the Irishman who presents an all-too-easy solution to the mystery before Corvin asks some pertinent questions, his distrust of hippies and general distaste for or lack of understanding of their scene – read sex, drugs and rock and roll – seem equally evident. ("It could have been me or it could have been her. Anything's on the cards when you take a trip. You're capable of doing anything. Some take a jump and think they can fly. You could kill someone and not know nothing about anything.")

This is also, however, somewhat tempered by being in accord with the character of Baker's (perpetually whistling and cigarette cadging) hard-but-fair cop, as an older figure representative of more traditional authoritarian values (which could as equally be left as right wing) who is clearly resentful of the privileges and power of the Hammond and Brighton families and his superiors and, if his slighly longish hair and modish sideburns are anything to go by, of the kind of freedoms enjoyed by Julia Durer and her cohorts. (“There should be a law against finding bodies on a Saturday.”)

An well constructed, technically accomplished film - cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller later lensed Argento's Deep Red and Fulci's own New York Ripper among others - the icing on the cake is Ennio Morricone's superlative score, with its beautiful main 'Una Lucertola' theme and effective, often experimental but always listenable, suspense and freak-out party cues.




Fulci demonstrates his love of rack focus time and again in the film

In short, about the only area the film seems wanting in compared to the Argento film it seems in some ways to consciously invert / respond to, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, is that its title has an even more tenuous connection to the plot, here stemming from a throwaway line about the kind of thing one might see when on a LSD trip.

Unfortunately for the English-speaking viewer at least there is not yet a completely satisfactory DVD of A Lizard in a Woman's Skin out there, Shriek Show's Region 1 release featuring the slightly cut English version and an unrestored, panned and scanned Italian one, albeit supplemented by some nice extras.

Some more krimi links

A few more krimis that are available on DVD, though the quality of the presentations seems to be rather variable:

Der Würger von Schloß Blackmoor / The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057692/

Available on Region 1 DVD - http://www.amazon.com/Strangler-Blackmoor-Castle-Karin-Dor/dp/B0000A0DVW/sr=11-1/qid=1168299032/ref=sr_11_1/103-8843256-7406238

The Phantom of Soho - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058466/

Available on Region 1 DVD - http://www.amazon.com/Phantom-Soho-Dieter-Borsche/dp/B00015YW0S/sr=11-1/qid=1168299080/ref=sr_11_1/103-8843256-7406238

Das Ungeheuer von London City / Monster of London City - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058706/

Available on Region 1 DVD with The Secret of the Red Orchid - http://www.amazon.com/Monster-London-City-Secret-Orchid/dp/B000E1OI6C/sr=1-1/qid=1168299138/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-8843256-7406238?ie=UTF8&s=dvd

Circus of Fear - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060865/

Available on Region 1 DVD - http://www.amazon.com/Circus-Fear-Christopher-Lee/dp/B000096I9T/sr=1-1/qid=1168299243/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-8843256-7406238?ie=UTF8&s=dvd

Circus of Fear is also available as part of Blue Underground's Christopher Lee collection, with two of Jess Franco's Fu Manchu adaptations and the Spanish director's Circus of Fear - as such whether to go for the solo DVD or the box set probably depends on your liking for Lee and Franco.

Krimi Box Sets

I have had a few emails / comments with questions about the krimi films and where to get them, so here is a list of the contents of the German box sets with links to the relevant IMDB entries for each film and to their Amazon.de pages; I have used the English title if there is only one, and otherwise given the original title and the various alternatives / AKA's.

Box Set 1:
The Fellowship of the Frog - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052829/
The Red Circle - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053228/
The Terrible People - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053630/
The Green Archer - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054947/

All the films here except The Green Archer have English language options and come from quite early in the krimi cycle, as can be seen from the box.

http://www.amazon.de/Edgar-Wallace-01-4-DVDs/dp/B0002YLABM/sr=1-1/qid=1168293439/ref=pd_bowtega_1/303-3575579-4014668?ie=UTF8&s=dvd

Box Set 2:
Dead Eyes of London - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054395/
Das Geheimnis der gelben Narzissen / The Devil's Daffodil / Daffodil Killer - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054912/
The Forger of London - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054906/
The Strange Countess - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055429/

Dead Eyes of London is also available on a nice Region 1 disc with Freda's Lo Spettro, which I would highly recommend. The Strange Countess has English language options, but I do not know about the others.

http://www.amazon.de/Edgar-Wallace-02-4-DVDs/dp/B0002YLABW/sr=1-2/qid=1168293439/ref=pd_bowtega_2/303-3575579-4014668?ie=UTF8&s=dvd
http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Eyes-London-Ghost/dp/B0001UZZO0/sr=8-1/qid=1168298600/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-8843256-7406238?ie=UTF8&s=dvd

Box Set 3:
Das Rätsel der roten Orchidee / The Puzzle of the Red Orchid / The Secret of the Red Orchid - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055391/
The Door with Seven Locks - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056630/
The Inn on the River - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056012/
The Squeaker - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057718/

All four films in this set have English language options, making it a good choice.

http://www.amazon.de/Edgar-Wallace-03-4-DVDs/dp/B0002YLAC6/sr=1-3/qid=1168293439/ref=pd_bowtega_3/303-3575579-4014668?ie=UTF8&s=dvd

Box Set 4:
The Black Abbot - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057476/
The Indian Scarf - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057183/
Room 13 - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058773/
Der Hexer / The Ringer / The Wizard / The Mysterious Magician - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058191/

All four films in this set also have English language options; I would say that overall it is the set to go for though Christopher Lee fans might be swayed by his presence in The Secret of the Red Orchid to go for Set 3 instead.

http://www.amazon.de/Edgar-Wallace-04-4-DVDs/dp/B0002YLACG/sr=1-5/qid=1168293439/ref=sr_1_5/303-3575579-4014668?ie=UTF8&s=dvd

Box Set 5:
Curse of the Hidden Vault - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058161/
Das Verrätertor / Traitor's Gate - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058718/
Wartezimmer zum Jenseits / Mark of the Tortoise / Waiting Room to the Beyond - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058737/
Neues vom Hexer - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059501/

