GIALLO SUNDAY: A Quiet Place to Kill

Apologies for the minimal visual content in today’s Giallo Sunday offering; the streaming copy I watched froze just before the end credits and I’d only seen fit to take one screengrab. Nonetheless, it features a bottle of J&B, so at least there’s one giallo trope present and correct.

Umberto Lenzi’s output is prodigious and entirely genre-based: polizia, gialli, war movies, horrors. His string of gialli from the late 60s to the mid-70s are of a uniform standard – glossy, sexy, cynical – and provide something of a headache for the film historian.

For example: Lenzi’s 1969 giallo ‘Orgasmo’ (not to be confused with his later ‘Spasmo’) starring Carroll Baker as an American heiress who gets involved with a European couple only for sexual tension and murderous passions to come to the surface was retitled ‘Paranoia’ for the American market. A year and three films later (told you his output was prodigious) Lenzi made a giallo called ‘Paranoia’, which again starred Carroll Baker again as an American heiress again becoming embroiled in sexual tension and murderous passions after again getting involved with a European couple, which – to avoid (or maybe generate) confusion – was retitled ‘A Quiet Place to Kill’ for the American market. Lenzi’s next film, starring Ray Lovelock and a jailbait Ornella Muti, was called ‘An Ideal Place to Kill’, and therefore retitled for the English speaking market ‘Oasis of Fear’ a.k.a. ‘Dirty Pictures’.

For the purposes of this review, I’ll go with ‘A Quiet Place to Kill’ as a title. That or, ‘The One Where Carroll Baker Plays a Racing Driver’. Or maybe not; that makes it sound too much like an episode of ‘Friends’.

Anyway, Carroll Baker plays Helen, a racing driver who, recuperating after a crash, is invited to spend some time at the coastal villa of her ex-husband Maurice (Jean Sorel). Arriving, she discovers the invitation came from Maurice’s new wife Constanze (Anna Proclemer). Constanze has twigged to something that Helen also found out the hard way – to whit, Maurice is a good-looking, smooth-talking love rat who leeches off rich women – and is looking for a partner in crime to help her dispose of Maurice and make it look like an accident.

The film plays out against a sunny backdrop of louche, amoral privilege, where characters wander around in elegant fashions, yachting, diving, playing tennis, drinking champagne or cocktails or (hey, let’s not forget who the sponsor is!) J&B, lounging by the pool, shooting each other baleful looks, and engaging in the odd bit of hate-fucking.

So: glamorous people, glamorous locations, copious amounts of nudity and a general air of moneyed cynicism. Oh yeah, and a murder plot. Let’s not forget the murder plot. Do I need to tell you that it doesn’t entirely go to plan? Do I need to mention that a rogue element enters the proceedings – in the shape of Constanze’s headstrong teenage daughter Susan (Marina Coffa). Or that there are possible witnesses to a certain, compromised event? Or that an authority figure – in this case public prosecutor Albert Duchamps (Luis Davila) – is sniffing around, convinced that there are inconsistencies.

The second half of ‘A Quiet Place to Kill’ inhabits the kind of territory best described in Patricia Highsmith’s ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’: you know what’s happened, why it happened, who did it and how they potentially screwed up, and the tension is generated by watching them scurry around like rats trying to lie, obfuscate and side-step their way free of the consequences. Lenzi throws in a final act curveball that explodes the character dynamics and steers things in an even more reprehensibly cynical direction.

There may not be any likeable characters here, but there’s plenty to enjoy: Baker is luminously gorgeous and spends much of the film in various states of undress; Sorel plays the good-looking bastard to a tee; Guglielmo Mancori’s widescreen cinematography is eye-catching; the lounge jazz soundtrack is, as ever in this genre, hilariously inappropriate; and the twists of the last few minutes are as serpentine as the hair-pin bends one of the characters makes a tyre-squealing escape attempt along in the tense finale.

Murder in a Blue World

Take a look at these three shots from Eloy de la Iglesia’s 1973 oddity ‘Murder in a Blue World’. The first shows a group of rather anti-social young men driving around at recklessly excessive speeds late at night. In the second, these selfsame gentlemen have paid a surprise visit to a middle class family and gearing up to do some unspeakable things. The last one shows a recidivist undergoing a radical experiment in aversion therapy.

