Il fiore dai petali d'acciaio / The Flower with Petals of Steel

Although I had seen The Flower with the Petals of Steel before, it was only via a rather fuzzy bootleg video copy. As such, I hadn't felt comfortable about discussing it until now, when the opportunity to see the film via a considerably better looking Italian television sourced rip emerged courtesy of Cinemageddon.

As it turns out, my feelings about Gianfranco Piccioli's giallo remain much the same.


The enigmatic opening sequence takes place under water

Visually many of the scenes are still dark, though it is a film with a lot of skulking around at night. Aurally Marcello Giombini's score, while at least distinctive from the dominant Morricone/Nicolai idiom of the time by virtue of following his own style, still seems that bit out of place.

It has a decent cast, headed by Gianni Garko and Carroll Baker; some nice production design – especially the titular sculpture and a broken doll scene – along with plenty of early 70s fashions; some nudity – the ever-game Baker in the shower, plus more from Paola Senatore and Pilar Velazques – and, to top it all of, prominent J&B placement and use.


There's plenty of this sort of thing from Senatore and Velazques, a bit less from Baker

In the main the film can perhaps best be compared to Four Flies on Grey Velvet, in that it's a study of a guilty protagonist and places suspense over surprise.

The obvious difference is in what happens immediately after the pivotal death upon which the narrative rests:

In Four Flies' Roberto Tobias flees the theatre after accidentally stabbing the man who has been following him and causing his fall into the orchestra pit.

Doctor Andreas Valenti (Garko) here is not in a position to flee, the accidental impalement of his lover Daniela (Senatore) onto the sharp metal flower sculpture occurring in his own home.


An accident waiting to happen

Valenti's immediate provides for one of the film's more shocking sequences, as he calmly dismembers Daniela's body, bags up the pieces and drives off to dispose of them in a grinder.

But these actions also make sense, as we later learn that his ex-wife – whom he inherited a considerable sum from – was committed to an asylum shortly after their marriage, vanished from the institution, and has not been seen since.


A Spasmo-esque moment

Still, no body equals no crime – but for a few complications:

Someone saw Valenti in the act and soon starts sending him the evidence to prove it.

Another ex-lover, Evelyn (Baker), who is presently in a relationship with Daniela, wonders where she is, especially since her car is still parked outside Valenti's house, and duly involves the police...

This narrative is bookended by two underwater sequences, with the opening one remaining absolutely detached from the main narrative and remaining unanswered until the end. This in itself isn't necessarily a problem, if one thinks of the similar fragments in, say, Rabid Dogs, but there the beginning, middle and end at least cohere into one film. Here, by contrast, the linkage between the parts just feels arbitrary and strains credibility, even by the already tolerant standards of the filone.

Il Corpo / The Body

The presence of Carroll Baker in this 1975 film from Luigi Scattini neatly makes its claims to be a giallo that bit clearer. For, if featuring no black gloved killers nor traumatic incidents in a characters past now erupting into the present, it does include a noir style conspiracy in which the participants are motivated by passion and / or prospective financial advantage.

But unlike the various films she made with Umberto Lenzi a few years earlier, Baker is here cast in a supporting role rather than as a conspirator or victim, with the majority of the drama instead revolving around the triangle of Enrico Maria Salerno, Zeudi Araya and Leonard Mann.

Salerno plays Antoine, a New York cabbie who won the lottery and left the rat race behind to go live in the tropical paradise of Trinidad.

That, at least, was the theory.

The practice has thus far proven somewhat different, entailing little more than a change of scenery, more mosquitoes, and a shift from driving a cab to piloting a boat.

Indeed, given that the story actually starts with two locals attacking Antoine because he apparently owes them money it's possible that his life could even be considered to have gotten worse, were it not for one major compensation.


Antoine and Alan

That is Araya. She plays Princess, a beautiful islander who serves as Antoine's lover and housekeeper.

