Al tropico del cancro / Tropic of Cancer / Death in Haiti

While vacationing in Haiti with his wife Grace (Anita Strindberg), Fred Wright (Gabriel Tinti) decides to make an impromptu visit on an old friend, Williams (Anthony Steffen), a doctor.


A classic giallo opening as the plane touches down

Fred's motives are not entirely pure, however, with it soon emerging that he is one of various parties interested in a new wonder drug that Williams has developed, some of whom will stop at nothing - including murder - to secure it for themselves. (Genre fans may be reminded of the plot of Bava's Five Dolls for an August Moon in this regard, with the brightly coloured visuals and Piero Umiliani's not dissimilar lounge score reinforcing this intertextual connection.)


The touristic gaze at the exoticised other? Tinti and Strindberg on vacation

The first complication is that the idealistic Williams appears to have no interest in selling the drug, regardless of the price...

The second complication is that the drug, the sample of which has gone missing, may in any case also have potentially fatal side effects for those who take it, with one of Williams's native assistants turning up dead soon afterwards, his blood being almost like water in its appearance and chemical composition...




A zombie?


A representative of corrupt officialdom?


A western capitalist neo-imperialist?


The man in the white suit? Umberto Raho has a small but pivotal role

Although showcasing a number of characteristic giallo themes, being bookended by the arrival and departure of a Pan Am jet and featuring the obligatory unidentified black gloved killer (or killers) working their way through a swathe of victims, the gloves admittedly somewhat incongruous in the tropical setting, Death in Haiti AKA Tropic of Cancer offsets such routine elements thanks to its atypical setting (rum rather than J&B being the drink of choice) and the inclusion of some documentary style footage of cockfighting, a slaughterhouse and voodoo rituals.


Williams: Before I met you, I heard you had a reputation for deep sea fishing. Are you still handy with a rod?
Wright: I thought you were the one handy with a rod - or at least that's what I've heard.
Williams: I wouldn't enter the competition with you Fred
Wright: I thought you already had

A credit at the end identifies this footage as having been taken from reality, with one having no reason to doubt this; if the voodoo footage is deployed as “exotic” backdrop for a thriller, this still accords with that Griersonian definition of documentary as “creative treatment of actuality”.






A shocking discovery in the abbatoir

These elements also transcend the mondo label that they might unthinkingly evoke.

Yes, we can no doubt impute that they express the “civilised” white man's fear of the “primitive” black Other, with that inevitable racist emphasis on the “threat” black male sexuality poses towards the white woman, as the exclusive property of the white man, but the truth is more complex and the film's representational strategies and politics more subtle and intelligent.

In the slaughterhouse sequence the imaginary boundary between white / black, and civilised / primitive is dissolved by the rational, scientific and “humane” organisation of the plant, which Williams is required to inspect as part of his duties, the logic of its operations really no different from those of the Parisian slaughterhouse of Franju's Blood of the Beasts; it should also be noted that the sequence is not completely gratuitous in terms of plot either, insofar as the body of one of a henchman who had earlier beaten up Williams is found hanging from a meathook.

Likewise, whilst one of the voodoo sequences climaxes with the ritual sacrifice and slaugher of an cow, its throat being slit on camera, that the filmmakers also include a voodoo cum Christian wedding ceremony, an unfamiliar rite of passage becoming a familiar one as we transition from the naked bride and groom lying on mats on the ground to entering the church in black suit and white dress with veil, along with some quite extensive discussions from Williams of the origins and nature of voodoo practice, indicating a genuine anthropological interest as much as the wild eye of the stereotypical mondo filmmaker.

We can also note here a well-mounted voodoo-inspired hallucination sequence in which Grace unconsciously attempts to work through / out her contradictory feelings towards her husband, Williams and her present environment. Visually reminiscent of both Polanski's Repulsion and Fulci's Lizard in a Woman's Skin - the latter also coincidentally featuring Strindberg - the dynamic of attraction / repulsion that emerges is one that speaks of both hopes and fears, of repressed desires that return precisely because they can never be entirely eliminated.


























In dreams I can rule your life

If it is probably fair to say that the attempt to combine documentary and giallo aesthetics and approaches does not always succeed, the filmmakers certainly deserve credit for trying to do something different. The combination of talent is interesting to note in this regard: Gian Paolo Lomi and Eduardo Mulargia co-directed, while Mulargia and Steffen co-wrote, perhaps suggestive of being both one of the Brazilian lead's more committed projects (generally just an actor, he also co-authored and produced Django the Bastard) and of a distinct division of labour amongst the directors. For while Mulargia can easily be characterised as a run of the mill filone filmmaker - albeit with films like Death in Haiti as a salutory reminder that there is frequently more to the formula film than simply following the formula - Lomi is something of a mystery man, with the IMDB listing only one other credit for him.




Death in Haiti

One of the film's most memorable presences, Alfio Nicolosi, who plays an admittedly rather stereotypically gay figure, would also appear to have only ever appeared in this film, something of a suprise seeing as his corpulent, cherub gone to seed form would seem to have made him a natural for playing decadent figures for Fellini or in the Decamerotics of the time.

Los Ojos azules de la muñeca rota poster

Spanish poster for the film, currently on Ebay

I vizi morbosi di una governante / Crazy Desires of a Murderer

Returning home after a round the world trip, Ileana telephones her elderly, wheelchair-bound father, the Baron de Chablais, to let him know she is safe and is also bringing some friends with her to the family villa. Before he can voice his opinion on the matter, father is surprised by the bloody handed figure who has been creeping through the chambers and passageways of the place.


Even the titles have that something about them

The credits roll, over a mournful Piero Piccioni cue; the rest of the score however sounding like the work of others with a number of cues that sound like things you have heard before somewhere – I think I caught Ennio Morricone's Lizard in a Woman's Skin theme for one.

It's something of a surprise when for us when Ileana and friends arrive and her father is very much alive, if hardly the epitome of health. More significant, however, it also reminds us of how easily we can be led astray by expectations and surface appearances, a theme that recurs as Ileana then explains how she took advantage of connections to smuggle rare art objects back with her; unbeknownst to her new “friends”, Bobby and Pier-Luigi, have also hidden their package of opium in one of these selfsame vases.




A profound commentary on the rapaciousness of western man?

That night another one of the group, Elsa, is stabbed to death and has her eyeballs removed, introducing an unwelcome complication for Bobby, Pier-Luigi and their criminal associates in the form of a police investigation...




More talk is cheap padding

Released on video by Redemption back in the 1990s, I vizi morbosi di una governante / Crazy Desires of a Murderer apparently sold somewhere in the region of 150 copies. It's a figure that not only gives some indication of the obscurity of veteran director Peter Rush / Filippo Walter Ratti's 1977 giallo but also, some would probably contend, an indication of its quality – or lack thereof. For this is the kind of thriller that doesn't really offer much to get excited about, going through the motions with a distinct lack of pace, style or impact.










A classic trauma and an important clue to the identity of the killer?

And yet, it has that strange charm to it, that indefinable quality that keeps you watching regardless. Perhaps it's the horror of the hairstyles and fashions on display, perhaps it's the way in which the lack of action makes it easy to slip into a near-hallucinatory state of mind, but the film does something...