Curse of the Hidden Vault and Mark of the Tortoise have English-language options, but I do not know about the others. Das Verrätertor / Traitor's Gate is credited to Freddie Francis and Jimmy Sangster, so might be of interest to British horror fans as well. Mark of the Tortoise is a Wallace-like James Handley Chase adaptation.

http://www.amazon.de/Edgar-Wallace-05-4-DVDs/dp/B00067Y558/sr=1-6/qid=1168293439/ref=sr_1_6/303-3575579-4014668?ie=UTF8&s=dvd

Box Set 6:
The Sinister Monk - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059846/
The Hunchback of Soho - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060192/
Das Geheimnis der weißen Nonne / The Trygon Factor - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061124/
Die Blaue Hand / Creature with the Blue Hand / The Bloody Dead - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061409/

The Sinister Monk and The Hunchback of Soho have English language options, but again I do not know about the others. Das Geheimnis der weißen Nonne / The Trygon Factor is credited to Cyril Frankel, and has a British cast alongside Siegfried Schurenberg and Eddi Arent. The Bloody Dead is also available on Region 1 DVD.

http://www.amazon.de/Edgar-Wallace-06-4-DVDs/dp/B00067Y55I/sr=1-8/qid=1168293439/ref=sr_1_8/303-3575579-4014668?ie=UTF8&s=dvd
http://www.amazon.com/Bloody-Dead-Creature-Blue-Hand/dp/B00007L4NP/sr=1-1/qid=1168298644/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-8843256-7406238?ie=UTF8&s=dvd

Box Set 7:
Der Mönch mit der Peitsche / The Monk with the Whip / The College Girl Murders / The Prussic Factor - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062022/
Der Hund von Blackwood Castle / The Horror of Blackwood Castle - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061795/
Im Banne des Unheimlichen / The Hand of Power / The Zombie Walks - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061795/
Der Gorilla von Soho / Ape Creature / Gorilla Gang - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063024/

Der Mönch mit der Peitsche / The Monk with the Whip sounds like might be a colour remake of The Sinister Monk, and is available on Region 1 DVD.

http://www.amazon.de/Edgar-Wallace-07-4-DVDs/dp/B0007CNX5U/sr=1-9/qid=1168293439/ref=sr_1_9/303-3575579-4014668?ie=UTF8&s=dvd
http://www.amazon.com/College-Girl-Murders-Grit-B%C3%B6ttcher/dp/B0009OL8GW/sr=11-1/qid=1168298695/ref=sr_11_1/103-8843256-7406238

Box Set 8:
Der Mann mit dem Glasauge / Terror on Half Moon Street / The Man with the Glass Eye - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063270/
Das Gesicht im Dunkeln / A Doppia faccia / Double Face / Puzzle of Horrors - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063979/
Die Tote aus der Themse / The Dead One in the Thames River - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067868/
Das Rätsel des silbernen Halbmonds / Sette orchidee macchiate di rosso / Seven Blood Stained Orchids - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067696/

Das Gesicht im Dunkeln is the Riccardo Freda giallo, co-scripted by Lucio Fulci; while Das Rätsel des silbernen Halbmonds is the Umberto Lenzi giallo. The latter is also available on Region 1 DVD.

http://www.amazon.de/Edgar-Wallace-08-5-DVDs/dp/B0007CNX64/sr=1-10/qid=1168293439/ref=sr_1_10/303-3575579-4014668?ie=UTF8&s=dvd
http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Blood-Stained-Orchids-Antonio-Sabato/dp/B00007G1Y5/sr=11-1/qid=1168298749/ref=sr_11_1/103-8843256-7406238http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Blood-Stained-Orchids-Antonio-Sabato/dp/B00007G1Y5/sr=11-1/qid=1168298749/ref=sr_11_1/103-8843256-7406238

Box Set 9:
Die Katze von Kensington - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116750/
Das Karussell des Todes - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113529/
Der Blinde - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112524/
Das Schloss des Grauens - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0315538/

Late 1990s TV adaptations with the character Inspector Higgins; I suspect these are for completists only.

http://www.amazon.de/Edgar-Wallace-09-4-DVDs/dp/B000B9WFZS/sr=1-11/qid=1168293439/ref=sr_1_11/303-3575579-4014668?ie=UTF8&s=dvd

Box Set 10:
Das Haus der toten Augen - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0325299/
Die unheimlichen Briefe - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0322130/
Die vier Gerechten - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317406/
Whiteface - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0327675/

Early 2000s TV adaptations with the character Inspector Higgins; the same remarks about being for completists only apply hier auch

http://www.amazon.de/Edgar-Wallace-10-4-DVDs/dp/B000B9WG02/sr=1-12/qid=1168293439/ref=sr_1_12/303-3575579-4014668?ie=UTF8&s=dvd

Finally, if you have not already done so, check out Latarnia's krimi corner and the links there.

Also, if you have any corrections or additions, please feel free to post them - I am in no way an krimi expert.

Cose avete fatto a Solange / What Have You Done to Solange

Enrico Rosseni (Fabio Testi) is the Italian and gymnastics teacher at the exclusive London Catholic girls school, St Hilda's. He is also secretly in a relationship with one of his pupils, Elizabeth Seccles (Christine Galbo).




The credits emphasise the Italian giallo aspect over the German krimi one

The couple are out boating on the Thames early in the evening when Elizabeth thinks she someone with a knife in the undergrowth. Enrico, however, is sceptical, and thinks that she is just finding excuses not to take their lovemaking any further. (“What next. It's all the fault of that damn uncle of yours. He insisted on sending you to that stupid Victorian school. There is always something to do or don't, to keep you from acting like a normal girl... What kind of knife was it? Was it a long one with a handle, a dagger, perhaps a sword? The archangel Gabriel come to punish you for your sins I suppose!”)

The next morning, Enrico hears on the radio that a body has been discovered on the riverbank. Worse, it transpires the victim, Hilda Erickson, was another pupil at St Hilda's.






The flash of the blade and the eyewitness

Unable to explain to the police, school governors or his wife Herta (Karin Baal) what he was doing on the evening in question, Enrico finds himself under suspicion when a photo of his visiting the murder scene is published.