Mann plays Alan, the drifter who rescues Antoine. With Alan soon proving as handy with boats as with his fists, Antoine offers him work and a place to stay.


Images of the characters behind symbolic bars recur throughout the film to convey their senses of entrapment

Though Princess initially gives Alan a frosty reception, this facade soon melts as they spend some time together away from Antoine's watchful eye.


Princess tries on the yellow rather than black dress as she prepares to make her move

Then, however, Princess turns cold again, although this only proves to be a test of Alan's commitment to their relationship and how far he is willing to go to be with her:



“Alan, do you really love me?”

“You know I love you.”

“Do you really love me very much? Do you love me enough to do anything at all for me?”

“Yes”

“Then, darling, I want you to kill him.”

But, as with Ossessione – a possible model given its own noir origins, comparable triangle of two men and one woman, and oppressive setting that the woman wants to get away from – the question is first whether words are one thing and deeds another and then, once the deed is done, whether the conspirators will get away with it...

Scattini's direction is simple but effective, juxtaposing a direct handheld camera style that gives a raw documentary feel with more carefully composed touristic imagery and some generally judicously used shock zooms.

The performances from Baker, Salerno and Mann are pleasing, benefitting from their willingness to engage with their characters, warts and all.


Unusually Antoine drinks rum rather than J&B whisky

One moment that particularly stands out in this regard is the first encounter between Baker and Salerno, in which we also learn of their past history together:

Madeleine's latest love has left her, as Antoine foretold he would. Having hit the bottle hard she is torn between being her desire not to be seen by her former husband in such a dissolute state and her momentary craving for his attention and affection, as those selfsame things that he is unable and unwilling to give.


The deglamourised Baker

If this scene would pose no threat to Baker in the context of a stage production of some respectable play about a middle-aged, alcoholic racist, commutated to the screen in the form of a popular film it carried more of a risk of typecasting for the 40-something star, as someone only suitable for portraying faded and tarnished glamour. (“You don't want that black bitch. Don't you understand – you don't own her, you're the slave, the slave of a black body!”)

As The Body of the title, Araya's role necessarily provides less to work with. Though perhaps not managing to transcend its limitations, her performance is nevertheless credible and belies her history as a beauty queen and model in a way that makes it clear Scattini was justified in casting her in a number of his films. (It also left me wondering what she might have brought to the Black Emanuelle franchise, in that disregarding Laura Gemser's beauty the Dutch-Indonesian actress does tend towards a certain inexpressiveness that sometimes detracts when her character presents the same blasé indifference to each and every encounter, no matter how outre.)






The body – Araya displaying her charms


Not Tinti and Gemser, but Mann and Araya

Scattini, Massimo Felisatti and Fabio Pittorru's writing is also better than average. Though they throw a number of twists into the tale, some of which are also pleasingly ironic, there is nothing that emerges as contrived either whilst watching the story unfold or reconstructing it retrospectively.

Instead, seemingly incidental aspects come to attain a greater significance. Note, for example, Antoine's drunken remarks to Alan that drifters and thieves are one and the same after they have failed to catch some apparent intruders one night, as an indication of suspicions of his new friend and that he's more on the ball than his habitually dishevelled, drunken state suggests. Or note Princess's request that Antoine get her a pair of shoes when he is in town, having hitherto declined to wear them.

Piero Umiliani contributes a beautifully evocative score that is by turns soothing, melancholy, romantic and impassioned, with Hammond organ grooves, lush vocalism and all the his trademark ingredients present; more generally, looking at the list of Umiliani and Scattini's collaborations, it's clear that they were very much in tune with one another, resulting in a series of scores that work beyond the images they support and which, like the film, can be enthusiastically recommended to those willing to go beyond the more familiar Argento / Martino / Morricone / Nicolai giallo idioms of the time.

