Handicapping The Best Picture Oscars 2020 – Joker

Joaquin Phoenix in “Joker.” credit: unilad.co.uk

Todd Phillips’ Joker (USA, 2019) was a film I, admittedly, wasn’t looking forward to seeing. Films that exist to display the squalid disintegration of its characters within the context of the squalid disintegration of civil humanity just flat-out don’t interest me anymore. The aversion started out with Leaving Las Vegas, continued with Requiem For A Dream, and has kept me away from countless potentially nihilist downer films ever since. So, it was a surprise of sorts to find that Joker is an admittedly powerful piece of work, deliberately structured and shot, and well-performed by the superb Joaquin Phoenix. I still wouldn’t recommend it, and view it as unsuccessful, but the ingredients of the first two-thirds of its running time are, inadvertently, greater than the sum of the whole movie’s parts.

Arthur Fleck’s life doesn’t seem so bad on its face – previously hospitalized for psychological issues, what imbalances there are seem to be controlled by medication, fairly steady work and a stable homelife taking care of his mom (Frances Conroy). He’ll never be rich, but he’ll get by long enough to cultivate his stand-up comic career, and appear on Murray Franklin’s late-night TV show. Then he’ll be rich. But he’s clearly seething under it all – his uncontrollable barks of inadvertent laughter and absence of any positive social skills leave him lonely and resentful. The beginning of the film throws his outsider-ness into your face – he’s a promotional clown hawking a going-out-of-business sale, and young toughs steal his sign, then beat hell out of him. His fellow promotional clowns are alternately supportive and undermining – one gives Arthur a pistol for protection, with the spiteful knowledge that Arthur will somehow make the worst of it. And he does. Twice. But the gun is power where he’s never had it before, and a thing or two leads to another thing or two…

That we care even a little about Arthur is evidence of Joaquin Phoenix’s masterful performance – he and his work transcend Todd Phillips’ clumsy Scorsese-founded strategies -the Taxi Driver time-bomb indignance, the King Of Comedy misplaced hero-worship – stolen in (dare I say?) laughable shamelessness. Phillips’ narrative is a series of events that strips Arthur’s already-strained civility away scene-by-scene; Gotham City only seems to have Latino teenage muggers, privileged Wall Street white boys harassing women on the subway (but they know all of the lyrics to Send In The Clowns…), faceless pedestrians, browbeating detectives and disappearing social services staffed by people just as weary and depressed as he is. He befriends a single mom in his building (Zazie Beetz), but the relationship is weirdly underwritten, or has been indifferently edited down to nothing. Otherwise, there are no likeable characters whatsoever anywhere. After an hour-and-a-half of this we sense the deck is stacked against him so contrivedly that we just ride along, long after we’ve given up on believing in any kind of coherent idea of Gotham City and long after we can’t be bothered to buy Phillips’ ideas about injustice, anarchy, chaos and who’s fault all that might be. The bursts of violence are effective, but there’s no suspense – they just jump out unexpectedly from little-if-any context to the new context the violence creates.

It’s not a mess, though. As I said, it has structure, and a through-line; its DC comic ethos pulls Phillips back from some of his excesses, but the Wayne family thread feels like a wedge against his other ideas rather than the logical destination for the overall narrative. Cinematographer Lawrence Sher lends verisimilitude to the visual scheme. Hildur Guðnadóttir’s musical soundtrack is interesting and unpredictable – it’s a respite from the careless use of wink-wink pop music elsewhere, but the film’s tone is so vaguely dark anyway that the music doesn’t serve as much of a compliment.

Phoenix’s performance is worth the price of admission, but everything surrounding it is grimly daunting. Ultimately, Todd Phillips is far more concerned about the effect his film is having on his audience than he is in just telling a good story. He wants to convey what he thinks are valuable lessons, but, like Arthur and his pistol, Phillips simply doesn’t have the judgment to not make a botch of it.

