L' Assassino ha riservato nove poltrone / The Killer Reserved Nine Seats

It is Patrick Davenant’s birthday and he is having an impromptu party for his family, friends and hangers-on. In an old abandoned theatre that he owns. Where, as we will soon learn, a hundred years ago this very night, a not dissimilar group mysteriously met their deaths…

On arriving at the place there is a guy in a black Nehru jacket – repeatedly referred to and making an interesting change from the usual black Macintosh, I suppose – surprisingly present, who presents himself as master of ceremonies. (“The actors are present and now the play may start…”)

No one will admit to recognising him. But nor do they think much of his presence until Patrick (Chris Avram) is almost hit by a falling beam. He immediately suspects everyone else.

For any permutation amongst his ex-wife and her lover (Howard Ross); his daughter Lynn (Paola Senatore) and her boyfriend Duncan (Gaetano Russo); his sister Rebecca (Eva Czemerys) and her lesbian lover Doris (Lucretia Love); his fiancee Kim (Janet Agren), or his doctor (Andrea Scotti) would benefit from his demise.

Always assuming, that is, that Patrick is not himself a dangerous paranoid…

It soon becomes clear that there is indeed at least one killer in their midst as Kim drops out of the running with a dagger in her back, following a surprisingly convincing enactment of Juliet’s suicide scene from Romeo and Juliet that did not warrant such cutting criticism…

Doris thinks she glimpses a cloaked and masked figure fleeing backstage and sets off to investigate – any bets on who will be next to die, in that classic idiot-plot way - while the others make for the exit. They discover the door to be locked, the key missing and the phone dead…








A nice moment that can be read as either a sign of the supernatural or just a coup de theatre, as Patrick walks in front of the stranger who disappeared while his back is turned

Yes, this is yet another giallo film take on Ten Little Indians that endeavors to spice up the old-fashioned Agatha Christie elements – i.e. plenty of suspects with motive and opportunity in an isolated no-exit setting – with a more contemporary / exploitative approach to the sex and violence and, just in case this were still not enough, a vague supernatural horror subplot.

It is too talky and – at least on the admittedly limited evidence of the Greek subtitled pan and scan version I watched – unimaginatively directed to be up there with Five Dolls for an August Moon as giallo take on Christie. Nor can it be ranked with the later – and perhaps itself imitative – Stagefright as theatrical horror, lacking as it does the sense of self-conscious irony that pervades Bava and Soavi’s films.

But neither is The Killer Reserved Nine Seats a complete waste of time thanks to its atmospheric and claustrophobic locations; ensemble cast of reliable genre names; groovy library-style score courtesy of the redoubtable Carlo Savina, and the film-makers unpretentious give-them-what-we-think-they-want approach.

I mean how – rhetorical question time – can you not like a film where a young, pre-hardcore Paula Senatore finds the time to break off from being terrified to undress, don a skimpy dressing gown and perform an impromptu dance / strip in front of the mirror?

The Girl in Room 2A / La Casa della paura

[Note that this review contains spoilers]

Written, produced and directed by William Rose, The Girl in Room 2A certainly starts off intriguingly, with the abduction, torture and murder of a young woman, only to then settle down into decidedly meandering and ineffectual mystery enlived only by the eye-candy provided by Daniela Giordano and – in smaller roles – Rosalba Neri and Karin Schubert.




Keep in mind this is supposed to look like a suicide

Giordano plays Margaret, just released from the woman's prison (“look, it wasn't a prison; it was the women's jail”) where she spent some time for being found in possession of drugs, although she continues to protest that they were not hers. Neri is the social worker, Mrs Songbird, responsible for Margaret's rehabilitation. She has found Margaret a place to stay in the halfway house run by Mrs Grant.

Margaret tries to settles in and tries to rest, but finds this difficult when the floor of the room has an inexplicable blood stain half-hidden under a rug, someone is pacing around outside and the shutters will not stay closed. She decides to go out for a walk, but is intercepted by Mrs Grant, who asks if she would like a cup of tea and a sedative to go with it. (“I use them myself. My doctor gives them to me. Just a nerve calmer. Try one!”)

That night Margaret is visited by a red masked figure. For a few minutes the film-makers try to make us unsure whether it is for real or in her mind, only for the next sequence to introduce a group of cultists led by the selfsame figure and including amongst their number Mrs Grant's son and Mr Dreese, whom we had earlier glimpsed watching Margaret with an unhealthy interest when she was in town. They kill off an ex-member, Johnstone, and dump his body off the same cliff as seen at the start of the film.




The Red Queen Kills Seven Times?

By now – one third of the way into the proceeding – one is wondering exactly what the point of it all is, insofar as about the only questions remaining are the identity of the cult leader and whether Margaret will realise the danger she is in. Unfortunately a visit to the suspiciously too-kind Mrs Songbird and the introduction of the dead girl's brother, who refuses to believe that she killed herself as per the official inquiry, pretty much prove to answer to both...


Any excuse for a picture of Rosalba Neri...

Lacking the trash value or Italian style required to overcome its flatly direction and poorly writing – how were the stab wounds on the dead girl and Johnstone not noticed? why does the red masked figure look nothing like Neri? – Girl in Room 2A can be summarised as one of those borderline gialli that can only be recommended to completists.

An interesting Daniela Giordano interview: http://members.aol.com/eurosin/giordano.htm

The Strange Case of Dr Mabuse

I am not really sure what to say about this book by David Kalat except for that it is a must-buy / must-read for anyone with an interest in European cult cinema, charting as it does one of the earliest and most enduring characters within the field from his origins in the early 1920s as German Fantomas with Norbert Jacques' serialised novel and the first of Fritz Lang's three films featuring him - or at least the idea of Mabuse; the distinction is at once important and meaningless - through to his seeming demise - read irrelevance - with the end of the Cold War and the Berlin Wall mere months after Claude Chabrol's finished shooting his affectionate Lang hommage / pastiche Club Extinction in 1989.

Not only are the Mabuse meets the krimis of the post-Lang CCC productions in there, but also Jess Franco's characteristically idiosyncratic take on the character - praised, for all its faults by Kalat for at least getting our from under the shadow of Lang - and Ulrike Ottinger's avant-garde queer retelling in The Image of Dorian Gray in the Yellow Press.

Truly a labour of love, persuasively written, a pleasure to read and full of details that you never knew.

The Phantom of Soho

This 1964 krimi presented me with something of a dilemma. It was a film I eagerly wanted to see on account of a Tenebrae connection made by Tim Lucas in The Video Watchdog Book, but which I was wary of approaching through Alpha Video's DVD

And, now, turning to write about the film, I face another version of this dilemma. It is a film I want to recommend, but on a DVD which I cannot – its quality is shockingly poor, the sort of thing for which there is really no excuse and for which Alpha do not deserve your hard-earned money for the simple reason that they do not seem to have done any work themselves.