[I watched the film through an English dubbed AVI from Cinemageddon]

Carroll Baker

Just noticed from the IMDB link that today is the 77th birthday of one of my favourite giallo divas, Carroll Baker. Hope she has a good one :-)

Il Fiore dai petali d'acciaio / The Flower with Petals of Steel

Surgeon Andrea Valenti (Gianni Garko) has a problem: he has just accidentally killed his latest girlfriend, Daniella (Paola Senatore), after she somehow contrived to impale herself on a jagged metal sculpture, presumably the flower with the petals of steel of the characteristically enigmatic title.

Andrea takes stock of the situtation. He wanted rid of her anyway and there is no-one to suspect that she is here. Accordingly he makes use of his skills, dismembers her body, disposes of it in a vat and generally plans to act as if nothing had happened.

Needless to say, there is quickly a complication. Daniella's half-sister Evelyne (Carroll Baker), who was once also Andrea's lover, wonders where she has disappeared to and, convinced that he knows more than he is letting on, goes to the police.




Mandatory Carroll Baker shower moment

While Ispettore Garrano's investigation finds nothing to directly implicate Andrea in the crime – if indeed it is a crime, seeing as there is no body nor trace of one to substantiate Evelyne's suspicions – the circumstantial evidence mounts when it is revealed, again via Evelyne's intervention, that the womanising doctor owes his position to an advantageous marriage. Or, rather, a marriage which was advantageous to him, insofar as his wife has long been institutionalised in the asylum...


The flower

Meanwhile, Andrea receives mysterious telephone calls and incriminating photographs of the incident with Daniella...

This Italian-Spanish co-production has one major problem. It just doesn't work, being the kind of film whose surprise ending – itself a somewhat ironic and ambiguous one, the conspirators on their boat thinking themselves to have gotten away with it all whilst the authorities are at the quayside; the kind of crime does (not) pay ending that one could well imagine being reworked for different territories, moralities and censorship regimes – produces a profound sense of dissatisfaction.


Iconic image #1


Iconic image #2


Iconic image #3 (that's a black gloved hand with a blade)


Iconic image #4

Part of the issue is that neither Garko nor Baker has a character we can particularly identify with and, more importantly, that we do not really know what positions we are supposed to take towards them and the situations presented within the narrative. It is not, of course, that a giallo needs to have a single strong, positive protagonist. Four Flies on Grey Velvet's Roberto Tobias is also responsible for an accidental death after all, but at least we know that his predicament is central to the unfolding narrative. Likewise, if Death Laid an Egg encourages us to take a detached view of its quartet of conspiring bourgeois, we understand that this is what director Questi wants us to do, the rules of his particular game.

Here, by contrast, we don't know if Evelyne, who clearly knows Andrea all too well, is conspiring against him or genuinely concerned for her sister, while the simple fact of the philandering Andrea's dismembering and disposing of Daniella's body makes somewhat difficult to have any positive feelings towards whatsoever. Again, however, we don't really understand his actions from what is presented before us.

Building on these reference points, it's also the sense that writer-director Gianfranco Piccioli doesn't really have anything to say and is just going through the motions, whether it be Baker's seemingly contractual shower sequence; Garko hitting the J&B; the detective / analyst comparisons as the police inspector pays a visit to the asylum and its head, played by Umberto Raho, or the inevitable point-of-view razor slashing and pseudo-lesbian sequences.


Effective compositions highlight the ambiguity of the characters, but leave the viewer without an obvious point of reference


Are we supposed to be on the left or the right, with Baker or Garko?

You accept the directorial sleights-of-hand and plot contrivances in Argento and Questi's films because they are themselves part of these films' problematics, the way in which, for instance, if Roberto fails to realise the identity of his persecutor until it is almost too late then this is precisely because he's never really thought about this individual and their relationship until this point; or the way that his deus ex machina salvation actually comes through the hand of God(frey).

Here, however, you watch the build up to the pivotal sequence a second time and note all the false connections and misdirections but conclude that they have no purpose beyond setting up a no longer susprising surprise ending.

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.

