Eva Nera and Porno Esotic Love or The D’Amato Effect

One of the most famous concepts in film studies is the so-called Kuleshov Effect, discovered in the ‘experiment’ carried out by the soviet film theorist and maker Lev Kuleshov. In this experiment Kuleshov took the same image of the actor Mozhukin and juxtaposing it with images of a bowl of soup, a child and a body in a coffin, got his subjects to read in meanings that were not there. The combination of shots A and B produced a third meaning, C, which was greater than their sum.

I mention this no doubt over-simplistic summary not to be gratuitous – look everyone, I’ve done film studies 101 – but rather because it seems to offer a route into these Joe D’Amato films. For what they present is approximately 60 per cent of the same footage, rescored and recut to produce two different erotic potboilers that would stand up for themselves when not watched back-to-back as I did this afternoon.

Eva Nera was made first and itself incorporates some footage from Emanuelle Nera Orient Reportage if memory serves correct. Shot and set in Hong Kong, it sees D’Amato’s regular fetish star Laura Gemser play a exotic dancer whose speciality is performing with snakes. Gemser’s real-life husband and perennial co-star Gabriel Tinti plays the man who first hires her to try to lure his snake-obsessed brother out of depression and then out of jealousy kills her girlfriend with a poisonous snake; his brother is played by Jack Palance in one of those take the cheque and run type performances. Eventually Eva figures out what happened and extracts her revenge…

Porno Esotic Love was made later and features footage that later wound up in Les Déchaînements pervers de Manuela. Shot in the Dominican Republic around the same time as Porno Holocaust and Erotic Nights of the Living Dead, it also sees Gemser play a snake dancer with lesbian proclivities. This time round it’s her girlfriend Annj Goren who falls in with some drug dealers and smugglers and in due course becomes hooked on heroin herself, with predictable consequences for all concerned…


The lesbian spectator as convenient surrogate for the male heterosexual?


The colonial gaze, embodied in the female?


Their subject

With almost exactly the same travelogue, exotic and softcore erotic footage, the real difference between the two films lies in the composition of the other 40 or so per cent of their footage. In Eva Nera it’s more plot and character focused, albeit of a decidedly rudimentary nature. Porno Esotic Love has actual hardcore footage with Goren pairing up with Mark Shanon and others; as ever Gemser’s participation remains limited to the softcore and pseudo-lesbian scenes.

D’Amato manages to make this grunt and grind material just about interesting, nicely moving his camera from the image to its reflection in a mirror or vice-versa. He also frequently captures a curious mixture of disgust and desperation in Goren’s face that seems to speak volumes in suggesting that her own motivation in these scenes may not have been that far from that of her character.

Though D’Amato sex-horror films might have self-consciously gone further in search of that attraction-repulsion dynamic, the image of Goren fellating Shanon, eyes closed in a cannot bear to look manner, are ultimately far more effective in making you question exactly why you are watching this and your own engagement with it. Put another way, it’s a fragment of the real, the thing itself rather than the allusions and illusions of montage.

Elsewhere, D’Amato’s juxtapositions and recontextualisations seem to almost humorously point to what more theoretically inclined types might well posit as the socially constructed and performative nature of sexual identity. Whereas in both films we get the same image of Gemser touching herself the fantasies intercut with it differ: in Eva Nera they are strictly of a lesbian girl-girl nature, while in Porno Esotic Love there are also somewhat incongruous images of Goren servicing and being serviced by two (black) men. Can we say return of the repressed?

Above all, however, the thing that binds the two films and the other D’Amato’s I’ve been watching recently together is the way that they use music. It doesn’t matter if it was composed by Nico Fidenco, Piero Umiliani, Alessandro Alessandroni or someone else, nor if it came from the library or was composed for the film, D’Amato always takes the same approach: layer it atop the scene, almost without regard for the audio-visual combinations which result.

It suggests an under-explored point of connection with Jess Franco’s more self-conscious jazz style improvisations, and makes me even more eager to see Les Déchaînements pervers de Manuela as a kind of Monk meets Coltrane meeting of these two giants of Eurotic horror…

It also perhaps highlights further connections between horror, porn and musical numbers awaiting exploration as far as less marginal critical practice goes...