Embarking on his own investigation, running parallel to the official one led by Inspector Barth (Joachim Fuchsberger) of Scotland Yard, he soon uncovers a sordid story of sex, drugs and a backstreet abortion gone horribly wrong...

What Have You Done to Solange's co-writer and director Massimo Dallamano started his career as a cinematographer – including credits on Leone's Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More – before turning to direction in the late 1960s.

Although his career was tragically curtailed by his death in an car accident in 1976, he nevertheless managed to turn out a number of decent genre films, including a quartet of gialli that seem, in retrospect, to chart many of the developments within the filone.

The first of these, La Morte non ha sesso / A Black Veil for Lisa was released in 1968. Thus pre-dating the giallo boom, it functioned as a more traditional thriller while also eschewing the whodunit element in favour of a close examination of its main characters and their motives.

Then came this film, released in 1972 at the peak of the cycle. Inaugurating what is often referred to as the “schoolgirls in peril” trilogy it presents an intriguing combination of Italian giallo and German krimi elements.

La Polizia chiede aiuto / What Have You Done to Your Daughters followed in 1974 and, paralleling the decline of the giallo and the rise of the poliziotto, placed the emphasis on the official investigation into a schoolgirl vice ring. (Dallamano's final film, 1976's Quelli della calibro 38 / Colt 38 Special Squad, continued this move, its title arguably suggesting that the police no longer needed outside help.)

Though directed by Alberto Negrin following Dallmano's death, Enigma Rosso / Rings of Fear, released in 1978, was indelibly marked with the latter's stamp, concluding the schoolgirl trilogy and giving Solange's Fabio Testi the role of the investigating officer.

With A Black Veil for Lisa and Rings of Fear lacking official releases, Dallamano's giallo reputation largely rests on this film and its immediate successor. Happily, What Have You Done to Solange lives up to its hype as one of the classics of the giallo.

The complicated plotting is characteristic of both giallo and krimi. Unlike many other examples of each, however, it holds up to closer scrutiny and provides substance as well as style.

Thus, for example, while we might question the realism of Enrico hearing about the murder on the radio and reaching the crime scene while the body is still there, the way in which he is subsequently questioned by Barth on the grounds of being a suspicious figure possibly returning to the scene of the proverbial crime alerts us the filmmakers being perfectly aware of the convention and thereby capable of playing with it.

While there are the usual (im)probable red herrings, such as a peeping tom teacher and a somewhat shifty priest, they are well integrated into the story. The killer's identity is also plausible rather than out of left field. Even if in consequence it is perhaps not too taxing for genre sleuths to figure out, it also grants the film a higher than usual degree of review potential, precisely because the second or third time round one can concentrate more on the mechanics of the plotting and the telling.








A parade of suspects and the first victim

The krimi fan will note that Fuchsberger is relegated to a supporting role and denied the kind of romantic interest he would have been given in a German-led production. The general ambience is also decidedly more realistic and sordid than would be permissible there: while an Edgar Wallace adaptation like The Sinister Monk invoked the nostalgic notion of “white slavery” it certainly not countenance a graphic backstreet abortion sequence.

The main concessions to the krimi audience, thus seem are the obligatory shots of the Houses of Parliament – albeit better integrated with the rest of the location shooting and in truth thereby more reminiscent of contemporaneous gialli such as Lizard in a Woman's Skin and All the Colours of the Dark – and a relatively poorly defined subplot involving the distinctive green pins worn by the victims.

Whether this last McGuffin actually comes from Wallace's The Case of the New Pin, as the film's German title implies is, however, debatable; personally I found it more reminiscent of the obscure 1963 British sexploitation drama The Yellow Teddybears, though surely more by coincidence than design.

Despite the sleaze – with one wondering in particular if a protagonist like Enrico Rosseni would be allowed to 'get away with it' today – there is also the impression that the film-makers tried to treat their subject matter with a degree of sensitivity and maturity.

Thus, for instance, while we get the obligatory exploitative scene of the schoolgirls showering, it is turned around on the viewer by revealing the aforementioned peeping tom teacher as his surrogate. The film may only go so far – significantly the camera set ups within the sequence seem designed to maximise rather the viewer's visual pleasure rather than frustrate it – but at least it makes the attempt.




Voyeurism turned back on itself?

Likewise, the characters and their relationships have a rare depth to them, with some interesting play upon national stereotypes in the case of Enrico and Herta as respective identification figures for the Italian and German audiences (“Even your much beloved [Rainer Maria] Rilke preferred Italian. For example, we say palm of the hand and you say flat of the hand. Italian is the language of angels” “And German is hard and graceless, like me. For all the sweetness of your angel's tongue, what were you doing with Hilda Ericson”). Barth, meanwhile, is the very English – read non-Catholic – detective, finding his investigation thwarted at one point when the priests react with predictable horror to his requests to know what the girls said in confession, while an eyewitness at a crucial point has a similarly 'English' reaction ("A priest is a priest, how am I supposed to know the difference?")

Production values are good. The cinematography is by Aristide Massaccessi, himself embarking on a directorial career as Joe D'Amato around the same time. Always at the service of the film as a whole, his work here reinforces the sense that he is one unsung figures of Italian cinematography, equally adapt at catching the glint of light on the killer's blade; shoot through keyholes or peepholes, and in constructing moodily lit night scenes. (One of the things that really detracts from Dallamano's work on A Fistful of Dollars for me is the poor quality of the day-for-night work in the cemetery shoot-out between the Baxters and Rojos.)

Antonio Siciliano's editing is crisp and concise, cutting in split-second inserts at times and contributing to whatever mood Dallamano wishes to create, be it tense, sleazy, romantic or sad. Here we might also consider the surprisingly complex associations made through Elizabeth's flashbacks to the riverside murder as she and Enrico subsequently try to pick up the romantic mood where they left off, as the knife / phallus connection again leading to a severe case of coitus interruptus; or the editing between Janet's demise and Elizabeth's waking from a nightmare, as if the two were psychically linked and providing that moment where the conscious and unconscious worlds merge; parallels with Fay Major's fugue state in The New York Ripper as she is attacked on the subway are also suggest themselves here.