Note the white surgical gloves in lieu of the black leather ones


Classic exploitation moments # 239

Passi di morte perduti nel buio / Death Steps in the Dark

Of the numerous directors who have made gialli over the years, Maurizio Predeaux is one of the more difficult to get a handle on. His first foray into the filone, 1973's Death Carries a Cane, makes sense as an excursion into a vogueish, if increasingly tired form, but would seem to have done less than spectacularly with critics and audiences alike. As such, it's hard to explain why the director should then have decided to return to the giallo with this 1977 entry, coming as it did at a time when the form's most successful practitioner, Dario Argento, had temporarily shifted his focus to out-and-out fantasy horror with Suspiria.


The abstract, lava-lamp titles recall Lizard in a Woman's Skin, albeit to lesser effect

Whatever the case, Predeaux is nothing if not consistent: both his gialli start off well, with a strong and engaging situation centred around a personable protagonist (Susan Scott in Death Carries a Cane, Leonard Mann here) but then proceed to lose their way on account of some ill-advised attempts at humour coupled with a general lack of aptitude that no amount of enthusiasm in delivering the generic goods can compensate for.


Approximately 2 minutes 30 seconds in and the black gloves make their first appearance

It's sometimes suggested that the writer-director was attempting to spoof the genre, an argument that would make sense were it not for the way in which he serves up plenty of sex and violence without hint of irony or distance.




Strangers on a train, one of whom may be the murderer

Whatever the case, Death Steps in the Dark opens on the train to Athens, where Italian photographer Luciano and Scandinavian model Ingrid are going on assignment.

Suddenly their compartment is plunged into darkness.

When the light returns, one of their fellow passengers, a nervous young woman, is dead, Luciano's pen-knife protruding from her chest.

The police interview Luciano, Ingrid and the other passengers in the compartment, including a suspicious priest – albeit Greek Orthodox rather than Roman Catholic, in accord with the Greek setting – but are unwilling or unable to actually charge any of them, though they do confiscate Luciano's passport much like as in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.










The fragmentation and fetishisation of the female body

Following some gratuitous lesbian activity – assuming, that is, any scenes of sapphic activity can ever actually be labelled gratuitous when we're speaking of an exploitation cinema targeted at male heterosexual spectators such as this – and the emergence of blackmail and drug-smuggling subplots, there is then another murder, the victim another fellow-passenger from the train.




When the man looks?

The mundane nature of the crimes also serves, however, to undercut the murder scenes, insofar as any fetish element within them, such as the obligatory black gloves and “phallocentric cutlery” employed by the murderer, is exposed as merely playing to convention; that this is what a giallo does.




Blink and you'll miss them inserts of the killer's eye, attempting a Cat o' Nine Tails treatment, but failing

On this occasion, however, circumstantial evidence also points firmly towards Luciano who thus goes on the run, disguising himself as a hooker, and, with the aid of Ingrid and Little Boffo, the youngest and dumbest of a family of good-natured if money grabbing career criminals, seeks out the real culprit, culminating in an unmasking scene that, featuring as it does a monster mask, wouldn't be far out of place in an episode of Scooby Doo...




The fleet is in – Man(n) in drag

If nothing else, the film's treatment of the cross-dressing theme, when contrasted with that of the likes of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, confirms a point that has often been made by film theorists in relation to dominant cinematic and cultural norms: men dressing as women equals funny, women dressing as men equals threatening.


A gratuitous shower scene

One saving grace is Riz Ortolani's score, though it surely deserved a better fate than this...

Lo Spettro / The Ghost

Dr John Hichcock is not a well man. Confined to a wheelchair by illness, he survives only due to regular injections from his friend and fellow physician Dr Charles Livingstone. What is worse than his physical condition, however, is his mental one. “Just a living corpse,” and increasingly obsessed with a world beyond this one, Hichcock wears himself out in séances and repeatedly makes suicidal gestures.

Finally tiring of Hichcock's antics, Dr Livingstone and Hichcock's younger wife, Margaret, decide that it would be best for all concerned if he be allowed to die: his suffering will be at an end, while they will no longer have to carry on their affair in secret and will doubtless inherit the considerable estate.




“One day you might regret that you stopped me from killing myself” – Elio Jotta as the sinister Dr Hichcock and Peter Baldwin as Dr Livingstone

One night Dr Livingstone thus fails to give Hichcock one of the drugs he needs, leading to his death. Hichcock's body is interred in the family tomb, and the will read, which presents Margaret and Charles with a nasty surprise, Hichcock having unexpectedly left the majority of his money to the local orphanage.


The two lovers in a not-so secret embrace; the blue light is a recurring visual motif

Worse follows, as the key to Hichcock's safe cannot be found. Housekeeper Catherine, who had earlier acted as a medium for Hichcock during the séances and has a habit of creeping onto the scene at inopportune moments, suggests that it must have been buried with him.

While Hichcock's body is in his coffin (and is in fact decaying faster than usual, on account of his treaments) a series of inexplicable apparitions compel Margaret and Charles to consider the possibility that his spirit lives on and is haunting them...

Despite seeing director Riccardo Freda – billed under his customary Robert Hampton name – reuinted with Barbara Steele and Harriet White and again featuring a character by the name of Dr Hichcock, Lo Spettro / The Ghost is a not so much a sequel to The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock as a reconfiguration.








Compare to the barbershop sequence in The Cat o' Nine Tails

With White again playing the sinister housekeeper that was her stock-in-trade, the main difference lies in Steele's role, less the innocent victim than her more usual victim-or-victimiser role.


The moment of decision – the two lovers' hands and the syringe

The model in this instance, given the Scottish setting, the recurring motif of bloodstains and references into the dialogue to “what's done cannot be undone” would seem to be Lady MacBeth, with Margaret the one who first takes the initiative and makes the fateful decision, but then finding having the greater difficulty in coming to terms with the deed – as much because she is our main point of identification and the primary target of Hichcock's wrath as anything else.


La vedova

While the visible manifestations of Hichcock – the figure at the window that then slowly advances on Margaret, the drops of blood that lead Livingstone to his hanging form and so on – convince, those in which only his voice is heard are less so. This is not, however, perhaps so much a failing of the filmmakers themselves, each manifestation being suitably uncanny / unheimlich, as a combination of the technological limitations upon them at the time and the phenomenological perspective I tend to take here.

In terms of the former, it is the way in which Hichcock's booming voice seemingly emanating from Catherine's mouth as she seemingly speaks in a trance really needs that 5.1 Dolby mix, even as the inclusion of such would then result in further complications if it in fact turns out that Hitchcock's ghost is not “for real” precisely because of the absence of such technology at the time the film it set.










Manifestations of Hichcock's ghost

One point of comparison here is Argento's Trauma, with its exposing the machinery by which medium Aura Petrescu invokes the spirits, as a complex, modern machinery of tape recorders and speakers capable of deceiving the ear in a way that wax cyliners and horns perhaps could not.

