Alibi perfetto / Circle of Fear

Given that this 1992 thriller is directed by the talented Aldo Lado yet struggles to achieve anything like the success of his previous work within the same broad territory, it could be taken as an exemplar of the problems facing Italian filmmakers at the time. Quite simply, audience interest had went elsewhere and the filmmakers were unsure how to respond.

Though Lado had certainly drawn from The Last House on the Left when making Late Night Trains some 15 or so years earlier, he had also succeeded in crafting something which was distinctively situated within its own national and historical contexts.

This is one of the things which is most lacking here, with there being no sense of the events occuring within any definable – or well defined – framework. Rather, it feels more like Lado and his collaborators, including regular Argento writing partner Franco Ferrini, simply cobbled together elements from traditional Italian giallo and poliziotto entries and adding in some Hong Kong “heroic bloodshed” style action and imagery along with The Silence of the Lambs Hollywood serial killer-isms, without much rhyme or reason or, more importantly, effect.


The credits begin with a giallo image




Before we enter into Deadly China Dolls / Heroic Bloodshed territory


Though the killer is soon back to business

The story starts off as confusingly as it means to continue, with the arrival of various parties at a Chinese restaurant. Before long an uncomfortably directed shoot out occurs, by way of which we learn that cops Tony and Lisa are intent on busting gangster Mancini with the consignment of heroin he was picking up. Though the cops sieze the heroin and money, Mancini escapes.


Lisa and her boss

Back at the station, their boss berates them for acting without orders, pointing out that it was only supposed to be a surveillance and evidence gathering exercise: “I want my best agents to behave like cops, not Rambo rip-offs.”

Later that evening, Tony and Lisa comiserate with some lovemaking: they are partners off the job as well as on it, with this also serving to amusingly highlight the unspoken subtext of many a male-male buddy cop film of similar vintage.

Around about this point we also get some curious scenes of a dangerous madwoman, the Countess, in an asylum and of another looking around the outside of and photographing a house.

The first connection is made when Tony and the latter woman, his soon to be ex- in more ways than one Elvi, visit the courthouse to finalise their divorce proceedings. In the parking lot they are shot by two gunmen, killing Elvi and leaving Tony in a coma, from which he soon recovers. (There is a short black and white flashback here, which led me to briefly hope that the film might be about to enter into Short Night of Glass Dolls territory.)

Tony's immediate feeling is that Mancini was behind the hit, but this does not square with the unprofessionalism of the assassins in targeting Elvi first and leaving him alive. The plot thus thickens further as he receives the photographs Elvi took of the house, revealing a shadowy figure at a window when blown up, and then investigates the house, which used to belong to the countess, finding a Deep Red-style mummified body, with its head in the oven.




Is this the face of the killer at the window?

Initially it is believed to be the Countess's son, Marco, but the forensic examination reveals that the victim is female and died a violent death. Meanwhile, the murder of a prostitute indicates that a serial killer, long thought dead or inactive, has returned...

The dialogue is pretty awful, encompassing just about every cop movie cliché one could imagine and again lacking the subtleties of earlier films, as with the foreshadowing throwaway references to vampires in Short Night of the Glass Dolls: “Police: Get Your Hands Up. Don't even think about it!”




Giallo technology, circa 1990

The leads are also distinctly C-level, although the actress playing Lisa is certainly easy on the eyes. As such, the old familiar faces among the supporting players – Philippe Leroy as the chief, Bobby Rhodes as the pathologist – are welcome as ever, while Romano Mussolini's jazzy score provides a pleasant aural backdrop though at times also veers into more routine 80s sax and synth territory.


Tony and the Countess

Lado doesn't give the impression of being a 'natural' action director. He tries, but the shoot outs are devoid of excitement, with the panning and scanning making it more difficult to work out the spatial relationships between the characters. He does, however, manage a few moments that recall past glories, such as the mirrored reflections when the Countess is interrogated Hannibal Lektor style, suggestive of the way in which the characters are haunted by one another's presences and pasts.

