THE GIALLO PROJECT - DATE FOR A MURDER

Vince Dreyser is an American living in Rome. He is, among other things, a private investigator and bodyguard to anyone with the cash to afford him. Vince has a chance meeting with an old friend, a chemical research scientist named Walter. Walter is off to be married in a few days time. The two friends, both on tight schedules, arrange a meet-up for later in the week. Only Walter never shows up. Shortly after, Vince catches word that Walter's traveling companions were found dead in an apparent car accident. Vince suspects foul play, a suspicion which proves to be all too correct. While nosing around, Vince is knocked unconscious by two thugs and left to die in a burning car.

Narrowly surviving the ordeal, Vince goes to work. He tracks down the mechanic who rented the car to Walter's traveling companions, beating the man mercilessly and threatening to set him on fire. The man gives him a name: Guido Salvatorelli. Vince tries setting Guido up, luring him out into the open at night to ambush him. Things go south however and Vince ends up in hot water with the local cops, men none too happy with an American shooting down an Italian, criminal or not, in the streets. The Police Commissioner, although weary of Vince's rough nosed tactics and penchant for shooting first and asking questions later, soon comes around to Vince's side. Men are being found dead all over the place, all of whom are connected in some way to Vince's missing friend.

Truth be told, DATE FOR A MURDER isn't really a giallo. It's more of a standard European action flick. Yes, there is a central mystery involving a string of murders and a few missing people, but the intent of the film is never to scare or even puzzle the brain. It's lightweight and airy, built around action set pieces rather than cold, spine tingling moments of suspense. But as the film is often referred to as a giallo, I thought it was worth a look and inclusion on the list, even if I don't personally feel that it belongs there. 

DATE FOR A MURDER was co-written by Fernando Di Leo, one of the great masters of the Italian poliziotteschi. It feels very much like a first draft for the harder edged crime thrillers Di Leo would craft in the future, films like MILANO CALIBRO 9 and THE BOSS. It's filled with macho men, high fashion women, rooftop fistfights and flying bullets. The first time we see Vince, he's practicing dodging rubber bullets in his hotel room. The next time we see him, he's seducing a pretty blonde. The poliziotteschi preferred their heroes to be Men with a capital M. Often cruel and rarely above using violence to prove a point, the heroes of the Italian crime thrillers were often quite difficult to sympathize with or even care for. They're brutes, hyper-masculine alpha males, with blood lusts and libidos cranked to 11.

Thankfully, Vince Dreyser is more Euro-spy than gun toting rampage beast. As played by veteran Italian character actor George Ardisson, Vince is a likeable chap, one with a serious romantic interest in Fidelia, the fashionable upper class and sharp witted daughter of a wealthy family. The moments between the two are rife with flirting and light comedy, perfect for transforming a hard-nosed P.I. with a gun into the kind of character you can actually root for as he's gunning down gangsters and fear for as he rushes headlong into danger. And there's plenty of danger afoot, too. There's a terrific chase and scuffle on a rooftop, more than a few shoot-outs and a fantastic, tense climax set in a meat packaging plant. The highlight of the film however is the fight between Vince and an elderly cripple, the latter riding about in a wheelchair constructed from an old motorcycle. Watching the cripple try to run over a staggered Vince, swerving back and forth inside a cramped office, sums this film up better than I could ever hope to do.

The final confrontation in DATE FOR A MURDER is a surprisingly emotional affair, as is the moment just before the closing credits. Over the course of the film's 105 minutes, I found myself liking Vince quite a bit and as a result, I found myself becoming more and more invested in his search for his missing friend. I liked the film a great deal, even if it didn't turn out to be the giallo I thought it was going to be. It's free from the cynical excesses and graphic brutality that ran rampant in the Italian crime thrillers of the 70s. It's enjoyable and lightweight, shot through with just the right flavor of humor. Is it suspenseful? Sometimes, but rarely. Is it nerve shredding? Barely. Is it really a giallo?

Well, I guess the jury is still out on that. For my money, no, it isn't. It's a crime thriller with just a pinch of yellow.

 

DATE FOR A MURDER 
(Omicidio per appuntamento)

Director: Mino Guerrini
Writer: Fernando Di Leo, Mino Guerrini, Franco Enna
Starring: George Ardisson, Halina Zalewska, Gunther Stoll, Hans von Borsody, Mario Brego
Italy, West Germany; Discobolo Films, Parnass Film
1967, 105 minutes

Narrative Variety: Amateur Detective
Murderer(s): 1 Male
Murderer(s) Role: Friend
Murderer(s) Motive: Greed
Victims: Man (found dead), Man (found dead)
Murderer(s) Death: Shot to death

THE GIALLO PROJECT - A... COME ASSASSINO

In a grand Italian villa, just shortly after 10 in the evening, a murder has been committed. Poor old John Prescott, the wealthy proprietor of an African diamond mine, has been found with his throat cut from ear to ear. Days later, his relatives gather in the villa to listen to an audio recording of John Prescott's will, joined by Prescott's most trusted business associate, his secretary Giacomo. We learn rather quickly why no one is in mourning. Prescott wasn't a kind man, nor was he especially loving to his family. In fact, it seems as if he hated every single one of them with a red hot passion. His will demonstrates this. Prescott's millions are to be divided in three, only payable after every man and woman in the room has spent a month living together in the villa. Then, after the 30 days have passed, the first three people to travel to Prescott's notary will be rewarded with one third of the inheritance. The not-so-subtle suggestion is quickly realized by Prescott's wormy nephew George. 

