E Tanta Paura / Plot of Fear

Two murders, those of well-known sexual deviant Mattia Grandi and a middle-aged woman, Laura Falconieri, occur on the same night in Milan, a connection between them established through what is soon to become the killer's calling card: illustrations from Pierino Porcospino / Shock Headed Peter, a tale by E T A Hoffmann.


Mattia's apartment


Complete with a representation of lion, subtly introducing a plot point


The man with the worst anglicised pseudonym, Franco Fumigalli alias Frank Smokecocks

Lieutenant Lomenzo (Michele Placido), a progressive-minded Neapolitan cop transferred up to Milan and determined to do his best to disprove Northern Italian stereotypes of their Southern countrymen is assigned the case.


One of the killer's calling cards

His investigations soon reveal that both victims were members of a group known as the Wildlife Friends. Though their name sounds innocent, their activities were decidedly less so, involving orgies at the Villa Hoffmann. Then again, immorality and illegality are not the same thing – unless you happen to be of a more conservative mindset than Lomenzo who, when asked why he doesn't arrest a couple making love in public, replies that he's “on their side.” More importantly, the group split up years ago, however, following the death of its founder and the villa's owner, Hoffmann (John Steiner) himself.





An example of the film's pervasive wit

As the “cartoon killer” continues to murder, Lomenzo makes the acquaintance of Jeanne (Corrine Clery), an associate of his girlfriend Ruth, who provides some futher clues in the case.


The first encounter between Lomenzo and Jeanne, in the lift

She confesses to Lomenzo that she was present at the Villa Hoffman on the night a prostitute, Rosa Catena, died of a heart attack at one of the Wildlife Friends' orgies after the Friends acted as if they were going to feed the girl to a tiger.


Riccio expounds his philosophy

A number of things do not make sense, however. Isn't it somewhat out of character for Rosa's former pimp, Agostino, to be seeking revenge on the remaining members of the Wildlife Friends as Jeanne contends – especially after four years have passed since her death. Wouldn't a tiger have been sent from Asia and not Africa, to which it is not a native species? Why should a vagrant glimpsed on the grounds of the villa be wearing nearly new, obviously expensive shoes? What motivates the enigmatic private investigator Pietro Riccio (Eli Wallach), who seems to have just about everyone of importance in the city – including the killers' victims – under surveillance, in providing advice and assistance to Lomenzo? Is Jeanne implicated in more than she lets on – and, if so, will the clearly infauated Lomenzo be able to separate out his professonial and the personal involments with her?


The Biancaneve style sexy cartoon

E Tanta Paura / Plot of Fear's Writer-director Paulo Cavara only made two gialli, this and the earlier Black Belly of the Tarantula, but they are enough to mark him out as someone with a distinctive take on the form. While he foregrounds the official police investigator above the conventional amateur sleuth here, this cannot entirely be explained away as a consession to the poliziotto audience insofar as the earlier film, made at the height of the post-Bird with the Crystal Plumage, used the same device.

In both cases, moreover, the cop and the mystery he investigates retain a distance from the polziotto act first, think later approach. It is not that Michele Placido or Giancarlo Giannini are incapable of doing the action man thing when required, as envinced here by the lengthy chase and fight that leads to the apprehension of Agostini, more that Cavara seems to prefer more sensitive, introspective and downright quirky cop figures above one dimensional displays of crowd-pleasing macho bullheadedness.

Put another way, it's hard to imagine Maurizio Merli entertaining the thought of eating macrobiotic food in preference to spaghetti and sugo or referencing positivist criminologist Cesare Lombroso by way of criticising his partners' common-sense approach to policework as Placido does here.










Politics and mirrors

Although such moments lighten the mood they are never allowed to dominate, with the audience constantly being reminded of the deadly serious nature of the game: No sooner have we been introduced to Grandi in his garishly decorated apartment and Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band reject outfit and his particular sexual peccadilloes (“Did you ever have him?” “No, I'm in the lesbian department. He hung out at the S&M fetish area in Porta Volta”) than he is strangled to death. The Amuck-like pornographic cartoon that plays in Jeanne's account of activities at the Villa Hoffmann likewise raises a smile, but were's soon dragged back down to reality as the luckless, soon to be dead, Rosa is called upon to service one of the guests with a blow-job under the table while the others attempt to guess who the lucky man is from the expression on his face. Then there's the moment when one of the rapidly dwindling number of Wildlife Friends, having decided to get out of Milan before it is too late, gives the finger to a hitchhiker on the autostrada only for his own car to break down and the driver of the passing lorry he tries to flag down give him the same treatment, after which he is then run down by the next vehicle...