Bryan Edgar Wallace; note how the image is also slightly cropped

The film itself was one of those produced by Artur Brauner's CCC from a story by Bryan Edgar Wallace, who appears in the credits sequence. Nevertheless, despite a few concessions to contemporary tastes, most notably some exposed breasts in a night-club routine, the setting is otherwise that comfortably familiar krimi neverwhen, the 1920s and the 1960s colliding in a German studio set evocation of an imaginary London populated by outmoded stock types.


Is that a Suspiria-like Bird with a Crystal Plumage?


Whatever the case, that is certainly Werner Peters


A voyeuristic / exhibitionistic ecdysiast performance

The case begins when Archibald Bissell, a prominent businessman, is dispatched by a silver-gloved, knife-wielding assassin. The motive was not robbery. Indeed, rather than taking the £100 Bissell had on him – a tidy sum whether the year is 1924 or 1964 – the killer left a distinctive African fetish doll.

It is the latter feature that causes Sir Phillip to assign the case to Inspector Patten (Dieter Borsche; that and the fact Patten was also Bissell's batman when they were in the colonial service in Africa together and so may also have a personal interest in the case.

His investigations soon uncover a mess of blackmail, white slavery and insurance fraud, all centred on the Soho night club Sansibar. Quite how this all relates to the Phantom – as Sir Phillip's crime writer friend Clorinda Smith (Barbara Rutting) dubs the killer, who soon strikes twice more, first assassinating an Italian posing as a Bedouin knife-thrower(!) and then an MP, to futher add to the confusion over motivation – seems almost another matter entirely.




Some of Franz Josef Gottlieb's striking compositions, ably photographed by Richard Angst and all but destroyed by Alpha's non-presentation

Without wishing to give too much away – but let us face it, if approaching the film with Tenebrae as primary reference point there is a strong sense of deja vu to dialogue like “You must admit: mystery writers have it easy compared to us [...] But the fact is you know from the very first who the culprit is, we criminologists rarely know up to the very end.” – the resolution to the whole mystery revolves around the crime author, allowed to participate in the investigation in the hope that she might provide the Scotland Yard men with a fresh perspective, that of the amateur who has hitherto dealt solely with fiction.

This said, what is different about the films, as another reminder of The Phantom of Soho's krimi status, is the downplaying of the psychosexual element to the killer's crimes. He – or she – is motivated neither by a desire to wipe out “human perversion” nor the legacy of traumatic sexual experience, as with Tenebre's multiple maniacs; unless, that is, we decide to extend the sexual to the point of being all-encompassing and thereby, I would content, fundamentally useless as explicatory tool.

Franz Josef Gottlieb's approach as director can basically be summed up as never to use a straightforward shot if he can find a more imaginative and visually striking one, including mounting the camera on the rotating wheel of the knife-thrower's assistant. It is a strategy that certainly sustains interest should the plot convolutions get too much and helps to create the desired atmosphere most of the time, albeit with the odd moment that is perhaps too self-indulgent or mannered for the good of the film as a whole.


The Phantom about to strike...


... and to be unmasked; note that at least in the version I saw we do not see the Phantom's mask until this point

Thus, if the old-fashioned black and white cinema-photography and Martin Bottcher's excellent crime jazz score further distance The Phantom of Soho from the impossibly modern feel of Argento's film, this same attitude also leads one to suspect that Gottlieb would happily have incorporated “unmotivated” Louma crane shots or machine-driven synthetic rhythms had the technology been available.

To sum up: a very good and interesting self-referential krimi, marred by an abysmal presentation.

An old film poster

I happened upon this poster for Guiseppe De Santis's Riso amaro / Bitter Rice while looking for an image from the torture scene in Rome Open City (I was thinking of it in relation to Fulci's The Beyond) and it struck me in terms of what it is saying about the film and, more specifically, its selling points - i.e. Silvana Mangano and sex.

While you could never say Bitter Rice is a giallo, its this focus on the illicit attraction and its transposition of an American-style crime story to an Italian setting that make it as much a genre film - i.e. thriller - as an art one - i.e. neo-realist - as per the Marxist critics who famously complained that the sight of Mangano in her tight, revealing outfits, labouring in the rice fields, could contribute nothing to an understanding of class relations. And there, I guess, is the problem the other way as well...

Murderock - uccide a passo di danza / Murder Rock

Meet the staff and students of New York's Arts for Living Centre, a dance school. Like its counterpart in Argento's Suspiria, it is a place characterised by petty rivalries and jealousies, where almost everyone has something to hide and the competition for recognition is fierce.


People are dying to go there

Now, following the announcement that there are only three places with a prestigious dance company available, it has turned deadly, as the naked body of the best of the students, Susan, is found in the showers with a chloroform impregnated cloth by her side and a long pin through her breast, penetrating her heart.


1, 2

3, 4


5, 6


7, 8

Could it be the school's director Dick Gibson (Claudio Casinelli), who watches all his charges through cameras connected to a bank of monitors – i.e. the Centre as technological version of the magical “living” witch-houses of Suspiria and Inferno – and is known for his penchant for taking advantage of the more ambitious / desperate female pupils. Perhaps Susan rebuffed his advances?

Or maybe her boyfriend Willy Stark (Christian Borromeo) who is also a dancer, and thereby a potential rival.

Or Bob, perhaps twisted by the disability that prevents him from dancing like the others and relegates him to the role of overworked, under-appreciated technician. (At the risk of reading too much in, might we consider him as a stand-in for director Lucio Fulci?)

Or teacher and choreographer Margie (Geretta Geretta; you will know her face even if her multiple AKAs are confusing), who resents having been subordinated to her more famous colleague Candice Norman (Olga Karlatos), whose own promising career as a dancer was cut tragically short by an accident some years back.

Or mystery man (Ray Lovelock), whom Candice first sees in one of those dream visions that are so familiar to Fulci's female giallo protagonists, from Lizard in a Woman's Skin, Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes and The New York Ripper, where he menaces her with a pin, and then on a billboard.

Or - well, you get the idea...










Neo-classic giallo imagery

Whoever the killer is, it is soon clear that it is not Janice as, following a suggestive dance routine in a strip club (i.e. more Flashdance than New York Ripper, for good or ill) and a visit from Willy, who again suspiciously disappears, this time with a potentially incriminating photograph, is tormented and dispatched by the unseen, inevitably black gloved killer.








More of Fulci's whited out crime scene photography, as also seen in Lizard in a Woman's Skin and Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes

This time, however, the police, in the shape of Lieutenant Borges – one wonders if the name is intended to suggest something of the labyrinthine quality of the typically giallo plot – have a clue. The killer also pinned Janice's pet canary. He and his erstwhile colleague Professor Davis – the Fulci scholar will note that The New York Ripper had the somewhat suspect Dr Davis – decide to keep this detail quiet, in the hope that the killer will betray themselves before the body count has risen too far...

Meanwhile, Candice embarks on her own private investigation into her mystery man...