A sombre "The murderer left the knife there" rather than The New York Ripper's "He stuck it up her joy trail"




A nod to Blood and Black Lace as one of the killer's victims is drowned in the bath?


The teachers are brought in for questioning, Blood and Black Lace style

Right, bring in the perverts... er priests; a line-up of (un)usual suspects

Effective is also a word that applies to Ennio Morricone's score, a classic blend of the romantic and atonal, with a couple of extremely nice moments when the scratch as the killer lifts the needle up from the record player rudely signals what is about to happen to his next victim and when church organ music bridges the transition from post-mortem and funeral sequences.

On the negative side, the film again suffers from the unconvincing variety pack of English accents common to many films of its type. In the Italian, however, it is emerges as one of those gialli that approaches the “cinema of poetry” ideal, as the objectivity and subjectivity of the filmmaker and his characters merge to powerful effect.

Some thoughts on Number 17, Easy Virtue and the giallo

Last night I watched a couple of early Hitchcock films, Easy Virtue and Number 17.

As a thriller whose first act takes place in an old dark house and whose second is an extended chase sequence, Number 17 probably is the more obviously relevant from the giallo fan's perspective, with weaknesses of plot and narrative significantly also meaning that it works better in terms of expressionist atmospheres and montage-driven set-pieces.

When a strong wind – nicely captured in a long tracking shot of billowing leaves – blows our stiff-upper lipped hero's hat into the garden of Number 17, he notices a to let / for sale sign and, finding the door to the property open, decides to have a look inside. He soon finds – and is found by – a tramp, with the pair then finding a body.

Left alone, the tramp searches through the dead man's possessions and finds a gun – leading to a suspenseful if implausible sequence as the tramp examines the weapon and almost shoots himself in the process – handcuffs, a telegram, a necklace and a ticket.




The effect is certainly striking, but whether the shadow and hand correspond is debatable

Exploring further, the two men then find a girl, who literally falls into their arms after crashing through the roof. Having revived her with some alcohol – one of the staples of both films and a factor that seems to indicate their Britishness at a time when the USA was in prohibition – attention turns to the telegram, which indicates that the dead man was involved with a robbery and that the house is the rendezvous point for the gang.




The telegram and mysterious ticket


Some black glove action

At this point other members of the gang arrive. They seem not, however, to have all met one another previously and, as a result, confusion ensues as to who is actually in on the conspiracy, even more so when the 'dead' man, who turns out only to have been unconscious, disappears then reappears but could be either a cop or a robber.


Another expressionist moment

The hero and heroine get tied to the bannister, allowing for some typically Hitchcock bondage bonding between them along with a moment of suspension suspense, before the dynamic, tense climax; also, alas, unfortunately marred by some poor model work.




Beauty in Rope Hell, Hitchcock style


Hitchcock as "ferry service" for German Expressionism to Britain?


The chase, predating The French Connection by nearly 40 years.


A finale not unlike Foreign Correspondent?

In sum, imagine George Hilton in there and you might have something akin to a 1932 version of The Devil Has Seven Faces or The Case of the Scorpion's Tail – not a classic, but with moments that register.

As a melodrama, there is less – at least on the surface – to say about Easy Virtue. Based on a Noel Coward play, the plot sees Larita Filton named in a divorce case after her artist lover shoots and wounds her brutal, drunken husband and then kills himself.




The Judge...




... and what he sees; justice is blind, indeed

Following this traumatic sequence of events, the “notorious” woman then goes to the south of France to get away from it all. There she meets John Whittaker, who is immediately smitten by her beauty and charm and proposes marriage. Larita accepts, the pair marry and then return to England.

Larita's problems have only just begun, however, as John's mother takes an immediate dislike to her and, worse, has the ill-defined sense that she has seen Larita somewhere before...

Presumably quite controversial in its day, Easy Virtue, now seems hopelessly of its time at a narrative level. It has considerably more to commend it on a technical level, with Hitchcock doing what he can to make the material more cinematic through such devices as the defamiliarising opening shot, a close up of the top of a judge's bewigged head; a succession of POV shots through the judge's monocled and near-sighted eye; and cutting from a swinging monocle to a pendulum.


Beauty and the beast, in the manner of Victorian melodrama



A montage moment

Thematically, meanwhile, the initial scenario has clear affinities with the director's later Blackmail while the dishonoured woman (“Shoot – there's nothing left to kill”) is perhaps a forerunner of Ingrid Bergman's character in Notorious; one would also not be surprised if the Hitchcock scholar could work in the “transference of guilt” as well via to the “stain” that Larita spreads onto the Whittaker family.


Another repeated image, as the end answers the beginning




The bite of Coward's dialogue still comes through

The film's most famous moment, meanwhile, is interesting in terms of the mechanics of suspense: when John proposes to Larita, she tells him she will give her response via telephone later that day, with the ensuing conversation and answer being conveyed not through an intertitle but via the expressions on the switchboard operator's face. Whereas normally suspense is about something bad – will the tramp accidentally shoot himself, for example – here it is about something good.

While this reversal also perhaps sees a reversal of the probabilities of different outcomes that is less successful, in that suspense has also been argued to depend on the worse outcome being the more plausible / likely, this also fits with the reverses that pertain in the film as a whole. Thus Coward and Hitchcock beautifully expose bourgeois hypocrisy and the differences between appearance and reality in a way that is ultimately perhaps is not too far removed from the world of the telefono rosso.

Perhaps the difference between the swinging red sign at the start of Blood and Black Lace and the swinging red telephone handle at its close is then that the former belongs more to the world of appearances – the glamorous house of Cristian – and the latter to that of reality – the material baseness behind denizens that leads them to conspire against and murder one another.

Everything is indeed connected – or at least can be made so...

What's in a name

One of the things in The Stendhal Syndrome that I don't like is Anna Manni's confusion when she learns that the French guy is named Marie. Now, I know it fits with the general theme of gender confusion that runs through the film, and also allows Dario Argento and Franco Ferrini to make a further allusion to the titular Stendhal, whose real name was Marie-Henri Beyle, but it also seems to forget about Italians like Gian Maria Volontè and Enrico Maria Salerno whose names seem to follow a similar pattern.