Remind you of anything?

Or should I say: remind you of anything you might have viddied at the old sinny, o my brothers?

Fifteen minutes in, I was ready to write off ‘Murder in a Blue World’ as a stylish if incoherent rip off of ‘A Clockwork Orange’. Then, just as the gang are gathering outside the home they are about to invade, de la Iglesia not only acknowledges Kubrick’s controversy-magnet but gets all meta about it. He cuts to the family watching TV. The announcer discusses the next programme: a screening of ‘A Clockwork Orange’, namechecking the director, studio and year of release, referring to it as “a symphony on the theme of violence”.

Later, de la Iglesia has his central character, Anna (Sue Lyon), read ‘Lolita’ as she sits in a bar. These are the only two Kubrick references in the big and they’re about as unsubtle as a falling anvil, but they’re nonetheless telling. ‘A Clockwork Orange’ informs the film’s aesthetic, from concepts (youth out of control; a government who resort to totalitarian methods; an aversion therapy programme finally revealed as a failure) to set-pieces (violence against a family; a retributive beating doled out to a gang member who questions the leader) to production design. The ‘Lolita’ reference inverts the concept of Lyon playing a 14-year old nymphet in Kubrick’s earlier film (she was 16 at the time of shooting) by having her disguised as an older woman for a key scene in ‘Murder in a Blue World’ (she was 27 when de la Iglesia’s film was made).

In this scene – and I’ll hoist the jolly SPOILER ALERT at this point and let it flutter proudly for the rest of the article – Anna is passing herself off as a spinster (not very convincingly) in order to persuade a gigolo to accompany her back to her place. Anna’s pad (she’s a nurse, by the way) is a sprawling mansion in its own grounds. It’s also the same house ‘The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll’ was filmed in …

… and there’s no way anyone on a nurse’s salary could afford to live there. Even if she worked in the private healthcare sector. Christ, I doubt even Victor (Jean Sorel), the doctor who fancies Eva and is secretly running the aversion therapy experiments in collusion with a shadowy government minister, could afford the mortgage payments.

But I digress. Anna is in the habit of picking up young men, taking them back to hers, making out a bit and then stabbing them in the heart. Casual sex and casual murder all rolled up in one. In addition to disguising herself as an old maid to snare a gigolo, she also passes herself off as a lesbian and visits a gay bar where she picks up a gay guy. Yeah, I didn’t make much sense of that either. Incidentally, gay bars in Europe in the 70s apparently looked like this:

So anyway, while Anna is happily nursing people by day and stabbing them in the heart by night, and Victor (hmmm, wasn’t there another bonkers medico who went by that name?) is happily fucking up sociopaths for the greater good of science/society/the minister’s re-election chances (delete as applicable), the droogs gang of anti-social youths are happily running around causing maybe. Then one of them, David (Chris Mitchum) pisses off the head droog youth and finds himself ass-whupped and exiled from the gang. Licking his wounds, he witnesses Anna dumping a body. He invades her home (maybe she was just house-sitting for the three weird sisters from ‘The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll’), spurns her advances (thus avoiding a blade in the old ticker) and blackmails her. Later, after a motorcycle chase lands him in traction and guess who happens to be on the ward, he kind of wishes he hadn’t.

‘Murder in a Blue World’ was almost a candidate for “Viva la Revolution”. There’s a clear theme of rebellion. The dr—shit, gotta stop doing that. The youths are rebelling against a government that automates everything and disseminates propaganda through commercials: constant soundbites interspersing TV programmes exhort the audience to seek useful enjoyment. Everyone drinks a concoction which is simply called Blue Drink (hence the film’s title) – whether this is some kind of mild narcotic designed to keep citizens stupified is something de la Iglesia never explains, which is a shame: it’s an interesting concept.

Elsewhere, David rebels against the gang he’s in. Anna rebels against the Hippocratic Oath, killing people during her off duty hours and, finally, in the hospital itself. Even the recidivists indoctrinated by the aversion therapy rebel, in the film’s out-of-nowhere but viscerally memorable final scene, against pretty much everything and everyone.