Time has not been kind to this 1984 giallo, also known as Giallo a disco and, most tellingly and wince- if not lawsuit-inducingly, Slashdance. Yet, if one can get beyond the music and the lyrics; the credits sequence breakdancers and the extended leg-warmer, leotard and pelvic thrusting routine that follows it, into the first atmospheric stalk-and-kill routine – already some of you are probably thinking this sounds like a somewhat tall order – it is actually is not quite as bad as its near rock bottom reputation would have it.

Much of the problem, I think, is that its time-capsule of New York as “Kids from Fame get slain” is inherently not as interesting to the Euro-trash cultist as The New York Ripper's of pre-AIDS, pre-clean up Times Square as existential hell, even if, on closer inspection, one sees that typical Fulci cynicism and world-weariness showing through in spades.

In this respect, it certainly also helps to have seen a lot of the directors' other films and those of others working in the same generic terrain - you would not want Murderock to be someone's first Fulci, giallo or Italian horror – and have the capacity to make the intertextual connections, like those outlined above or the every-voice-has-its-own-distinctive-signature-idea from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage as explained by an oscilloscope operating policeman played by none other than Al Cliver.


Olga Karlatos about to get a wooden splinter in eye? No, but a definite Fulci moment


Signs of life?


Before Sliver, there was Murderock?

Or, as Roland Barthes once argued, that every voice had its own distinctive “grain”. And the voice which comes through here, providing what “pleasures” there are to be found in “the text,” is that of Fulci. Indeed, watching the extras on the second disc of Shriek Show's pretty impressive DVD package (from which the screen captures are culled) one gets a real sense of screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti's point, that Fulci was an accomplished technician but had the misfortune to never quite have the resources he really needed to bring his vision to full clarity.

The sad thing is, however, that whereas the gap between the idea and the realisation was minimal at the time of his near-masterpieces of the late 1960s / early 1970s and late 1970s / early 1980s, by the time of Murder Rock he would seem to have been into a losing battle with the industry, the world and his own health; a Beyond from which there would be no return...

Further links / reviews / opinions:

http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=62372

http://www.dvdmaniacs.net/Reviews/M-P/murder_rock.html
http://www.dvdactive.com/reviews/dvd/murder-rock.html
http://www.eurohorrordvds.net/movies/reviews/murderrockreview.php

Death Laid an Egg

Tonight I had a very interesting experience: I screened Death Laid an Egg for some of my film society friends, none of whom had ever heard of, let alone seen the film before. Everybody in the admittedly small sample seemed to enjoy it, in its bizarre way, but what was also interesting, I felt, were the different 'pleasures of the text' that came through, with an appreciatiation - for instance - for the whole 60s design and costumes, the kind of retro / camp aspect that Gary Needham talks about in his introduction to the form. Indeed, one of my friends said she was inspired to go away and look at old dressmaking patterns and make something like one of Gina Lollobrigida's costumes.

Grand guignol / fumetti neri / Inferno

Today I was at a conference on film audiences. One of the presentations included some images from Theatre du Grand Guignol that I thought were interesting in relation to its Italian variant and the iconography of Kriminal and, though it, Argento's Inferno, of the skull mask, the “come sweet death, one last caress” etc.:

Italian Cinema: Gender and Genre

“Maggie Gunsberg examines popular genre cinema in Italy during the 1950s and 1960s, focussing on melodrama, commedia all'italiana, peplum, horror and the spaghetti western. These genres are explored from a gender standpoint which takes into account the historical and socio-economic context of cinematic production and consumption. An interdisciplinary feminist approach informed by current film theory and other perspectives (psychoanalytic, materialist, deconstructive), leads to the analysis of genre-specific representations of femininity and masculinity as constructed by the formal properties of film.”

As the synopsis suggests, this is a heavy-duty academic study of Italian filone film and does not address the giallo specifically, pretty much ending just as it was taking over at the box office. Nevertheless, any book which has a cover image from Freda's Lo Spettro and discusses Duccio Tessari's rules for the peplum gets my recommendation.

Some telling dialogue from Tenebrae

Gianni: “I was on my way back to the house. I know there's a piece of the puzzle there if I can only remember it, see it.”

Or, the expectation that a Bird with the Crystal Plumage / Deep Red dynamic is about to develop, as Gianni revisits the scene of the crime, the haunted house.

Peter Neale: “I'm sorry Gianni, I'm really sorry that you had to get caught up in all of this.”

Or, Neale's admissions of guilt and another signal that Argento is playing by a different set of rules to his more celebrated earlier gialli, that the (young) man who just about knows too much is about to die; the dynamic being more akin to Four Flies on Grey Velvet, where Arrosio is allowed the pleasure of knowing that he was right and had solved the mystery, albeit “only at the moment of dying”

Who says Argento cannot write effective, multi-layered dialogue?

Woman-machine

In Lenzi's A Quiet Place to Kill and Argento's Cat o' Nine Tails there are sequences where a woman – Helen / Anna Terzi – drives her sports car fast, scaring her male passenger – Maurice Sauvage / Carlo Giordani – in the front seat, “the death seat” as it is termed in the former film.

What both sequences depict is a kind of role reversal, with the woman in control of the situation, confident in her abilities and the man in a position of helplessness. They also suggest a different relationship to technology, specifically the car, as the woman experiences the vehicle as an extension of her body, knows what she / it can do as an assemblage and revelling in its power. The man, meanwhile, is for a change alienated from the technology which entraps and encases him but remains distinct from his being.

Beyond this, the two sequences also seem to embody the confidence of their respective directors, their control over their material and technique. (Say what you like about Lenzi, but he knows how to shoot a chase sequence.)

Paranoia / A Quiet Place to Kill

Following a racing car accident that leaves her out of cash and short on options, Helen (Caroll Baker) is surprised to receive an invitation from her ex-husband Maurice (Jean Sorel) to pay him a visit at his luxury villa on the Mallorca coast.


Caroll Baker, but not as we normally know her, in the negative image titles that warrant close scrutiny.

Arriving, she is even more surprised to learn that Maurice married again, shortly after divorcing her three years previous, and that is was in fact his wife, Constance (Anna Proclemer), who penned the invite.












Up-tight American women meet “typical European male, selfish, amoral and corrupt”




But finds him irresistible nonetheless; blocks of red recur throughout Lenzi's compositions, with colour being used in an expressive manner.

Offering Helen money to pay for her smashed car, hospital bills and to generally get back on her feet, Constance soon reveals her reasons for asking Helen here: she is concerned that Maurice is “only waiting for a richer woman,” and will surely abandon her, as he did Helen, once she has outlived her usefulness.

Helen is wary of both getting involved, however, on account of her own ambivalent feelings towards Maurice – it was his presence, real or imagined, at the racetrack that immediately precipitated her accident – in that can't live with him / can't live without him repulsion / attraction dynamic.

Indeed, that night Helen thinks back to happier times with Maurice, before being interrupted by Constance: Maurice suffers an attack of some kind – a suspicious coincidence given the emerging conspiracy, especially when Constance accidentally-on-purpose drops the only hypodermic of adrenalin before it can be administered to Maurice.

