Nove ospiti per un delitto / Nine Guests for a Crime

Unlike many more enigmatically titled entries - Argento's Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Fulci's A Lizard in a Woman's Skin etc. - 1977 giallo from Ferdinando Baldi is one whose title tells you almost everything you need to know.

There are indeed nine guests for a crime.

The nine guests are members of a wealthy bourgeois family - the patriarch, his wife, their children and their respective partners - who go for a vacation at the patriarch's villa on an otherwise uninhabited island.

The crime aspect is more ambiguous, on account of the narrative being structured around an opening murder, shot through a gauze to connote its past / flashback status, followed by a subsequent And Then There Were None / Ten Little Indians / Ten Little Niggers scenario as the members of the family begin to be suspiciously killed off one-by-one.

The first thing that hurts the film as far as the mystery aspect is concerned is that the link between the past and present murders is not really made clear until comparatively late on. We see the victim being caught in flagrante with a woman, but not who she is, what happens to her, nor who guns the man down.

The second is that the identity of the avenger and the guilty parties amongst the group, in relation to this initial crime, are rather obvious to anyone who has seen the likes of Lupo's The Weekend Murders and Bava's Five Dolls for an August Moon and Bay of Blood.

Much like Dolls, the film sees a character apparently die and disappear, albeit without the immediate suggestion of foul play. Much like Bay of Blood - and D'Amato's Anthropophagous the Beast a psychically sensitive character foretells doom as she reads the tarot.

Unfortunately the opportunity for these same premonitions to create a more supernatural horror atmosphere is bungled. While we see the dead man trying to claw his way out of a sandy grave and the subsequent appearances of a zombie-like figure - curiously reminiscent of D'Amato's Erotic Nights of the Living Dead - the idea of an killer from beyond the grave cannot be sustained.

Whereas other gothic gialli like Crispino's The Etruscan Kills Again and Miraglia's The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave and The Red Queen Kills Seven Times are careful to maintain a degree of uncertainty as to the nature of their monsters / murderers until the denouement, here the dead man and the zombie are interrupted by a more traditional wet-suited, black-gloved killer - albeit one who uses a pistol in disposing of two unfortunate sailors / employees.

Set pieces like this are reasonably well handed by Baldi, with the requisite hand held camera, racking of focus and zooms. Elsewhere there is plenty of gratuitous female nudity and J&B drinking. But if all the check-boxes are thereby ticked, what's largely lacking is the sense doing much beyond going through the motions, in taking an approach that is more personal or attuned to the specifics of the film, whether in a supportive or subversive manner.

The exception is Baldi's enthusiasm for shooting through grids and bars within the villa, useful both for conveying the entrapped nature of the characters and suggesting a visual connection to the opening scene insofar as it is filmed through gauze. These techniques also, however, again indicate a certain hesitancy in that, although none of the characters really being particularly pleasant or there to obviously identify with as investigator, the film-makers weren't willing to push things that bit more and play up their unpleasantness so that we wanted to see them really suffer, as with many of those in Bava's Greed Trilogy.

One thing the film definitely has going for it is a quality male cast, with Arthur Kennedy playing the patriarch and Massimo Foschi - particularly impressive - Venantino Venantini and John Richardson the sons and lovers.

The Weekend Murders / Concerto per pistola solista

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


Little visual gimmicks abound in the film

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

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

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




A suicide that isn't


A rabbit gives its life for the sake of the film

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






The detourment of a typical giallo moment




An impressive ensemble cast is assembled in the film

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

All told, an enjoyable way to spend 98 minutes.