“It's a provocation to...”, George screams out. He doesn't even have to finish the sentence. Everyone knows full well what John Prescott's intentions were.

The other members of the party include George's flirtatious wife, Adriana, an ex-stripper who was courted aggressively by the now deceased Mr. Prescott, and Martha, Prescott's sister, forever mourning the death of her husband. There's Angela, Prescott's pretty blonde niece and her milquetoast husband Armando. Rounding out the Prescott family is John's giggling idiot son, Julian, a man-child who is always seen playing with knives. The only real outsider is Giacomo, a beefy, bitter man not at all sorry to see his old boss dead. Around these suspects orbits a police detective, the ever watchful Inspector Matt. He's here to find out who killed John Prescott. What he should really be worried about is who is willing to kill for John Prescott's millions.

And that's the driving force behind Angelo Dorigo's A… COME ASSASSINO. To be honest, I shouldn't be classifying this film as an Amateur Detective story, in part because the Detective in question is a professional. It's also because A… COME ASSASSINO is more BAY OF BLOOD than it is THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE. It isn't a story with a single killer. It's a story practically littered with them. In the tally below, you'll only see two victims, but the film is stuffed full of dead bodies. See, no one actually cares who murdered John Prescott that night. They hated the man and he hated them in return. All anyone cares about is the money and it's that greed that sets the murderous mayhem in motion.

This is a film with many, many layers of deception going on all at once. We no sooner learn that Character A has been conspiring with Character B to frame Character C than we learn that Character B has been working with Character D to bring down Character A. It's an ever-shifting mass of bad intentions, ulterior motives and triple crosses. Of course, every character in this film is a horrible, despicable person so their eventual deaths don't exactly fill us with sadness, but there is a wonderful time to be had in watching these godawful creatures twist each other in murderous pretzels, only to have their greedy venom spit right back in their faces. It's such a joy to watch this all go down that I half forgot this was supposed to be a mystery rather than a glorious bit of cynical black comedy.

The solution to the puzzle of who killed John Prescott quite literally doesn't matter. It's just a MacGuffin, a bloody bit of plot to get this whole ball rolling downhill. What matters here is the whirlpool of immorality and greed, and the eventually drowning of all these disgusting characters in it. Taken as a tasty bit of hyper-cynical melodrama, the film works damn well. It has a brisk pace, the black and white cinematography is gorgeous (even though my copy of the film leaves MUCH to be desired), and the acting is all on point. Every actor, from Mary Arden to Sergio Ciani (aka Alan Steel aka the guy in all those awful Hercules movies), plays their part perfectly. They're just awful, terrible, horrible human beings.

But that's where I can see A… COME ASSASSINO losing much of it's audience. Because even though this is technically a giallo, there really isn't an awful lot of giallo in it. This is not a film that will appeal to murder mystery purists or even casual armchair detectives. Try as you might, you will not be able to piece together all the alibis, facts and lies in any kind of logical manner. Every character in this film is playing every other character in this film. It is lie after lie after lie for 70 straight minutes. So if you're looking for a puzzle to solve, stick with the jigsaw variety. But if you want a wonderful bit of immoral, blackly comedic melodrama full of backstabbings, rooftop brawls, shoot-outs and polite insults, A… COME ASSASSINO is a film to seek out. It's a great, entertaining ride.

A… COME ASSASSINO

(aka A… For Assassin)

Director: Angelo Dorigo

Writer: Sergio Bazzini, Roberto Natale, Ernesto Gastaldi

Starring: Sergio Ciani, Mary Arden, Ivano Davoli, Aiche Nana, Giovanna Galetti

Italy; Bival Film

1966, 76 minutes

Narrative Variety: Amateur Detective

Murderer(s): 1 Woman

Murderer(s) Role: Sister

Murderer(s) Motive: Revenge

Victims: Man (throat cut), Woman (stabbed to death)

Murderer(s) Death: N/A

THE GIALLO PROJECT - THE THIRD EYE

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)

THE GIALLO PROJECT - THE MURDER CLINIC

Elio Scardamaglia's THE MURDER CLINIC marks a first for the still growing filone. It's a period piece, set in the late 1800s. While watching the film, the time period seems apropos. It is every inch a Victorian Gothic melodrama, steeped in madness, repression and guilt, tied loosely together with a nice yellow ribbon. Pretty women skulk around dark corridors lit only by candlelight in search of answers to dangerous mysteries. Scenes like that exist in the more modern gialli of the 1960s, but THE MURDER CLINIC seems to be purposefully trying to recreate the Victorian Gothic rather than merely calling back to it, if not outright parodying it.