Unfortunately for her, he does not need it, recovering of his own accord or through Helen's ministrations; the filmmakers decision to elide exactly what happened a wise one.








Mirrors and double-images also recur throughout

The next day, Constance makes Helen a new offer: $100,000 to help her dispose of Maurice. She gives Helen a day to think about it while she is out of town sorting out the latest problems with her daughter Susan, the product of her previous marriage to the oil-tycoon from whom she inherited her fortune.

Helen does and decides to get away from the villa. Her car will not start, however, and thus she is forced to stay there, with Maurice. Though Helen soon discovers that Maurice removed a part from her car, she finds it impossible to be angry with him – the addiction Constance spoke of is growing; the drug not Helen as the Spanish title (Una Droga llamada Helen) has it, but Maurice – and avenges herself by indulging in some hair-raising driving stunts (something of an Umberto Lenzi signature if one thinks of his poliziotto work) en route to the disco.






The obligatory Psycho allusion

There the director goes into zoom, whip pan and dutch angle overload, while Maurice tells Helen that he still loves her: “I've done everything wrong, but I want to make it up to you.” They kiss and a red curtain wipes across the scene, before we cut to a new location, a coastal tower (again the Lenzi fan might note similarities with the lighthouse in Spasmo) and the bedrooom, where Helen and Maurice have just made love for the first time since their divorce. “I couldn't help myself. I had to make love with you one more time.”

Again, however, that the scene is established via a mirror shot and sees Maurice make his more controlled declaration of love whilst looking in it – vanity, thy name is also man – is suggestive that something is not quite right.

Sure enough, Maurice then makes Helen a proposal of his own, that they should get back together. The only fly in the ointment is that neither has any money. Maurice suggests, however, that Constance would quite possibly countenance a menage a trois, so confident is he of his effect on her.

But Helen is appalled at the suggestion and, with Constance returning, announces that she has now reached her decision: to get rid of Maurice. “The most important thing is that it must look like an accident.” “And that I be there to witness it.”




“Hey, will you stop it with that spying machine of yours”

Accordingly, the women convince Maurice to take them out on his boat on a fishing trip. As he is about to go SCUBA diving Helen points the spear gun at him, but finds she cannot shoot him. There is a struggle, in which Maurice fatally stabs Constance with his knife. Thinking fast – their friends Harry (Alberto Dalbés) and Hymie are approaching in their boat and want to pull up alongside – the conspirators tie Constance's body to the anchor and capsize the craft.

Harry is not entirely convinced that it was an accident, however – how did an experienced sailor sink his vessel doing a routine manouevre on a calm sea, and accordingly decide to investigate the accident. He thus resolves to find Constance's body.

Worse still, Susan (Marina Coffa) arrives unexpectedly and, on learning of her mother's death and noticing the hints of intimacy between her stepfather and Helen, begins to voice her suspicions. “I've thought of a plot for a murder story. A man and a woman meet again and fall in love. But he's married again and so they decide to murder the second wife and make it look like an accident...”

Like its predecessor Orgasmo – which confusingly also has Paranoia as one of its AKA's – this is one of those gialli that functions primarily as a sexed up variant on the classic thriller, part Hitchcock, part noir and part Les Diaboliques. As such, it serves to indicate the inadequacies of Linda Williams's summary dismissal of the form, read through the usual reductive lens of Argento and Bava, as fundamentally irrelevant to the emergence of the contemporary “erotic thriller”.




Classic giallo imagery - the bloody knife, the J&B bottle and a yellow telephone

Much more importantly as far as the casual viewer is concerned, it is also a damn good example of its type that pretty much pushes all the right buttons, showcasing yet another group of glamourous jet-setters doing unpleasant things to one another in pleasant, sun-drenched, not-a-care-in-the-world locations; very much A Beautiful Place to Kill.

Some may find Lenzi's direction, like that of many giallo directors, to be somewhat zoom happy but this is counterbalanced by the general quality of his compositions and the range of techniques he deploys to generally good effect. You get the sense that he was making an effort here, trying things out, looking for interesting ways of telling the story visually, instead of just seeking the fastest and most economical route to the finished product. While his strategies, such as a repeated emphasis on mirrored compositions, expressive use of colour (particularly red), shifts in focus and a general self-conscious aesthetic, are perhaps not the most innovative – we need some new clichés – they work well enough that in the end one does not really mind too much.

Despite four different writers being credited, the narrative is near water tight and keeps one engaged and guessing throughout, throwing in as many twists and turns as the coastal roads carved out of the cliffs of the landscape whilst avoiding anything too contrived. Again, you can tell that things are there for a reason.

The performances are likewise impressive, the various conspirators and co-conspirators playing their roles to a T, such that one understands why Helen continues to feel something for Maurice despite herself and what she knows about him, making her “addiction” and subsequent predicament credible.

The whole thing is rounded off to (near) perfection by attractive lensing – Aristide Massaccessi was camera operator, Gugliemo Mancori cinematographer – production design and scoring, with Gregorio Garcia Segura's lounge jazz score betraying the influence of credited group director Piero Umiliani in the best possible way; given that some of the compositions are reminiscent of those in Five Dolls for an August Moon and sound like they also have Umiliani at the Hammond, one also wonders how extensive the two men's contributions were and whether Segura's credit was more for co-production or other contractual reasons.

Nelle pieghe della carne / In the Folds of the Flesh

This 1970 giallo is the kind of film that the non-cultist will find impossible to take seriously. And yet in its art-house ambitions / pretensions – an opening quotation purportedly from Freud atop an abstract paint swirl type backdrop; a character named Pascal “like the philosopher”; black-and-white and still image flashbacks etc – this is precisely what the director and co-writer Sergio Bergonzelli would seem to want us to do.

We start off in medias res, as the aforementioned Pascal (Fernando Sancho) notices a seemingly unattended motorboat with which he might escape from the police pursuing him following his escape from jail. Curiously, however, a woman then sets the boat moving and, unaware of Pascal's presence, then proceeds to bury a body in a shallow grave on the grounds. The police arrive on the scene, fail to notice the body literally beneath their feet, recapture Pascal and leave.


Obligatory Freud reference


And the Devil whispered, but is it art?

Following this somewhat disorienting introduction the filmmakers settle down somewhat and establish the inhabitants of the house: Lucille (Eleonora Rossi Drago), her son, his friend / partner Falesse (Anna Maria Pierangeli) and a couple of pet vultures.

We also learn that Falesse suffers from a Marnie / Repulsion / Hands of the Ripper style sexual psychosis, apparently the legacy of her being raped by her father, as she soon claims two more victims.


A different kind of shower sequence; not supposed to be titillating




Attempts at visual style


A Lenzi regular in a typically sleazy role

But just when we think we are starting to get a handle on the proceedings, Pascal shows up again, making one wonder about the efficacy of his captors. He forces Lucille, Falesse and Colin to dig up the body and, confused when they unearth a dog instead – earlier strangled when it started digging around, prior to the dispatching of its master – shoots one of the vultures. (If nothing else, Sancho was a natural for this kind of role, inevitably making one think of the innumerable Mexican banditos he incarnated in Italian westerns.)