Then again, the extent to which we experience sound as naturalistic or artificial is also highly contingent, with it certainly within the realms of possibility that the uncanny nature of the acousmatic voice would be enough of a shock to the Victorian or Edwardian hearing it for the first time for other matters not to enter the equation. One also thinks here of the stories of audiences recoiling in terror from the Lumiere's L'Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat. The flatness of and absence of colour and sound from the image evidently did not prevent it from seeming real, an indication of the importance of belief that is all the more significant in a fantastique narrative such as the one presented here. (To introduce another relevant Shakespearean reference point, Hamlet, the issue is that of distinguishing between the real and that which only seems to be such, a situation inevitably complicated by the power of belief to here make the supernatural real and / or real in its consequences.)

In terms of the latter, it is all the other sensory information that is not quite brought into play, in that Margaret would presumably have some notion of where Hichcock's voice was emanating from by virtue of her embodiment and the information coming from her entire sensorium – a multi-sensory, cinesthetic approach that the filmmakers elsewhere succeed in evoking / invoking, not least in Margaret and Livingstone's visible and palpable revulsion at the sight and, perhaps just as importantly, smell of Hichcock's decaying flesh.

This is also, however, about the only thing I can really find to criticise about the film.

Production values and performances are good, even with the usual limitations of dubbing, and the filmmakers' evocation of small town Scotland, 1910, surprisingly effective, the shift in locale making it easier for them to convince us of its reality as compared to the London metropolis of The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock or the Paris of I Vampiri.

The character of Canon Owens, the voice of presbyterian morality and a consistent chorus on the action, voicing his and / or the community's disapproval at Hichcock's unorthodox beliefs and experiments prior to his demise, and at Livingstone's staying at the house subsequently, is particularly convincing in this regard.

True, the professional historian could probably find little details that don't quite ring true, but in this it's no different from a Hammer horror film of the same time (are Dracula's Holmwoods in mittel Europe or middle England?), with the general look of the film, with lavish on a budget production design and expressive use of colour and lighting, serving to further strengthen the comparison.





Harriet White's housekeeper creeps up on Barbara Steele yet again

One significant difference, however, is that the physicality of the Hammer gothic would seem to have largely precluded uncanny scenarios. Hammer monsters tended to be (corpo)real and dealt with as such by the savants (i.e. the palpable sexual threat Dracula represents is countered by the prophylactics of stake and crucifix), it being their mechanical thrillers such as Taste of Fear or Paranoiac that are of more interest as a point of comparison for the ontological and epistemological questions of the sort found here.










Do you remember? Is it real or all in her mind?

More importantly for the typical viewer less concerned with such theoretical and metaphysical speculations, there's a care evident in the writing and direction, with scarcely a line or shot being wasted. Note, for instance, how Margaret's admonition to her hisband whilst performing the daily ritual of shaving him, “Don't move darling, or I'll cut you,” prefigures a later razor slashing that still has the capacity to shock. Or take the way in which the opening credits, playing out over a séance, finish up on a skull, as the naturalistic introduction of a symbolic memento mori that will recur, along with a number of other key fetish objects, like the bottle of Dutch gin and the music box, to “bring back memories” in an almost Proustian way.

Again it is not hard to see Freda's influence on Argento, even if the way in which the two filmmakers approach these fetish objects is somewhat different, Freda more inclined to establish significance through words what Argento does through images, the kind of hyper-realistic defamiliarisations found in Deep Red have no obvious counterpart here.




“Out out, damned spot” – will Margaret's hands ever be free of blood?

One question remains: when Canon Owens offers his summing up, that “the Devil is a very real person,” to whom might he be referring amongst the protagonists? Specifically, is the Devil incarnate as woman or man?

The film is available on US NTSC DVD from Retromedia, and comes double billed with Alfred Vohrer's Dead Eyes of London.

Florinda Bolkan's website

Florinda Bolkan's official website: http://florindabolkan.com/

Thanks to Eugene for the link.

Found on ebay

Giallo / noir or Noir / giallo

One issue I’m sure everyone interested in the giallo film has encountered at some point is that of trying to explain exactly what it is to a friend, colleague or random encounter at a party.

There’s a good chance that, drawing on the fact that the term, like noir, derives from literature, one will invoke the idea of film noir.

While certainly useful, I sometimes think that a problem in doing this is that it lead us onto a path where noir is the ideal and model by which giallo is measured and found wanting, that rather than having a free play of terms, we end up still with the noir as the positive norm from which the giallo then negatively deviates.

It was interesting, then, to discover that David Bordwell has remarked to the effect that noir cannot not truly be called a genre because at the time of the original noir cycle of the 1940s the term was not in popular use within the USA: “nobody set out to make or see a film noir in the sense that people deliberately chose to make a western, a comedy or a musical.”

Recognition of noir as a genre by this criteria was thus a later phenomenon, occurring after the fact at that point when film-makers and audiences alike began to be aware of this French term.

What I’m wondering, then, is if the giallo film could in a sense be said to pre-date the (American, if not French) noir, insofar as the first generally accepted, unequivocal example of the form, The Girl Who Knew Too Much, would seem to have been clearly understood as a giallo by Italian producers and consumers alike circa 1963. Yes, this is partly because the remit of the term giallo has tended to allow for a wider range of product than noir (i.e. giallo equals just about any mystery or thriller, noir equals a specific type of hard boiled thriller) and, yes, the giallo film would quickly develop a more distinctive identity of its own, but isn’t this is a significant difference, that the Italian giallo film was first of all an emic phenomenon, and the American noir an etic one?

And, going beyond this, whether we could say something similar about filone and genre, given that the latter is again a French import into English, perhaps simply our way of saying type in accord with film studies shibboleths?

Los Ojos azules de la muñeca rota / The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll

This 1973 Spanish amarillo – i.e. giallo in all but name – sees weightlifter turned one-man horror factory Paul Naschy play a mysterious, evidently troubled drifter, Gilles, who takes a job as handyman to a trio of sisters on their farmhouse high the the French Pyrenees.

Soon after his arrival, a local girl is murdered. Soon after this the killer strikes again, this time also mutilating their victim by removing her eyes.




Who is the real auteur here – star Paul Naschy / Jacinto Molina or director Carlos Aured?

Needless to say, Gilles is immediately under suspicion – especially seeing as the local chief of police is sure he recalls seeing his face somewhere before and his doctor colleague suggests that “the killer possesses uncommon strength,” having “ran her through with a single blow.”

Given the deserved reputation the three sisters have amongst the local populace – the alternative English title for the film House of Psychotic Women is only a slight piece of exploitation cinema hyperbole – he is hardly the only suspect, however.


As the title suggests, both eyes and broken doll motifs prove significant to the maniac's psychosis

Given the generic rules, coupled with numerous flashbacks type sequences showing a traumatic scene in Gilles’ past, in which he strangles a woman, perhaps Gilles is in any case too obvious a culprit.

Then again, perhaps the sisters – one scarred and sans some digits following an accident; another wheelchair bound yet apparently devoid of actual physical symptoms and the third a jealous, possessive nymphomaniac; the mother was committed to an asylum while their father, suffering from an incurable disease, committed suicide – could also be red herrings, such that detectives and viewers should be searching elsewhere, perhaps in the direction of to the new nurse who arrived unexpectedly, say...