Movies – Cleo From 5 To 7

Corinne Marchand (left) in “Cleo From 5 To 7.” credit: thenewpotato.com

Agnès Varda wasn’t nearly as prolific a filmmaker as her French New Wave contemporaries – Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, or even her husband, Jacques Demy – but a few of her films are flat-out masterpieces, and rank right alongside those other directors’ works. Her films aren’t nearly as directly film-referential as Godard’s or Truffaut’s; she shares with Rohmer and Demy a real respect for the narrative first, but the films are nonetheless infused with her personal, singular visual and structural style. Unlike those contemporaries, she didn’t come from a film-specific background – she was a working photographer for a few years before making her first foray into film, and her work draws from a dense tutelage in the visual arts, as well as her fervent political and social concerns during the early sixties. Many are more comfortable grouping her with the filmmakers of the Rive Gauche (Left Bank) movement, along with Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Marguerite Duras, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, who also drew from writing and the other fine arts, as well as filmmaking.

Cleo From 5 To 7 (Cléo de 5 [cinq] à 7 [sept]) (France, 1962) was her first feature film (after a number of short films), and it is most certainly one of those masterpieces I mentioned earlier. The film is shot primarily in black-and-white, although its first sequence – a tarot-card reading – starts off in color. As soon as we see faces, it reverts. This is Varda telling us that the human events we see are constructed, rendered. Like Godard, Varda wants us to be keenly aware we’re watching a movie, and wants us to stay objective about it all rather than losing ourselves in the realism of the narrative alone. There are a few other film-centric visual tricks – a nod to Duchamps’ Nude Descending A Staircase, a loose rehearsal that turns into a small production number, an instant behind-the-curtain-and-out-from-the-curtain costume change, an extraordinary tracking sequence where we start to follow along with a car ride, a film-within-the-film, and a nod late in the film to F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise – but, for the most part, they’re subliminal. Everything else about the film tells us we’re watching a real person in real time dealing with a number of real humanistic concerns.

Cléo Victoire (the very tall, very attractive Corinne Marchand, who is in nearly every frame of the film) is a pop singer who has seen some success but isn’t quite a household name yet. And like any performer, she’s scrupulous about how she’s perceived and what people think of her. But a very earthly concern is intruding on her aspirations; her doctor has raised the possibility that she may have stomach cancer, and she’ll hear about the medical test results later that day. The tarot-card reading that starts the story is at 5:00 p.m., and she expects to hear the test results by 7:00; the length of the film itself, ostensibly, is the real time activities of those two hours. Cléo meets with her personal assistant Angèle (Dominique Davray), buys a hat, returns to her apartment for that rehearsal (with her pianist / musical director, played by Michel Legrand himself), throws a hissy and stalks out on her own. She then has a cocktail at Le Dôme, and interacts with crowds and street performers before visiting an old friend who is now an artists’ model. They watch a melodramatic and comical short film with her friend’s projectionist boyfriend (the film, amusingly, stars Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina), and say goodbye. Cléo then wanders in the Parc Montsouris, where she meets a charming young man, Antoine, about to return to military duty in Algeria. (Antoine is played by Antoine Bourseiller, who shortly after the film became the ex- Mr. Agnès Varda.)