Lucio Fulci

“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass” – Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life

“A cry against a certain sort of fascism” – Lucio Fulci, explaining a notorious gore scene in City of the Living Dead

Lucio Fulci was born in 1927 and studied medicine – a revealing first career in the light of his famously gore-drenched horror films – before enrolling in film school. Working as a screenwriter and critic on graduation, Fulci made his directorial debut in 1959 with the youth oriented musical Ragazzi del juke box. The film was not a success at the box office and led to a temporary change in career as Fulci became the lyric writer for a number of Italian pop singers of the time.

Encouraged to return to cinema by his mentor Steno, Fulci established himself something of a comedy specialist with a succession of vehicles for Franco and Ciccio such as I due evasi di sing sing (1964) and 002 Operazione luna (1965). This was not ideal for the cineaste seeking to establish himself, however. The stars of the show were the comics themselves and it was almost a given that critics would find nothing good to say about their or the directors' work in any case.

What the filone cinema gave with one hand it thus took away with the other. While work could be found it was hard to imbue it with personal qualities of the sort encouraged auteurism and, more importantly, to have this recognised by the critical tastemakers. If the constant flow of the filone cinema with its short lived cycles of spaghetti westerns one year and Bondian spy thrillers the next afforded the director the opportunity to try their hand at a wide range of genres and styles, it also tended to discourage longer term commitment to any particular genre, as with the likes of Mario Bava and Sergio Martino, or else constrained the filmmaker to work in it long after he had lost interest, as with Leone's later spaghetti westerns and epic struggle to realise Once Upon a Time in America.

At this time, however, this filone gave Fulci the opportunity to try his hand at something different and thereby demonstrate his versatility. 1966's Massacre Time cannot be considered prime Fulci, however, though has its moments and hints at an affinity with and facility for the violent and grotesque.

The first blossoming of Fulci's talents really emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s through the anti-clerical historical drama Beatrice Cenci, which the director often identified as his best film, and a series of hard-hitting thrillers all'taliana. Having written Double Face (1969) for Riccardo Freda, Fulci reworked the same Hitchcockian material for his own debut in the filone, Perversion Story, a hippie-era reworking of Vertigo that saw him make the first of an intermittent series of US excursions. Unfortunately if Perversion Story (1969) shows that Fulci's grasp of filmmaking technique was up to the minute, it also hinted at a certain uncertainty regarding the younger audience and its counter-culture.

This generation gap also helps explain how it was Dario Argento who would really establish this filone with his “animal trilogy” of 1970-72. Being of a younger generation, Argento better understood the new audience, their attitudes and forms of life.

Yet if the sound-alike titles of Fulci's subsequent gialli A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971) and Don't Torture a Duckling (1972) position them as imitation Argento and their writer-director as an also-ran, the actual style and content of the films again indicates a filmmaker keen to further establish his own identity and reputation. Thus Lizard inverts the structure of Argento's debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) and presents ambiguous dream images in lieu of its thesis-cum-model's concrete flashbacks, while Duckling features a rural southern Italian setting instead of a Roman or northern urban one and a strong anti-clerical streak.

Fulci's talent for provocation and distinctive style were again to the fore in another 1972 film, The Eroticist. A comedy about a sexually repressed senator whose political ambitions threaten to be undone by his compulsion to pinch women's bottoms, that the film found many enemies and few friends indicates just how successful its shotgun blasting of church, state, military, left and right alike was and Fulci's talent for provocation in word and deed alike. (“Argento is an artisan who thinks he's an artist”)

If anything the one-two of Duckling and The Eroticist would seem to have worked too well, insofar as Fulci became somewhat persona non grata for the next few years, which saw him work on a children's adaptation of White Fang (1972) and a sequel Challenge to White Fang (1974), along with comedies such as the largely self-explanatory Dracula in the Provinces and an unusual western, Four of the Apocalypse (both 1975).