Then we get a flashback to a Nazi death camp, as the young Lucille witnesses her sisters and mother being sent to the gas chamber. This of course gives her the idea of dropping cyanide tablets into Pascal's bath, causing it to unleash a cloud of lethal gas that kills him instantly. (The delivery method, the cuckoo of a clock pushing the tablets into the bath is quite amusing, however, as are the previous remarks about whether or not a bath would prove fatal to the unhygenic looking Pascal.)

Then a man shows up purporting to be Falesse's father. He does not look anything like what Lucille remembers, though he explains this away on account of having had plastic surgery to confuse his enemies – there is a crime subplot here as well, and yet another conspiracy – and seem to know things that an impostor probably would not.


A moment of shock

It gets even more confusing as shock revelation is piled on shock revelation. Indeed, the film increasingly emerges as something like a parody of giallo style, with crash zooms, kaleidoscopic lens effects and some of the worst styles and special effects to (dis)grace the screen; thematics, with the recourse to the Freudian, slippage between analyst and detective, and fascination with fascism; and performance, the (apposite) histrionics from the female leads making the likes of Edwige Fenech seems almost restrained by comparison.

Lydia MacDonald

How does one go about researching a cult movie figure and making the case for them with 'official' culture?

Specifically Lydia MacDonald.

I am interested in her because she was born in Edinburgh, where I live, to an Italian mother and Scottish father, and went to Italy circa 1944, where she become the favoured vocalist of Piero Piccioni, one of the great composers of the Italian cinema.

I would like to see her get a plaque of acknowledgement like Alistair Sim and Sean Connery. (Within a mile of where I live there is also the HQ / office of J&B; I will need to get a photograph...)

The 1930s British Edgar Wallace films

Just a heads up for any krimi fans out there: the book The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema 1929-1939 edited by Jeffrey Richards contains a chapter by James Chapman, 'Celluloid Shockers', which discusses the thriller genre in Britain during this time and relates it to the popular literature of Edgar Wallace, Sax Rohmer and other "sensation literature" writers. (The book also contains a chapter by Richards himself on Tod Slaughter, in which he charts a line of descent from Slaughter through Gainsborough through Hammer, for those more interested in British horror.)

Fairground attractions

I was watching A Dragonfly for Each Corpse a couple of nights ago. Its inclusion of a fairground ride as backdrop in one sequence got me wondering how many times ghost trains, rollercoasters and suchlike appear in gialli, having also seen them in Rings of Fear, Eyeball and Naked Girl Killed in Park.

Admittedly this list is not as long as one of the number of gialli featuring fashion houses or modelling agencies, but I presume there must be others I have not thought of or seen – does Suspicious Death of a Minor also include one, or am I just thinking of its slapstick comedy elements? – and its recurrence seems more than mere coincidence.

The question then arises is why. Though I do not want to over-analyse, we might speculate that it ties in with the “primitive” / “cinema of attractions” dynamic that elsewhere emerges in the shocking set-piece – too many to list – and the exhibitionist stage routine – Case of the Bloody Iris, Death Walks on High Heels, Strip Nude for Your Killer etc.

The Killers are our Guests / Gli assassini sono nostro ospiti

The question the student of Italian genre cinema may find themselves asking is whether The Killers are our Guests / Gli assassini sono nostro ospiti is a poliziotto posing as a giallo, a giallo posing as poliziotto, or just a crime thriller that happens to oscillate between filone in a way that made box-office sense in 1974 and complicates things for us today in trying to write about it.

Certainly the opening pre-credits sequence, in which a woman, Elisa (Margaret Lee), steals a car is more poliziotto in its dynamics: the street is too well lit and open for a giallo, the danger more that from bag snatcher than black gloved, blade-wielding assassin. Yet much will ultimately come to hang on this, via the victim's testimone oculare. (The poliziotto detective does not need the eye-witness; he knows who the bad guys are, his problem to prove it.)

This comes with hindsight, however, with the first act of the movie proper being very much poliziotto in its dynamics, as a group of three masked robbers – including, as we later learn, Elisa – hold up a jewellery store, the whole operation apparently masterminded by a fourth figure, Eddie, who is located in the cafe opposite where he acts as lookout and runs interference on the play by making a distracting telephone at the moment the others rush in.

Things do not go according to (Nice Guy?) Eddie's gameplan, however, and a shoot-out ensues, leaving the jewellery store owner's son and a customer dead and one of the robbers, Franco, with a life-threatening bullet wound.

Fleeing the scene in the getaway car, Franco, Mario and Elisa debate the situation:

Franco: “What went wrong?”

Mario: “I'll tell you what went wrong: having a woman with us. They warned me not to take you!”

Elisa: “I told you I didn't know how to shoot. Anyway Franco got in front of me!”

While Mario is in favour of getting out of the city as fast as possible and letting Franco take his chances, Elisa insists that they take him to the nearest doctor. The matter is settled when, swerving to avoid a truck that appears out of the mist, their driver crashes, fatally injuring himself – unhesitatingly Mario puts a bullet in his brain – and leaving the others trapped in the city and forced to go along with Elisa's proposal. Accordingly they head for the nearest doctor, one Dr Guido Malerva (Anthony Steffen), and burst in on him and his wife, Mara.

At this point the film becomes more the traditional The Desperate Hours style thriller – or, if one wants Italian reference points, Enzo Castellari's Cold Eyes of Fear and Ruggero Deodato's House on the Edge of the Park – as the householders look for the opportunity to escape, alert the authorities or turn their situation to their respective benefit, as their already fraught relationship is pushed to breaking point.


“Get up Mara!”
“Why should I?!”


“Look, we'll just have to do what they tell us to do – we don't have any choice.”

This also leads to one of the odder seeming sequences in the film as Mara and Elisa find the time for a pseudo-lesbian encounter. Crucially, however, alhough its primary function is obviously that of providing an extra little frisson for the (assumed male) spectator, it is not completely gratuitous in terms of also showcasing Mara's desire to humiliate a husband she sees as weak and ineffectual and her relentless probing for weaknesses in the intruders' armour, with a degree of critical distance also being imparted by the way in which it the scene is consciously presented as a pseudo-lesbian act staged for the benefit of Guido and / or Mario.







It is also true to say, however, that writer-director and cinematographer Vincenzo Rigo never quite manages to really get to grips with the scene and communicate what it might mean beyond this. Indeed, this is something which the film as a whole suffers from, its dynamics being neither satifactorily those of giallo nor poliziotto, suspense nor shock. Again, however, the combination is a difficult one to pull off. And if The Killers are our Guests' denouement is hardly on a par with that of Rabid Dogs – Bava's film being a textbook example of how to do the suspense / shock thing in a way that just makes you appreciate every nuance of dialogue, performance and direction that second time round – it feels less contrived than House on the Edge of the Park and demonstrates more of a sense of aspiration. (Again, however, this is not to criticise Deodato per se. Rather, his film, like Castellari's, has its own strengths, delivering what is expected but not striving to go beyond this as a goal.)