A photo hides a clue

Though the contribution of director Carlos Aured cannot be ignored, there seems little doubt that Los Ojos azules de la muñeca rota / The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll is really first and foremost the product of its star and co-writer, Naschy. The character of Gilles comes across as very much a naturalised / thriller version of his most famous creation, the werewolf Waldemar Daninsky, as a tragic, romantic figure who is the victim of bestial impulses he cannot fully control, the connection being made almost explicit in a sequence near the end where a posse, led by the police chief, chase Gilles across snowy, mountainous terrain, only managing to catch up with him when he inadvertently gets his foot caught in a jawed trap evidently left by a hunter.



Obligatory moments in a Paul Naschy film #1 – he gets his kit off


Obligatory moments in a Paul Naschy film #1 – she gets her kit off


Obligatory moments in a Paul Naschy film #3 – he gets in a fight and turns the tables on his better armed assailant through his superior physical prowess

The problem as far as reading the character goes is, however, that while Naschy hardly provides an uncritical endorsement of machismo and misogyny here or elsewhere his explorations of gender politics, much like those of Dario Argento and Jesus Franco, equally fail to provide the (too) neat, comfortable, unequivocal, politically correct, mainstream feminist message some would look for, whilst the more naturalistic setting here also removes something of the comfortable distance of fantasy as seen in the Daninsky films.

A key scene in this regard is that where a frustrated Gilles confronts one of the sisters in the house's barn, throwing her against the hay and remarking “You don't have to go anywhere to look for a man – you’ve got one right here,” only for a(nother) traumatic flashback to cause him to recoil, such that the object of his attentions – not particularly appreciating them, no clearly meaning no – is not required to fend him off with the farm implement she had reached out for a few seconds previously...


The obligatory enigmatic flashback / dream sequence

Likewise while elsewhere we certainly get the obligatory scenes where Naschy takes his shirt off to display his physique, engages in some mano a mano action with a rival – his predecessor as the handyman, as it turns out, and thus another potential suspect – and indulges himself with the ladies, there’s always something not quite right about the way these scenes come across such that they cannot simply be read as wish fulfilment fantasies on the part of either actor or (male) viewer who (mis)identify with the character, something more complex that requires a double-take.

Much the same can be said of the filmmakers' deployment of popular psychoanalytic discourses around such themes as trauma, mind-body dualism and fetishism. They do not do so uncritically, evincing what the non-believer would probably identify as a healthy degree of scepticism, and the acolyte as yet further demonstration of deeper repression in a refusal to confront the Freudian / Lacanian capital-T Truth. To say much more could spoil things, so we will simply cite that old Biblical chestnut of “physician, heal thyself...” (what was that about the Law of the Father again?)

Aured's direction tends towards the over-emphatic, too many scenes breaking down into zoom, close-up, zoom, close-up, whether anything is being signified thereby or not. The stalk and slash set pieces are well executed, however, minimising the killer's physical presence to prevent us from being able to see whether the shape is that of Naschy or another and thus sustaining the mystery and suspicion surrounding the characters.

Likewise, while there is a sense that other techniques, including Dutch angles, freewheeling hand-held camera and even some slow-motion and step printing are being deployed more on the basis that they can than as fully worked through instances of form expressing content or vice-versa (nevermind their becoming indistinguishable) one can at least thereby see that the director was making the effort.

It's a quality that is a consistent feature of Naschy's oeuvre as a whole and, in the end, one of its most endearing qualities. For while may not be able to take a film like Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll entirely seriously – and indeed much of the pleasure we derive from it likely to be other than that the filmmakers themselves intended, with then-fashionable trappings that now seem the very epitome of 70s kitsch very much in evidence – the very fact that they themselves took what they were doing seriously and did their best deserves our respect and recognition.


More Italian-style black glove fetishism


Another young, attractive victim dies like a pig, as her throat is unceremoniously slit

The thing that many are likely to find most problematic about the film is the unexpected inclusion of some real life animal killing, a pig having its throat slit on camera. While this scene is gratuitous, in the sense that it could be excised without affecting the overall meaning of the piece too much – i.e. if you watched a cut version without the pig slaughtering you wouldn’t necessarily be aware that it had been cut – it can also be justified as another quotidian detail that helps establish the reality of the rural milieux.

Likewise the very juxtaposition of the real animal and faked human killings again serves, intentionally or not, to raise the kind of questions of representation that the uninitiated might not expect of a genre film like this; if this kind of thing again seems odd, recall that the theme of the hunt was one often used by Spanish film-makers around this time to make a coded point against the Franco regime, Carlos Saura’s La Caza and Jesus Franco’s La Comtesse Perverse thus having more in common than many of the former’s art-house fans might care to admit...

Those familiar with Deep Red, with its nursery rhyme playing killer, may also want to note that the maniac here has a similar leitmotif, specifically Frere Jacques...

La Commare secca / The Grim Reaper

This was Bertolucci’s debut feature, made when he was barely into his 20s from a scenario by Pier Paolo Pasolini, with whom he had worked as assistant on Accatone. It’s perhaps best summarised as a version of Rashomon set in the universe of Accatone, a deconstructive take on the crime film or detective story; hence its inclusion here in relation to the giallo.




Strong geometric arrangements


The discovery of the body

The film opens with the discovery of a prostitute’s body by the banks of the Tiber and proceeds, through the at times interlocking flashback accounts of five potential suspects / witnesses to the crime, to reveal what happened and whodunnit. In truth, however, this aspect is never really that important compared to the exploration of character, environment and their interaction, along with formal experimentation.


All roads lead to Rome, specifically a river-side park – the sleeping soldier in the foreground, the two youths and the prostitute in the background.

In particular we never actually see the detectives whose voices we intermittently hear within the interrogations, the film-makers instead letting the interviewees speak for themselves, in their own language, with minimal interruptions. The crucial point, of course, is the disjunctions and discrepancies that emerge between the spoken and visual accounts of the same scene, as the character’s monologue or dialogue suggests one thing and the mise-en-scene another, or those between different depictions of / perspective on the same scene.




The interrogation scenes are characterised by an expressionistic rather than neo-realistic mise-en-scene


Sometimes the two aesthetics are combined, however, as in this fragmented, mirrored composition

One consequence of this, however, is also that it’s more difficult to really empathise or identify with the characters to the same extent as in a more conventional narrative. While this doesn’t prevent one from enjoying or appreciating a film – after all, something similar could be said of Bava’s Blood and Black Lace or Bay of Blood and Questi’s Death Laid an Egg, for instance, the important thing is the different social positions of their respective protagonists. In Bava and Questi’s films, we are invited to look on with a detached, critical eye as supposedly civilised bourgeois men and women reveal their material baseness and spiritual bankruptcy. Here, however, we are presumably supposed to feel sympathy for the poor and disadvantaged types, but may find ourselves conflicted as when, for example, an evidently gay character attempts to pick up two youths, who in turn plan to rob him. Then again, part of Pasolini’s brilliance (like that of Hubert Selby Jr.) always lay in making us think about our own reactions to characters and worlds we would likely not want to visit in our real lives.




Shadows on the wall; the platonic myth of the cave is a theme that recurs in The Conformist, although perhaps via Moravia rather than Bertolucci himself.

At times the camera attains its own presence and consciousness, as when a tracking shot starts with the point of view of a character only to end with their inclusion within the same shot (this character being the one ultimately revealed as the murderer, thus possibly connoting their fragmented “self”), or the observation of two girls dancing back and forth left to right, moving in and out of the frame; “poetic” elements not surprising if we again consider the influence of Pasolini, but forging perhaps unexpected connections with more obviously generic gialli.




