Truth be told, there
isn't much giallo in Mino Guerrini's THE THIRD EYE. Or at least not
much of what is commonly thought of as giallo. The film fits
comfortably into the Poisoned Past narrative type. It deals with a
young, rich man driven to insanity and murder by a woman under his
employ. It's the kind of giallo that wasn't made much in the 1970s,
with the decade all but consumed by the Amateur Detective narrative.
There is no mystery to be solved in THE THIRD EYE. The killers are
out in the open, their motives crystal clear. Guerrini trades the
more common murder mystery tropes for those of the Freudian
psycho-sexual thriller, swapping the antagonist/protagonist roles to
give us a movie about a murderer, rather than a simple thriller about
murder.
Franco Nero stars as
Mino, a twenty-something Count living in a large villa somewhere in
the Italian countryside. Around him orbits three women. There is his
mother, a woman who seeks to control him, Marta, the maid who
secretly loves him, and Laura, the woman he will soon be marrying.
Laura wants Mino to move away with her, away from his domineering
mother, but Mino refuses. Frustrated, Laura heads off home, unaware
that Marta has severed the break lines on her car. Mino takes off
after her, leaving Marta and his mother home alone. While he is gone,
the two women have a bit of a spat, one which ends with Marta pushing
Mino's mother down a flight of stairs before strangling her to death.
Things don't end well for Laura either. Unable to stop her speeding
car, she plummets down the side of a ravine, dying in the crash.
Mino returns home to
grieve over Laura's death only to be faced with the police. They inform
him of his mother's “accident”. And just like that, Mino begins
his downward spiral. As time goes on, Mino becomes more and more
unhinged, eventually bringing a burlesque dancer home with him just
so he can strangle her in his bed, a bed also adorned with the
preserved body of Laura. Overhearing the racket, Marta investigates.
She finds Mino in shock and comforts him, even offering to help him
clean up his mess. Maybe a bit of hydrochloric acid would make this
all go away. But in exchange for her silence, Marta demands that Mino
marry her, placing her at the top of the food chain where she feels
she belongs. After all, her father damn near ran the estate for
decades. But an unspecified amount of time (and an unspecified amount
of victims) later, a new complication arrives in the form of Laura's
identical twin sister, Daniela. With that, the film descends into
bloodshed.
It's obvious within
the first 15 minutes that Guerrini's main inspiration for his film
was Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO. All the signs are there. The dead
father. The domineering mother. The peephole in the wall used to spy
on sexual proclivities. The poisonous codependency. Mino's taxidermy
hobby. All ripped from Hitchcock (also, the arrival of Daniela on the scene is as much a nod to Pierre
Boileau, Thomas Narcejac and Hitchcock as it is a useful device for
drawing the film to a close). But it isn't just visual and narrative
homages. Along for the ride is the same kind Freudian psychobabble,
the kind most modern psychologists laugh at, that Hitchcock loaded into
PSYCHO. As a result, the psychology side of things sometimes feels a bit too
corny and simplistic. Mino doesn't really go mad. He goes movie mad,
with his insanity revealing itself through laughing fits,
bulging eyes and periodic sobbing. When these moments happen, its
almost as if THE THIRD EYE becomes some other film entirely.
And
that's because THE THIRD EYE is actually a damn fine bit of
calculated filmmaking. It's a somber, almost hypnotic film, one with a subdued,
borderline claustrophobic atmosphere. For a film made in 1966, some
of the more darker moments, like the gutting of a bird or a last act
fatal stabbing, are really quite disturbing, easily matching some of
the more memorable horror-esque moments from the best of the 1970s
gialli. Nero's wide eyed theatrics whenever he has to slip into Mr.
Hyde mode run so counter to the environment they're set in, that they
just come off as, frankly, quite idiotic.
But then you have
Marta, played by the wonderful Gioia Pascal. She is every inch the
monster Mino is, directly responsible for the murder of Laura,
indirectly responsible for every woman Mino brought home with him.
Pascal's performance easily places her among the top giallo villains
of all time. While Nero goes ham with his mannerisms, Pascal chills
the blood with little more than an unblinking stare. Her performance
is understated and controlled, delivered with a diamond cutter's
level of precision.
And really, you
could extend that praise to both Guerrini and his creative team.
Outside of Nero's movie madman moments, there isn't a single missed
beat in THE THIRD EYE. Not a single misstep. At 98 minutes, the film
is paced perfectly, never wasting its running time on half thought
through subplots or extraneous characters (I believe there are only
eight or nine speaking roles in the entire film). If you're looking
for a model of efficiency, look no further.
THE THIRD EYE did
well at release, probably bolstered by Nero's quickly rising star
power. The same year Guerrini's film hit the theaters, Nero landed a
box office hit with DJANGO. THE THIRD EYE would go on to inspire more
than a few gialli of the 1970s, most obviously Emilio Miraglia's THE
NIGHT EVELYN CAME OUT OF THE GRAVE, a film which uses enough of
Guerrini's narrative that it probably should be classified as a
rip-off (though a damn good one). But the oddest film THE THIRD EYE
influenced was Joe D'Amato's nasty vomitorium, BEYOND THE DARKNESS.
You could probably
go as far as to label D'Amato's film a remake. Very little was
changed. All the core narrative developments are there, as is the
Freudian psycho-nonsense. The subtleties have all been gutted though
(pun intended) and replaced with nauseating violence, and the overall
experience is more blackly comedic than quietly disturbing, but…
It's all there. Just don't mistake BEYOND THE DARKNESS for a decent
substitute. THE THIRD EYE is a damn fine film, one of the best gialli
of the 1960s, and is not to be missed by serious fans of the filone.
THE
THIRD EYE
(Il
terzo occhio)
Director:
Mino Guerrini
Writer:
Mino Guerrini, Piero Regnoli
Starring:
Franco Nero, Erika Blanc, Gioia Pascal, Olga Solbelli, Gara Granda
Production
Location: Italy; Panda Societa per L'Industria Cinematografica
1966,
98 minutes
Narrative
Variety: Poisoned past
Murderer(s):
1 Male, 1 Female
Murderer(s)
Role: Count (Male), Maid (Female)
Murderer(s)
Motive: Madness, jealousy
Victims:
1 Woman (strangled), 1 Woman (automobile accident), 1 Woman
(strangled), 1 Woman (strangled)
Murderer(s)
Death: Female (stabbed)
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