A moment of giallo style abstract artistry


Pistilli with major sideburn action


One of those 70s faces as Mario


The mille miglia look, circa 1974

Whatever one ends up feeling about Rigo's film, Margaret Lee and Luigi Pistilli are good value, the latter's role as the cop assigned the case again enhancing the overarching sense of thriller-ness by being neither classic giallo amateur detective nor classic poliziotto man-on-a-mission. Roberto Rizzo's effective score also makes one wonder why his name is not more familiar.

Words and (no) pictures #3

“I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it. Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility, I am in constant motion, I draw near, then away from objects, I crawl under, I climb on to them. [...] Free of the limits of time and space, I put together any given points in the universe, no matter where I've recorded them. My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I decipher in a way a world unknown to you."
- Dziga Vertov (Denis Kaufman) Kino Eye Manifesto

Now go watch the Louma crane sequence from Tenebrae, as a demonstration that Argento's occasional references to Vertov, Eisenstein and Soviet Montage are more than mere name-dropping.

New giallo film

The site for a new giallo style movie: http://www.giallo-movie.co.uk/

Words and pictures #2

How can any-space-whatever be constructed (in the studio or on location)? How can any-space-whatever be extracted from a given state of things; from a determinate space? The first way was shadow, shadows: a space full of shadows, or covered with shadows, becomes any-space-whatever. [...] Expressionism operates with darkness and light, the opaque black background and the luminous principle: the two powers couple together gripping like wrestlers, giving space a great depth, a prominent and distorted perspective, which will be filled with shadows, sometimes in the form of all the degrees of chiaroscuro, sometimes in the form of alternating and contrasted streaks. A 'Gothic' world, which drowns and breaks the contours, which endows things with non-organic life in which they lose their individuality, and which potentialises space, whilst making it something unlimited.
Gilles Deleuze - Cinema 1






The neo-Gothic, neo-Expressionist colourised any-space-whatevers of Inferno's New York Witch House, with colour as a third term to black and white; note the way the door on the right is now and now is not depending on the light / colour

Infernal Affairs

In his essay on Deep Red, Aaron Smuts proposes a Humean “principle of association” operating within the film, intensifying the visceral impact of its murder set-pieces amongst other things. By this he means the way in which Argento and his co-writer Bernardino Zapponi try to associate the film's horrors within everyday experiences that the viewer is likely to have had and then intensify or amplify them to operatic proportions.

Another type of association is found within Deep Red's own diegesis, as events and pieces of dialogue foreshadow the later murders: Marc's pseudo-Freudian interpretation of how when playing the piano he is “really” bashing bashing his father's teeth thus associate with Professor Giordani's having his teeth smashed against the fireplace by the killer; Marc's being blasted with steam by an espresso machine (“hey”) with Amanda Righetti's having her head immersed in boiling water, and so on.

It is an idea that also seems to have considerable mileage in relation to the internal logic of Inferno in particular. I am not just thinking of the way in which Sara cuts her hand on the taxi door and Rose hers on a broken doorknob prior to their murders, on the same night, one in Rome and the other in New York, but also some of the otherwise inexplicable inserts that Argento includes.




In time but not place?






New York, the very same night...

Might the perplexing shots of black-gloved hands snipping the heads off paper dolls refer to Rose's guillotining with a window pane in particular (if you look carefully a statue of Napoleon can be seen in the window of Kazanian's antique shop, among the more usual giallo/surrealist dolls; while the guillotine also appears more obviously in Trauma) and the lizard eating the butterfly to the stuffed animals that she finds in what appears to be a deserted and dilapidated version of the alchemical laboratory Sara discovers in the library in Rome?

There is no definitive answer, of course, but that is the whole point and why the film so frustrates when approached with a conventional meaning seeking and fixing mindset.

“There are more things in heaven and earth [...] than are dreamt of in your philosophy” and, indeed, to the Argento text, where "beauty will be convulsive or not at all"

Killer Kid

In Anthony Ascott's giallo The Case of the Bloody Iris an otherwise innocuous seeming old lady is made into a suspect by the expedient of having her purchase of what are described as “horror comics” - fumetti neri, including the fictitious title Killerman - from an edicola.

One interesting thing here is how the transgressive aspect of such titles, including the real-world Diabolik, Kriminal, Sadistik and Satanik, seems to be signalled in the Italian at the level of their titular protagonists, the letter K being one that is foreign – with all the associated connotations of otherness, potential danger etc. – to the Italian alphabet.

The function of the K, then, seems akin to that of the X in more familiar English-language / American comics like X-Men. The difference is that whereas X-Men present us with the world from the perspective of the outsider (i.e. the mutant) who fights heroically for a society that fears and rejects them on account of their difference, in their fumetti counterparts the world is presented from the perspective of an outsider (i.e. the master criminal) who revels in their rejection of society and its norms.

Words and pictures #1

"Let us define the screaming point in a cinematic narrative as something that generally gushes forth from the mouth of a woman, which by the way does not have to be heard, but which above all must fall at an appointed spot, explode at a precise moment, at the crossroads of converging plot lines, at the end of an often convoluted trajectory, but calculated to give this point a maximum impact. The film functions like a Rube Goldberg cartoon mechanism full of gears, pistons, chains and belts – a machine built to give birth to a scream."
Michel Chion – The Voice in Cinema




The finale of Tenebrae

Strip Nude for Your Killer / Nude per l'assassino

A model from the Albatross Agency dies of a heart attack while undergoing a backstreet abortion. Although the doctor who perfored the operation and the unidentified figure who procured it conceal the circumstances of her death, it soon becomes apparent that someone knows as the doctor himself is murdered. The killer then turns his or her attentions to the owners, staff and models from the agency, be they guilty, innocent or some combination of the two...




Did someone say sleazy; the camera start off lower than this

While it is obvious that the figure, clad in sleek black motorcycle leathers and face-obscuring crash helmet, is not bulky co-owner Maurizio Montani, the list of suspects is otherwise open, albeit constantly narrowing as the killer continues on their quest for vengeance.


Just like Blow-Up in its self-reflexive critique of its medium. Or something...


“Now it's time for your in depth interview”

Could it be Gisella, Maurizio's possessive bisexual wife? Or sleazy photographer Carlo Bianchi, possessing a bad temper and the kind of guy who will opportunistically take test shots of any attractive woman he sees, never mind his camera actually being out of film. (“Do you know just how many of the great fashion models began by doing exactly what you're doing now?”) Or someone nobody would suspect?






Woman as mannequin / mannequin as woman


And the Jess Franco style implication of the film audience as voyeur, perhaps

(Strip) Nude for Your Killer / Nude per l'assassino is the kind of giallo that it is difficult to make a case for, operating as it does in lowest common denominator terms of sex and violence.