This is essentially the plot, but, as we know, the plot isn’t necessarily the movie like the map isn’t the territory. Cléo’s anxiety about the tests seeps into all of those other activities – there’s almost constant friction between her artist’s life, which she and others have manufactured for her as befitting a soon-to-be-famous pop singer constantly regarded by her fans, and her dread that it may all end just as it’s starting. Her long, tall supermodel good-looks, the hard work she’s put into her singing, and her exquisite-yet-playful tastemaking and trendsetting will all be for naught. In short, Cléo’s all about Cléo. Angèle is a good-humored assistant, but it’s clear that Cléo takes her for granted. Cléo loses herself in self-involvement on that hat-shopping stop, practically dancing through the reflections from the shop windows and the mirrors inside. “Everything suits me,” she declares. “Trying things on intoxicates me.” She finds the idea of a female cab-driver ‘revolting,’ while the cab radio describes the turmoil in Algeria. Her apartment is theatrically minimal, and Angèle scurries after her as she drops shoes and clothes on the floor and ‘exercises’ in a feathery silk robe. But when she throws that fit over her rehearsal, a very uncharacteristic thing happens – she disengages from her arranged existence and strikes out on her own, even if it’s only for an hour or so. On the surface, it’s a wake-up call from Monsieur Mortality for Cléo, but Varda uses that device to illustrate a lot of other social and cultural concerns – how society regards the feminine, how society is seduced by popular culture, how we interact with each other in public and in private, what we regard and disregard as important and/or frivolous. The first thing Cléo sees when she leaves the apartment is a street performer eating live frogs – that’s show-biz, darlin’! Despite her indulgences, we always like Cléo throughout the entire movie, because Varda subtly but clearly illustrates how Cléo is simply a product of the culture she’s part of. When she chooses to get out of her own head in the later parts of the film, she’s an almost effortlessly engaging person.

The writer John Berger famously stated, “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” Varda uses Cléo as an exemplar of that extra layer of self-consciousness that our culture imposes on women as a survival mechanism – not just in terms of clothes or physical attractiveness, but in their overall behavior and their own general life aspirations. Cléo’s artist model friend Dorothée (Dorothée Blanck) is a good foil for the anxieties that Cléo represents – she’s refreshingly frank about what her artist-gazer sculpture students are really looking at when they see her nude – “a shape…an idea.” It’s her suggestion that Cléo visit the Parc Montsouris, and you can almost see, really see, Cléo unwinding from her lucrative but limited existence.

5:00 to 7:00 is, obviously, two hours. And yet the film is 90 minutes long. You’ll have to see the film to understand why that simultaneously doesn’t matter and is very important. But see the film you certainly should. It’s one of my favorite French films, capturing the spirit of the time and its characters, yet really having nothing in common with any other film you’ve seen before. Varda’s (and her three credited cinematographers’) images are rapturous, both in terms of expanding the narrative and in celebrating the larger Parisian setting. That so many big, important ideas are wrapped up in this very animate and fascinating entertainment is one of those little filmmaking miracles that only come along every ten years or so.

(2012)

Movies – Certified Copy

William Shimell and Juliette Binoche in “Certified Copy.” credit: ropeofsilicon.com

There are a number of films that work on a number of different levels, but are equally enjoyable regardless of which level you find yourself on. For instance, you might find ‘Animal Farm’ to be a dark and interesting adult fantasy story. George Orwell, after all, is a helluva writer, and it’s easy to find human parallels in his characterizations and plot mechanics. That it’s also a fairly detailed allegory of the rise of Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky in the Leninist U.S.S.R. casts another whole perspective, but not knowing that doesn’t necessarily rob you of the initial interest and enjoyment of the ‘fictional’ story. Stuart Rosenberg’s ‘Cool Hand Luke’ is, even now, a wildly popular Paul Newman movie. Would you enjoy it more, or less, if you knew Luke’s separate episodes in the prison paralleled The Passion? Or does it matter either way? Most of us saw, and enjoyed, ‘Forbidden Planet’ as youngsters long before we realized it was a version of Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest.’ As literal-mindedly as most of us receive the world, and the stories that we relate to that condense or explain our own experiences of it, there’s also a marvelous capacity in each of us to take things presented to us in the abstract, and still form our own patterns of logic, our own senses of cause-and-effect or realistic context. And not just in cases of direct allegory, but in any series of recognizable events or people. We fill in the gaps and join the loose ends together to construct our own sense of what we’re seeing and experiencing, as long as the writer or filmmaker has given us enough information for us to form our own conclusions.

