Il Vizio ha le calze nere / Reflections in Black

One of the joys of the giallo, for me, is the sense that that's always something new out there waiting to be discovered and perhaps rescued from the enormous condescension of cinematic posterity. While some films manage to transcend their grey market origins all too many others leave you wondering whether they are intrinsically bad films or are just victims of circumstance through panning-and-scanning; wear and tear; unsympathetic cuts; burned-in subtitles intruding on the image and all those other ignominies that we come to know and to develop a tolerance for. (Or, as cultists, bear like battle scars.)

Tano Cimarosa's Reflections in Black at first seems as though it is going to be a case in point, opening in the classic fashion with the death of a beautiful woman at the hands of a black-gloved, razor-wielding assassin, here also identified by the black stockings she wears and which give the film its original Italian title, Il Vizio ha le calze nere (i.e. “Vice has black stockings”)


Black gloves...


... black stockings...


... and a straight-razor...


... wielded to deadly effect...

Nevertheless, some curious jump cuts – one minute the assassin has entered the house, the next their victim is seeing exiting it, wounded – serve to suggest the intrusion of the censors early on; an intrusion that appears to have continued thereafter if the unusually short running time of just over 70 minutes and which must have excised some quite hard material if what still remains is anything to go by.

With the only eyewitness being a policeman who was almost run over by the killer's vehicle, the amateur detective plot is absent, with the emphasis instead being placed squarely upon the professional; a paradigmatic choice which helps situate the film as a relatively late giallo, coming around that point in the mid-1970s by which the box-office balance and public taste had tipped in favour of its poliziotto counterpart. Even so, while the pervasive attitude of the anni di piombo is conveyed by a number of remarks about widespread corruption and collusion between the upper echelons of civil and criminal society, these prove to be more throwaway than anything else, with the three men conducting the investigation also marked by an action second rather than first approach.




Cimarosa tries to throw suspicion on someone in the crowd as the first victim's body is discovered

Inspector Lavina (John Richardson) is in charge. Below him are Panto – played by the director in his more usual role as character actor – and Gerrini, representing hard-won on-the-job experience and a more modern, scientific approach respectively.

Their investigation soon focusses in on the dead woman's acquaintances, a curious combination of high and low class types including a countess (Magda Konopka), a photographer (Dagmar Lassander), a hairdresser and a junkie (Ninetto Davoli).


A photo that may hold the key to the mystery

Nonetheless, it is clear that they are on the right track as the killer strikes again, slitting the throat of a woman in the park and knocking her boyfriend unconscious – the latter element suggesting someone with a clear set of designated victims rather than a maniac striking at random. (Always assuming, of course, that there is only one killer and that he or she didn't deliberately change modus operandi to confuse matters.)




Having the lovers surprised while he's changing a tyre is a nice touch...

It's also around this point that the film's weaknesses come to the fore. While Cimarosa clearly understood what his audience wanted by way of sex – particularly of the sapphic variety, as we soon see – and sadism and does his level best to meet expectations on both counts, his direction looks to be sorely lacking in style. The bigger problem, however – and one that cannot be really be put down to the copy under review here – is that there are just too many characters and complex inter-relationships to reward keeping track of, especially in light of the killer's predictably unpredictable identity and a summing up which, as Adrian Luther Smith suggests in his Blood and Black Lace review, not even the one offering it seems entirely convinced by.




A lady above suspicion with her forbidden photographs / photographs suggesting a forbidden love


This bleached out dream / fantasy sequence goes on like this for a minute...


... clearly something hot is going on...




The killer also wields stockings


If this composition were intentional it would be almost Godard-like in its audacity

On the plus side, Carlo Savina's main theme, variations on which accompany the stalk and the slash sequences, sets a suitably downbeat tone, whilst it's always pleasing to see Konopka and Lassander, even if both also seem a little tired looking when compared to the likes of Satanik and Femina Ridens of a few years earlier. Still, there's something about such rapidly fading grandeur that is distinctly appropriate to Cimarosa's end-of-the-line giallo...

Guess the book

Which book is this an Italian edition of, and which influential thriller was based upon it?

Guess the film

“[H]is meretricious movie of seminarian grand guignol”

Anyone care to guess which film R. T. Witcombe is describing here, and who the director is?

Freda book

Just something I came across more or less randomly whilst surfing: a 1994, 400 page book, in French, about Riccardo Freda.

Il Rosso segno della follia / A Hatchet for the Honeymoon

John Harrington is quite, quite mad. Unusually, however, he is perfectly aware of and comfortable with this situation: “Paranoiac – an enchanting word and so full of possibilities!”

His compulsion to murder young brides is also therapeutic, each fresh victim bringing him closer to understanding a childhood trauma by revealing another crucial detail of this Freudian primal scene.

Tiring of his wife, own Mildred, John seeks a divorce. But having worked hard to make the bridal wear business John inherited from his beloved mother into a success, Mildred is unwilling to accede to his demands, expressing a firm belief that their marriage is of the “till death do us part” variety.

Thus John decides to do away with Mildred.

In an unexpected twist on the till death do us part theme, she then returns as a ghost to haunt him, this making his craziness more outwardly manifest insofar as no-one else can see her or thus who John is talking to...