L' Ultimo treno della notte / Don't Ride on Late Night Trains

Munich, a few days before Christmas. Students Margaret Hoffenbach (Irene Miracle) and Lisa Stradi (Marina Berti) are preparing to go spend the holidays with Lisa's parents in Italy.

Deciding to take the train rather than flying, they soon come to the attentions of a couple of young thugs, Blackie (Flavio Bucci) and Curly (Gianfranco De Grassi) who boarded, sans tickets, to evade the law after a petty crime spree – mugging a Santa Claus, ripping a rich woman's fur coat and so on.

Things take a more serious turn as Blackie corners another passenger (Macha Méril) in the toilet and sexually assaults her.

A bomb threat stops the train, prompting Margaret and Lisa to disembark and take another train. Unfortunately Blackie, Curly and the woman – who by this time we have realised is dangerously unbalanced, even if her exact motivations will remain indecipherable – are among the other passengers who have the same idea.

The five soon find themselves sharing a carriage. Over the course of the journey Blackie and Curly, encouraged and assisted by the woman, become increasingly abusive, culminating in the rape and murder of Lisa and the death of Margaret as she make a desperate bid to escape.
Realising that Blackie and Curly do not have tickets, but oblivious to the crimes that have just occurred, the guard throws them off the train at the next station, at which the woman also disembarks, injuring her leg in the process.

This, as it happens, is also the station at which Lisa's parents are waiting. Not yet particularly worried and thinking that his daughter and her friend will arrive on the next train, Dr Stradi (Enrico Mario Salerno) agrees to take the woman to their house to treat her wound. Blackie and Curly tag along.

Round about this point Mrs Stradi notices that one of the thugs is wearing a distinctive tie suspiciously like the one earlier described on the telephone to her as being Lisa's Christmas present for her father. Coupled with the radio announcements that two girls' bodies have been found in the vicinity, the horrible truth dawns...

First things first. Yes, Aldo Lado's L' Ultimo treno della notte is obviously inspired by Last House on the Left. But insofar as Wes Craven's film in turn was a contemporary revisioning of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring which in turn drew inspiration from a medieval Swedish legend, it can be argued that no one here can really throw the first stone as far as originality or imitation goes.

In any case, L' Ultimo treno della notte emerges as superior to Craven's film on many counts and its equal on the others, such that alternative titlings Second House on the Left and New House on the Left attest not so much to an inferior unofficial sequel but to a distinctively Italian refinement of the original which benefits from a more convincing narrative, stronger characterisation and consistent overall tone.

Whereas the means by which Krug and company end up in the Collingwood's house comes across as contrived, a deus ex machina that might work in the medieval and mythical context of Bergman's film but not in the real world of post-Manson America, there's no reason to believe here that Dr Stradi wouldn't need much convincing from the woman since it's quickly established that he's the kind of dedicated type who finds it difficult not to take his work home with him. An underling's prognosis that “I don't think there's any use in operating. He's in a deep coma.” prompts the response “You'd better change your attitude quickly if you don't want trouble. Even if the chance is remote you must operate, right?! All right, let's go. Call my wife please, tell her I'll be a little late.”

The one aspect that does remain somewhat awkward in this regard is the way the passengers are kept on the train despite the possibility that there may be a bomb on it. It just doesn't ring true, even if it also comments on the very real situation of Germany and Italy in this period with the RAF and Red Brigades. But, given that the general sense of a “legitimation crisis” of both left and right is conveyed elsewhere in the film, whether by the group of old comrades in arms on the train, singing a dubious Nazi-era song and responding in Pavlovian dog fashion to Blackie's barked “Heil Hitler,” or the various chattering class conversations about the decline and possibly immanent fall of western civilisation, it really wasn't necessary when a simple mechanical breakdown could have been used instead – especially seeing as this could also connote social breakdown, that the trains are not running on time...