A good example of that sort of thing would be the opening scene of Mario Bava's THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, widely considered to be the first proper giallo film. We see Nora sitting on board a plane heading to Italy while a voice over informs us that Nora has an addiction to reading murder mysteries, a peculiar addiction that later calls into question whether or not Nora really did witness a murder and is now targeted for death. It might just be her murder mystery fueled imagination at work. Jane Austen's popular parody of Victorian Gothic melodrama, Northanger Abbey, likewise features a heroine with a particular obsession with a certain type of literature (in Catherine's case, Gothic novels). But in Austen's novel, Catherine's Gothic literature fueled imagination turns out to be fantasy. In Bava's film, Nora really is being hunted by a killer. Regardless of the difference, both Austen's novel and Bava's film use Gothic tropes to flesh out the backbone of their narratives, only to turn distinctly more modern as their stories unfold.

THE MURDER CLINIC however stays comfortably within the realm of the Victorian Gothic throughout, even as a straight razor wielding killer wreaks havoc on the narrative. The film concerns a small clinic somewhere in the English countryside. The man in charge is named Robert Vance. He has a wife named Lizabeth who has a frail heart and little patience for her husband's flirtations with some of his patients. Staying at the clinic are a bevy of interesting faces. There's Fred, a man prone to psychotic breaks, an elderly woman whose only friend is a stuffed cat, and Janey, a recently arrived mute. One night, Janey is chased from her room and slashed to ribbons by a killer. Vance discovers her body and buries it somewhere off the property. Unfortunately, someone knows about Vance's clandestine body disposal.

As all of this is going on, Gisele, a bitter, cheating wife, is being escorted back east by her husband. When their carriage breaks down, Gisele attempts an escape, clubbing her husband over the head. This spooks the horses and off they go into the distance, but not before trampling her husband to death. It is Gisele that sees Vance burying poor Janey's corpse. Gisele fakes an illness, taking advantage of Vance's lustful eye, and is brought back to the clinic where she proceeds to blackmail Vance into giving her an awful lot of money.

Vance has no choice but to pay up. You see, many years back, Vance was charged with attempted murder. Lizabeth's younger, prettier sister, Laura, had been visiting the couple at their soon to be constructed clinic when she suffered a horrible accident, falling into a pit filled with lime. The accident left her horribly scarred and Vance was brought to trial. Witnesses at the scene swore that they saw Vance push Laura into the lime, but a lack of physical evidence set him free. His reputation as a doctor ruined, Vance abandoned his dream of owning his own clinic and took the lead job at the nuthouse in the English countryside. If Gisele goes to the police, what little life Vance has will be over.

And amid all of this melodrama is Mary, the good-hearted nurse, madly in love with Vance. What about those strange noises that we hear coming from the attic? The noises that sound like footsteps? That would be Laura, the mad woman in the attic (the films very own Bertha Mason), kept there in seclusion as Vance works on curing her of her deformity through radical skin grafting experiments. Oh, and we can't forget about the killer, can we?

Except that the film does, because it doesn't quite feel like THE MURDER CLINIC was designed to ever be a straight forward murder mystery. The film was co-written by Ernesto Gastaldi, one of the great giallo screenwriters. THE MURDER CLINIC, in many, many ways, feels a dry run for Gastaldi's later giallo masterwork, YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY. Both films are built on the backs of Victorian Gothic literature tropes and both films are loaded with poisonous relationships, characters stuck in seemingly inescapable personal hells, and are rife with potential violence. Both films feature typical giallo killers slashing women to shreds, but neither film ever really commits to being a proper giallo film. 

YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY is (more of less) an adaptation of Poe's The Black Cat, with the black gloved killer angle of the first half treated as a massive red herring, something that appears to have been included just to throw us off the films true motive. The killing scenes in THE MURDER CLINIC are more directly tied into the narrative, but they come off as afterthoughts, like they were given more and more emphasis as the script went through revisions.

That might be because the murder mystery angle of the film feels far less thought out than the more melodramatic angles. For example, it's a bit difficult to believe that Gisele would so brazenly attempt to blackmail Vance, especially when she believes him to be a cold blooded killer. The idea that Vance is keeping Laura in the attic isn't well thought out either. The film could have taken the more interesting EYES WITHOUT A FACE tactic of having Vance killing young women for their skin, all so he could carry out his guilt ridden experiments in skin grafting. I suppose we're meant to think that Laura is responsible for the killings, but the film never bothers to give her a proper motive. Fred is the only likely suspect the film offers up. There's a short scene of Fred attacking Gisele in her bedroom, a scene that only exists so the film can conjure up a believable guilty party.

THE MURDER CLINIC spends an awful lot of time (nearly 40 of its relatively short 87 minutes) just getting all of these characters under the same roof. It then spends another 15 or so minutes getting down to business working out the love triangles, the blackmail angle, telling us of Vance's troubled past and Laura's accident… It is one hell of a busy hour and through much of that hour, I was really engaged with the film. I was enjoying trying to figure out just who was playing who, why no one seemed all that bothered by Janey's first act murder, or where the film was going to take the characters as all these personalities began to clash and crumble.