If this wasn't bad enough, the police are becoming increasingly suspicious that he is the bride killer. All the victims can, after all, be traced back to the House of Harrington in one way or another.

While John points out that there are 200 weddings a day in Paris this only makes things worse, making the coincidence seem all the more striking, design rather than accident...






Bava's involvement in the project extended beyond the direction to cinematography and the title design, in which the Red Sign of madness over Harrington is a recurring motif

Mario Bava's 1969 return to the giallo may have also witnessed a return to the fashion setting of Blood and Black Lace and the theme of the discrepancy between the public face of the bourgeois and the monster lying beneath, but it does so with a very different tone to its predecessor.




The real train and the simulacrum

From the outset, as the director cuts from stock-type footage of a real train – a train on which the as-yet-unidentified Harrington as just killed once more – to a very obvious model (whilst the audio continues as before) before then revealing that Harrington is now at home playing with his toys, it is clear that Il Rosso segno della follia / Hatchet for the Honeymoon is more light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek than deadly serious.


The oh-so Freudian motif of the stairs in John's haunted memories

Rather than presenting the killer as an un-knowable, masked Other as in Blood and Black Lace, Bava instead draws us in to identifying with him through extensive use of voice-over and subjective camera and a more abstract, less explicit manner.

Like Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux – identified by Tim Lucas in his liner notes on the Image Entertainment DVD as a key intertext for the film – you come to understand why he kills, becoming unable to condemn even if you do not condone.






The superficially charming John Harrington wouldn't hurt a fly – until, having saved it from drowing, he feeds it to his parrot...

But there are also differences between the two characters and films: whereas Chaplin sought to comment on the ironies and inequities of a world that accepts at the societal scale what it denies at the individual – kill one man and you are a murderer, kill a million and you are a conqueror – Bava is less concerned with making such a grand(iose) statement. However, insofar as this was also the kind of subtext that many critics felt out of place in Leone's The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, the Good's remark that “I've never seen so many men wasted so badly” an admission that in the scheme of things he and the other rogues are, like Verdoux, “merely amateurs,” perhaps this is no bad thing as a wise acknowledgement by Bava of the kind of limitations he was working under.




John's ideal women – mannequins preserved in a state of perfection, unable to answer him back

Yet, other subtexts are undoubtedly there if one wants to search for them. Harrington's quest for self-knowledge that will ultimately prove self-destructive has clear echoes of the Oedipus myth – arguably the first detective narrative and protagonist – itself given a consciously idiosyncratic interpretation by Pasolini the previous year.

With an elegant score by Sante Romitelli, considerable camp / kitsch charm and three attractive female presences in the forms of Dagmar Lassander, Femi Benussi as models / victims who fall into the House of Harrington's ambit and Laura Betti – reinforcing the Pasolini connection, having approached Bava to express her interest in working with him on the back of her award-winning performance in Medea - as Mildred, perhaps Hatchet for the Honeymoon's only real weakness is that from a generic perspective the resolution of its central enigma is all too predictable.

But given the aforementioned opening sequences, perhaps this was entirely the point: if Pasolini's Oedipus Rex represents the most subversive take on a classical text in the Italian cinema of the 1960s (“I have never dreamt of making love with my mother, rather I have dreamt, if at all, of making love with my father...”) might not Hatchet for the Honeymoon be the equivalent ne plus ultra for the giallo, circa 1969?

The Double - again

Can anyone more literary tell whether La Controfigura / The Double draws any inspiration from Dostoyevski's The Double? Could be an interesting connection if it did since Bertolucci's Partner was loosely based on the Dostoyevski text...

Do You like Hitchcock

Whereas De Palma has long embraced Hitchcock, indicating that it would be an error for the film-maker not acknowledge and use his masterful visual language, Argento has long had a more hesitant relationship here. He recognises the value of cultivating the Argento brand name a la Hitchcock and of being seen as Hitchcock's Italian equivalent / successor, but doesn't want to be reduced to just being this. Accordingly in his actual film-making practices he works in a dialectical way with Hitchcock and some of his other key reference points and influences, most notably Lang and Antonioni. Ironically, however, this is not that different from what Hitchcock was himself doing early (1920s) and late (the 1960s) on in his career with these selfsame figures.

Argento also exhibits something of a tendency to alternate between more personal and experimental projects that fail to find favour at the time (i.e. Phenomena, Trauma, The Stendhal Syndrome, perhaps Inferno) and audience pleasers that give the audience more of what it expects (i.e. Opera, Sleepless, perhaps Tenebrae to a certain extent ). Again this is reminiscent of the way Hitchcock would often “run for cover” to a safer project after a more risk-taking one that failed to find favour (e.g. North by Northwest following Vertigo and The Wrong Man.)

In titling a (TV) film Do You Like Hitchcock? but then proceeding to equally reference others, was Argento basically owning up to the way that things are, that a TV series sold on the basis of the Hitchcock name has a viability amongst the general audience which one sold under the banner of Lang would not? Is the role of the film-maker as artist to give his audience what he believes they need and not that which they believe they want, leaving that for the film-maker as entertainer? But where does that balance lie, both in general and from film to film?