GIALLO SUNDAY: Death Walks on High Heels

I just love the title. ‘Death Walks on High Heels’. It gives me a mental image that’s half ‘Seventh Seal’, half ‘Priscilla, Queen of the Desert’.

The film itself is similarly schizophrenic: it starts off like a Hitchcock movie in the chic, playful stage of his career (think ‘North by Northwest’ or ‘To Catch a Thief’, but with more in the way of striptease routines and straight razors), then catches a flight to England and holes up in a rural backwater village with a bit of a ‘Straw Dogs’ vibe before sharing a cup of tea with Baxter of the Yard (I kid you not, that’s exactly how the character’s introduced) for an Agatha Christie inspired carousel of twists and turns, murky motives and herrings of a decidedly crimson pigmentation.

Sounds like a mishmash, doesn’t it; an all-over-the-place splurge of WTF? Credit, then, to director Luciano Ercoli – he of ‘Forbidden Photos of a Woman Above Suspicion’ fame – for never letting things degenerate into a scattering of loose ends. And for wrapping the whole thing up satisfactorily despite narrative developments that leave you wondering if a couple of reels from a whole other movie haven’t been spliced in by accident and so much rug-pulling in the final act that you begin to fear for the floorboards.

Things start off with a jewel thief in the twilight of his career knifed to death on a train to Switzerland. Back in his home country of France, his daughter Nicole (Susan Scott), an exotic dancer, is pulled in by the police and grilled about where he stashed the ill-gotten cache of diamonds from his last job. She denies all knowledge. They give her loser, pisshead boyfriend Michel (Simon Andreu – the sleazy sex fiend from the aforementioned ‘Forbidden Photos’) a grilling as well, but he doesn’t come up with anything either.

Nicole argues with Michel and sends him packing. At the nightclub, she’s propositioned by middle-aged wannabe lothario Dr Robert Matthews (Frank Wolff), who’s looking for a dalliance before he heads home to England. Successfully disentangling herself from his attentions, Nicole is then menaced by a masked figure with piercing blue eyes who breaks into her home and threatens to do unspeakable things with a straight-razor if she doesn’t come up with the diamonds.

Turning to Michel again for comfort, Nicole begins to suspect that he might be involved in the attack on her. She exploits Matthews’ libido and promises to be his mistress if he takes her to England. Hardly believing his luck, the “good” doctor agrees and loses no time installing her in his holiday home on the coast while he tries to arrange a divorce from his wife Vanessa (Claudie Lange). Biding her time during Matthews’ frequent commutes up to London to his practice, Nicole is increasingly unnerved by the too-inquisitive behaviour of the locals. Meanwhile, Michel has got a lead on Matthews’ identity and is determined to track Nicole down. His eventual arrival in the village coincides with a murder. Next thing, the tenacious Inspector Baxter (Carlo Gentili) is on the case and determined to prove that a copper in a giallo doesn’t have to be a bumbling incompetent.

After a slow midsection in which every suggestive bit of dialogue between Nicole and Matthews, every candlelit meal and every lingering glance is documented in such painfully slow detail that the only thing separating ‘Death Walks on High Heels’ from ‘Elvira Madigan’ is a bit of soft focus and twenty minutes of Mozart’s Piano Concerto N° 21, things perk up no end as Baxter untangles a web of murderous motives, village secrets are revealed, alibis are disproved and Michel goes on the run when things take an even more surprising turn.

Gorgeously shot, featuring generally decent performances (Scott’s range is limited but, damn!, the woman had vamp written all over her) and boasting enough twists and turns to fill half a dozen other movies, ‘Death Walks in High Heels’ transcends its almost comedic title and delivers a thinking-caps-on slice of entertainment, the denouement of which will probably make you, once your head’s stopped spinning, want to rewatch it immediately just to assurance yourself that it did actually fit together so cleverly.