That’s the beauty of Abbas Kiarostami’s great film, Certified Copy (Copie Conforme) (France and Italy, 2010). We’re introduced to two separate people; a circumstance brings them together, they spend time amiably, discuss and argue things with familiarity, then battle and make-up intimately. Have they been married all along? Are they strangers who have silently agreed to role-play, to challenge deeply private aspects of themselves with each other? Or something in-between? You can practically watch the entire movie thinking ‘they’re really strangers,’ and it works. Then watch it again – ‘They’ve been married all along’ – and it works. Each scene, each discussion, each place they find themselves in, adds certainty here, then ambiguity there. One can even take the whole film as a formal exercise of the director – the settings are real, but the people are placeholders, constructs, for a whole sequence of issues that these two people couldn’t possibly have taken realistic part in, but nonetheless explore together. It seems wholly realistic, even as we feel it couldn’t be, but it’s all absolutely true-to-life.

James Miller (William Shimell) is an essayist and academic who has written a book, Copie Conforme (Certified Copy), subtitled ‘Forget The Original, Just Get A Good Copy’. It questions distinctions of value or authenticity between original works of craft or art and earnestly produced copies and reproductions, and how we subjectively decide whether they’re good or bad, true or inauthentic. Elle (Juliette Binoche) runs a small gallery of artifacts and reproductions in the Tuscan village of Arezzo, where she lives with her son. Attending a presentation about the book, she leaves her number with one of his associates; they meet, and they agree to spend the day in nearby Lucignano, seeing sights and discussing his work before he’s to catch a train out in the evening. And the day they spend together unfurls and expands into a demonstration of how people relate to things and places and each other, and how individual, and collectively shared, histories color our behaviors and perceptions towards all of that.

Juliette Binoche deservedly won the best actress award at Cannes last year for her richly realized character here, and obviously found creative common cause with the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. This is Mr. Kiarostami’s first film outside of Iran (predictably, it’s banned there), but characteristic of his films there is his preference for casting non-professional actors in substantial roles, and here Ms. Binoche’s counterpart is William Shimell, a British opera baritone whom Mr. Kiarostami had directed in Cosi Fan Tutte. It’s his acting debut, and he brings admirable gravity, efficiency, and no little charm to the role.

I love films like this, and could swim around with this for four or five more viewings. That’s certainly not required for you, but it’s a film that should not be missed. It’s been compared to everything from Rossellini’s Journey to Italy to Last Year at Marienbad to Two for the Road to Celine and Julie Go Boating to Before Sunrise. Kiarostami executes faithful reproductions of those films’ important ideas, but places them into his own fascinating and original context. And there’s enough warmth and fun sprinkled through all those bigger ideas to keep whatever level you meet the film on an enjoyable and entertaining place to be.

(2013)

 

 

 

Movies – The Giallo Project – Assorted 1972 Pt. 3

After the earlier successes of Argento, Mario Bava, Sergio Martino and Lucio Fulci, every working journeyman director employed by every mainstream producer in Italy was expected to try their hand at the giallo, with predictably chequered results. I’m as delighted by diamonds in the rough as most viewers, but the happy surprises are few and far between among most of these one-off efforts.

Alex Cord and Samantha Eggar in “The Dead Are Alive.”
credit: labitatoredelbuio.blogspot.com

Yet another attempt to meld the giallo template with other mystery / horror motifs, Armando Crispino’s The Dead Are Alive (or L’Etrusco Uccide Ancora, it’s far better original Italian title – The Etruscan Kills Again) (Italy, 1972) follows Jason Porter (Alex Cord), a lanky, troubled hard-drinking archaeologist who’s exploring an ancient Etruscan tomb with his documenting crew. They’re photographing tomb interiors with special cameras on telescoping rods through small entry holes drilled through the ground to preserve the site from open air. One of the frescoes depicts an Etruscan demon god, Tuchulcha, and a series of ritual murders he seems to have inspired long ago. Once Porter’s images are seen, one of the blown-up copies is just as quickly stolen, and present-day murders soon mimic the ancient ones.