The dancing girls and the exploration of screen space – presently invisible does not mean absent

Fans of the filone cinema may also want to note that Jimmy the Phenomenal has a blink and you’ll miss him appearance in a café near the end, while Nico Fidenco is credited as the vocalist on one of the diegetic musical numbers.


Jimmy

La Commare secca is available on NTSC DVD as part of The Criterion Collection.

Neo-realism as filone?

I’ve been reading the collection on neo-realism Springtime in Italy. While on the surface it’s pretty distant from the filone cinema that I tend to discuss here, neo-realism being an art rather than a popular cinema that tended to have more success internationally and with the critics than domestically and with a mass audience, whereas for the filone cinema the reverse tends to be the case, some of what Franco Venturini says in his essay on The Origins of Neo-realism seems to suggest that we could almost talk of it as a filone phenomenon:

“In the genesis of neo-realism, a decisive and unilateral contribution does not exist; it did not arise from a single factor, but from a sum of factors which influenced the movement in a complex way.

To understand this I must refer to the provincial condition of the Italian cinema [...] whose various channels remained in a a fluid state, not quite materialising into a solidified, concrete tradition. [...] Due to their very state of fluidity and lack of tradition, there was never a question of a limitation of growth. The substance of neo-realism and its rapid development are linked to the provincial condition of Italian cinema.”

Was Rome Open City the surprise hit that encouraged the production of films in a similar style, quickly leading to their meeting with more commercial cinema, such as Giuseppe De Santis’s crime melodrama Bitter Rice, paralleling the way as the early 1970s saw both popular and art films using the giallo / thriller mode?

Follia Omicida / Murder Obsession

We open with an iconic scene, straight out of countless gialli: a beautiful woman, dressed for bed in is disturbed by a noise and goes to the window to investigate. There she finds a maniac waiting. He forces her onto the bed, rips her nightdress open and strangles her to death.

Yet something is also wrong with the scene. While the killer is wearing black leathers, his face is visible rather than masked. It’s less surprising, then, when the lights go up and it is revealed that we are on a set, with the scene that has just been shot the last one for Hans Schwartz’s latest film.






The closing scene of the film within the film that opens the film, with some characteristically giallo use of the colour giallo

What proves to be more important by way of the narrative about to unfold is that leading man and strangler Michael found himself getting too into the role, on account of a childhood trauma in which his father, a successful conductor whom he now resembles, was fatally wounded.






Childhood flashbacks triggered by some photographs; the issue is not, as in Deep Red, who the figures in the primal scene are, but rather who was wielding the knife and struck the fatal blow

On the spur of the moment he thus decides to invite his film-making friends to his family villa for the weekend and to see his mother for the first time in many years.


An image familiar from innumerable Italian Gothics – the crumbling ancestral home, replete with half-buried secrets and memories

Michael and his girlfriend Deborah are the first to arrive, and are met at the gate by family retainer Oliver, who intimates that Michael’s mother, Glenda, is not well. Michael, meanwhile, presents Deborah as his secretary, a move which does not seem to make much difference as far as Glenda’s decidedly chilly reaction is concerned.


An unusual mother-son relationship

Soon the others arrive – Mark’s co-star Beryl Cunningham, Hans and his assistant director Shirley – and things start to get weird.

First, Oliver recoils in fear when Hans (who never goes anywhere without his camera, or has he prefers to refer to it, his third eye) attempts to photograph him, reminding Beryl of the superstitious inhabitants of her island home, Martinique.

Then an unidentified figure pulls the light switch and almost drowns Beryl in the bath – assuming, that is, she didn’t just hallucinate the whole thing, as Shirley suspects might be the case.




Attempted murder in the dark

Then Deborah has an unusually vivid nightmare in which she discovers a dungeon in the depths of the house, is affixed to an X-shaped frame and almost sacrificed by a masked figure.










Deborah's nightmare flight

Worse is to come the next morning. Leaving the others to explore the estate grounds, Mark and Beryl make love. He then awakens to find her dead body besides him, his bloody knife at her side...

It’s impossible not to watch Murder Obsession without feeling a certain sadness at the whole thing, representing as it does not Riccardo Freda’s farewell to the filone he effectively inaugurated a quarter of a century before with I Vampiri.

As with that film, it’s difficult to pin down exactly what Murder Obsession is generically, easier to say that it’s a Freda film, in which the Gothic and giallo elements intermingle and rational logic is secondary to atmosphere and mood.






The effectiveness of an effect is inversely proportional to the amount of time one spends looking at it?






Ditto

It’s an approach which turns what would otherwise be weaknesses, like the obvious falseness of some of the effects or the way Anita Strindberg’s Glenda and John Richardson’s Oliver seem not to have aged at all over a period within which Michael has developed from a curly-headed child into the spitting image of his late father, into strengths.

If a giant spider looks fake, then remember it is (re)presented within the context of an already ambiguous dream sequence, its value perhaps more symbolic than real; if Strindberg is too young to play mother to Stefano Patrizi – in real life she was born in 1944, he 1950 – this only adds to the strangeness of their relationship, with remarks to the effect of “not having changed a bit” recalling and reversing the relationship between Pierre Lantin and the Countess Du Grande, posing as a younger relative, in the aforementioned I Vampiri.

More generally, it’s entirely in keeping with Freda’s rejection of overtly supernatural material as silly coupled with an interest in seeing what happens when individuals take a belief in such seriously. In the end, it really doesn’t matter the Seal of Solomon really has the intrinsic power to repel the demon if the one who may be possessed by this demon believes it does, just as in Tragic Ceremony – another relevant Freda intertext here – one of the results of the black magic rites is a number of bodies whatever efficacy or otherwise you ascribe them.

This said, Murder Obsession doesn’t always work. While Freda rarely makes errors of judgement within his mise-en-scene, with “unmotivated” camera movements, “natural” intrusions (we’re told the wiring is susceptible to short circuiting when the weather is bad, as it seems to be every night) and recurring aural and visual motifs hinting at a world alive with possibility and meaning if we want to look for it, in a manner more akin to the hyper-reality of Deep Red and Shock than more realistic early 70s gialli (although such tropes as the J&B bottle, the tape recorder and the photograph that reveals a vital detail are present), the Seal of Solomon aspect is less well handled.

It is not so much that its significance comes out of the blue, clearly being visible in a magical tome earlier on, more that Deborah’s wearing of it / a Star of David at a crucial moment is not adequately telegraphed in advance. While her name certainly suggests she may be Jewish, the characterisation is really a bit too sketchy, especially when the nightmare sequence is presented as a black mass, a satanic inversion of Christian beliefs. (One half wonders in this regard if there were some issues of translation of ideas between Freda, as the Catholic co-scenarist, and Simon Mizrahi, as the Jewish dialogue writer.)


Jewish...


... and Christian iconography

It’s different in Deep Red, where Helga Ulmann’s Jewishness is an excessive element, a subtext which certainly adds to the resonances of the film but which is not necessary for viewers to pick up on to enjoy or understand it, or Antonio Bido’s Argento-inspired Cat with the Eyes of Jade, where the (return of the) repressed trauma of the Holocaust is fully integrated into the narrative.