The film was co-scripted by frequent Fellini collabotor and Deep Red co-writer Bernardino Zapponi, with a sense of connection to the Argento film through the haunted house, children's story and return of the past motifs. At the same time, however, one also wonders if Argento was thinking of Plot of Fear's use of Hoffman when he made Sleepless, with its nursery-rhyme killer also leaving distinctive calling cards with each victim.

Steiner is amusingly typecast, with his character at one point admitting to having a father in the SS. While obviously cast for her physical assets and willingness to display them, Clery again impresses by making something more enigmatic of her character, making you wonder whether she is expressing her genuine feelings or putting on a very good performance. Placido and Wallach are even better, the former trying too hard to live up to an impossible ideal and the latter by turns impish, deadly earnest and simply enigmatic, someone who may be a Mabuse but not necessarily an entirely malign one.

If the film has a weakness, it is that it raises more questions than it can hope to answer on the incommensurability of law and order and the fixedness versus changeability of human nature, with the ambiguous denoument being likely to disappoint more mainstream audiences wanting to see something more traditional and unequivocal by which the bad guy(s) are unmasked and punished and the good guy(s) triumphant. It does work out that way, but only in an approximate, so-so way at best...




More reflections

Cavara's direction is effective, drawing us in to the mystery and providing enough hints as to what might be going on without being so obvious as to overdo things. Thus, for example, while the climax foregrounds the role of mirrors, their deploymenpt through the course of the narrative is more subtle, seen in the likes of repeated shots of the Placido and company driving around, the streets above them frequently reflected on their windscreens, or in opening a shot with an image on a surface. Vision, or its obscuring, are pivotal.




Men are pigs?

When he goes for the jugular he can also provide effective shocks as well, as when a pan along a row of gutted pigs in a slaughterhouse ends with one of cartoon killer's victims on a meathook, or the burning alive of another, “Joan of Arc” style.

Daniele Patucchi's music is less satisfactory, though the fuzz guitar driven main theme is endearingly trashy and very catchy. The suspense cues could be better, however.

The film is available on R0 DVD from Raro.

La Ragazza dal pigiama giallo / The Pyjama Girl Case

The body of a young woman is found on the beach, her face burned beyond recognition. The post-mortem reveals that she had been shot and bludgeoned. In addition to the official investigation, retired old-timer Inspector Timpson (Ray Milland) takes an interest in the case, which soon becomes an obsession.


The true face of horror

Deciding that before they can find the killer they must first identify the victim, the police have the body embalmed and put on public display. This seems to give them the break they need, leading to the arrest of a low-life by the name of Quint.

Timpson, however, is not convinced and goes to a rendezvous with the man he believes to be the real killer. The correctness of his deduction is confirmed by his own murder, compelling his ex-colleagues to re-open the case...






The macabre, Damien Hirst-like exhibition of the pyjama girl to the Sydney public


Luis Barboo in a cameo appearance as one of the audience; note the yellow of the perspex of the girls's glass cage

Though La Ragazza dal pigiama giallo / The Pyjama Girl Case / The Girl in the Yellow Pyjamas is the film certainly belongs within the form, as signalled by its self-referential title, hardly your typical giallo.

Drawing its inspiration from a notorious real-life murder case that shocked 1930s Australia (and which is examined in detail on the featurette on Blue Underground's excellent DVD) the film avoids the conventional trappings of black gloved killers, subjective stalk and slash camera and so on, favouring a low-key approach that's almost documentary like at times, most notably in its warts-and-all exploration of the demi-monde of Sydney's immigrant communities. (“Don't tell me you're jealous – Oh yes, you're Italian...”)


Michele Placido plays to the Italian stereotype


Stylised, but not too stylised?