Porter’s archaeological dig is, for good or bad, near the villa where a former lover of his, Myra (an oddly generic Samantha Eggar), lives with her rich and eccentric musical conductor husband Nikos Samarakis (John Marley; like Cord, another American TV veteran). Nikos is hosting Porter while he’s working, thinking it would be nice for Myra to see her old friend. But Myra seems reluctant to revisit old times with him.

Porter’s own archaeological crew, as well as the people working around Nikos on a staging of Verdi’s Requiem, create a small set of suspects. Nikos’ son Igor is helping out Porter’s crew, but Nikos’ first wife, Leni, makes a disruptive appearance as well, hoping to reclaim Igor, Nikos’ money, and cast out Myra (with her ex-boyfriend’s help). And a conniving young security guard is on the hook when identical pairs of shoes stolen from wardrobe end up on murdered women’s feet. But soap-operatic family drama and adjacent skullduggery enervate the mystery far more than providing any genuine plot-thickening. By the time we learn who the killer is, too much time has been wasted on irrelevance.

The police aren’t usually much help in these films, but at least Inspector Giuranna here (Enzo Tarascio, fresh from his villainous turn in The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave) is smart and classy – he may be the only likable character in the entire film. Some people are good with this script, but I thought the whole film was pretty dull. I’ll hope for far better on Crispino’s 1975 Autopsy.

Evelyn Stewart and Ivan Rassimov in “A White Dress for Marialé.” credit: mondo-digital.com

Romano Scavolini is the younger brother of Sauro, who wrote and directed Love And Death In The Garden Of The Gods (1972). Romano shot that film, and well, and brings his own more aggressive style to A White Dress for Marialé (Un Bianco Vestito Per Marialé) (Italy, 1972). Like Bava’s 5 Dolls For An August Moon (1970) or Margheriti’s Seven Deaths In The Cat’s Eye (1972), it’s roughly shaped on the Ten Little Indians template – stick ten (or so) people in a castle or mansion, don’t let them leave and start killing them off. Which of them is the killer? And why?

Marialé (Evelyn Stewart), as a young girl, witnessed the murder/suicide of her father upon discovering adulterous Mom in flagrante delicto in the woods. Now, as a fragile adult, she’s kept cloistered in her husband Paolo’s (Luigi Pistilli) estate along with Paolo’s reptilian manservant Osvaldo (Gengher Gatti) and fed a steady diet of tranquilizers. Is she that irretrievably wounded, or do the men have greedier ‘gaslight’ motives? But one day some old “friends” from the past arrive at the door as guests – Marialé secretly managed to send out telegrams, and wants to have a party after this very long period of time. Paolo reluctantly indulges her, the guests exchange pleasantries, and all seem to know each other – but we shortly grasp why these people don’t get together more often. With the exception of Massimo (rock-solid Ivan Rassimov), an old flame of Marialé’s whom Paolo isn’t happy to see, the rest of them are privileged sexist racist party animals who, with Marialé’s cynical encouragement, get stinking drunk and humiliate each other in rather hard-to-watch Buñuelian fashion. And, shortly after the hangovers set in, the murders start.

The script is written by Remigio Del Grosso and Giuseppe Mangione, two genre veteran screenwriters having a go with the giallo. It feels more like old man wish fulfillment than a genuine multi-character thriller. Marialé and Paolo are variations on other giallo character tropes – is she victim or perpetrator? Is he a loyal caretaker husband or opportunist scoundrel? The other characters are just sketched-in – no one in the film rises above killer’s fodder, not even the always-likable Rassimov. Scavolini keeps things antic with lush colors, crazy lighting, crash-zooms and even an indoor windstorm. But it ultimately falls a bit below an average seventies made-for-TV thriller.

Eva Czemerys in “The Cat In Heat.” credit: cultandexploitation.blogspot.com

Nello Rossati’s The Cat In Heat (La Gatta In Calore) (Italy, 1972) is another far more half-hearted soap opera than genuinely effective giallo; the narrative psychologies that might steer it into that territory are so indifferently presented by Rossati and his cast that I didn’t believe a minute of it.