The importance of Argento to Fulci's career was confirmed by his next films. The Psychic (1977) presented his response to Argento's Deep Red (1975) by way of introducing a supernatural element into the hitherto naturalistic world of his thrillers while simultaneously pursuing a more restrained, less visceral approach curiously at odds with his rival's trajectory at this time through Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980). Perhaps on account of this The Psychic failed to find an audience, resulting in yet another return to the now all but moribund western filone with Silver Saddle (1978).

Then in 1979 came Dawn of the Dead and Zombie. Released in Italy by Argento, Romero's gory horror comic satire had proven a great success with Italian audiences and, as such, producers saw the prospect of a new and profitable filone to exploit. Fulci was not the first choice to direct Zombie, however, only getting the job after Enzo Castellari passed on it and suggested his name; for perhaps the first and only time in Fulci's career his luck was in.

Astutely described by genre critic Kim Newman as less an imitation Romero than a bloodier return to the B-movies of the thirties and forties, Zombie outdid its part-model in gore and at the international box office whilst providing the defining moment and image of Fulci's career: the once seen, never-forgotten skewering of a woman's eye on a foot-long wooden splinter; hence one side of the Adorno quote with which we introduced this profile.

Directing the underappreciated violent gangster entry The Smuggler (1980) around the same time to further demonstrate his generic breadth and now-established predilection for the visceral, Fulci was rewarded by Zombie producer Fabrizio De Angelis with the opportunity to quickly make three further zombie horror films over the next three years. Often grouped as a loose trilogy on account of their US settings and the constant presence of actress Catriona MacColl, City of the Living Dead (1980), The Beyond (1981)and The House by the Cemetery (1982) continued Fulci's moment in the spotlight.

While certainly drawing inspiration from Argento in their structure and gore set-pieces, with a rain of maggots in City and the evisceration of its owner by a seeing eye dog in The Beyond obvious lifts from Suspiria (1977), these hallucinatory fever-dreams again foreground Fulci's own style above that of his younger rival. Where Argento favours two or three jump cuts closing in, Fulci will use a zoom; where Argento cuts to a detail, Fulci will rack focus onto it; where Argento make the sweeping operatic camera movement central to his set-pieces, Fulci will fix his camera in place, all the better to see that-which-should-not-be-seen.

The tragedy for Fulci, however, was that in thus continuing to consciously differentiate his approach to horror from Argento's he also laid himself wide open for critics to mistake his stylistic choices for incompetence and a dubious fixation with the abject and unconscionable. Few, except that rare horror enthusiast who could see beyond the gore, cared that he had conceived of The Beyond as an exercise in absolute cinema inspired by Artaud's theories of the Theatre of Cruelty or that the killing of a retarded man with a drill through his head might be justified as “a cry against a certain sort of fascism”.

Rather than being different but equal from Argento, Fulci was merely inferior – just as at the wider level the Italian filone cinema tended to be read as inferior to rather than merely different from its Hollywood genre counterparts.

Nor did Fulci's return to the more naturalistic world of the thriller help matters. Released in the same year as Argento's relentlessly self-reflexive – and thus more safely distanced – Tenebrae, 1982's nihilistically bleak The New York Ripper was fundamentally the wrong film at the wrong time, representing male psychosis and female victimhood in ways that seemed all too real in the context of feminist arguments against the slasher film, moral panics about video nasties and a renascent conservatism across most of the western world.

Famously escorted out of the UK by the police after the BBFC had refused to even consider the film for certification, the film lost money for De Angelis.

This perhaps contributed to a compromised budget and vision for Manhattan Baby (1982), a surprisingly restrained horror that nevertheless forms a recognisable companion piece to the absurdist trilogy preceeding it and, corresponding with the ever more precipitous decline of the Italian popular cinema, the effective end of Fulci's brief but brilliant flowering.

Never one to give up without a fight, Fulci nevertheless continued to attempt to adapt to the flow of the filone and second guess audiences and his erstwhile rival throughout the 1980s with such films as the post-apocalyptic Mad Max styled Conquest (1983); the slash-and-dance Flashdance inspired Murderock (1984); the Nine and a Half weeks-esque erotic drama/thriller The Devil's Honey (1986); and an out-and-out rip off of one of Argento's messiest and least appealing films, Phenomena, entitled Aenigma for extra obviousness (1987).