The area where reworking rather than copying the material is most apparent is the positioning of Blackie and Curly compared to Krug and Weasel. In Last House on the Left the bad guys are really too much cartoon figures at times, their remorse at the slaying of the two girls somewhat inconsistent with a past history that includes slaying slain two nuns and a priest and Krug’s hooking his own son on heroin. Here, by contrast, we see two ordinary young thugs, certainly not the sort of people we'd like to meet but not beyond redemption or simply growing out of this sort of thing, who happen to fall under the influence of a psychopathic “other”.

What's more troubling, of course, is the nature of this psychopathic other, that the woman on the train – the only identification she’s ever given – also takes us in initially through the simple facts of her age, class and gender. As she is introduced saying her farewells and boarding the train, we think we know her and the situation that is about to unfold, that she is another potential victim of these young thugs, not the one who will influence them to murder. (Note here the exchange as she enters the train carriage: “What are you doing boys? Leave the girls alone!” “If you say so,” suggesting that things could have gone very differently.)

We could dismiss Lado's characterisation here as misogynistic, nothing more than another unknowable, monstrous feminine figure who confirms the necessity of male control. To do so, however, seems to me to miss the entire point, precisely because it reasserts this same control, rendering character and film more knowable and blunting their subversive challenge. For, as anyone who has also seen Lado's other horror-thrillers Who Saw Her Die and Short Night of the Glass Dolls will know, he is the kind of genre filmmaker who refuses to provide easy entertainment and instead compels you to work through the images he presents and your responses to them.

This, in turn, perhaps accounts for the film still being refused a certificate in the UK. With the possible exception of the “no means yes” encounter in the toilet between the woman and Blackie, it’s difficult to pick out any one thing as clearly unacceptable. Rather, it seems to be the whole ambiguous tone of the piece and the questions that arise thereby: Who is really in control? What does (the) woman want? What motivates her? What is the relationship between societal and individual malaise? What can and should be done about them? What if the people we’re supposed to look to for answers, those citizens above suspicion, not only don’t have answers but also contribute to the situation, whether explicitly – the woman, with her sins of commission – or implicitly – all those who look away and try to avoid getting involved? (“I was just passing through,” as one man says by way of trying to excuse himself.)

Lado’s direction is similarly intelligent, making good use of location and showing his technical flair, as with the rapid intercutting between Lisa’s moment of death and her parents’ dinner party or the stylised lighting of the carriage during the central torture sequence, without coming across as self-indulgent. (One also wonders is Argento saw his former colleague’s film prior to making Suspiria in this (blue) light, especially given the casting of Bucci in that film and Miracle in its Inferno.)

The writer-director also knows when to let the actors take the lead, drawing impressive performances from the principals, each of whom is thoroughly convincing in their respective roles. Morricone’s score, led by Curly’s diegetic harmonica wails, is simple but effective. It’s hard, however, to find anything good to say about the warbling Demis Roussos ballad that plays over the credits, which may well prove the truest moment of torture in the entire thing as far as the typical viewer is concerned...

The film is available on DVD from Blue Underground. Midnight Video had a Japanese subtitled version available, which pixellates moments of nudity.

Chi l'ha vista morire? / Who Saw Her Die?

1968, the French Pyrenees: A young red-haired girl, Nicole, is abducted and murdered, her body left buried in the snow. The case is never solved.

Four years later, Venice: Roberta (Nicoletta Elmi) arrives to visit her sculptor father Francesco (George Lazenby) from London where she and her mother, Francesco's estranged wife, Elizabeth (Anita Strindberg) live.




Atypical and typical ways to open a giallo: the snowy wilderness and the plane landing in the Italian city, in this case the oft-used Venice

Then Roberta disappears. Frantic with worry, Francesco searches everywhere he can think of. Her body turns up floating in one of the canals. Yet, strangely, she has not been molested…


Who could kill a child - Nicoletta Elmi in yet another giallo


Black gloves, but not as we are accustomed to seeing them

Frustrated by the failures of the police, realising that his daughter's murder was by no means the first perpetrated by the killer, whoever he or she may be, and haunted by his own feelings of guilt – at the exact moment Roberta was snatched, Francesco was making love with his girlfriend Gabriella (Rosemarie Lindt) – Francesco embarks on his own investigation, soon uncovering a web of corruption, blackmail and perversion amongst the city's elite, including a number of his own contacts and associates from the fine art world...