Here, however, what we have is something that flip-flops between significance and insignificance and which, one feels, might have been better integrated by, for instance, suggesting that part of Michael’s reluctance to present Deborah as his girlfriend could have been on religious grounds as he feared a prejudiced response from his mother – an attitude that might then in turn have helped explain his attraction / repulsion feelings towards Laura Gemser’s Beryl, here recalling Xavier Mendik’s analysis of her Black Emanuelle roles.

If not a masterpiece, Murder Obsession is nevertheless a fitting end to Freda’s career – necessarily discounting D’Artagnan’s Daughter – that aficionados will appreciate; if I have commented extensively on the odd little thing that mar the film slightly, it is at the expense of praising the larger contributions of the cast, crew and composer Franco Mannino alike.

John Morghen

I was reading The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture last week, finding books of that sort to be useful in placing Italian cinema.

They are also a great source of little bits of trivia.

I noticed, for instance, that the primary schools programme in early Fascist era Italy was drawn up by one Giovanni Lombardo Radice, whilst elsewhere there is a reference to Porci con le ali by a Marco Lombardo Radice along with Lidia Ravera.

I wonder what their relationship, if any, is to iconic Italian genre film star John Morghen AKA Giovanni Lombardo Radice, especially since, if I remember correctly, part of the reason he took his pseudonym (the surname being a grandmother's) was not just to sound less Italian but also to distance his work in trash cinema from his family and his own theatre work.

Im Banne des Unheimlichen / The Hand of Power / The Zombie Walks

The funeral of Sir Oliver is interrupted by the sound of his corpse laughing. While this understandably makes headlines, Inspector Higgins of Scotland Yard sees no reason for the authorities to get involved until a skull-masked figure starts menacing and murdering the remaining members of the family and their associates.




The skeletal presence in the credits sequence playing over Sir Oliver's coffin

Needless to say there is no shortage of suspects, especially since Sir Oliver’s own death – if indeed he is in fact definitely such – might well be down to foul play...


Establishing shot stock footage #1

Giallo fans will note a number of apparent similarities with The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail, through the centrality of animal and a plot involving blowing up an air-plane, and The Black Belly of the Tarantula and The Crimes of the Black Cat, through the bizarre murder method employed, the skull-masked killer’s scorpion motif ring having a spike poisoned with a deadly paralysing agent.


The delights and dangers of testimone oculare...


The kind of extravagant, excessive production design that wouldn't be too out of place in Inferno, as Higgins seeks advice from an expert on poisons

Another touch in common with the giallo more generally – Blow Up, The Cat o’ Nine Tails and the aforementioned The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail among others, as well as horror entries like Bloody Pit of Horror – is the importance of a minor detail in a photograph in throwing some light on the mystery.

The sense of being a transitional work is, however, perhaps more immediately apparent in terms of the more overt horror film element compared to earlier krimis. Ultimately, however, the mystery is resolved in favour of natural terror rather than supernatural horror, more The Hound of the Baskervilles than The Plague of the Zombies if we're talking English gothic models, by way of moving further into the realms of the improbable but not ever reaching the far shore of the impossible.

Or, more concretely, whilst the zombie state as a particular form of catatonia in which a still living person looks dead is improbable, the zombie state as that of a dead body returning to life is impossible. Oddly, however, the weirdest idea in the whole film is perhaps that of one of Sir Cecil’s staff has green skin, and being taken for a Creole from the West Indies on account of this. Put it down to a more innocent, less culturally aware and sensitive age...

In terms of the former Hammer film, it’s also worth noting the telling exchange between Higgins and the resident cleric. Higgins suggests something akin to Peter Cushing’s Sherlock Holmes, that both men fight evil in their own way, but the cleric is having none of it, as if to indicate that he is more (giallo) suspect than (Hammer) savant.

There are some nice match edits and other characteristically extravagant touches from Alfred Vohrer and his team – cinematographer Karl Lob, editor Jutta Herring etc. – with the shift to colour also allowing for the use of expressive (or neo-expressionist) red and green lighting effects that would not be out of place in a Bava film, bringing a new element to that otherwise familiar mixture of establishing shots of New Scotland Yard, Piccadilly Circus and red double decker busses combined with obvious, invariably fog-shrouded German exteriors and studio sets.








You're going to meet death now, the living dead...

Peter Thomas’s music is likewise his brash, brassy crime jazz for the most part, but also sees the inclusion of some Hubler and Schwab type interludes, most notably the sitar and porn funk keyboard led piece playing in a restaurant / nightclub scene that, but for the absence of nudity, wouldn’t be too out of place in a Franco film from the same period; in this regard it’s worth mentioning that Ewa Stromberg has a small role as a library assistant.

The animated titles are another highlight: a skeleton appears superimposed on Sir Oliver’s coffin and then alternately spits out the titles or grabs them with a bony arm.

Christian imagery in Italian cinema #1

From Rossellini's Rome Open City (1945)


From Fulci's The Beyond (1981)

Cronaca di un amore / Story of a Love Affair

Investigation of a woman above suspicion?

Wanting to know more about his considerably younger wife Paola's past and possibly suspecting her of being unfaithful, Milanese businessman Enrico Fontana hires private investigators to look into her life. While the investigation finds nothing particularly untoward, it does reveal that one of Paola's friends, Giovanna Carlini, died in an accident shortly before she was due to be married and mere days before Paola's move from Ferrara to Milan.







Lifts and stairs have an important place in the film; cinematographer Guiseppe Rotunno later worked on The Stendhal Syndrome

It also, however, has the unanticipated consequence of bringing Giovanna's fiance, Guido, to the city, to alert Paola to the fact that she is under observation. Soon they rekindle their old relationship and start to dream of a new life together – a life in which Enrico has no place but his wealth does...


Antonioni's skill in using found architectural features is already evident. 20 years on would these have been J&B bottles?

Michelangelo Antonioni's debut feature has been described as an Italian film noir and, as such, is of interest to the giallo enthusiast as a borderline predecessor of the form. While it doesn't have a black gloved killer wielding a gleaming blade, bars playing easy listening hammond grooves and serving endless glasses of J&B (though modish jazz music and brand names both have their place in the film), it does present a traumatic incident whose consequences reach out of the past and a less than flattering portrait of sophisticated, fashionable, high society (but not yet jet-set) life; it's this shift in socio-economic position that also makes it an important development from Luchino Visconti's earlier Ossessione, whose impoverished, rural characters are less representative of the giallo as it was to develop in line with the “economic miracle”.


The fatal or the suffering woman?

Vittorio Cottafavi

Does anyone have any suggestions where to begin with Vittorio Cottafavi? He's sometimes referred to with Bava and Freda as one of the founding fathers of the Italian fantasy cinema, and would seem to have been to the peplum, which he specialised in / was associated with, something akin to what Leone is to the spaghetti western and (arguably) Argento to the giallo, but he's not a name that seems to occur that frequently nowadays.

Is it just that the peplum has not yet been rehabilitated and revalued, and that once we've exhausted the giallo, horror, poliziotto, mondo and sexy, we'll move on to superspy and peplum?

Trauma / Vertigo

I’ve been looking through Antoinio Bruschini and Antonio Tentori’s Sotto gli occhi dell’assassino, which picks up where Profondo tenebre left off by examining the giallo from 1983 through to 2001.