La Última señora Anderson / The Fourth Victim

“To lose one [...] may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

By way of Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell, Arthur Anderson (Michael Craig) could well be either the luckiest or unluckiest man alive. He's the latter if the deaths of three successive wives in three years – the latest being plucked out of the swimming pool as the film opens – were accidental. He's the former if he has successfully managed to get away with murder on each occasion, whilst also pocketing ever-increasing sums from an equally ever-more reluctant and sceptical insurance company.


Not quite Death at the Deep End of the Swimming Pool as the US alternative title has it, but close enough given artistic license...

Inspector Dunphy (José Luis López Vázquez) of New Scotland Yard strongly suspects murder most foul, but thanks to the testimony given by Anderson's devoted housekeeper – testimony later revealed to the viewer to be false – is disappointed when the jury acquits. While the law states that Anderson cannot be tried for the same crime again even if he were to admit to it, Dunphy is confident that his nemesis will marry to kill again. This time, however, he will be ready and waiting...

No sooner has Anderson returned to his country house by a lake than he finds his new and attractive neighbour Julie Spencer taking a dip in his pool. A whirlwind romance follows and within a month they are married...


A skewed view of the jet-set giallo as Anderson and Dunphy meet in a travel agents after the trial.


Check out those place names, as a Spanish imaginary geography of Dover and its vicinity

Directed by reliable Euro-trash stalwart Eugenio Martin from a script co-authored by Santiago Moncada, La Última señora Anderson / The Fourth Victim / The Fourth Mrs Anderson is a film of two distinct halves – or better three distinct acts, only the first one and a half of which are detailed here.

The problem with the obscure Spanish-Italian thriller – one hesitates to use the giallo label on account of the balance between the co-production partners seemingly leaning towards the former – is thus it thus throws one too many curve-balls at its audience as it progresses, with questions emerging as to who the fourth Mrs Anderson actually is through the introduction of another woman (Marina Malfatti) also purporting to be Julie Spencer...


Note the clippings on the wall: we know there's more to Baker's character than meets the eye, but not enough.




Much the same applies to the likeness between the third Mrs Anderson and Marina Malfatti's mysterious character.

Whilst not necessarily absolute fatal – the performances and Martin's direction are good enough if never outstanding, the kitsch elements bolstered by the quaint evocation of an English rural setting by Spaniards seemingly doing so on the basis of old films and novels – it is a move that drastically weakens our ability to engage with the characters as they have been established to that point, for the simple reason that we no longer know where we stand or, to be more specific, where the film-makers wanting to position us – with Arthur, Baker's Julie or as a detached outsider looking in on an unfolding tragedy? (For a point of comparison, see Hitchcock's thematically similar Suspicion, told from the consistent perspective of the young wife who believes her new husband is a killer; Paul Verhoeven's later De Vierde man / The Fourth Man also offers an interesting, somewhat self-explanatory reversal of the initial scenario presented here.)

Bava fans will find the film of interest in relation to A Hatchet for the Honeymoon, as two Moncada-penned efforts combining murder, marriage and madness; Kill Baby Kill, for a sequence in which one of the protagonists follows themselves through Gothic spaces; and Five Dolls for an August Moon, for the way Piero Umiliani's pleasing easy listening score quotes one of its main motifs.

Il Coltello di ghiaccio / Knife of Ice

Drawing acknowledged inspiration from Robert Siodmak's classic proto-proto-slasher The Spiral Staircase, the last of Umberto Lenzi's gialli with Carroll Baker differs from its predecessors in replacing financially motivated conspiracies to murder with an insane killer.

Though a strong entry on the whole, the film is marred by an awkward opening sequence and not entirely convincing surprise ending – not in itself necessarily a bad thing nor particularly rare within the filone, but not well enough executed to really work except as a demonstration of Chion's cathartic “screaming point” notion. (Knife of Ice is also of interest in terms of Chion's positing of the mute – the voiceless presence – as antithesis of the acousmetre – the bodiless voice – and as a companion piece / counterpoint to the likes of Cat o' Nine Tails and Crimes of the Black Cat as yet another giallo exploration of disability and its effects upon our experience of the world.)