Is there a difference between the French and Italian naming conventions here, an attempt at writing something multi-layered that does not quite come off (at least as far as I am concerned) or a generational / regional / other thing? After all, Asia Argento's 'real' first name is Aria, because of the rules of what a child could or could not be named that pertained in 1975.

Ascenseur pour l'échafaud

One of the staple locations in the giallo filone is the elevator. Yet, the more you think about it, the more you realise that not all elevators are created equal and, indeed, how they express different things about their distinctive worlds, much in the same way as human character might – the way in which, for instance, the Edwige Fenech protagonists of Sergio Martino's The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh and All the Colours of the Dark convey a very different model of the modern woman than the Susan Scott protagonists of Luciano Ercoli's Death Walks on High Heels and Death Walks at Midnight.

Thus, for example, the elevator in a film like Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage – and, at this level at least, its many imitators – operates according to an impersonal and mechanistic logic, in accord with the scientifically understandable modern world in which it is squarely situated.

It simply does not care whether a maniac awaits a passenger at the other end; whether a passenger is a maniac, perhaps about to spatter its confines with his / her victim's blood; or indeed if it will subsequently open up a chasm for the killer to fall into or remorselessly descend to crush them.

In Argento's more fantastical films – and here subsuming them within the giallo because of the presence of black gloved killer and amateur seeker protagonists – elevators seem however to have personalities and minds of their own, subordinate to the occult powers they serve and operating according to their rules.

Note how, for instance, following her sojourn into the basement of the witch-house Rose Elliot must take the stairs after the elevator fails to arrive and she hears some of its other inhabitants coming in Inferno, or the way in which the distinctive design and décor of the building in which Sonia lives retrospectively signal it to be part of Mater Suspiriorum's domain and thereby no place of safety for the fleeing Pat Hingle in Suspiria.






Still in the belly of the beast (the Tanzacademie building is actually called 'The Whale')




Like the rest of the building the lift obeys its mistress's logic

The finale of Deep Red perhaps presents the tipping point here, the moment when the scientific logic of the Animal Trilogy transforms into the associational / magical logic of the Three Mothers films, as the lift “conspires” with Marc Daly to decapitating Martha, but perhaps only so that he can gaze into the pool of her blood and recognise his own irrevocably altered being.




Again, albeit probably coincidentally, triangular formations






How did she produce such a perfect pool of blood; a deep / shallow reflecting surface of hidden profundity?

The French Sex Murders

From the sublime to the ridiculous – there is really no other way to summarise the difference between Death Occurred Last Night and this 1972 giallo which, lacking style, substance or budget, throws everything it can at the audience in hope that something will connect in that all-but-patented Dick Randall way.

The big gimmick, as signalled by the alternative The Bogeyman and the French Murders title is the presence of professional Humphrey Bogart lookalike Roberto Sacchi as the detective investigating a series of call-girl murders. He cannot really act – or more kindly is not given the opportunity to show that he can – but does seem to have his model's look and mannerisms down pretty well.

His case, introduced via flashback to allow for some 1940s film noir style voice over from Sacchi's English dubber and some quick scene setting via a Citroen DS pulling up beneath the Eiffel Tower, from which an unidentified silhouette then plunges – an undeniably effective opening, with the animated silhouette a refreshing departure from the more usual dummy and probably used because they could not get away with throwing one off the structure – at first seems open and shut.






Bogey lookalike in Paris

Following the theft of some jewels Gottvales (Peter Martell / Pietro Martellanza) retreats to the brothel belonging to Madame Colette (Anita Ekberg) to see his favourite girl, Francine (Barbara Bouchet). He wants her to leave with him, but she declines, causing him to get violent.

The next thing we see is Gottvalles leaving the scene in a hurry as American writer Randall – confusingly played by Raf Valentu / Renato Romano rather than Randall, though the producer does have one of his customary cameo roles later – who is researching for an article on the place, finds Francine's bloody corpse.


There are two things wrong with this picture - Bouchet is not naked and her character is already out of the film


A negative image like Alphaville, remembering that Howard Vernon was in Godard's film


or a cop out of A Bout de souffle; really any resemblance is purely coincidental

Inspector Bogart and his men quickly hunt down Gottvalles who protests his innocence. No-one really believes him, however, nor feels inclined to challenge the circumstantial nature of the evidence against him, and thus he is found guilty and condemned to be guillotined. Crazed, Gottvalles swears that he will have revenge on the judge and those who have betrayed him.

En route to what seems a hastily scheduled execution Gottvales seizes the chance to escape, but is then decapitated when his motorbike slams into a parked truck with an (in)conveniently positioned razor-sharp ledge.










The same person later did the effects on Alien and E.T., believe it or not

As Professor Waldemar (Howard Vernon) remarks it seems as if a kind of divine justice has intervened.

Then there is a second murder with the same modus operandi as the first. Either Gottvales has returned from the grave or they got the wrong man and the real maniac is still at large.

The list of suspects is, as usual, a long one. The Professor himself is distinctly of the mad scientist variety and was in possession of the dead man's head. Then there is his friend, the Judge; handsome assistant and beautiful daughter who – for good measure – are also carrying on a clandestine relationshp against his wishes. Then we have Gottvales's ex-wife Marianne (Rosalba Neri) and her current lover, a sleazy nightclub impresario with a wandering eye. And assorted other suspects / red herrings.


More of this, please

Only one thing is really certain: this list will be much shorter by the time Inspector Bogart delivers his summing up.

The French Sex Murders' co-writer and director Ferdinando Merighi – credited as F. L Morris – looks to be one of the forgotten me of Italian genre cinema, with only a fistful of other credits to his name. On this evidence, it is both understandable and probably for the best. Excepting some experiments with inverted and tinted images there is a distinct lack of visual flair to the proceedings, with insufficient dynamism and inventiveness to overcome the flat lighting and functional set-ups characteristic of Randall's low budgets.






La dolce morte of la dolce vita's Anita Ekberg x3


A piece of near-classic giallo imagery

Despite coming from future Academy Award winner Carlo Rambaldi the set-piece gore effects are marked more by enthusiasm than accomplishment. Again this seems more down to limited resources than anything else. The previous year Rambaldi had, after all, managed to create mutilated dogs on Fulci's Lizard in a Woman's Skin that were sufficiently convincing for him to have to produce them to prove he was not guilty of animal cruelty.