Discussing Trauma they compare the sequence in which the severed head of Dr Lloyd falls down a lift shaft, screaming, to the Scottie Ferguson dream sequence in Vertigo. It’s an apt comparison given the similarities between Argento’s and Hitchcock’s films elsewhere, both having an unusually compromised and ineffectual male; a female presented as suicidal, who seemingly kills herself; and the vision of a distinctive piece of jewellery that leads the male to the truth.

What it also got me thinking about was the frequently heard criticism that the sequence in the Argento film is silly compared to the apparent lack of such comments regarding Vertigo.

From my experience contemporary audiences respond to the sequences in similar ways, unable to take them seriously and tending to laugh in that “it’s so bad” way.



But I can’t remember hearing much criticism of the Vertigo sequence or critical responses saying that it’s the kind of thing which prevents the film from being a masterpiece, a negative which has to be scored against the technical achievement of the famous vertigo effect track and zoom and as a demonstration / reminder that Hitchcock’s experiments didn’t always come off.

Is it that the positioning of the sequence as dream / nightmare / vision allows it to get away with being less than convincing? If so, why isn’t this same courtesy extended to, say, the skeleton at the end of Inferno? Or is it more a reluctance to express a different opinion, to say that the Vertigo dream is frankly kitsch rather than art, say? Is it too much to ask for consistency? (Yes)

http://content.ytmnd.com/content/e/6/a/e6ae9b370ae92bd149850816bda50a26.gif

Giallo literature / film essay

A useful essay on giallo literature and film:

http://congress70.library.uu.nl/publish/articles/000004/index.html

Is it just me or does the film section read like a cut and paste from Gary Needham's Kinoeye piece?

The Villa Borghese

A number of gialli and horror films used a / the Villa Borghese as a location. Who owned the property and made it available for filmmakers? Was it ex /neo-fascist Junio Valerio Borghese, who made an abortive attempt at a coup in 1970? It would make for an amusing little connection...

Morte sospetta di una minorenne / Suspicious Death of a Minor

Over an kinetic organ-drive title track that sounds like it could have been an out-take from Goblin's Deep Red score, a young woman is pursued by man wearing mirror sunglasses and seeks temporary refuge in the arms of another before continuing her flight. Though she is caught by the man in the sunglasses and again escapes, her salvation is only temporary as he then kills her in a seedy motel that night.

The police investigation is characteristically inept, the inspector unable to even prevent a scooter-riding bag-snatcher from robbing him, this incident being observed by the other man from the opening sequence, Paolo Germi (Claudio Cassinelli).

Indeed, he turns out to be our point of identification, even if his own investigations into the case remain on a don't ask, don't tell basis, recruiting the bag-snatcher to help him but declining to tell who they're working for beyond “the FCT,” or, colloquially, the “mind your own business”.

At any rate, the trail from the dead girl leads to a babysitting agency and from there to the kidnappers of a chocolate magnate's son – an odd combination if ever there was one.






Typically dramatic compositions and camera set-ups; the mirror shade wearing assassin has an implacable and unstoppable Terminator-esque quality to him

Round about this point the police reappear, leading to a protracted car chase that ends up at their HQ, for Germi is in fact an undercover officer who now tells the superintendent (Mel Ferrer) what he knows thus far, that there is clearly a wider criminal conspiracy afoot involving, inter alia, vice, drugs and kidnapping rackets.

The issue is finding out who is behind it all before they cover their tracks, leaving the inevitable trail of bodies and whether anything can even be proven against them...

By 1975 the giallo boom was well and truly over. The two emblematic films in this regard are Dario Argento's Deep Red, witnessing both his return to the filone and the introduction of horror elements, and this film from Sergio Martino. For while Morte sospetta di una minorenne / Suspicious Death of a Minor is not a purist's giallo in the way its predecessors were nor is it quite the typical poliziotto in the manner of 1973's The Violent Professionals. Rather, it's a curious hybrid of the two that also features a strong comedy element to remind us of yet another filone occupying the ever-adaptable director around the same time.






Ill-advised Keystone Kops slapstick comedy

Thus, while the opening sequence makes the move of identifying the killer and, retrospectively, the man who will ultimately prove to be at the nexus of the various criminal conspiracies (the contemporary Italian audience would likely have attached more significance to his fleeting appearance, seeing as he is played by Massimo Girotti) the introduction of Cassinelli's character is somewhat ambiguous. Yes, if we know who he, as the top billed star, we can probably work out that he is the good guy, but he is not explicitly and quickly established as the undercover and unconventional cop, as happens – for instance – with Luc Merenda in The Violent Professionals.






A complex, mediated universe of representations where the investigator and viewer alike must learn to read the signs

The combination of giallo, poliziotteschi and slapstick comedy elements proves an uncomfortable one at times, with the extended played-for-laughs car chase between the police sitting ill-at-ease with the conspiracy that emerges.

You half wonder if part of the reason the bad guy can get away with it, beyond their positions as citizens above suspicion, is that the good guys are not so much inept and / or hamstrung by the need to follow procedure – the former the characteristic giallo trope, the latter the characteristic poliziotto one – as too busy goofing off, cheerfully destroying all in their path in a manner that wouldn't be too out of place in one of John Landis's destruction derbies.




The giallo and poliziotto as cinema of attractions - the shoot out on the rollercoaster

A key sequence in this regard is a shoot out on a roller-coaster, which might be compared to the bizarre mechanical doll preceding Professor Giordani's murder in Deep Red. Neither has narrative or logical sense, making you shake your head in disbelief whilst taking pleasure in their sheer audacity, that the film-makers would think of such a thing and then realise it on screen.

The difference, and the problem as far as Suspicious Death of a Minor is concerned, is that it lacks the sense of an overarching structure into which everything somehow fits, which the supernatural and subliminal provide for Argento's film. Thus, for example, whereas Marc Daly's remarks there about bashing his father's teeth in whilst playing the piano tellingly and ironically foreshadow Giodani's having his teeth bashed in, the way Germi keeps breaking his glasses here is more a running gag, invariably being followed by his exasperated exclamation of “sporca putana,” than a commentary on any metaphorical blindness as “the police feel around in the dark”.

On the plus side, Martino handles suspense, shock and action with customary efficiency and effectiveness, whilst a penchant for left- and right-of centre compositions within the more talky scenes serves to indicate an engagement with the material as a whole and to conveying something of a more general sense of a world out of sorts in a Pasolinian “poetic” manner.

Claudio Cassinelli makes for an engaging lead, bringing energy, enthusiasm and depth to the role, the latter most evident in the final scenes when the viewer may be unsure if he has given in to temptation or gone into avenging mode; I won't say anything more for fear of spoiling your enjoyment.


Yellow is again dotted through the film in an often symbolic manner.

There is also a nice little in-joke as Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key plays at the cinema used as a meeting point; trivia fans may also note that the actress playing the bag-snatcher sidekick's mother was also one of the Romanian ogres in Suspiria.

