1970 - ***
While its lighting is a little flat, this film's got ballsy twists, and the ability to go deep into sordidness without getting depressingly graphic (the severed heads are numerous but humorous). Even though you've got no clue who's who 'til the final denouement it's worth being confused for a finale that's like having eight Brian De Palma Hitchcock climax wigs coming off at the same time. Plus there's mod clothes and Ultramannish paint swirl credits. Jesus Villa Rojo did the score, which prefigures SILENCE OF THE LAMBS in places, and as long as the lurid topless Auschwitz flashback doesn't get your PC braids in a knot and if you like mixing metaphors like you're a student at Freud's psychosexual taboo bartending school after a night of banging against the wall trying to study for finals during his roommate's orgy, and if you like crazy chicks, you'll love IN THE FOLDS, for THE FLESH is not weak!
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1972 - ***
Edwige Fenech is having weird nightmares ever since the accident that killed her unborn child. Is Richard gaslighting her? Why is he slipping blue powder in her water and refusing to let her see a shrink? Is that strange-looking man (Ivan Rassimov) stalking her or is he a hallucination? Her sister brings her to get psychiatric help while her neighbor calls for a ritual led by a Robert Downey Jr-esque hippy with blonde hair and long gold fingernails. The 'is there or is there not a guy trying to kill you' aspect makes it all similar to another Italian flick which is almost a near giallo in itself, THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE (my review here) - maybe there's just a lot of phantom killer pretty boy gigolos skulking around Europe, or there were in that golden time before, you know, AIDS.
COLORS star Edwige Fenech is a sultry icon in some blog circles, and I'll admit she does have nice boots, which look good running amidst the fallen autumnal foliage of England where this film was shot. However I think it was rather a mistake to film this in England. The dreary skies and colorless Tudor architecture of England instead are a far cry from the chiaroscuro trimmings of Rome where most gialli are lensed. Still if that's my only complaint, bravo. Bruno Nicolai's score seems largely ripped from the stuff he conducted two years earlier for Ennio Morricone --that "la la la la" child's singsong motif from BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE is thrown in for almost no reason at all -- though I guess it was originally stolen two years before that (from ROSEMARY'S BABY), but that's beside the point. Stealing is part of the culture in Roma! But this is England.
1971 - ***
Argento purists often give CAT the air. Karl Malden and James Franciscus aren't Jessica Harper and David Hemmings, who made their weird holidays (SUSPIRIA and DEEP RED respectively) in fucked-up continental Europe extra terrifying; their big eyes, weak limbs, and little noses helped give them a helpless aura that burly Malden and Franciscus lacketh. Argento men need to be feminine and the women masculine to suit his melted-down gender aesthetic: his real-life scary-sexy wife Daria Nicolodi (Asia's mom) played Hemmings' love interest in DEEP RED and watching them together was like feeling chaffed, as if you'd skinned your knee, with that eerie masochistic lower spine tingle for fear mom would put iodine on it. Malden is less iodine and more like oxidized bronze. Franciscus is Heston-painted lead. Neither could in a million years turn out to be drag kings, and there is no place for overly confident macho gravitas in Argento (except as red herring eccentrics eating cats and visiting coffin conventions).
The plot involves a mysterious clinic that has pissed off some employee or something, so he breaks in and she or he is maybe hiding his or her true gender after a sexual reassignment. While it's minor Argento compared with DEEP RED or CRYSTAL it holds up well, especially on the new Blue Underground Blu-ray. It looks so 3-D clear, and the percussive super-funky Ennio Morricone score is so thumping and rattly, scrabbling around the corners of the room depending on your speakers, that you're bound to get a terrified frisson somewhere or other. See it on a big HD screen and forgive Franciscus his trespasses, because he's a reporter and he just has to know the dilly.
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1971 - ***1/2
Sometimes there comes a film like THE FIFTH CORD, that is so good it's impossible to follow, at least when your brain is as toasted as mine. I recall that Franco Nero smolders and drinks valiantly against the current of ennui and fatalistic Ennio Morricone music. He also exposes the vanity and childish narcissism of handsome drunks, men who've been presuming their charm will melt even the frostiest of ex-wives for so long they can't stop swagger-stumbling even when fully aware it no longer works. I recognize the Nero expose' of Italian machismo - and I salute him, for he is the giallo version of BAD LIEUTENANT.
And while all the international architecture and light through Venetian blinds, the roving camera, crisp sets, and good dubbing all elevate this to the top of the giallo food chain, there's a sense of phoniness inside the souls of the characters that not only excuses phoniness in the film but resembles Antonioni-esque fatalism. Even when the crippled heiress is being terrified, crawling across the floor like a snake towards her distant wheelchair, she's framed beautifully by a lion, Morricone's organ fugue, dark yellow curtains billowing, and a gray cat. The blacks are so deep she seems like she's crawling out of the letterbox frame into the black bars. And there's a cool use of International style architecture's lines as both prison and protection: every scene is so layered in vertical and horizontal lines that when they aren't there the characters seem suddenly, horrifically exposed.
As a recovering alcoholic I recognize myself in Nero's self-deluding eyes, and while the way he slaps around young hoods in motorcycle jumpsuits is commendable, the way he treats women isn't. But the film's cognizant of that and thus it works. Cops with goofball smiles, typing, smoking, drinking and obscene whispered phone calls from the killer round out the package. As Michael Mackenzie at Home Cinema notes:
"That The Fifth Cord (Giornata Nera per l'Ariete, which translates as "Black Day of the Ram") could pass for a film made by the maestro himself is high praise indeed, and it is to the credit of its director, the elusive Luigi Bazzoni, that the film so perfectly captures the mood of Argento's "Animal Trilogy" without ever coming across as a slavish copy.".
1964 - ***
The film that started it all--the black gloves, the mannequins, the terrified fashion plates--and it's the one that should most be on Blu-ray! Oh please VCI, pleeease do a better job or pass it over to a better label. It's sooo pretty and rich with the titular textures and deep red gel lighting that the sleazy misogynist relish of lingering on screaming women's faces, necks, and bodies is almost forgivable. After all, it's not the women's or director Mario Bava's, but Roman Catholic culture's fault. Italy invented the Madonna/Whore complex.
Here's why I think this: the Catholic-Italian suffocating power of a mother's love and guilt trips make your sexual desires painfully ungratified while growing up, and meanwhile the moms of girls you know make sure you're not allowed to get within ten feet of them unsupervised. Even masturbation is a sin, and your mom makes it impossible to try. The giallo is the result of the curdled venom of semen retentum finally lashing out with a phallic blade at those hydra-like red apron strings projected on the white blouse wall, and there's nothing wrong with that, if it's via artistic sublimation (pretending to kill women for a movie is much better than to kill them in real life, capito?) Now that we know it's wrong, and why, and why we'll never do it again, can we film it?
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