Although the cast looks good on paper and is further bolstered by some uncredited cameo appearances the ensemble nature of the piece prevents any individual from getting as much screen time, characterisation or – putting things squarely in exploitation terms – physical exposure as one might like. Rosalba Neri does at least deliver a seductive singing number, but Bouchet does not even get naked before her character is killed off. Likewise, while there is plenty of nudity and softcore fumbling amongst the rest of the cast, is it consistently – and unintentionally no doubt – subverted by the an all-pervading 70s porn ambience.


A nod to Fritz Lang's classic, remembering that Howard Vernon was his great friend in later life, post The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse

Bruno Nicolai's score is a definite plus, but also sounds suspiciously like it has been taken from other films; the kind of secondhand, mix and match approach that seems, in fact, to typify the entire enterprise. (Unless – and I suppose it is possible, given the sheer number of scores most of the usual suspects amongst Italian composers were turning out at this time and the sometimes questionable attribution of certain scores to one or another – the cues originated here or were of a more library nature to begin with.)

The French Sex Murders is available on a nice DVD from Mondo Macabro, released as part of their Dick Randall collection. For the more casual giallo fan, however, the same company has also released the far superior The Killer Must Kill Again, accompanied by better – and more giallo-centred – extras.

La morte risale a ieri sera / Death Occured Last Night

The key words that sum up this 1970 giallo from Duccio Tessari are downbeat, depressing and disturbing – and I mean those as compliments.

At the same time, one can easily appreciate how this would not help its recognition by closed-minded genre fans – good time, trashy entertainment it is not – while the same fact of being made by someone previously responsible for sundry pepla, spaghettis and superspies likely meant it tended to go under-appreciated by mainstream critics; as evinced by Tom Milne's Monthly Film Bulletin review of the time, wherein he argued that the film seemed “to be wrestling with ideas rather above its station”.

If only it were a case of 'their loss being our gain', but with only grey market sources available – and here I must thank Paul for giving me the opportunity to at least see the film – it is another instance where the limitations of the presentation mean that a certain degree of dedication to the cause, above and beyond what should really be required is necessary; this is a film which deserves a top-notch official release from the likes of Blue Underground, Noshame or Mondo Macabro.

Though the seriousness and character-driven nature of the film makes it of a piece with the director's other equally impressive gialli, I also wonder whether some of Death Occurred Last Night's particular qualities might also be attributed to co-writer and producer Artur Brauner.

While better known as a purveyor of lowest common denominator fare like his (Bryan) Edgar Wallace adaptations and for giving Fritz Lang the opportunity to make another Dr Mabuse film before then subjecting the character to the indignities of becoming little more than a franchise figure, Brauner was also someone who had also long striven to re-establish the artistic credibility of his adopted homeland's cinema. He had, for example, written and produced one of West Germany's first films about Nazi atrocities, Morituri and advocated a “risky wave” of more challenging cinema in advance of the Oberhausen Manifesto; if he was guilty of producing the kind of crass, conservative, commercial cinema the Oberhausen signatories criticised, he was also someone who saw that a healthy cinema could and should support a diversity of production – indeed, the same year as he produced this film he also had a credit on Vittorio De Sica's Garden of the Finzi-Continis.

In terms of Death Occurred Last Night specifically the Italian and German sides of the co-production seem to emerge in the contrast between the official / krimi police procedural investigation that dominates the first half of the film and the subsequent shift into more private / giallo / poliziotto quests as the inadequacies of the law in the face of widespread social weakness, corruption and indifference become all-too evident.

The film opens with distraught widower Berzaghi (Raf Vallone) paying a desperate visit to high-ranking policeman Dr Lamberti (Frank Wolff). Berzaghi explains that his daughter Donatella has been missing for the past month. Thinking he has heard it all before, Lamberti asks how old the missing girl. On hearing the answer 25, he thinks he knows it all too.

Then Berzaghi explains: Donatella has the mental age of a three-year old. She is also physically attractive, trusting and if not necessarily “nymphomaniac” - a term that I think would imply a more 'adult' awareness of things – certainly flirtatious.

Deciding that Donatella has most likely been abducted for use as a prostitute, Berzaghi and his colleague Mascaranti (Gabriel Tinti) call on an ex-pimp contact, Salvatore, now working in a car showroom – in keeping with the pervasive mood, perhaps not really that much of a change of occupational direction; a sense again conveyed by the preceding scene in which a woman poses as a customer, takes a sports car for a test drive and leaves Salvatore with the vehicle once she has reached her destination.

Reluctantly Salvatore takes Lamberti and Mascaranti around Milan's brothels as they search for a lead. The undercover investigation seems, however, to be going nowhere, especially after the hot-headed Mascaranti reacts instinctively to the appearance of a couple of heavies and thereby alerts the underworld. Lamberti, however, also makes contact with an independent prostitute, Terrell, who indicates that one of her clients might have seen the missing girl and thereby provides a new avenue for investigation. Concerned for her safety, Lamberti takes her home with him, much to the consternation of his long-suffering wife (Eva Renzi).

A few days later, Salvatore contacts Lamberti indicating that he has heard that Donatella's abductors want to be rid of her, and agrees to help arrange a meet / sting operation. Unfortunately Salvatore is not being entirely honest and in trying a scam only succeeds in bringing about Donatella's murder, her horribly burnt body being found in a field...

Wolff's Dr Lamberti is a policeman who wears the weight of the world on his shoulders, his conscience and commitment to his job such that he cannot permit himself two weeks leave to have his sinus problems treated - it is not as if the criminals would also take a fortnight's holiday, he explains - while the torment and anguish Vallone's father goes through and the way he expresses them are heart-wrenching.

Tessari's direction is fairly straightforward for the most part, putting the camera at the service of story and performers rather than engaging in self-conscious displays of technique. At the same time, however, one of the most memorable moments sees him shoot a stairway from below in almost abstracted fashion as oranges rain down in slow motion. But crucially it is not gratuitous. Rather it stands out precisely because in the context of the narrative it comes at the moment when one of the conspirators reveals herself and drops her shopping.