Unfortunately, the film never really hits that high note of drama. It descends into slasher territory with characters dying left and right before petering out with a tired, easy resolution. However, I would say that the first hour or so more than makes up for the deficiencies of the final act. The murder mystery may not be the strongest, but the range of characters and the dramatic interplay between them is surprisingly delicious. I would have preferred the film to be longer. I would have preferred to have had the drama between the characters reach a boiling point and THEN have the killer step in to bring that drama to a bloody end. I think the film would have been better served that way. If THE MURDER CLINIC had more effectively tied the bloody business into its very well done melodramatic material, I would not hesitate in calling this film one of the best 1960s gialli out there. As it stands, I still recommend giving the film a watch, but I can't deny that it is, at the end of the day, kind of disappointing.

THE MURDER CLINIC

(La lama nel corpo)

Director: Elio Scardamaglia

Writer: Ernesto Gastaldi, Luciano Martino

Starring: William Berger, Francoise Prevost, Mary Young, Barbara Wilson, Philippe Hersent

Villa Parisi, Frascati, Rome, Lazio, Italy; Ci. Ti. Cinematografica, Leone Film, Orphee Productions

1966, 87 minutes

Narrative Variety: Poisoned Past

Murderer(s): 1 female

Murderer(s) Role: Wife

Murderer(s) Motive: Jealousy

Victims: 1 woman (slashed to death with a razor), 1 man (run over by carriage), 1 woman (slashed to death with a razor), 1 man (dies off screen, presumed suicide), 1 woman (throat slashed)

Murderer(s) Death: Falls to her death (suicide)

THE GIALLO PROJECT - NIGHT OF VIOLENCE

A gorgeous and half nude blonde, a series of creepy phone calls, a mysterious man lurking in the shadows outside… Roberto Mauri's NIGHT OF VIOLENCE has the typical routine thriller set-up. That gorgeous blonde is named Carla, a well-off prostitute. After saying goodbye to one John, she's off to meet another. Along the way, she blows a tire, stranding her in the middle of nowhere. As she frets about on the side of the road, a man approaches, offering to fix her flat. Although they exchange some pleasantries, the encounter ends in violence.

We learn a few scenes later that the now-deceased Carla was the daughter of an ambassador. Naturally, this attracts the attention of the press and puts a good bit of pressure on the local police. What begins as a simple tale of tracking down a killer becomes much more complicated as multiple women (and a few cops) are attacked in the city, each attack seemingly the work of a different man. And then there's the whole prostitution ring. And the drug racket. And Carla's angry sister who decides to stop waiting for the police to break the case wide open and takes matters into her own hands.

NIGHT OF VIOLENCE has its fair share of triumphs. For starters, the film is beautifully shot with rich, Expressionistic black and white cinematography. It has a fantastic jazz score written by Aldo Piga. It boasts a top notch cast of tough guys and pretty faces. The climatic moments of the film are some of the best around. But what it is lacking the most is focus.

Ostensibly, this is a murder mystery film. After all, we start the story with a single woman who ends up dead. She turns out to be rich, her father an ambassador (which usually signals political intrigue in these kinds of films). We have a steadfast, determined police inspector on the case. That is a typical set-up, the kind that fuels many thrillers. But thrillers can't just bounce from A-B without complication, right? That would make things too simple. That's where the prostitution ring comes in. Could Carla's death have something to do with that?

As swiftly as the question is raised, it is answered. No, it does not. But then we learn that the man Carla was going off to meet, another man of wealth, is a drug runner. Maybe THAT has something to do with Carla's murder? Again, the possibility is brought up and then swiftly dealt with and again, the answer is no. We're about half way through the film before we return to what got us here in the first place. Women begin to be attacked, usually in public places. The attacker is always chased off, the women always surviving. The victims, all prostitutes and therefore all tied by vocation to Carla, all give different descriptions of their attacker to the police. But what these attacks get us here are a series of brief police interrogations and one visit to a film set. It isn't until the final 15 minutes of the film that Mauri gets his narrative back on track and NIGHT OF VIOLENCE finally becomes the thriller we were promised all along.

Put simply, we spend too much time dealing with side stories here and not enough time actually exploring the central mystery of the film. Many of these side stories are nothing but distractions anyway. We know that Carla's John-in-waiting didn't kill her so why are we to suddenly think he's a suspect? Well, Mauri wanted to include a subplot about a drug ring, that's why. We spend a bit of time with Linda, another prostitute, and her physically abusive pimp. They have a disagreement that leads to him slapping her around, telling her to remember “what happened to Carla Pratesi”. But again, we know he isn't the killer so what exactly are we doing spending time with these people? Linda's story is dropped, the drug ring goes nowhere, nothing at all is done about the prostitution ring… Worse, the questions we want answered, the plot threads we want to be explored, are ignored completely throughout the film. Why did Carla turn to prostitution at all? She's already wealthy with a respectable family so how did she end up turning tricks? Who was it that was calling her on the phone the night she died? I don't know. The film never tells us.