Though having their moments, films like these remain strictly for the already converted, the kind of texts where much of the pleasure comes from that often dubious game of spotting the auteur's signature touch.

An official sequel to Zombie in 1988 offered Fulci the chance to kick-start his flagging career but was scuppered by the illness that was to dog him for the remainder of his life and career. Remaining keen to keep working till the last, the late 1980s and early 1990s saw few willing to take the chance on Fulci, with the result a series of ultra-low budget horror movies like A Cat in the Brain and Voices from Beyond (both 1990) which could only really be sold to undemanding video gore fans and/or the small but growing cult around the director.

Having spend over 20 years sniping at one another Argento and Fulci then remarkably became reconciled with one another in the mid-1990s with the younger director agreeing to produce and bankroll his former rival's comeback picture, an adaptation of Leroux's oft-filmed tale The Wax Museum.

Unfortunately as the film was in pre-production Fulci died. The circumstances were characteristically ambiguous: a diabetic, he either forgot to or declined to take his medication. We were thus left to wonder what might have been and a distinctive cinematic legacy whose generic diversity and stylistic and thematic consistency have too often gone under-acknowledged through an at times regrettable, if understandable, fixation on one particular gore subset of this whole.

As much as a damaged life – to again return to the Adorno quote with which we introduced this profile – Fulci’s was thus a damaged career, doomed to be misunderstood at the time it mattered, when he was alive.

Yet, like one of his famous zombies, Fulci's cinematic legacy has an undeath through the enthusiasm of high-profile fans like Quentin Tarantino, whose Rollling Thunder imprint re-released The Beyond theatrically in 1998, and lovingly restored by-the-fans-for-the-fans DVD releases exploring the breadth and depth of his filmography, which I would urge everyone reading this to rediscover.

[As part of a writing on film class I'm doing we had to do a profile of a film personality who interests us, so I chose Fulci; I'm not sure if Ragazzi del juke box is really a musical...]

Coartada en disco rojo / I Due volti della paura / The Two Faces of Fear

Suppose it's 1972 and you're making a giallo. Sure, you've managed to secure the services of George Hilton, Fernando Rey, Luciana Paluzzi, Edouardo Fajardo and Fernando Rey; a formidable cast that should appeal to audiences in your target co-production markets of Spain and Italy. But is it enough – how many times have your audience seen Hilton do that same shifty suspect schtick or Strindberg play the ice-maiden already? What can you do to try to stand out in a crowded marketplace?

Well, if you're Tulio Demicheli the answer seemed to be to bring in some open heart surgery footage...


Would make for a good double bill with Night of the Bloody Apes?

It's a mondo-style attraction-repulsion device that makes or breaks what is otherwise be a pretty average giallo where all the right ingredients are present, but not quite mixed in the proper proportions.




It's like this officer: I was just cleaning it and it went off...

We open with a classic subjective-cameras scene. The crime is theft rather than murder, however – that comes later, with the weapon of choice unusually a pistol.

We're already getting ahead of ourselves, however, inasmuch as there is a considerable chunk of exposition to get through beforehand. Pay attention now:

The thing stolen was Dr Michele Azzini's letter accepting a job at a clinic in Milan. This clinic is the rival to the one where he and his fiancee Paola Lombardi (Strindberg) work. Paola was – and perhaps still is – in a relationship with another colleague, Dr Roberto Carli (Hilton). His wife Elena (Paluzzi) owns the clinic, which she inherited from her father and has built up with the assistance of her loyal manager – and, as we later learn, former lover – Luisi (Fajardo).




Reading too much into a tense exchange of gazes?

Elena also has a serious heart condition which needs operated on. While Roberto could perform the operation, it offers a way of exerting emotional pressure on Michele to stay at the clinic for the time being lest the offer of a 25 per cent share in the clinic not sway him...

The relative weight of these factors proves somewhat moot when Michele is murdered.