Aldo Lado's second giallo makes for a more conventional filone outing than its predecessor through its psychologically motivated black-gloved killer; considerable use of the subjective camera; comparatively explicit murder scenes – excepting, of course, the taboo subject of child murder, where the focus is necessarily on the aftermath rather than the act – though still characterised by a more restrained approach than seen in many contemporaries, and more mundane world devoid of occult references.






A wordless sequence that speaks volumes: Francesco and Elizabeth re-united in their shared grief

As with Short Night of Glass Dolls, however, Lado again demonstrates a level of artistry and intelligence not always seen in the filone, along with a consistent interest in playing with the then-emergent conventions.

Like most gialli the killer is represented metonymically by fragments that identify them qua killer, but not as a specific individual. Unusually, however, Lado presents them as wearing a veil rather than a mask and fedora, knitted rather than black leather gloves and old-style women's boots, painting the picture of a harmless nonna dressed against the winter cold instead of a stylish, dressed to kill mostro.

This said, viewers familiar with the filone are likely to have little difficulty in identifying the killer from the suspects presented and will also probably experience something of a sense of deja vu as to the manner of their demise; to say much more would run the risk of spoiling things.

What is worth noting, however, is that on the featurette included on Anchor Bay's DVD, Lado mentions providing a get out clause by which the killer is not what they seemed to be purely as a way of appeasing the authorities – as with Short Night, there is the sense of a filmmaker who is subversive in more than one sense.

Who Saw Her Die? also has a distinctive rhythm to it, and one which is again perhaps more reminscent of the art cinema than the popular / vernacular, as characterised by a distracted audience impatiently awaiting the next set-piece; tellingly from reading a number of comments on the IMDB and elsewhere a criticism often levelled against the film is that it lacks pace.

Rather than entering the scene at the dramatically significant moment and cutting from one shot to the next on the point of action, Lado instead often present a pre-existing world and holds a shot for an extra beat or two, giving the film a certain documentary quality, as when Roberta's body drifts silently and disruptively into the midst of a busy market or we observe the father of one of the killer's previous victims at work in a glass factory or are left in Franco's studio, empty but haunted by his dead daughter.


Francesco's studio; note the sign on the wall

Similar directorial attention to detail is apparent in Serpieri's first visit to a suspected paedophile lawyer in some way involved with the murders. As the lawyer fingers a pendant similar to one Roberta had been given shortly before her abduction and murder, Serpieri neither seems to notice nor Lado's direction to draw attention to the gesture as one with definite significance: rather than pointing it out with a close-up or zoom in in the manner of an “obvious cinema”, he leaves it up to the spectator to notice, or not, and make a connection, or not.




Images can be deceptive

Ennio Morricone's score ranks as one of the most haunting he composed for the genre. Whereas some of his gialli scores feature three types of cue – the character leitmotif; the improvised, aleatory or otherwise technically experimental suspense cue, and the easy listening party cue – and others the first two of these, here he strips things down by providing only the first, providing a number of subtle variations on the same theme dominated by a children's choir and invariably signalling the killer's presence within or – more usually – at the periphery of the scene.

Here we can note, for instance, how the black rubber glove wearing cleaner who runs the bath – a sequence which would be the prelude to a successful or attempted drowning in most other gialli – is clearly signalled as a Hitchcockian joke by departing from the killer's fetish attire of knitted gloves, as the otherwise eerie ambient soundscape of the running water becomes less eerie precisely because of the absence of the musical leitmotif.

Simultaneously the cross-cutting in of the cue as Serpieri stalks the lawyer through the streets as the camera cuts back and forth between Serpieri's point-of-view and that of an unidentified presence following him, indicates where the real killer is at that moment.