A black gloved hand pouring J&B; how iconic can you get?

It certainly succeeds in accomplishing what it sets out do, but does it have anything else going for it besides the obvious charms of cast members like Edwige Fenech and Femi Benussi and Berto Pisano's effective score?

Oddly enough, I think yes – albeit in a roundabout way. For while undoubtedly sleazy and exploitative, the film also seems to operate, in its half-conscious ironies, as something of an auto-critique.

The world of fashion and modelling is, of course, one that many gialli, from Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace all the way through to his son Lamberto's Delirium: Photos of Gioia and beyond, have visited. On one level the reason, as here, is obvious: the opportunities the environment affords to showcase beautiful women in various states of dress and undress. Yet, beyond this, the setting can also be seen as frequently expressing ambiguities about glamour as a whole; ambiguities that reside at the core of world itself. We come back, that is, to the double meaning of glamour as something both attractive and illusory / magical.




An almost equal opportunities piece of exploitation; whether Franco Diogene's refusal to strip nude for his killer is a good or bad thing is debatable...

Thus, for example, when Carlo chats up Benussi's character with promises of Vogue covers, it is the sense that she knows he is full of it, but is happily going along because it suits her agenda as well. Likewise, it is the sense that a girl-girl nightclub act is precisely that, nothing to do with any expression of real feelings.




Yet another stereotypical 'fag' meets his demise


And is discovered in a scene that ultimately fails to make sense

In a similar vein while the antics of Maurizio, as he desperately takes a model back to his house and offers her whatever she wants to make love to him, before finding himself unable to perform and thus being forced to resort to an inflatable doll once more, at which point he is dispatched by the killer, are undoubtedly played primarily for grim laughs, they nevertheless also have an almost unbearable sadness to them. (One almost wonders what proportion of the film's audience were more like Maurizio than the lady-killer Carlo, or at least found the former easier to actually emphathise with.)


Nelle pieghe della carne

Beyond this, it is also worth remembering the event around which the whole scenario develops. The legalisation or liberalisation of abortion was, after all, an important topic in many Western countries around this time – including Italy – in the wake of the personal-is-political campaigns of second-wave feminism. And here even if the film's sexual politics are frequently highly dubious, not least in the way Fenech's Magda meekly accepts the treatment she receives from Carlo, the very way in which she is otherwise presented as a more no-nonsense type who takes an active role in the investigation of the mystery is worth thinking about in comparison with the traditional passive / hysterical victim roles she tended to play earlier in her giallo career.


La Ragazza con la pistola - Fenech with short hair and firearm

Not Deep Red in terms of its critical profundity then (what is?) but perhaps a film with slightly more to it than its trash title and reputation would indicate.

Ripping audio

Thanks to all of those who offered suggestions on how to rip the audio from DVDs. Here is what I ended up doing, all in Linux, should it be useful to anyone else:

First I used mplayer to identify the tracks on the disc:

myplayer -identify dvd://

Then I determined what the id number of the commentary track was from the list. On the Anchor Bay Tenebre DVD it was 131, for instance.

Then I ripped this track, outputting it as a .wav file:

mplayer -vid 0 -aid 131 -vo null -ao pcm:file=tenebre.wav dvd://

Then I converted the .wav file to mp3 using LAME:

lame -h tenebre.wav tenebre.mp3

See No Evil

This book by the authors of Killing for Culture and prime movers behind Headpress, David Kerekes and David Slater, examines the banned films and video controversy in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s.

The first four chapters of the book, together occupying the first 70 or so pages, chart the history of video culture from its beginnings at the dawn of the 1980s to the 1984 Video Recordings Act.

Besides the obvious – that the Act signalled the end of the line for those films that found themselves on the official blacklist – the new requirement to have all films passed by the BBFC also led to the disappearance of countless innocuous obscurities that it simply wasn't worth paying for to have classified.



The next, major, section of the book, running almost 200 pages, concentrates on the nasties themselves. The authors look at each, from Absurd to Zombie Flesh Eaters in detail with a story synopsis followed by critique.

By taking this all-inclusive approach, rather than focussing exclusively on the most (in)famous nasties – Evil Dead, SS Experiment Camp, Cannibal Holocaust etc – as many writers are prone to do, Kerekes and Slater effectively highlight the sheer diversity of the official nasties in terms of origin, vintage and quality.

Some were good, others bad, others just plain inept. Some, like House on the Edge of the Park, would likely meet most people's definitions of obscenity. Others, like Cannibal Man, were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

While one may not always agree with the authors evaluations of the films, their refusal to follow received opinion is refreshing. Joe D'amato's Absurd and Anthropophagous receive positive write-ups, for instance, whereas Lucio Fulci's The Beyond is dismissed as a relatively inferior effort.

After this lengthy section Kerekes and Slater bring the story more or less up to date – i.e. 2000 – with 80 or so pages examining the black market and pirate trade that developed, including useful first-hand testimonies that show just how messed up the whole censorship/obscentity law situation is in the UK, and two more general chapters on media violence debates and more recent causes celebre.

The final two chapter were, for me, was where the book was weakest. The focus is less sharp, the area too broad and many of the questions broached simply unanswerable. This said, I still found Kerekes and Slater's discussions to be preferable to sometimes awkward half academic half-populist collections like Screen Violence and Ill Effects.

And, had it been possible, I would have preferred to see an updating of the black market and pirates story to take into account the internet and DVD and how they have changed the rules of the game utterly.

But, on the whole, this is an excellent study of the video nasty phenomenon that consolidates Kerekes and Slater's position as two of the best writers on fringe cinema and culture out there. The section cataloguing the nasties is, in itself, worth the purchase price.

Shock! Horror! / The Original Video Nasties

Though both growing out of the same broad environment, Alan Bryce's The Original Video Nasties: from Absurd to Zombie Flesh Eaters and Francis Brewster, Harvey Fenton and Marc Morris's Shock! Horror! present contrasting views of the world of the pre-Video Recordings Act (VRA) video landscape in the UK.

To explain – and here dealing very much with the basic facts, upon which both volumes are in agreement – During the early days of home video the major studios felt that the format was their enemy and accordingly released films onto video tentatively at best. This created a product vacuum which was filled by countless enterprising distributors, who pretty much bought up whatever product they could get their hands on, including a lot of low-budget, obscure European and North American horror and exploitation films.



Fighting for shelf space, these videos needed to attract the prospective renter's attention, encouraging all manner of over-the-top box covers – the near-naked upside down crucified woman of SS Experiment Camp, the flesh-hungry savages of Cannibal Holocaust or the drill tearing through flesh and bone of The Driller Killer.

Unsurprisingly it was soon decided by the moral entrepreneurs that “something ought to be done” and, a media campaign and some government legislation, a number of films found themselves banned as legally obscene and countless others en route to oblivion as not worth paying the money to have certificated. The odd little mistake like The Burning – accidentally put out on video with footage cut by the censors – aside, the majors, meanwhile, took control of the industry, thank you very much...