Inspector Nardi (Rey) is called in to investigate and while soon identifying the weapon – a Remington 9mm pistol, exactly like the one Elena owns, but which has now suspiciously gone missing – has considerably more trouble with motive and opportunity, with a surfeit of the former and a paucity of the latter. Everyone, it seems, has an alibi...



“I even massaged his prostate”
“Massages his prostate. Don't you know that's against the rules!” – Nardi's assistant tries to coax information out of a parrot which witnessed the crime.

Unfortunately his confusions are shared by the audience alike until late in the day, with the general sense of a narrative and character relationships that are too convoluted for their own good and of a failure to satisfactorily establish whether or not we have another point of identification with the narrative until decidedly late in the proceedings.

It is Elena who emerges as the woman in peril through an extended stalking sequence. The thing is that Elena's stalker turns out to have been one of Nardi's own men...










All the Colours of the Dark...

If, that is, it was a way of determining whether her condition was for real – it seems to be, since she's the one who then goes under the surgeon's rather than the slasher's blade, though the outcome may be the same – and/or of forcing the others to show their true colours, it was a decidedly risky one that doesn't quite convince, especially as things then play out...

While The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh used a similar device, it worked because we were with Edwige Fenech's character and had also been let in on enough of the conspiracy against her to know broadly where our loyalties lay; Strange Vice achieved a better balance between suspense and surprise where The Two Faces of Fear too often piles on one surprise after another.

Demichelli just over-eggs it: almost every little gesture and detail, every exchange of dialogue or looks amongst the central quartet is equally replete with potential meaning and thus equally meaningless, leading to too many things which go nowhere – a letter that may incriminate one suspect, an insurance policy that suggests a further motive for another – and a failure to satisfactorily engage the viewer in the process of playing detective for him or herself.

There are some gialli where you can watch them a second or third time and really appreciate the director's craft, the way he subtly directs or misdirects your attentions and presumptions – Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is perhaps the most obvious example, though Amadeo's Smile Before Death also comes to mind – but this is not one of them. Just as the those who take a psychoanalytic approach to each and every case need to be reminded a cigar is sometimes only a cigar, here Demicheli needs to be reminded that sometimes a closeup of a detail is only a close up of a detail.




Yet more stairwells to die for, even with the compositions somewhat off in the non-OAR presentation

It's more of a shame because when Dimicheli goes for the self-consciously stylish image – a defamiliarising shots of a stairwell here; some expressive use of colour there; a recurring theme of the need to read the signs – he gets it. Likewise, his failure is that of trying too hard rather than not hard enough.








It's all about reading the signs

On the plus side Rey's good-humoured, world-weary detective, who quit smoking six months previously and finds his and others' nicotine cravings to be a constant distraction, is an endearing creation. The other performances are effective, but never quite rise about the level of doing the same thing as we've seen elsewhere. Indeed, in the case of Hilton in particular this is to Two Faces of Fear's detriment because one tends to thereby recall other more consistently trashy yet engaging gialli like The Case of the Bloody Iris.

Franco Micalizzi's score is another asset and, being more in the giallo than the poliziotto vein, serves as a useful reminder of his versatility.

Locandine collector blog

Self-explanatory really: a blog with locandine

http://locanblog.blogspot.com/

Anyone got a spare forty thousand?

Currently on Ebay - two original Simeoni paintings from The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock of Barbara Steele and Teresa Fitzgerald:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/SIMEONI-FREDA-RAPTUS-IMPOSSIBLE-PAINTINGS-INTO-THE-FILM_W0QQitemZ300199318722QQihZ020QQcategoryZ197QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Il Porno shop della settima strada / The Pleasure Shop on 7th Avenue

Two desperate thieves, Bob (Ernest Arnold according to the credits and IMDB, though one strongly suspects he is in fact Ernesto Colli) and Ricky, rob a chemist, despite the owners indications that he is protected by the mob, specifically one Archie Moran, and that they are thus making a big mistake.

Sure enough, two of Moran's goons soon arrive seeking their weekly protection, forcing the thieves to flee out the back door. Trying to evade their purusers the two men find themselves in the titular “pleasure shop” and on learning that its manager Lorna (Annamaria Clementi) is the girlfriend of the selfsame Moran decide to kidnap her. They figure she could prove a useful bargaining chip as they hastily improvise an escape plan, entailing getting the hell out of New York and making for the Canadian border with the weekend traffic.