Indeed, to return to an argument I made in relation to Puzzle, where I suggested that Tessari might be considered a master of the traditional thriller, it is a moment that seems distinctively Hitchcockian, in terms of Gilles Deleuze's notions of the Hitchcock “demark”- i.e. the thing that should not be; that does not belong there, and which which thereby stains or reveals the guilty - with the teddy bear Berzaghi is carrying functioning in a similar way to, for instance, the distinctive necklace forgetfully donned by Judy in Vertigo.

Although there is a nice moment early on as a flashback sequence showing the Berzaghi family's daily routine sees Donatalla put on a record - with forceful vocals by the inimitable Mina - which then plays diegetically over the scene, I cannot help feel that it often detracts from the sombre tone of the film, being too bold, brash and upbeat and insufficiently melancholy. Some of the cues even sound almost interchangable with those composer Gianni Ferrio provided for the very different - i.e. trashy fun - Death Walks at Midnight; not a good thing however enjoyable listening they are in their own right. Still, this is but a minor issue in a film otherwise distinguished by sensitive, thoughful - and thought-provoking - writing, direction and performances.

I Corpi presentano tracce di violenza forte: some notes on representations of violence in Torso and the Italian giallo

[Note that this post contains spoilers]

A “psychosexual maniac” is stalking the students of a Rome University class. First, Florence and her boyfriend are murdered by a peeping tom in a lover's lane. Next, Carol (Conchita Airoldi) leaves a party in a marijuana haze after giving a couple of her fellow students the brush off. Though pursuing, they prove all mouth and little action as one crashes his motorcycle and lands unceremoniously in the dirt. It is too late for their quarry, though, as she flees ever deeper into the woods and there encounters the killer. This time, however, at least there is a clue: the distinctive red and black patterned scarf used by the killer to strange Carol.

Another student, Daniela (Tina Aumont) receives a threatening telephone call, warning that to tell the police about the red scarf – which flashbacks reveal she saw around the neck of a fellow student, Stefano, whom the audience has already seen assaulting a prostitute he picked up – would be a bad idea.

The police, meanwhile, go to question the stallholder (Ernesto Colli) who sells the scarves. No friend of the police, he professes to know nothing but then attempts to blackmail the killer, with predictably fatal consequences.

Seeking to get away from the unpleasantness, Daniela and her friends Ursula, Katia (Carla Brait) and Jane (Suzy Kendall) decide to spend some time at Daniela's uncle's hilltop villa in the country. Unfortunately the killer is on their trail...

Taking his later Suspicious Death of a Minor to be more of a poliziotto, Torso / I Corpi presentano tracce di violenza carne was the last classic giallo to be directed by Sergio Martino. Released in Italy at the tail end of 1972, the film nevertheless also seems to indicate a growing dissatisfaction with the filone formula as then extant.

Torso features a different cast from Martino's usual, with the likes of Edwige Fenech, George Hilton, Ivan Rassimov and Anita Strindberg conspicuous in their absence, while the musical duties are assigned to the De Angelis Brothers rather than Bruno Nicolai. Perhaps the most interesting change, however, lies in the dynamics of the film. Though starting off very much as a traditional giallo, the second half of the film has been argued as moving more into slasher film territory by downplaying the traditional whodunnit and conspiracy aspect of the giallo and producing, in the figure of Jane, a prototypical “final girl”.

Whatever the relative merits and / or demerits of these changes, they would seem to have worked with the audience as far I Corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale's box office is concerned, with the film doing approximately the same business as its two 1972 predecessors, All the Colours of the Dark and Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, combined.




Yet more broken doll imagery - "dolls, just stupid dolls" and some soft-focus lovemaking reminiscent of the opening of Your Vice...


From Torso to Black Christmas and When a Stranger Calls, with the killer on the phone?


The masked, gloved, knife-wielding killer

The thing that I find most interesting about the film, however, is the way it might help illuminate certain aspects of cinematic violence as they might pertain in the giallo.

In a 1993 Film Quarterly article, Devin McKinney attempted to distinguish between two sorts of screen violence. In its “weak” form, characteristic of most mainstream cinema, violence is more likely to be spectacular, throwaway and even pleasurable. In its “strong” form, typically associated with art cinema, violence is more likely to be depicted in a complex and consequential way.

While McKinney's own position would likely disincline him to give a film like Torso the benefit of the doubt – especially when its first half operates broadly in weak violence terms – events at the villa have a stronger edge via the way we are denied the on-screen spectacle of Daniela, Katia and Ursula's deaths in favour of an emphasis on the – thoroughly unpleasant – aftermath and Jane's suitably horrified / terrified reactions.

More generally, one also wonders what the emphasis on trauma within the giallo might mean for McKinney's thesis, in that innumerable genre entries explore the longer-term consequences of a violent act in the past.

While trauma admittedly often serves as little more than pretext for violence as spectacle in some of the better, more thoughtful, aspirational and consequential examples of the giallo – The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Don't Torture a Duckling, The Cat with the Eyes of Jade or The Stendhal Syndrome for example – the balance swings the other way.

A particularly good example here is another hybrid, the much maligned Trauma itself. A large part of the reason for the film's poor reception, I would suggest, was its giallo disavowal of the usual inconsequential pleasures of the more mainstream slasher film. Thus, for instance, when David catches sight of the vulnerable Aura undressing his gaze – and ours – is an explicitly guilty one.

This is not to say that Trauma is an unqualified success; some of the murder set pieces do seem to be intended to be spectacular but fail. This kind of analysis does seem, however, to offer some potential here and more generally in distinguishing between the less aspirational “vernacular” giallo and the more aspirational “auteur” or “art / popular” variants.

Returning to Torso itself, one question that arises is which kind of giallo it is. As a "vernacular" film there is, I would suggest, the matter of which vernacular audience – that in the Italian terza visione cinemas (as I Corpi...) or in the American grindhouses and drive-ins (as Torso), as evinced by the difference between the two versions, the Italian one including an opening monologue on art (overlaid atop a sex scene in an almost Godardian juxtaposition that reminded me of Le Mepris) and some low comedic moments absent from its international counterpart.