The otherwise reliable Silvano Tranquilli is Antonio, a hard-working but oft-travelling businessman being wrung out by his career; his fetching yet neglected wife Anna (Eva Czemerys, who starts out engagingly but seems to lose interest as the film “progresses”…) regrettably starts a sex-and-drugs dalliance with the young party dude next door, Massimo (Anthony Fontane), an affair that gets thanklessly sleazier by the day. As the film begins, Antonio arrives at home from yet another business trip to find Massimo’s inert body in the front yard and a numbed Anna in the kitchen with a gun on the table. We then flash back to her initial disappointments with Antonio’s neglect, her revulsion/attraction to the cad-next-door and a weirdly lethargic parade of furtive bedroom sessions, parties with Massimo’s weird friends, drug experiments and group sex. All of this was done better in Lucio Fulci’s vastly superior Lizard In A Woman’s Skin a year previously – Czemerys is game for most of it, but Rossati’s ineptitude doesn’t serve her well. Pretty dispiriting stuff, but it was only Rossati’s second film – he continued cranking out mid-grade genre films through the early nineties.

Bedy Moratti and Eva Czemerys in “The Weapon, The Hour And The Motive.” credit: italo-cinema.de

Even in a much smaller role, Eva Czemerys has a far better time of it in The Weapon, The Hour And The Motive (L’Arma, L’Ora, Il Movente) (Italy, 1972). In his only directing effort, writer/producer Francesco Mazzei spins an admirable thriller from some fairly pedestrian elements. I suspect he wasn’t the intended original director, but he acquits himself well here, emphasizing the violence, sex and psychology over ordered, logical narrative – the real trick in successful giallos. Even veteran genre directors can flounder with the style, as we’ve seen.

Young Don Giorgio (Maurizio Bonuglia) is the pastor of a small-town church and school. There’s a staff of assistants and nuns, and he gets help from citizens in the community as well. There’s even a small foster child, Ferruccio (Arturo Trina), whom the nuns have adopted, and who is being raised there on the church grounds. Unfortunately, Don Giorgio can’t resist having sex with the more attractive female friends-of-the-church. The guilt finally catches up with him, and he tries to break things off with his two affairs, Orchidea (Bedy Moratti) who assists at the church and helps to tend Ferruccio, and Giulia (Eva Czemerys), a married parishioner who’s a little more resistant to losing her boy-toy. But no sooner does he turn over his new leaf then he’s brutally murdered in the music room just off the chapel. The jilted women? Their husbands? Perhaps one of the nuns, Sister Tarquinia (Claudia Gravi)?

Enter Commissioner Boito (Renzo Montagnani), one of the more engaging and capable policemen you’re likely to find in the giallo universe. Cranky, but with a sense of humor, Boito arrives on his motorcycle, starts the investigation, and proceeds to fall in love with one of the main suspects, even after another suspect is killed. It isn’t tough to figure who the guilty party is, but, like an episode of Columbo, whodunnit is less interesting than what happens afterwards. One of the murders stands out for both its ferocity and brevity (more early effects work from Carlo Rambaldi), the camera work of journeyman Giovanni Ciarlo is admirable (the revolving viewpoint from the center of a patio table is impressive and discreet), and Mazzei throws in some nunsploitation T & A to keep the core audience content. Overall, I liked this film a lot, even while acknowledging its many faults.