D'Amato borrows the old hall of mirrors shot...

After collecting the mutual acquaintance who suggested the job in the first place, Sammy (Peter Outlaw –the kind of pseudonym that makes you wonder what other credits he may have that aren’t listed on the IMDB, with this being his only one), they break into what should be an empty suburban house suitable for hiding out in, only to find it unexpectedly occupied by three students, the couple Frank (Christian Borromeo) and Sue and the repressed Faye (Brigitte Petronio), who have themselves broken in.

A sex and violence variant on the classic Desperate Hours scenario thus ensues, with Moran and his men closing in all the while thanks to a message surreptitiously dropped by Lorna...




You won't find a greater hive of scum and villainy...

One of the distinguishing features of Joe D'Amato's cinema in the 1970s was his enthusiasm for blending sex and other material, most often horror. It's an approach I'd previously tended to dismiss as simple opportunism, a calculation seemingly based on the premise that if X percent of his audience wanted the former and Y percent the latter then by including both he could appeal to the larger constituency Z, comprising X plus Y. While I still think there is an element of truth to this, along with the possibility that this combination more often than not likely alienated as many from each camp as it brought in, that Z equals the lesser intersection of X and Y, it also failed to place a film like The Porno Shop on Seventh Avenue in context, as the product of the period in which porn cinema had moved from loop with no pretence of presenting anything other than sex to features which strove to integrate their sexual numbers into a narrative framework.


A female voyeur

Likewise, though I still believe that the likes of Erotic Nights of the Living Dead or Porno Holocaust are unsuccessful hybrids in conventional terms, as much “turn off” as “turn on” for even D’Amato’s audience, this film actually works pretty well as a sleazy sex-and violence one-two. The key difference, I think, is that it is lower key, operating in the naturalistic terror arena than the supernatural horror one. Moreover, it also manages to avoid the kind of mythic contrivances that weaken many other Last House on the Left style entries, barring the convenient coincidence of having the two groups happen to choose the same des-res; the obvious point of comparison here, given the presence of Christian Borromeo and Brigitte Petronio, some card playing and casual racism in both films, is Ruggero Deodato’s House on the Edge of the Park.
The film’s discourses around race are, as so often the case in D’Amato’s films (Tough to Kill, the Black Emanuelle series etc.) themselves intriguing. Sammy is black and the butt of much casual racism from his white colleagues, who are identified as Italian or Puerto Rican by the Jewish-coded shopkeeper Cohen; clearly there is a lot going on here, even if much of it is confused and contradictory.

Much the same applies to the film’s treatment of gender. There are numerous awkward shifts in tone where any given situation may shift from no-means-no rape to no-means-yes 70s porno rape or similar dubious male fantasy scenario. Yet given the set-up we might also sometimes be able to contextualise these as somewhat rational attempts by the three women to make the best of a bad situation, as when Sue offers herself to Bob when he appears about to rape Faye.

Unfortunately as far as mounting any kind of critique of masculinity and making quasi-feminist justifications for the film goes, it's also precisely at such moments that D'Amato's inevitably reminds us of his real motives and audience: the music segues from suspense to porn cues as, rather than taking the opportunity to escape or actively turn the tables, the woman also gets down.

Yet one also, as ever, gets a sense of an admittedly paradoxical disarming naïvete behind D'Amato's calculating crassness throughout the film, that he really doesn't take any of this terribly seriously and probably wonders how anyone could ever do so.

It's all entertainment, however dubious, and as such needs to be taken in terms of whether it’s a worthwhile way to spend 90 minutes. Obviously if you're seeking life-changing cinema, D'Amato is not your man. But if what you want is a bit of sex, a bit of violence and a bit of I-can't-believe-I-just-saw-that – one moment of note being when, having just been saved Bob’s attentions Faye then lies back to enjoy the show as they have sex and masturbates herself; though sleazehounds should also be aware be there is nothing here to compare with the likes of Emanuelle in America – he can be always relied upon to deliver the goods. In keeping with this general attitude, there's even a happy ending of sorts for almost all concerned.