It also throws the viewer expecting a conventional giallo for a loop through the device – only understood retrospectively – of introducing the pyjama girl to us in a parallel narrative, without revealing that it takes place in the past.

Indeed, thanks to the inclusion of a conventionally connoted vaseline-on-the-lens type dreamy “I remember” flashback in which she and her friend go to bed together, we could easily think that the latter is the victim and that what's about to develop is your standard psychosexual killer seeking to punish deviant women type affair.

What emerges is far more disturbing precisely on account of its banality, as we see how the “pyjama girl” (Dalila Di Lazarro) is deserted by her lover (Mel Ferrer), marries another (Michele Placido) on the rebound, embarks on an affair with a third (Howard Ross / Renato Rossini) and falls pregnant, en route to a denouement that's less premeditated murder than the inevitable accidental outcome of circumstances.

It's the kind of everyday tragedy that we find in neo-realism – the peasant girl mistaken for the GI's killer in Paisa and then shot as a Nazi collaborator, say – or in Pabst's Pandora's Box – the pyjama girl as a 1970s Lulu – of all-too-human characters rather than would-be supermen.

Equally, however, these two unlikely seeming reference points also point to one of the film's few weaknesses, perhaps stemming from director and co-writer Flavio Mogherini's background as a production designer.

It's that tension between simply showing the world out there and making more obvious interventions, of whether its enough in itself to show a factory floor to make a socio-political point or make it a more overtly expressionistic / symbolic unnatural landscape, or what the use of slow-motion and yellow lighting say as the pyjama girl ascends the stairs with the men to whom she has agreed to prostitute herself.








The giallo as exploitation and commentary on exploitation

Sometimes, as in both these instances, the ostensible gulf between objective and subjective is intersubjectively resolved in that poetic manner Mikel Koven distinguishes, although I would contend that there is also a greater degree of conscious artistry here than his thesis would seem to admit of. Elsewhere, however, as with the red and green lights that Mogherini likes to have play across the pyjama girl's face, it feels too self-conscious and contrived.




A case of Bava or Argento-itis

In a similar vein, if it seems impossible for directors to film in Sydney without including a scene or two in front of the opera house there are again potential subtexts: what does it represent, but a vision of the Australian dream; a dream only available to the disadvantaged and disenfranchised as an exterior to be taken in but not actually entered into.

As Troy Howarth pointed out, there are certain parallels between the film and Dario Argento's Sleepless, where Ulysses Moretti is also a retired ex-detective whose unofficial investigation is regarded with suspicion and / or derision by his younger counterparts, but ultimately leads to the solving of the case – albeit at the cost of his life as he gets too close to the truth. (“Times have changed. The modern delinquent's a different breed... don't take this to heart but age isn't on your side and God knows what you might run into in a case of this kind.”)

Yet beyond this Sleepless is the more traditional and conventional giallo through its cunning psychopath playing games with the police and extensive use of the subjective camera killers' eye-view set pieces, precisely because it represented an attempt by its director to “get back to basics” and give his core audience what they wanted / expected after the debacle of Phantom of the Opera.

Where Argento does seem to succeed, however, is in painting a more convincing picture of modern versus traditional police methods, insofar as here modern methods come down to old-fashioned brutality as a confession is forcibly extracted from Quint. Unless, of course, that's the point the film-makers were making here, of a sense of frustration creeping in as new technological and criminological approaches fail to deliver what they promise:

“I've got a theory. In my opinion the girl was raped before she was killed, obviously by some psychopath. Probably a man with a castration complex.”

Again, one comes down to that interpretive richness that makes the film so fascinating to review...






The alien geography of Sydney

Minor criticisms notwithstanding, The Pyjama Girl Case emerges as an impeccably mounted example of the filone as non-filone, the kind of giallo where the writing, direction, performances – Di Lazarro and Michele Placido are particularly outstanding as the ill-fated couple – and overall seriousness of tone, where the sleazy and salacious details always have that double edge to them, perhaps most eloquently expressed in the gallery sequence where the girl's body is exhibited like some perverse artwork before crowds of ambiguously motivated public spirited and / or ghoulish types, could appeal to wider audiences for whom the term “European cult cinema” is otherwise anathema.


A Bava-esque pieta?