And that's a damn shame because when NIGHT OF VIOLENCE focuses on the mystery of Carla's murder, it's a damn good giallo (though with a police inspector as its lead, the film falls more into the realm of the poliziotteschi than the giallo). The reveal of the killer's identity is one of the films major strengths. It's weird, even by giallo standards, if only because it presents us with a killer that is neither someone within Carla's social circle (like in your typical Poisoned Past narrative) or someone who is known by the detective (as it would be in the Amateur Detective narrative). It's just some random stranger we only get to spend time with during the final confrontation.

The killer is revealed to be an Italian former athlete scarred by radiation when the Americans bombed Japan in the 1940s. He returned to Italy to find his home gone, turned into a market, and his family moved on. As he wandered Rome, depressed and lonely, he found an abandoned building filled with movie props, most notably the life casts of several Italian actors (diegetic actors, unfortunately; no real world actors). Carla's murder was a complete accident. He never meant to kill her, only rape her (which is disgusting enough, to be honest). His confrontation with Carla's sister in the final scenes of the film turn him into a sympathetic creature, if only because his motives are so pathetic. He eventually saves his captive's life before committing suicide, harmlessly firing shots into the air so the cops will fill him with bullets.

There's a whiff of something in NIGHT OF VIOLENCE, the hint of some forgotten bit of subtext. There's flirtations with the idea that wealth requires the abandonment of virtue, and that society turns a blind eye to the crimes of the wealthy and the famous, especially if those crimes are against women. The pimp that smacks Linda around is incarcerated not because he beat her up, but because he recently robbed a store, an act he already served time for committing. When the inspector and his men arrive to a film set to interview an actor identified by a victim, the cops treat him with respect, apologizing for having to question him at all. Scenes like that lead me to believe that what Mauri and his co-writer planned NIGHT OF VIOLENCE to be was something more serious minded and narratively complex. Unfortunately, at some point all of that was gutted and what we got instead were pointless drug rackets and fisticuffs.

NIGHT OF VIOLENCE

(La notti della violenza)

Director: Roberto Mauri

Writer: Roberto Mauri, Edoardo Mulargia

Starring: Alberto Lupo, Marilu Tolo, Lisa Gastoni, Helene Chanel

Italy; DMC Cinematografica

1965, 91 minutes

Narrative Variety: Poliziotteschi-giallo

Murderer(s): 1 male

Murderer(s) Role: Ex-athlete, no ties to anyone in the film

Murderer(s) Motive: Loneliness, murder was accidental

Victims: female (suffocated off-screen)

Murderer(s) Death: Shot by the police

THE GIALLO PROJECT - THE MONSTER OF VENICE

There's a killer loose in Venice. In the dead of night, the killer dresses in a diving suit, plucking nubile young lasses off the streets, drowning them in the canals. This unknown killer takes the corpses back to his hideout, a ruined monastery deep beneath the water. Using a special embalming fluid, he preserves their bodies, keeping them in glass cases. Andrea, a reporter for a local paper, knows there is a serial murderer among the populace, but the police won't have any of it, believing Andrea's theory is a ploy to sell papers. As more and more young women go missing, Andrea decides to track down the killer himself.

On paper, this is one hell of a setup. In execution, however, it's more than a little botched. When Dino Tavella's giallo THE MONSTER OF VENICE (easily found on DVD under its American title, THE EMBALMER) decides to focus on this strand of the narrative, the film works exceptionally well, if a little corny. But Tavella's film seems to forget its underlying murder mystery with staggering ease, giving nearly two-thirds of the running time over to your typical travelogue extravagances and weak romance. About a third of the way into the film, Maureen arrives, a teacher from Rome chaperoning a gaggle of pretty girls on a trip to Venice. Andrea and Maureen fall madly in love and thus begins the dramatic shift from modern Gothic horror to treacly melodrama.

The film picks back up during its final twenty minutes, but by then the effectiveness of the murder mystery angle has been largely neutered, if only because the film has worn out its welcome. That's a damn shame too, as the final act is where the film shines brightest, a descent into and then a chase through dimly lit, rotting, crumbling catacombs, complete with a room full of robed, skeletal monks. The killer's outfit, a crusty robe and cheap skeleton Halloween mask, actually becomes one of the most haunting images the film offers up and Tavella goes to great lengths to pile on the dread. There's a wonderful scene of the killer sitting among the dead monks, anxiously waiting for Maureen to wander by so he can grab at her. It's nicely effective stuff, but again, the effect is all for naught as Tavella can come up with nothing better to do during the climax than to have Andrea and the killer engage in a poorly shot, poorly choreographed fist fight that shatters credibility before plummeting down into unintentional comedy.