Besides being technically tolerably well-made – D’Amato serves as his own cinematographer under his real name Aristide Massaccessi once more, even if more as an economic than an aesthetic decision – and making the most of its limited range of locations, cast and musical selections, the film proves of considerable interest as a document of a demi-monde and type of cinema long past. While few will mourn their passing, for those of us who welcome an alternative to bland Hollywood product and a diversity of cinema, the re-emergence of films like The Porno Shop on Seventh Avenue is to be very much welcomed.

[The film was released with English subtitles by Luminous Film and Video Wurks and can be downloaded in AVI format from Cinemageddon]

L' Assassino... è al telefono / The Killer Is on the Phone / Scenes from a Murder

Arriving back in Ostend after spending a few days working in London, acclaimed actress Eleanor (Anne Heywood) suffers a shock when she crosses paths with hitman Drasovic (Telly Savalas).


We open with the arrival of a ferry rather than a jet, though elsewhere Drasovic repeatedly reschedules a flight to London

The effect is to make her forget all that has happened in the last five years - neither that her home in Zune Street has long been demolished; nor that her fiance, Peter, was killed by Drasovic; nor her subsequent marriage to George.








The moment of recognition; a OAR presentation would undoubtedly help us appreciate the scene better here

But whereas Eleanor can't yet place where she has seen Drasovic before, he realises that she is an unforeseen loose that needs tying up before he returns to the job at hand, that of assassinating the man responsible for brokering a deal between oil producers and petrochemical companies.


A later moment of misrecognition as the assassin strikes at who he believes to be Eleanor; note the use of the screen between the two as an echo of the earlier images

The mystery, meanwhile, is whether someone amongst Eleanor's personal and professional circle might have hired Drasovic all those years ago; certainly there is no shortage of suspects:

Dr Chandler: I'd like to try a shot of Pentathol

Thomas, Eleanor's stage partner: Isn't that dangerous

Dorothy, Eleanor's sister and potentially jealous understudy: Only if you're afraid of the truth

Dr Chandler: Is anybody here afraid of it?

George: Of course not.

Cue potentially telling exchange of glances between those present.

The film has a literate, self-reflexive script, even referencing Pirandello at one point (“one shot of pentathol and his philosophy [of truth] goes down the drain,” according to Thomas) but is ultimately too conventional to succeed as a Tenebre-style mise-en-abyme deconstruction of giallo conventions.




A fetishistic arrangement of watches conceals the real tools of the assassin's trade

There's no real prospect that Eleanor will emerge as the one who conspired to have Peter killed and that this explains her repressed memories, for instance.

While it can fairly be argued that this isn't its goal, as further demonstrated by the identity and motive of Drasovic's employer five years earlier, the film is also less successful than Puzzle as an amnesia themed giallo.

One thus gets the same impression as with Alberto De Martino’s other gialli, such as Man with the Icy Eyes and Blood Link: he certainly has an affinity for the genre and the capacity to come up with intriguing situations, but never quite manages to bring them to realization on screen to their full potential.

The characterisations of Eleanor and Drasovic are too straightforward (though the latter’s penchant for collecting model soldiers is a nice touch) while the mise-en-scene lacks the kind of enigmatic details to draw one in and reward careful or repeat viewings; there is nothing comparable to the musical clock in Tessari's film.

Yet if the one-note nature of Heywood and Savalas's characters largely restricts their performances to neurotic woman-in-peril and killer automaton cliche, it cannot be denied that both are effective, playing their roles as if to the manner born.

Moreover, this also creates that bit more space and purpose for the supporting cast, insofar as in addition to fulfilling the usual functions of suspects, red herrings and additional victims, somewhere amongst their number we know there must be the point of connection between the leads, grating each line or gesture that potential additional bit of gravitas.

The film was lensed by Aristide Massaccessi and, as such, looks good. Stelvio Cipriani’s mournful themes are another asset, as are his effective suspense cues and shock stingers.