So why didn’t I feature this in “Viva la Revolution”? Simply because it’s never made clear why they rebel. For all that it’s insinuated that the government controls the populace, the iron fist of authority is curiously absent from the film. Even the minister who sanctions Victor’s experiments on felons appears only briefly on a videophone. Most of the characters seem to live an affluent enough life – particularly Anna (maybe the house was an inheritance. But even then, the rates, the upkeep, the insurance!) No-one seems to be oppressed.

‘Murder in a Blue World’ is full of intriguing (if only partly explored) concepts, and its three distinct narrative strands are, individually, quite absorbing. The problem is, it never really seems to cohere. Scenes are ordered as if at random. Subplots are either arbitrarily curtailed (such as David’s blackmail of Anna) or just plain forgotten about (such as the crusading journalist irate at police inefficiency during the murder investigation). If it weren’t for that (quite literally) killer last scene, the film would have been, at best, a nicely shot failure. As it is, it’s a quirky also-ran. I can’t help thinking that if the immediacy and focus of its last two minutes had been applied to the preceding ninety-six, it could have been some kind of demented masterpiece, Kubrick rip-offery notwithstanding.

Short Night of Glass Dolls

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: giallo / In category: 6 of 10 / Overall: 47 of 100

Aldo Lado’s ‘Short Night of Glass Dolls’ is a superb, darkly compelling and unexpectedly political giallo lumbered with a nonsensical title. In the all-too-short (11 minute) interview with the director which appears as a special feature on the Blue Underground DVD, the amiable Lado explains that he’d originally titled it ‘Malastrana’, after the district of Prague the film is set in. When his producer voiced concerns that the reference would be lost on the audience, it was changed to ‘Short Night of the Butterflies’, echoing a scene in which doomed heroine Mira (Barbara Bach) likens herself to one of the butterflies pinned in a glass display case owned as an objet d’ art by her journalist boyfriend Gregory Moore (Jean Sorel). With Duccio Tessari’s ‘The Bloodstained Butterfly’ released at the same time, Lado’s title underwent another change at the last minute.

As with ‘Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion’ it’s atypical for a giallo in terms of low body count; also, the murders are played fast and sudden rather than elaborate and suspenseful. The set-up and aesthetic of the movie, at least for its first half, is more in keeping with film noir, in particular bringing to mind the dead/dying man as protagonist of Rudolph Maté’s ‘D.O.A.’ or Billy Wilder’s ‘Sunset Boulevard’.

Gregory is the found in the grounds of a stately home in the opening sequence. An ambulance rushes him through the streets of Prague. The medics think he’s dead. Gregory’s voiceover desperately assures the audience he isn’t – he’s drugged, unable to move a muscle or speak a word. Rolled off a gurney and onto a mortuary slab, Gregory’s story unfolds in flashback as he waits for his autopsy. As the DVD back cover blurb has it, “Can a reporter with no visible signs off life solve this perverse puzzle before he meets his ultimate deadline?”

See what they did there?

The “perverse puzzle”, by the way, centres around the disappearance of Mira. As Gregory, against the advice of the local police, commences his own investigation – warily aided by his colleagues Jessica (Ingrid Thulin) and Jack (Mario Adorf), he comes to realise that there’s a connection between Mira’s disappearance and that of several local girls. His questions meet with silence. The families who lost their daughters seem too scared to talk to him. A cabal of influential high society and political types close ranks against him. The few leads he uncovers are terminated. Threats from the authorities are stepped up.

‘Short Night of Glass Dolls’ was Aldo Lado’s first film and he did a bang up job. An excellent cast give commendable performances (only Barbara Bach comes off as wooden, but she hardly features prominently), while DoP Giuseppe Ruzzolini (who lensed Pasolini’s ‘Teorama’) gives the whole thing a moody and atmospheric look. After a relatively slow start, Lado kicks the narrative into high gear with Mira’s disappearance. The more desperate and agitated Gregory’s pursuit of the truth, the more out of his depth he gets. Things move inexorably towards a denouement that brings to mind the grotesque, quasi-satanic goings on of ‘All the Colours of the Dark’, but acts as a perfect metaphor for the social and political injustice that Lado’s persuasively cynical script kicks against.

Definitely not your average giallo but arguably one of the best, ‘Short Night of Glass Dolls’ is highly recommended.