If the monothematic nature of the score perhaps makes it a touch repetitive – a criticism that, reading some other reviews, often seems to emerge – this same repetition can also perhaps be justified as an insight into the killer's monomaniacal personality, that he or she has to kill and Serpieri's subsequent obsession, even as the latter raises the idea of an alternate score featuring an obvious Serpieri leitmotif and a kind of musical duel. (The music that plays over the wrapping up scene at the end, the killer having been unmasked and brought to justice, actually lacks the children's choir, only for it to re-emerge as the end credits roll.)


Curiously off-centre framings suggest a world out of sorts

Another nice touch is the murder of another character in a cinema, recalling the krimi Curse of the Hidden but with the difference of having the killer use a silent method – strangulation – rather than a noisy one – shooting, relying on the noise issuing from the screen to mask the fatal shot – and the screening of a mondo sexy film rather than a thriller murder mystery, to nicely tap into the situation of the viewer themself, momentarily breaching the barrier between screen and spectator and likely giving an extra frisson to the theatrical experience of the film regrettably absent on home viewing.








Alone in the dark – the assassin strikes...


Francesco arrives and realises what has happened, just as the killer exits

Whilst we can safely “play at cops and robbers” – the remarks of the representative of official authority, whose characteristic lack of effectiveness and engagement ironically signals why the protagonist's amateur, private investigation is so necessary – in a way that Serpieri cannot, we are not equally safe from those others watching the film in the dark with us or awaiting on the way back home from the cinema; the double edge of the cover provided by darkness...

La Corta notte delle bambole di vetro / Short Night of Glass Dolls

[Warning: this discussion contains potential spoilers]

Communist-era Prague: A foreign journalist, Gregory Moore (Jean Sorel) awakens in a catatonic state. Unable to move or speak, he desperately tries to recall what happened before he undergoes an autopsy...








“I'm dead?! I'm not dead” – Gregory comes to in the morgue

Fragments return: his Czech girlfriend Mira Svoboda (Barbara Bach) whom he planned to help leave the country... his colleagues at the press bureau, including boozy Irishman Jack MacPherson (Mario Adorf) and concerned ex-lover Jessica (Ingrid Thulin) ... their attending a social function graced by prominent party members and other nomenklatura... Mira's mysterious disappearance immediately thereafter...




A setting more appropriate for the gothic than the giallo?


Mira and Gregory in happier times; note the butterflies on the wall

Was it the authorities themselves who were responsible? Certainly the police were less than helpful, conducting only a perfunctory investigation and trying to dissuade Gregory and his friends from undertaking their own, which led to the discovery of a young woman's body in the river. But it wasn't Mira...

Perhaps all is not lost...




A couple the enigmatic visual fragments - shards of crystal? - that flash through Gregory's mind's eye, out of place and time

Doctor Karting pays a visit to the morgue and notices something is amiss: his old friend's body continues to show no signs of rigor mortis nor is it cooling down...

Spurred on by this, Gregory recalls uncovers a chain of mysterious disappearances, then the murder of an informant before his eyes... On the dead man's body a potential clue, a membership card for the prestigious Klub 99 ... Simply an association of music lovers or something more sinister, seeing as all the missing young women gave recitals there...

Can Gregory remember the truth that will set him free?

Although narratives told by a dead or dying protagonist are a familiar device in noir – Double Indemnity, DOA, Sunset Boulevard, Point Blank etc. – and indeed crop up in the occasional giallo such as The Double, there seems something characteristically Italian – excessive – about crossing it with a satanic conspiracy out of Rosemary's Baby for added exploitation potential.




More butterflies, in their glass cages...

Yet as a giallo in terms of the narrow post-Bird with the Crystal Plumage definition, Aldo Lado's debut feature stands out precisely on account of eschewing most of the themes and motifs audiences had come to expect from the filone by way of black-gloved killers stalking beautiful, scantily dressed women and impelled by quasi-Freudian repetition compulsions.

While this obviously lessens the scope for set-pieces, with the most overt concessions to the filone audience in the murders of Gregory's informant and subsequently one of his friends being positively restrained – the use of the train station as backdrop in the former case also recalling The Cat o' Nine Tails to again demonstrate that less is sometimes actually more (shocking) – there is little doubt that Lado has an assured grasp of technique, his material and – most important of all – their ultimate indivisibility and the need for each to inform and be co-present in the other.