The real saving grace of THE MONSTER OF VENICE is its setting. There's something beautifully terrifying about Venice. It is equal parts tragic, haunting, lovely and unsettling. A drowned city, teetering on collapse, but so beautiful, so wonderfully mysterious. Tavella understands both the beauty and the terror of the city, and the moments when all we're doing is touring the city by gondola or walking through the streets are packed with hypnotic glory. Like in Nicolas Roeg's excellent DON'T LOOK NOW, Venice is a genuine character here. I just wish the film was as in love with its story as it is with its setting. 

THE MONSTER OF VENICE

(Il mostro di Venezia, The Embalmer)

Director: Dino Tavella

Writer: Paolo Lombardo, Gian Battista Mussetto, Dino Tavella, Antonio Walter

Starring: Maureen Brown, Luigi Martocci, Alcide Gazzotto, Alba Brotto

Italy; Gondola Film

1965, 77 minutes

Narrative Variety: Amateur Detective

Murderer(s): 1 male

Murderer(s) Role: Friend

Murderer(s) Motive: Unexplained, presumably madness

Victims: 1 female (off-screen), 1 female (drowned), 1 female (drowned), 1 female (drowned), 1 female (off-screen), 1 male (stabbed), 1 female (drowned), 1 female (strangled)

Murderer(s) Death: Shot to death

THE GIALLO PROJECT - LIBIDO

When he was a child, Christian witnessed his sex maniac father murder a lusty, young blonde. 20 years later, Christian returns to his father's home with an eye on selling the property once the deed is transferred to him in a few months time. Along for the visit is his finance, Helene, the estate caretaker (and close family friend) Paul and Paul's ditzy, younger blonde wife, Brigitte. There is obvious acrimony between Christian and Paul, the former eager to fire his longtime associate and the latter desperate to keep the estate in the family name. As the days go by, Christian gains the attention of Brigitte, Paul and Helene begin spending more time together, but far more worryingly, Christian begins seeing and hearing things around the estate. Is he going mad or is something far more sinister afoot?

LIBIDO marks the arrival of Ernesto Gastaldi, one of Italy's foremost genre film screenwriters, in the land of the giallo. The simple story of LIBIDO is by far the most typical form of the Poisoned Past narrative found in the entirety of the filone and Gastaldi would go on to refine the narrative of LIBIDO through multiple films including THE SWEET BODY OF DEBORAH, A… COME ASSASSINO and THE STRANGE VICE OF MRS. WARDH, a landmark title in the giallo. It's a simple premise that works, a character haunted by something in the past is tormented by someone in the present, someone close, someone who knows all too well the extent of their trauma. These usually skew towards the psychosexual, but LIBIDO plays it more straight, bearing little of the complexity that would go on to mark Gastaldi's later work.

The film begins with a quote by Freud explaining his idea of the libido (the psychic energy that exists in our subconscious) and from that we surmise that this will be more of a psychological thriller than a potboiler. Indeed, Gastaldi seems to be playing that game. It's easy to read the characters as metaphors for Freudian sexual/power dominance ideas with the id, ego and superego being represented by Brigitte, Helene and Paul respectively. But whatever psychological depth Gastaldi and his co-writer Mara Maryl (who plays Brigitte in the film) were trying to add to the film gets brushed aside for a more routine and simplistic mystery in the later half. That isn't to say that the second half of the film is therefore uninteresting or subpar. Far from it. Once LIBIDO takes its sharp right turn into mystery thriller territory, it becomes a bleak, delicious bit of filmmaking.

The final third of the film piles on the twists, turns and reversals as characters get caught in lies, divulge secrets and display signs of malicious intent. Christian owns up to having violent impulses just before Helene starts sporting scratches and bruises on her body. Is Christian harming her while in some kind of fugue state? Brigitte lets slip that while Christian may think Helene and Paul didn't meet until after their engagement, the truth is that Paul deliberately set up the meeting between Helene and Christian, hoping it would lead to their engagement. Christian follows Paul and Helene when they head off to do some shopping. He later spies them in an embrace outside of a hotel. Are they trying to drive him crazy to get their hands on his inheritance?

The final solution to this puzzle is a triple twist ending that would feel positively hackneyed had it not been set up with so much care. While undeniably twisted, the final moments of LIBIDO pack a genuine punch, wonderfully, blackly ironic in their machinations but almost heartbreaking at the same time. While the impact will likely be diminished if you're at all familiar with Gastaldi's later work (especially YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY), the send-off to LIBIDO definitely sold me on the films greatness. And I don't use that term lightly. With its abundance of memorable performances, stylish direction and suitably slippery narrative, this is a film that deserves a critical reappraisal. It is an easy film to recommend, especially if you're interested in the foundational roots of the giallo. 