Paola Senatore in “A.A.A. Masseuse, Good-Looking, Offers Her Services.” credit: italianfilmreview.com

Demofilo Fidani had a pretty dubious reputation as a writer and director of spaghetti westerns, but, despite low budgets and flimsy scripts, he efficiently cranked out product. His giallo foray is A.A.A. Masseuse, Good-Looking, Offers Her Services (A.A.A. Massaggiatrice Bella Presenza Offresi) (Italy, 1972). Fidani apparently couldn’t decide whether to make a sexy softcore comedy or a serial killer movie, so he split the difference. Young Cristina (Paola Senatore), fresh out of school, forthrightly decides to make her way in the real world in the sex industry, despite Mom’s loving concern and Dad’s indignant resentment. Her first appointments are botches in one vaguely humorous way or another, but she eventually acquires a comparably inexperienced agent (aka pimp), Oskar (Howard Ross) who actually becomes pretty good at it, landing her a series of slightly kinky clients of gracious temperament and financial resources. Business is just settling in when her clients start being inexplicably murdered by a fedora-wearing, trenchcoated masked person with a razor. Could the killer be another client, Cristina’s tossed-off boyfriend, her too-nice-to-be-true roommate Paola (Simonetta Vitelli), or Paola’s birddogging boyfriend (Jerry Colman)?

Uncharacteristically for these films, the police inspector on the case (seasoned character veteran Ettore Manni) actually figures out how to catch the killer, and succeeds. The killer’s identity is a logical conclusion to events, no shock or surprise. I wouldn’t go too far afield to track this one down – nothing special visually, the music’s adequate – but it’s an OK timewaster, and the fellow birddogs among us will appreciate the early Paola Senatore work.

Robert Sacchi in “The French Sex Murders.” credit: horor-web.cz

Finally, we arrive at our final work of second-tier Italian sex thriller entertainment, Ferdinando Merighi’s The French Sex Murders (Casa D’Appuntamento) (Italy, 1972). Like many of credited writer / directors of these ’72 knock-offs, Merighi had little, if any, actual directing experience, but he came cheap and had an industrious background as a longtime assistant. French Sex Murders, on paper, I suspect, is actually a cracking-good mystery, with various suspects from a small but interesting array of backgrounds. But it’s indifferently shot and performed; everyone here, sadly is either a little bored or couldn’t care less.

The initial episodes concern a jewel thief – cat burglar, Antoine (Peter Martell from Ercoli’s Death Walks At Midnight), who makes a fair-sized score and brings it to Madame Colette’s brothel to parade it to Francine (Barbara Bouchet), his favorite girl. But Antoine is hesitantly admitted, and we soon see why – he’s an abusive near-psychotic bigmouth who has his way with Francine, then beats her in nauseating fashion. Soon after Antoine’s departure, Francine’s lifeless body is discovered in the room, and the chase is on for the inarguably guilty Antoine.

The investigating detective, Inspector Fontaine (Robert Sacchi, who, apropos of nothing, is doing a Humphrey Bogart impersonation…!) gets statements from the other house girls and Randall (Renato Romano), who helps Madame Colette with business, serves as a doorman/bouncer and is writing a book on his experiences. Meanwhile, Antoine seeks help from his ex-wife, Marianne (Rosalba Neri; always nice to see but indifferently used here), who runs a nightclub with her husband Pepi (Rolf Eden). Sent away, understandably, Antoine’s apprehended outside her flat, and the case is referred to a judge, George Tessier (William Alexander), and a research psychologist and scientist, Professor Waldemar (Euro-B-movie veteran Howard Vernon) who consult together. Including Waldemar’s daughter Leonora (Evelyne Kraft), Waldemar’s young assistant Roger DuLuc (oddly uncredited) and a few other minor characters, there are far too many characters to keep track of, but they all fit into the narrative weave credibly.

There are some surprising twists – including Antoine’s eventual fate – and creative murder methods (Carlo Rambaldi once again), but otherwise the visual flourishes are clumsy and arbitrary – reverse-negative shots, single-color tinting and the usual crash-zooms. There are two credited cinematographers, and they are both boring and lazy. There are four credited screenwriters, including Merighi and one of the producers – I suspect they stuck closely to Paolo Daniele’s original story (who…?) and at least one of the other two actually knew what they were doing. Again, a fairly silly, slightly sleazy entry that there’s no need to outrightly avoid, but with the well-structured narrative and some top-shelf actors, the blown opportunities here are numerous and discouraging.