But whereas Alan Bryce's book concentrates its attention on the video nasties and the VRA, Brewster and company's casts its net wider, giving equal weight to the larger number of pre-VRA and pre-Video Packaging Recordings Committee (VPRC) releases that have never been granted the prestige of an official nasty label.

To explain again: While the VRA might have gotten rid of the most contentious films, it did less about contentious artwork. Thus, in the wake of the Hungerford Massacre (a purportedly “Rambo” inspired mass killing spree) it was decided that video artwork and packaging now also had to be officially approved. The effects of this can be seen, for example, in the subtle change to the iconic artwork for Argento's Tenebrae (itself a former a VRA casualty) where the trail of blood from the woman's neck inexplicably becomes a bow, somehow being deemed more “tasteful”.

This wider focus is one reasons that Brewster and company's book is preferable to Bryce's. Yet even beyond this its coverage of the nasties themselves is actually better, with more detail and less obvious rehashing of the same old material, worsened by Bryce's frequent references to films that are now available as ones he cannot imagine ever getting a certificate. And while he has attempted to update his write-ups of the nasties with information on their DVD releases, these are perfunctory and immediately out of date.

Needless to say, Argento, giallo and Eurocult fans are also better served by Shock! Horror! because its wider remit allows for the inclusion of the likes of Spasmo, S(c)hock, Rings of Fear and The Other Hell.

Score this one as FAB Press 1, Stray Cat 0

Commentaries and a question

I've been listening to Michael McKenzie's excellent commentaries on Profondo Rosso and Suspiria over the weekend - they are available from his site Whiggles.com, by the way, if anyone has not already heard them - and just transferred them to my MP3 player.

This, of course, got me wondering: what is the easiest, and cheapest, way of taking a DVD with an existing commentary track, ripping it and converting it to MP3, as it is something I think I would to do with - for example - the official Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Tenebre commentaries.

Una sull'atra / One on Top of the Other

Things are not going well for Dr George Dumurrier (George Sorel). His clinic is in financial difficulties and he cannot spend as much time with his sick wife, Susan (Marisa Mell), as he would like. Susan's illness, an especially acute form of asthma, has also made her bitter, encouraging George to embark on an affair with Jane (Elsa Martinelli). She in turn is now wanting George to get more serious about their relationship.


Director Fulci in one of his customary cameo appearances, here directing attention to a vital detail

Suddenly everything changes for the better as Susan suffers a fatal asthma attack and George learns that he is the sole beneficiary of an insurance policy he did not know she had.

Then everything gets much, much worse. While out dining with Jane, George receives a mysterious phone call summoning him to a strip club, The Roaring Twenties, where one of the dancers, Monica Weston (Marisa Mell), bears a remarkable physical similarity to Susan. An insurance investigator is also on George's trail, puts two and two together and, investigating the woman, finds evidence that implicates George in his wife's murder and could lead him to the gas chamber...






Note the symbolic / expressive use of giallo

One on Top of the Other - a title I prefer to the alternative Perversion Story for both being a literal translation of the Italian Una sull'altra and avoiding any confusion when director Lucio Fulci's other 1969 film, Beatrice Cenci, has also gone under the Perversion Story label – provides a fascinating insight into how the giallo might have developed had it not been for Dario Argento. In taking up the themes and iconography of Bava's The Girl Who Knew too Much and Blood and Black Lace and infusing them with his own distinctive psychosexual unease, Argento undoubtedly gave the filone a massive boost but also arguably served to inhibit its development as the kind of erotic thriller that can be seen emerging here and in the likes of Umberto Lenzi's Orgasmo and So Sweet, So Perverse or Riccardo Freda's Double Face, all dating from the end of the 1960s.

Equally, however, when one watches these films and their director's subsequent, post-Bird with the Crystal Plumage, contributions to the filone a key difference emerges: whereas Lenzi and Freda seem more comfortable in the pre-Argento world, Fulci exhibits a greater degree of adaptability and ability to successfully synthesise other filmmakers' concerns with his own.




Realism, Fulci-style

For if Argento was the starting point for A Lizard in a Woman's Skin, sometimes remarked upon as being as a kind of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in negative or mirror image, the departure points here are Vertigo and Double Indemnity, the former foregrounded through the San Francisco locations and doubling of the (dark) Susan and (blonde) Monica; the latter through the importance of money over sex as motive.




The eyes as window to the soul; are Susan Dumurrier and Monica Weston one and the same?


The image and its double

And if Fulci's writing and directing are not on the same exalted plane as those of his models, with the final third of the film perhaps not quite matching the first two and his displays of technique sometimes coming across as too much for their own sake, One on Top of the Other is nevertheless an accomplished and entertaining piece of work in which a surprising degree of thought is apparent - surprising, that is, for the uninitiated, not for the typical reader of this piece.






Variations on the hand and the glove; touching and being touched

Thus, for example, while it is true that Hitchcock would never have used an impossible angle from inside / behind a cabinet, it is the precisely this emphatic technique that suggests Fulci was thinking about the needs of his audiences, in further spelling out to them that the difference between the two very similar looking bottles of medicine on the same shelf is important and, equally importantly, endeavouring to do so cinematically. (If anyone wants to do a deconstructionist reading of the film inspired by Derrida's notion of the pharmakon as poison / cure, here is a c(l)ue.)








Time-capsule eroticism, tease and sleaze from 1969

It can also be said that some of his signature tropes have more of a raison d'être than was often the case, the close-ups and zoom-ins on eyes in particular serving to foreground the question of whether Susan and Monica are in fact one and the same.


Poison was the cure

Likewise, those familiar with Fulci's oeuvre as a whole will notice the little touches – the nose plugs in Susan's body, recalling City of the Living Dead and Fulci's medical background – or the broader sense of a distinctive radical / conservative politics that critiques the death penalty while simultaneously expressing deep unease at the emerging hippie-style demi-monde of sex, drugs and rock and roll.

Although it is difficult to fully appreciate the nuances of performance in the VHS-dub version of the film I watched – there is now thankfully a DVD from Severin Films, complete with the Italian audio – the cast of familiar genre stars and supporting players seem to do a good job; to put it another way, though Mell's dubbing voice as Monica Weston is a touch too trashy it does not induce laughter in the manner of the more pick and mix English voice assortments of Cold Eyes of Fear or All the Colours of the Dark. (One of Fulci's other strengths in his gialli was his ability to bring out the specifics of a location, be it London, San Francisco, New York, or rural southern Italy.)






Fulci was never afraid to experiment; the middle shot is from the love scene between George and Jane

Riz Ortolani's brash, big band styled score suits the ambience surprisingly well and once more demonstrates the sheer versatility and adaptability of the Italian composers of this period, while Alejandro Ulloa's crisp cinematography adds to the slickness of the overall experience.

As Adrian Luther-Smith said, “a giallo that rests atop many others”.