Much like Murder In A Blue World, Juan Antonio Bardem’s The Corruption of Chris Miller (La Corrupción De Chris Miller) (Spain, 1973) draws a great deal of its style and tone from contemporaneous giallo films from Italy. In fact, the screenplay is from the prolific Santiago Moncada, a Spanish novelist, playwright and screenwriter who also wrote Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1970) for Mario Bava, worked on All the Colors of the Dark (1972) for Sergio Martino and wrote Claudio Guerín’s A Bell From Hell. A renowned filmmaker in his own right, J. A. Bardem’s (he’s Javier’s uncle) best-known work is Death Of A Cyclist (1955), a classic Spanish drama where an adulterous couple accidentally hit-and-run a bicyclist, and conceal it to keep their affair a secret. This film is pretty slow going for the average giallo viewer, but has enough visual expertise and good ideas to merit viewing.
The film opens with a fairly messy murder – a beloved entertainer, Perla, is unexpectedly set-upon in her home by her jilted lover, who is wearing a Charlie Chaplin mask and suit she made famous in one of her musical numbers. After a grisly volley of scissor stabs, he leaves the body, discards the costume and flees in the rain.
Meanwhile, in a nearby small country estate, we meet Ruth Miller (Jean Seberg) and her stepdaughter Chris (grown Spanish child actress and singer Marisol). A year or so ago, Ruth’s husband, Chris’ father by his first marriage, abandoned them. Chris is obsessed with the idea that he’ll return, and accuses Ruth of hiding letters from him. Ruth, however, knows he’s likely gone for good, and acts out her persistent rage in a different way – subtly tormenting and gaslighting Chris (a rape survivor as well), while pretending to always be about her best interests, both maternally and, perhaps, sexually.
One day, Ruth discovers a handsome drifter sleeping in the barn, Barney Webster (Barry Stokes). He’s come from the U.K. to Spain for “anthropology,” but it’s far more likely he’s studying the mating rituals of women he’ll never see after the next day. Ruth gives him handyman chores and the spare bedroom and keeps him around for a while, for both her own indulgences and to provide more disruptive distraction for the twitchy Chris. You’d think this clichéd fox-in-the-henhouse scenario must run out of cinematic steam at some point, but it’s a tried-and-true boiling pot of emotion and contradiction, and that’s how it effectively works here.
And just in case you were drifting, that murderer re-appears in a long black poncho to slaughter a nearby farm family with a hand scythe, leaving yet another gouts-of-blood-and-corpses home redecorating project. Surely this can’t be Barney, but he’s really the only candidate here in these otherwise placid rural glens and meadows; Chris often takes afternoon-long horse rides from a nearby stable, leaving Ruth to her illustration artwork.
Bardem’s direction is solid here, and seasoned cinematographer Juan Gelpí gives everything a lush gothic sheen, almost Hammer-studios-like. But at close to two hours, the film is a bit sluggish – Marisol does good work here, but Seberg, despite her dogged professionalism, just can’t muster the high-melodrama goods the role requires. Perhaps no twentieth-century actress, outside of wartime, got a rawer deal than Jean Seberg having to contend with J. Edgar Hoover’s and the F.B.I.’s constant and debilitating persecution while she lived in Europe. It’s worth looking up if you’re not familiar with the story.
The film’s not so much a whodunnit as it is an examination of the distorting power of repressed rage, and the “banality of evil” that everyday businesspeople can fall into – two sides of the western-capitalist-cultural coin. The film’s not particularly successful – there’s more blood and skin onscreen than there is invested in the film’s conceptual conceits – but it’s an entertaining time-waster that has smart ideas and intentions.
Our next film is Death Smiles on a Murderer (La Morte Ha Sorriso All’Assassino) (Italy, 1973), Credited to Aristide Massaccesi (his real name), this is an early work by gore-and-erotica exploitation king Joe D’Amato, filmed soon after his collaboration with Luigi Batzella on The Devil’s Wedding Night (Il Plenilunio Delle Vergini), another entertaining variation on the Countess Elizabeth Báthory vampire legend. D’Amato wrote the story and recruited two other screenwriters to help him knock out the actual screenplay. Exploitation geeks used to D’Amato’s trademark transgressive strong medicine from Porno Holocaust, Anthropophagous, Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals or Beyond the Darkness won’t find much here to get their blood going, but I actually found it to be a really satisfying piece of low-budget gothic horror entertainment. And, of course, as we learned with Massimo Dallamano’s What Have They Done To Solange?, he’s an impressive cinematographer as well – the film looks great despite its modest budget.