Art or commerce?


The consequences of violence

As an auteur film, meanwhile, the issue seems that of exactly who this author might be, of distinguishing between the contributions of Martino and Gastaldi. While not discounting the latter's work, I would suggest that the most successful elements of the film, most notably the extremely suspenseful, largely silent scenes at the villa, belong primarily to the director. Other elements, like the broken dolls and fall-of-man themes, seem more generic / attributable to the writer. The same can be said of the less successful mystery element, with the usual rule of black-gloved thumb applying: if somebody is an obvious suspect, like Stefano, then they are likely just a red herring.

As far as the Psycho-esque element of unexpectedly killing off apparent protagonist Daniela goes, meanwhile, it is worth remembering that Gastaldi and Martino has used the same device themselves in The Case of the Scorpion's Tail with Evelyn Stewart's character.

As ever, the issue is one of the more mainstream critics applying only certain frames of reference and deeming the giallo to be beneath them.

Whatever one thinks of it, Torso thus emerges yet another giallo that manages to be both entertaining and – if one is willing to go beyond “mere entertainment”– thought-provoking.

Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key

Oliviero Ruvigny (Luigi Pistilli) is a burnt-out, alcoholic, mother-fixated writer who has not written a line in three years and survives by selling off the furniture from the crumbling family mansion. His main pleasure in life is taunting his beautiful wife Irina (Anita Strindberg) who also attentions of her dead mother-in-law' cat, a malevolent creature that more than live up to its name, Satan, as far as she is concerned.






Yet another picture that holds a power


An early appearance by Dalila Di Lazzaro, later the lead in Flavio Mogherini's The Pyjama Girl Case

Visiting the village for much-needed supplies after hosting another party for the hippies at the nearby commune, Oliviero arranges a rendezvous with the girl from the bookstore, Fausta (Daniela Giordano). But while waiting for him to arrive, she is murdered by a sickle-wielding, black-gloved figure.




Daniela Giordano in a particularly thankless role.

When the police call at the villa the next day Oliviero claims that he was with Irina all evening. This satisfies the police but leaves Irina – seemingly too frightened to tell them the truth – ever more worried.


Ruvigny hits the J&B

Then the Ruvigny's maid (Carla Brait) is killed. Again proclaiming his innocence, Oliviero convinces Irina that the best thing to do is wall up the body in the cellar and, if anyone asks, say that she left their service; to go to the authorities "would be like putting a noose around my neck" he explains.


The maid dons Oliviero's mother's dress and suffers the consequences


Ivan Rassimov, looking shifty as ever

The last thing either of them needs, then, is the unexpected arrival of Olivieri's niece Floriana (Edwige Fenech), although Irina warms to her as she stands up to Oliviero and offers her aunt more than a shoulder to cry on.


I love the abstract, gestalt figure qualities of this composition





Unfortunately at this point, the film loses its way somewhat.

Fausta's killer is unmasked as an escaped lunatic, thereby removing the burden of suspicion from Oliviero but also making his and Irina's subsequent actions less believable.

More damaging, however, is the dirt bike sequence that follows, which effectively puts a brake on the narrative for the better part of five minutes.

Happily things pick up after this as the various plots come together, though never quite recapturing the lost momentum of the first half.


All work and no play makes Oliviero a dull boy?

Combining familiar generic themes and motifs with more overtly Gothic elements drawn from Edgar Allen Poe's short story The Black Cat – itself later adapted by Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento in giallo / horror style – this 1972 entry boasts one of the most extravagant titles in the entire giallo filone, itself stemming from a line in the filmmakers' earlier The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh.

At the helm, Sergio Martino again demonstrates his undoubted technical abilities, although some of his choices also feel a touch over-emphatic. It is not that an extreme close-up, shock zoom or sudden cut-in has no place here – that would be an absurd suggestion to make – more that they feel somewhat redundant when the point has already been made through dialogue, performance or other, more subtle, aspects of mise-en-scene. Sometimes more is less.

Against this, however, there are some beautifully realised moments. A love scene between Floriana and Irina, for instance, may use all the slow-dissolve, hands-clasping-in-ecstasy cliches, but in doing so it perhaps indicates not only their pleasure as immediate meaning but also a retrospectively element of falseness when it becomes evident that both participants are playing particular roles.

Bruno Nicolai's score lacks variety compared to his work for Martino elsewhere, with an absence of suspense and lounge themes in favour of numerous minor variations on the same gentle, romantic harpsichord and string led theme. This also, however, perhaps allows for a better fit with the overall tone of the film, insofar as the emphasis is more upon the relationships between the characters than the woman-in-peril scenario.

While Strindberg is perhaps the designated victim, she is more the victim of systematic abuse than a clear cut conspiracy of the sort experienced by Edwige Fenech in The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh or All the Colours of the Dark.

Fenech herself is intriguingly cast against type as a conniving bitch with her own agenda, leaving Rassimov with the short end of the stick once more as yet another sinister presence; while his exact allegiance and part in the various plots and counter-plots remains a mystery until late on, it is evident from his very first appearance that can be up to no good.

To an extent Luigi Pistilli might also appear typecast, insofar as he is again given the role of someone troubled, haunted and compromised following his reluctant co-conspirator of a forceful Lady Macbeth type wife in Bay of Blood and his policeman traumatised by a suspect's death in The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire. Again, however, what matters is the way he differentiates each such figure from the others, with his alcoholic Oliviero also giving an ironic twist to the omnipresent J&B bottle as more a signifier of failure ("It's all poison", as the character remarks at one point) than la dolce vita.


Leering local layabouts


The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll?


La Chute, again

It is also worth noting that the film features both dummy and doll action. There is also a scene repeated in Torso, as a gang of locals leer at and make crude remarks as to what they would like to do to Irina: if Martino gives the (implied) male spectator his “visual pleasures” he also likes to explicitly problematise them on occasion. I also find these moments curiously reminiscent of those in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura where Monica Vitti's character similarly finds herself being eyed up and objectivised; whether the allusion is conscious or not is if course another matter entirely...