LIBIDO

Director: Ernesto Gastaldi, Vittorio Salerno

Writer: Ernesto Gastaldi, Mara Maryl

Starring: Giancarlo Giannini, Dominique Boschero, Luciano Pigozzi, Mara Maryl

Italy; Nucleo Dariano Film

1965, 87 minutes

Narrative Variety: Poisoned Past

Murderer(s): 1 male (in flashback), 1 female (present day)

Murderer(s) Role: Father (in flashback), Friend (present day)

Murderer(s) Motive: Money

Victims: 1 woman (killed off screen in flashback), 1 man (pushed from a cliff), 1 woman (shot)

Murderer(s) Death: N/A

THE GIALLO PROJECT - LADY OF THE LAKE

When the opening titles of a film include the names Franco Rossellini, Luigi Bazzoni and Guilio Questi, it's safe to assume that all bets are off. LADY OF THE LAKE is an almost perfect blend of three idiosyncratic sensibilities. It's a film that uses the murder mystery as an abstraction, only there to provide a semi-sturdy foundation for a house built of half-remembered narrative occurrences, subtle misdirections and dreamlike flourishes of visual imagination. There's a hefty dollop of Antonioni sloshing around in its DNA, with whiffs of the French New Wave dancing through its aiery atmosphere. It feels, in many ways, post modern yet its visuals lie somewhere in-between the chiaroscuro streets of the Film Noir and the dark hallways of the finest British Gothic horror.

It's a film that is best watched. Reading about it will only give you half the story and little of the experience. The film tells the tale of Mr. Bernard (we're never given his first name), a writer suffering from a bout of existential melancholy, who travels to a lake side hotel during the winter to work on a book. He hopes to meet up with Tilde, a pretty blonde maid he met his last time there. The lake that sits near the hotel fascinates him. We're told that beneath the waters lies the ruins of a city, though we're never given any sort of evidence to back up that claim.

Upon arriving, Bernard is greeted by Enrico, the affable hotel owner, and his daughter, Irma. Enrico's son, Mario, arrives later with his distant, clearly disturbed younger wife Adriana. But still, there's no sign of Tilde. Visiting a photographer acquaintance of his in town, Bernard learns the tragic news. Tilde is dead. She was found to have ingested poison, the death ruled a suicide by local police. But the photographer claims to know the truth. Tilde did in fact have poison in her system, but the real cause of her death came from a slit throat. He shows Bernard a photograph he took of Tilde shortly before the murder. She is obviously pregnant.

But with whose child?

As the days go on, Bernard begins investigating Tilde's death. He begins to feel ill, sporting a high fever. Or is he being poisoned, too? Was his dream of Irma confessing her guilt over Tilde's death a fevered hallucination, or did it really happen? A memory keeps haunting Bernard, a memory of Tilde making love to an unseen man during the night. Was he the one who murdered her? Is it true that Enrico might have paid off the police to keep Tilde's murder from going public? With little more than rumors, conjecture and a handful of hazy memories, Bernard seeks to stitch together the truth, even though it might lead to his own destruction.

What makes LADY OF THE LAKE such a fascinating piece of film is its main narrative convention, that of the unreliable narrator. Bernard is as much of a mystery to us as the murder of Tilde. Though he knows Enrico and his family from his years of spending summers at the hotel, they're little more than passing acquaintances. Like Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW, our entire vantage point is through the eyes of the protagonist. When you couple that with Bernard's constant fevered mind, you're left with a skewed perspective and little solid ground to stand on. Unlike your usual Amateur Detective tale, Tilde's murder happened in the past and with the town all but empty, there's no one for Bernard to question but the people he suspects. With nothing more than rumors from a man he barely knows to go on, Bernard begins to read guilt where guilt might not lie.

Simple things like a nervous laugh or a passing glance are read as indications of something sinister. With only a single memory as a clue, Bernard begins to seek patterns out of nothingness. He descends into conspiracy thinking. When he spies Adriana, Mario's mentally indisposed wife, walking near the lake at night, it becomes something more than a night time stroll. And when she attempts to pass him a note one afternoon by dropping a piece of paper out of a window, Bernard assumes she has urgent news to tell him about Tilde. After she is found drowned in the lake, what other conclusion can Bernard draw than she was murdered? As the film descends further down its complicated path, Bernard begins to come to the realization that the truth he is seeking might not be as simplistic as he hoped it would be.

It might just be that the woman whose death he is seeking to avenge, a woman he never really knew but grew to cherish through unrequited love, might not have been much of an angel after all.

And therein lies the central conceit of the film. The nature of truth. The uncertainty of memory. The desire to solve what might be unsolvable, if for no other reason than to feel the satisfaction of some kind of closure. LADY OF THE LAKE doesn't end with closure of any substantial type, but that shouldn't come as a surprise. It isn't a film concerned with tying a nice bow of poetic justice on top of a package filled with easy answers. In the end, closure is as elusive as the truth and the journey to enlightened discovery can sometimes carry a burden far greater than the weight of simply not knowing.

LADY OF THE LAKE

(La donna del lago)

Director: Luigi Bazzoni, Franco Rossellini

Writer: Luigi Bazzoni, Giulio Questi, Franco Rossellini, Renzo Rossellini

Starring: Peter Baldwin, Salvo Randone, Valentina Cortese, Virni Lisi, Philippe Leroy

Italy; B.R.C. Produzione S.r.l., Istituto Luce

1965, 95 minutes

Narrative Variety:Amateur Detective

Murderer(s): 1 male, 1 female

Murderer(s) Role: Son of lead suspect, Daughter of lead suspect

Murderer(s) Motive: Killed initial victim in response to blackmail. Later victim was killed to keep victim from talking. The final two murders in the film are carried out to prevent a family's reputation from being ruined.