credit: unpoppedcinema.blogspot.com
While lounging in the back garden of their country estate, Walter (Sergio Doria) and Eva (Angela Bo) witness a mysterious black horse-drawn carriage careening down the adjacent country lane. The driver is struck by a low-hanging branch, the rig lurches out of control, crashing, and the driver is impaled on the shattered forward harness. Inside the sedan is a beautiful young woman, Greta (always-alluring B-movie veteran Ewa Aulin) (Deadly Sweet [1967], Death Laid An Egg [1968]). She’s brought into the house, made comfortable, and Dr. Sturges (Klaus Kinski, making his usual indelible impression in a small role) is summoned to examine her. He discovers she’s wearing a small pendant with engravings relating to an ancient and arcane system for reviving the dead. This explains the film’s opening segment, where we see Greta dealing with her scientist brother, an obsessive and eccentric abuser who nonetheless reanimates her after a tragedy that seems to have occurred three years earlier. Sturges is shocked that someone had succeeded with the process he’d been working on for quite a while, and throws himself into feverish mad-scientist mode.
Meanwhile, both Walter and Eva are each smitten with Greta, and pursue their own amorous assignations with her. But when one of them lets jealousy get the best of them, things take a decidedly Edgar Allen Poe-inspired turn, and the rest of the film becomes a pretty convincing supernatural revenge thriller. We learn that that tragedy Greta encountered three years ago involved Walter’s wealthy father, Dr. von Ravensbrück (Giacomo Rossi Stuart), and the whole von Ravensbrück family is about to encounter a vengeful dose of blood-spattered karma.
The supernatural elements threaten to pull this out of giallo categorization, but, like Mario Bava’s Hatchet For The Honeymoon (1970), its gothic stylishness, the socio-carnal psychological underpinnings and the cumulative body count all recommend it. The narrative is well-structured, but can be a little scrambled if you’re not paying attention, and Berto Pisano’s musical score is spare but memorably effective. Overall, I found this to be a very pleasant surprise, and I recommend it.
Ahh, the vagaries of the filmmaking process. Death Carries A Cane (Passi Di Danza Su Una Lama Di Rasoio, or Dance Steps On A Razor Blade) (Italy, 1973) would seem to be another entry in Luciano Ercoli’s succession of giallos featuring Susan Scott (aka Nieves Navarro), co-starring Simón Andreu, and featuring a hybrid Spanish / Italian production crew. But Ercoli is absent here, as is screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi – we’re a league or two down from their usual work. The credited director is Mauricio Pradeaux, a journeyman writer/director of dubious genre accomplishments, but this awkward patchwork of a not-so-thrilling thriller feels like it was shot in separate chunks by two or three different directors before Pradeaux finished the job, such as it is.
Kitty (Susan Scott, reliable as always even here) is a sculptor and photographer; her husband Alberto (Robert Hoffmann, an undeniably handsome but stiffly generic loaf of Wonder Bread) collaborates with Kitty and another mutual friend, Marco (Simón Andreu) on performance art pieces and music videos. One day, while Kitty is showing Alberto’s uncle and wife the touristy sites in Rome, she witnesses a murder with one of those coin-operated telescopes through an apartment window blocks and blocks away. They take their information to the police (which, in most giallos is a complete waste of time), and Kitty tells her reporter friend Lydia (Anuska Borova, impressive in her only film role), who is also Marco’s partner. They have a partial address, identify a few people near the crime scene (a chestnut vendor and a customer), and suspect the murder is tied to a previous unsolved case. But, despite the patchy descriptions, the killer does everyone a favor by starting to kill the witnesses Kitty identified – black trenchcoat, hat, mask, gloves, straight razor, you know the drill. Forensics also reveals that the killer left evidence of the use of a cane, and anyone with a cane or a limp becomes a suspect: Alberto with his twisted ankle, Lydia’s twin sister Silvia (also Anuska Borova, of course), whom, it’s suggested, suffered a debilitating injury at a dance academy that two of the murder victims attended, and even a cane-bearing police commissioner, who screws up a sting involving Kitty as bait for the killer. The dance academy becomes central to the investigations, and it’s there that the crimes are explained in what aspires to be a thrilling conclusion.
Alas, no luck. The solution is out of left field, and totally bereft of any previous hints or clues. The awkward sequences of hand-held camerawork, arty overhead shots of staircases, slipshod red herrings, generic and indifferent gore effects and unmotivated nude scenes all blend together to become instantly forgettable. There’s a nod or two here and there to Hitchcock, but it’s all pretty thin soup. It’s really only watchable for Susan Scott completists.
Periscope In The Bathtub 