Juxtaposing fragmentary montages of random signifiers with longer dramatic scenes in which their meanings unfold like a wings of the butterfly, a recurring motif in the film, the writer-director draws the viewer deeper and deeper into a nightmare reminiscent of Kafka or Poe in which hitherto casual remarks – Gregory's “I'd better rescue Mira from the body snatchers” – and details – Mira's name apparently translates as “Peace Freedom,” and as such speaks of an outlook at odds with the established, entrenched order – retrospectively attain key significance.

Much the same can be said of the throwaway experiment in which a scientist colleague of Karting's demonstrates that tomatoes feel pain, a meter rising whenever he penetrates their flesh with a needle: it may seem like just more egregious science of the Four Flies on Grey Velvet sort, but then allows Lado to draw comparisons with Gregory's equally inert form ironically showing no signs of life, while the way in which the technocrat crushes said tomato as he reproaches his colleague for sentimentality retrospectively alludes to his role in the conspiracy.


Lado arguably draws attention to his art a bit too much on occasion

At the same time, however, it is also the surfeit of instances such as this that arguably conspire to take the film down a notch precisely by overburdening it with significance at times. Here one also notes a crucial difference from Rosemary's Baby: whereas Polanski leaves it up to the (hyper)attentive viewer to notice that a cabbie can also be seen during a satanic orgy, Lado cuts in a flashback insert of a prominent cultists at work and play.




The habituees of the Klub 99 remind one of the vampires in Polanski's Dance of the Vampires – you're going to meet death now, the living dead...

Minor errors of judgement aside – and as a first film it has to be said that this displays a level of assurance and control that's up there with Argento's debut – Short Night of Glass Dolls is nevertheless an enjoyably different take on the Italian thriller deserving of the acclaim it has belatedly received.

Thinking about it in relation to Argento's one also wonders if the influence went both ways, insofar as the mission statement of Lado's cultists – “We will hold the reins of power in the world… Our bitterest enemies are persons who love freedom… We need the young to keep us alive. They must become as us. They must think as we do. And those who rebel must be sacrificed” – doesn't sound that far removed from that of their immortal witches of the Three Mothers films who “don't want anything to change”. (“There is politics,” as Argento has said in interviews; just not an easily identifiable and quantifiable politics.)

Likewise – with this being a device that broadens the scope of the film out to make it less a direct reference to Communist repression in Czechoslovakia in the immediate aftermath of the Prague Spring than a general comment on the mentality of all too many ruling elites regardless of time and place, to thereby perhaps explain just how Lado was able to make the film under the auspices of the hard-line regime – we can also note the reference to branches of the secret society all over the world. It also curiously calls to mind Elio Petri's eerie, typically idiosyncratic take in the political-occult-gialli – generic taxonomy clearly creaking here – in Todo Modo.


Jessica reaches the “screaming point”

Performances and technical credits are as good as one would expect from the likes of Bergman regular Thulin – an actress equally at home in The Damned and Salon Kitty – and the Morricone / Nicolai composer / conductor one-two, contributing an appealing combination of the restrained, elegant yet sinister (Mephisto?) waltz and minimalist cues based around heartbeat and breath rhythms, neatly suspended between the diegetic and non-diegetic and underscoring the more suspenseful moments.

Lado's comments on the film on the Anchor Bay DVD are interesting. He explains that the inspiration for the film came from the case of an outspoken Italian judge who was effectively “buried alive” by an appointment in Sicily. It was originally known as Malastrana, referring to the distinctive district in Prague that forms the backdrop to the action, before this was deemed too esoteric for the likely audience. Accordingly the more generic animal title Short Night of the Butterflies was decided upon and promotional materials prepared, only for the too-similar sounding The Bloodstained Butterfly to beat it to cinema screens. It's a shame because the butterfly – delicate, fragile, emphemeral – is used throughout the film and is more meaningful than the Glass Dolls title. But, by any other name this is a giallo that warrants your attention...