Forbidden Photos of a Woman Above Suspicion

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: giallo / In category: 5 of 10 / Overall: 46 of 100

Despite a thematic connection with Sergio Martino’s ‘All the Colours of the Dark’ and Lucio Fulci’s ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’ in its depiction of a psychologically beleaguered heroine, Luciano Ercoli’s ‘Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion’ is in some ways an atypical giallo. Mainly in the fact that there’s no killer, black gloved or otherwise. Accordingly, the body count is low: three deaths, one offscreen (which may or may not be a suicide), the other two during the climax when (MINOR SPOILER) the villains are offed.

What ‘Forbidden Photos’ does have, and he’s as nasty a piece of work as any antagonist the genre has to offer, is the unnamed blackmailer and sex offender (Simon Andreu) who targets trophy wife Minou (Dagmar Lassander) during her sojourn at a seaside resort while her industrialist husband Peter (Pier Paolo Capponi) is away on a business trip. Unnamed characters are the bane of the reviewer’s life, and I don’t fancy typing or even copy-and-pasting “the blackmailer and sex offender” repeatedly during the next few paragraphs, so let’s call him Bob.

Bob attacks Minou while she’s taking an evening constitutional along the shore; it’s not quite rape, but definitely a sexual assault. Before letting her go, he implies that her husband is a fraud and a murderer. Upon his return, Peter puts the matter in the hands of his friend Frank (Osvaldo Genazzini), a police commissioner, and reassures Minou that she’s safe now. His assurances are vapid and less than placatory; his mind is on a crucial business deal, and besides he half believes Minou’s dependency on tranquillizers is behind her story.

Indeed, the opening sequence, containing the only voiceover in the film (unreliable narration?), has Minou decide that the time has come to stop smoking and drinking and wean herself off the tranks. Her musings accompany a montage of her getting ready, as if for a night out, only for the sequence to end as she pours a drink, pops a pill and zones out on the sofa. That Ercoli cuts straight to Minou’s evening stroll along the beach suggests her encounter with Bob could well be a product of her addled mind.

Subsequent events, however, suggest otherwise. Minou and Peter meet their old friend Dominique (Susan Scott) at a nightclub – backstory: Dominique introduced Minou to Peter, with whom she had a thing way back when – who mentions a news story about a financier dying in mysterious circumstances. The police seem to think its suicide, but Minou – aware that Peter owed the financier a debt that could have scuppered his potentially profitable deal with a German consortium – has her doubts, particularly when she realises that the circumstances could have been engineered by technology Peter’s firm was working on.

Bob reappears and plays Minou a tape that seems to implicate Peter. She tries to buy him off, but he’s not interested in money. He torments Minou, instead, with mind games and sexual demands. But is Minou, her relationship with Peter in limbo and her curiosity secretly aroused by Dominique’s free-spirited lifestyle and collection of erotica, more attracted to Bob than scared of him? Certainly, Bob’s physical similarity to Peter hints at surrogacy. Likewise, the similarities between Minou and Dominique. Both are redheads, similar height and figure. Minou berates herself at one point for dressing like a housewife and opts for a more revealing décolletage – obviously patterning herself on Dominique who has the wardrobe of a Victoria’s secret model and the va-va-voom to go with it.

Ercoli and screenwriters Ernesto Gastaldi and May Velasco have so much fun dishing out red herrings and misdirections, as well as drawing multi-layered parallels between the principals, that payoff (though well-handled) seems a little pedestrian by comparison. Still, it offers the incidental pleasure, inimical to most gialli, of a hapless copper (here Commissioner Frank) having the whole thing spelled out for him by a secondary character.

Elsewhere, though, many gialli tropes are missing. There are no elaborate and grand guignol death scenes or rooftop chases; and although Allejandro Ulloa’s cinematography is eye-catching ‘Forbidden Photos’ lacks the off-kilter compositions and hyper-stylized imagery that characterizes the most famous examples of the genre. The performances are generally good – with Andreu a stand-out – and even if Lassender doesn’t quite hit the heights of Edwige Fenech in ‘All the Colours of the Dark’, she essays the woman in peril role competently enough.

It’s weird, really. For a giallo that sounds like it ought to disappoint on so many levels, ‘Forbidden Photos’ is never less than entertaining and a decent addition to the collection.