Video clip

A little clip of Claudio Simonetti performing music from (?) Mother of Tears:

http://video.google.it/videoplay?docid=2715202263412876306&hl=it

99 Donne

This 1999 volume from Manlio Gomarasca and Davide Pulici of Nocturno Cinema is dedicated to the stars and starlets of the Italian B cinema. It is divided into four parts, the first three in Italian and the fourth an English translation of the second and third, without pictures and in a smaller typeface.

Part one, running approximately 60 pages, presents comprehensive career profiles of some 46 female stars from A (Patrizia Adiutori) through to Z (Zigi Zanger). Part two, the longest at around 150 pages, presents longer and more in-depth career-spanning interviews with 15 actresses, including Erica Blanc, Rosalba Neri, Barbara Bouchet, Daniela Giordano, Zora Kerowa and Monika Zanchi. Part three, the shortest, does the same for directors Tinto Brass and Fernando Di Leo.

If there are not quite 99 Donne as the title promises, with the odd striking omission like Susan Scott / Nieves Navarro and Florinda Bolkan, and perhaps a sense of overfamiliarity to some of the interviewees – I don't know about you, but I think I now have three or four somewhat similar Bouchet interviews / profiles – this is nevertheless a very welcome volume for the fan of Italian cult cinema, for the reason that it approaches its subject with knowledge and enthusiasm (reading the interviews one is often struck by the difference between Gomarasca and Pulice's reverence for 30 year old films that to the actresses themselves frequently represented little more than a soon-spent paycheque for a few days routine work on a soon-forgotten job) to draw out all sorts of behind the scenes details, insights and plain old style scandal, Cinecittá Babylon style.

Thus, for example, Blanc recounts how the simple fact of changing her hair colour from blonde to red brought about a change in roles, from victim to victimiser, whilst Daniela Giordano's recollection of colliding with co-star Brett Hasley during a love scene in Four Times that Night and accidentally knocking the caps off three of his teeth makes for an interesting counterpoint to his complaint, in an old European Trash Cinema interview, that she had terrible body odour.

The point is not so much the truth or otherwise of such statements – as with Bava's Rashomon inspired film we're dealing with perspectives on what really happened, after the fact recollections and reconstructions – but the composite pictures they paint of what it was like to be a young, glamourous starlet in the Italian B cinema during its heyday and / or decline.

That the industry and these careers are now essentially in the past also means, however, that there's less that sense of self-censorship by which all but the worst individuals and experiences are defined so positively as to require serious reading between the lines. Rather, there's more a settling of accounts and and acknowledgement of good, bad and ugly alike. There is also, however, a certain consistency to the praise or criticism given a number of directors, co-stars and others that seems to confirms much of what one already felt. Thus, for example, Aristide Massaccessi (to whom the authors dedicate the volume) repeatly emerges as a supremely talented craftsman who could have done so much more had the environments in which his work was produced and received been more favourable – an evaluation that, on reflection, also seems to pertain to so many of the careers detailed herein.

Così dolce... così perversa / So Sweet So Perverse

Jean (Jean-Louis Tritignant) and Danielle's relationship is not what it was. While still married they lead somewhat separate lives dominated by ennui; “It keeps getting harder and harder to feel excited,” as Jean remarks prior to what proves to be a dispassionate, dissatisfying and above all thoroughly routine and businesslike affair with another of their circle, Helene Valmont (Helga Line).

One evening soon thereafter Jean is disturbed by noise coming from the apartment above. Going to investigate – (not) coincidentally he has both a dropped ear-ring to return and a key to the apartment, which Danielle was thinking of also renting – he encounters their new neighbour, Nicole (Carroll Baker) with whom he soon becomes infatuated.

Though Jean's feelings are genuine, its also perhaps the sense of excitement which the presence of her sadistic, possessive ex-boyfriend Klaus (Horst Frank) brings to the relationship and the opportunity it affords for him to play the hero, “The Victorian image of the dominant male [...] a little out of place today,” as Danielle tellingly puts it.








Mirror, mirror on the wall...

Indeed, it then transpires that Danielle (Erica Blanc) and Nicole have themselves conspired against Jean, Klaus being the hitman hired to murder him. But, after Klaus has apparently fatally stabbed Jean – crucially neither we nor the women, whilst present at the scene, actually witness this fatal blow – and pitched his car over a cliff to leave a horribly burnt corpse for Danielle to (mis)identify for the police as that of her husband, the intrigue deepens still further, with little ultimately proving to be as it seems...

Released shortly before The Bird with the Crystal Plumage changed the face of the giallo forever, Umberto Lenzi's second venture into the filone works along the same broad lines as his first, Orgasmo / Paranoia, by attempting to refashion – or sex up – the Les Diaboliques style thriller for the late 1960s audience.

It is less successful as its predecessor, however, having more of an obviously 'mechanical' feel to it, with contrivances and misdirections that work the first time round but don't stand up as well on repeat viewings, most notably a flashback that retrospectively appears false and scenes where characters externalise feelings as if to another while they are not actually “under observation” in this manner nor required to thereby “put on a show”.

Perhaps more of a problem, however, is that it's hard to see why Danielle should be conspiring against Jean in the first place. She is not desperate for money, a divorce or anything else, their tacic agreement to live separate lives apparetly a more or less mutually (dis)agreeable one.






A love that could not speak its name?

One answer, perhaps also alluded to by that suggestive title – a suggestiveness continued by the film, which is actually less explicit in what it shows than its at-the-time X-rated predecessor – is the strong intimation that she has lesbian tendencies: You wonder if she herself was infatuated with Nicole to begin with, but correctly surmised that Jean, in his masculine pride, could never accept her having a relationship with another woman, and accordingly realised he had to go, and whether the need to join the dots beyond this indicates a certain nervousness about going too far on the part of the filmmakers.






Shifts in and fun with focus

In her interview in 99 Donne, Erica Blanc indicates that she was originally slated to play Nicole and Baker Danielle, but that the American actress, perhaps wary of over(t)ly repeating her Orgasmo role, then had them switch. It is a testament to each actresses' abilities that you would likely never know otherwise. While Trintignant, Frank and Line inherently have less room to maneuvre, with each playing largely to type - i.e. Tritignant as the neurotic, shifty bourgeois, Frank as the smug sadist of Aryan demeanour, Line as the sophisticated, glamourous love interest – there is nothing to complain about in that if ain't broke don't fix it way.


Classic giallo imagery #1 – the stairwell and the lift to the scaffold


Classic giallo imagery #2 – the barely identifiable remains in the morgue


Classic giallo imagery #3 - the tape recorder


Classic giallo imagery #4 – the jet plane

Lenzi's contribution is difficult to fully appreciate on account of panning and scanning that makes a mockery of any inventive use of widescreen, but several nice touches do come through including the familiar symbolic / suggestive use of mirrors and some almost three-dimensional explorations of focus effects. A high-speed driving sequence meanwhile suggests not only his characters' search for thrills to momentarily relieve their boredom but also later poliziotteschi, whilst some unexpected discontinuity editing – note the way Jean and Helene's tryst is presented – further reminds us that the gap between the worlds of Lenzi and Antonioni and their audiences implied by Kim Newman is less absolute than relative.

Riz Ortolani's score is another asset, providing a characteristic mix of lush, sophisticated jazz-inflected easy listening and pop that further situates the film in giallo erotico territory, even as title track “Why” later cropped up in psycho-killer on the loose outing Seven Bloodstained Orchids.