Victims: 1 female (throat slit – off screen), 1 female (drowned – off screen), 1 male (killed off screen), 1 male (killed off screen)

Murderer(s) Death: Male killer, killed off screen. Female killer, presumably drowned, thought to be suicide – off screen.

THE GIALLO PROJECT - ASSASSINATION IN ROME

A wealthy woman with a missing husband, a dead body found at the Trevi Fountain, a suave reporter, a roll of microfilm… These are the essential elements in ASSASSINATION IN ROME. Looking at the title, you might think this would turn out to be a politically charged thriller, but alas, this film is a much more scattershot, plot-heavy potboiler (the original Italian title translates to THE SECRET OF THE RED DRESS, a much more typical, Edgar Wallace-styled title). Character introductions come fast and furious as the film builds steam, pouring attention into a revolving door of MacGuffins and dead ends, before finally settling down in the comfortable realm of murder mystery tropes. 

Here we see the Amateur Detective narrative come into play, the first time since Bava's THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH. The mystery to be solved concerns a tie between the missing husband and the dead body found at the Fountain, a dead body which just so happened to be carrying a package of heroin. Our detective character throughout the film is Dick, a smooth talking ladies man in good with the local police inspector. Reporters are an obvious choice for the amateur detective role. By profession, they know every one and every thing in town. They're scamps and snoops, their pockets lined with other people's dirty laundry, all the better for prying information out of locals. Using a reporter eliminates the need for hefty exposition. We expect a reporter like Dick to know things. After all, that's his job.

As the film plays on, a few more key characters are introduced. A couple of bumbling thieves (aka The Comic Relief), a big bruiser prone to knocking Dick unconscious whenever he enters a dark room, Dick's nosy girlfriend Erika, an ex-crime boss from New York who used to have ties to the drug trade, and a short-lived helper character (all of the Amateur Detective films have a helper character, someone who discovers crucial information, only to wind up dead before passing it on). By mid-point, this is a veritable War and Peace, brimming with characters that add a bit of personality to the film, but do very little to actually move the plot along.

When the film finally decides to treat its mystery with a bit more finesse, it all culminates in a few fistfights, a deadly gunshot and a frantic race against time to keep Shelley (that's the wealthy woman I mentioned earlier; her past romantic feelings for Dick – no laughing at that – adds a touch of pathos to their otherwise bland chemistry) and her recently found, hospitalized husband from ending up dead. When the final reveal happens, the film simply decides to wrap it up and roll credits. Only the reveal, the point when the events of the film should all be explained, isn't handled well at all. I had to rewatch a third of the film to make sure I didn't miss some kind of explicit explanation for why the killer did what they did. I'm still a little fuzzy on that point. Maybe something was lost in translation.

I don't want to sound too negative about ASSASSINATION IN ROME. It's a perfectly serviceable thriller. But that's kind of the problem, isn't it? Sure, it might be self aware (the film points out that the Trevi Fountain was featured in Fellini's LA DOLCE VITA, cleverly juxtaposing Anita Ekberg's joyous, lively romp in the water with the discovery of a dead body) and carried by several strong performances (Hugh O'Brian, Alberto Closas and Eleonora Rossi Drago are all quite good here), but the running time is too long and the narrative is too unfocused for it to ever really transcend its populist cinema roots. This was yet another multi-country co-production featuring aging Hollywood actors and set primarily in popular postcard settings like Venice with a few briefs excursions to tourist trap locations.

It never really forms its own unique identity, trading subversiveness for pandering and playing it safe all through the running time. It tries to be too much, a film about drug trade one minute, government secrets the next, and finally a full-throated murder mystery. But despite all of that, it is a damn fine way to spend a lazy Saturday afternoon. The film looks wonderful, has more than its fair share of clever, sometimes even thrilling, moments (even if they don't add up to much) and even has a sense of humor about the whole thing. It's a mixed bag for sure, but there are a few choice nuggets of goodness here, enough that I would recommend giving it a watch if you're into early gialli.

ASSASSINATION IN ROME 
(Il segreto del vestito rosso)
Director: Silvio Amadio
Writer: Silvio Amadio, Giovanni Simonelli
Starring: Cyd Charisse, Hugh O'Brian, Alberto Closas, Eleonora Rossi Drago
Production Location ; Italy, France, Spain Production Co. Apo Film, Midega Film Dicifrance
1965, 110 minutes

Narrative Variety: Amateur Detective
Murderer(s): 1 Female
Murderer(s) Role: Love interest
Murderer(s) Motive: Money
Victims: 1 male (poisoned), 1 male (poisoned), 1 male (stabbed)
Murderer(s) Death: Falling