Nice sentiment, shame about the misspelling


A reminder that Lenzi was also the man who brought you Cannibal Ferox and a neat demonstration of the attraction / repulsion dynamics of horror?






It's all about reading the signs

We begin with a series of bullfights. They're not entirely gratuitous, insofar as the different reactions of cousins Jenny (Evelyn Stewart) and Martha (Baker) to the killing of the animals – or, more positively, the skill and bravery of the toreros – seems intended to provide us with insights into their respective personalities, but do add an unpleasant element that sits somewhat uncomfortably with the more restrained approach found elsewhere in the film; treat it as a historical artefact, a demonstration of what passed for representative displays of Spanishness to tourists in the dying days of the Franco regime, and it shouldn't impact too much on the film in toto.

Following the bullfight – an incident some months in the past, as it soon turns out – we learn that Martha is mute following a traumatic incident when she was 13 years old, in which her parents died in a train crash. She has never been able to near the railway since – until today, that is, as she goes to meet her cousin at the station, who is returning to the family villa following a successful singing tour – i.e. Jenny found her voice and Martha lost hers.






The rhetoric of the close up and rack focus

On the way back home, their chauffeur Marcos (Eduardo Fajardo) is forced to stop the car as its engine is overheating. While he goes to fetch help, a strange looking man suddenly appears out of the fog and stares at the women menacingly, but disappears before Marcos returns; he did not see the man, he tells them.

At the villa we are introduced to the rest of the family and their associates. There is uncle Ralph (George Rigaud), with a dodgy heart and an interest in the occult; housekeeper Mrs Britain; Father Martin and his young ward, Christina – whose birthday it is – and Martha's physician, Dr Laurent.

That night Jenny is disturbed by a noise, goes to investigate and its then dispatched by an unidentified black-gloved knife wielder.




Before and after

The body is soon discovered – but not before a well-executed suspense sequence that also builds suspicion as to who knows what – and the police called in. Their questions establish the chauffeur, housekeeper and doctor as suspects - or red herrings, of course – whilst the fact that this is the second body to have been found in dubious circumstances in the past 24 hours points to the presence of a maniac in the locality.


Lenzi's representation of the killer's depredations is uncharacteristically restrained.






Mark of the Devil I, II and III as an occult subplot develops

At Jenny's funeral Martha is disturbed by the sight of the mystery man in the bushes, but he disappears before she can alert any of the others to his presence. There is, however, a potential clue in the form of a satanic pendant, while the man's wild-eyed stare makes the inspector think that he may also be a drug addict.

More worryingly the inspector also conjectures that the killer, whoever he or she may be – perhaps satanist equals drug addict equals killer is too neat an equation for Lenzi – has a particular interest in blondes and that Martha may well be next on his agenda...


The screaming point #1 - Martha uses the car horn to alert the others to her grim discovery of Jenny's body




The screaming point #2 - what will Martha do this time? Note that unlike the knife-wielder who dispatched Jenny this figure is not wearing black gloves

Well written, directed and performed in the main – Baker is particularly impressive in her mute role – Knife of Ice is a thoroughly professional piece of work marred primarily by that ending. This said, the journey there, the process of figuring out whodunnit amidst all the potentially meaningful exchanges – “Yes, I have an idea who might have committed these crimes – but then who doesn't? Why don't you ask Father Martin's opinion?” – is an enjoyable one.

Though perhaps relying on the zoom-in and extreme close-up a touch too often and over-indulging in flashback montages for some viewers, Lenzi elsewhere demonstrates an admirable facility for prolonged suspense sequences where something may be lurking in the shadows or the fog or not.




Little dots of yellow that didn't have to be there

Indeed, its perhaps this general excessiveness that ultimately makes the film work: when everything is so hysterical and histrionic, everyone becomes a suspect and every look, gesture, word or element of mise-en-scene overdetermined with possible significance.