‘With all your oddities and fixations, you’re quite an adventure, but nothing else!’
A public advocate against divorce discovers that his wife is having an affair and kills her. After disposing of her body, he hooks up with two other women. However, his dead wife isn’t resting easy…
Ultra low-budget Giallo mystery from director Francesco Degli Espinosa and scriptwriter Renato Polselli. Donald O’Brien plays the lead, with Erika Blanc, Malisa Longo, and Maria D’Incoronato playing the three women in his life.
Respected academic and social reformer Professor Riccardo Rossi (O’Brien) neglects his wife, Elisa (Longo), in favour of social causes and public works. Deciding to skip a meeting and come home early, he surprises Longo in bed with her lover, who skips out before he can access the bedroom. Lacing her drink with sleeping pills, he proposes a trip which ends with her tied up in a sack and dumped from the passenger seat into a lake. In the aftermath of the murder, O’Brien meets sex worker Eva (Blanc), and the two begin a relationship.
Longo’s pretty young niece, Barbara (D’Incoronato), comes looking for her aunt, and O’Brien turns on the charm to deflect her suspicions. Blanc moves in with him, but he becomes increasingly drawn to the much younger D’Incoronato. However, he soon begins to see Longo everywhere, and he’s also being followed by a mysterious man in a beard and sunglasses, who he also saw on the night that he dumped his wife’s body. Blanc becomes increasingly concerned about his behaviour, especially considering that she doesn’t share his wifely hallucinations. O’Brien begins to unravel as his dead wife’s visits continue, and his infatuation with D’Incoronato develops into something more serious.
A minor and largely forgotten entry in Giallo history, Espinosa’s feature struggles with a visible lack of resources and a poorly developed script. The initial premise is fine; a member of the moral majority finds his world turned upside down in such a humiliating way that it provokes him to kill. His anger on discovering his wife’s infidelity is understandable, even if it can’t excuse his subsequent actions. However, any sympathy the audience may have for him evaporates quickly with his subsequent actions. He beds Blanc’s streetwalker when his wife is barely cold and wastes no time putting the moves on her nubile niece. In no time at all, he’s groping her in public despite their considerable age difference (what a prince!) Of course, an unsympathetic lead character is not necessarily a dealbreaker, but the creepy sex pest murderer is always a bit of a hard sell.
It doesn’t help with audience engagement when the story treads water for long stretches, the action being little more than a succession of repetitive events. The mystery doesn’t seem very mysterious at all, especially considering some of the action is so poorly staged that the ‘big twist’ seems evident and inevitable. When it eventually arrives in the last quarter of an hour, we find Espinosa is far from satisfied with it. Instead, he throws in another three(!) twists before the final credits roll. Unfortunately, the first pushes suspension of disbelief a little too far, so the two subsequent reverses also lack credibility. It also doesn’t help that all of these convolutions arrive in a hurry at the end after a second act that’s severely padded. The ambition is admirable, I guess, but not the execution.
A significant issue here is that there’s only just about enough plot for an episode of an anthology TV show, and this lack of development can probably be at least partially attributed to budgetary limitations. These show through in several obvious ways. There’s only a tiny cast with almost no supporting roles, and although O’Brien’s wealth is an important plot point, there’s little evidence of it. His home is small and sparsely furnished; he drives a 2CV and isn’t blessed with an expensive wardrobe. At best, he looks like a guy with a comfortable job in middle management. There’s also a gritty, almost Cinéma vérité feel to the location shooting, but there’s a strong suspicion that this was not a stylistic choice, but a necessity of guerrilla filmmaking.
For fans of the flesh, there is the obligatory sex scene with O’Brien and Blanc that no doubt appeared prominently in the trailer and serves to justify the film’s rather misleading title. Her musical choices for their initial night of passion are pretty interesting. Despite clearly putting on a Glen Campbell record, the result on the soundtrack isn’t very ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’, and later on, Frank Sinatra sounds like he’s mainlining Bach rather than exercising those famous pipes. Unfortunately, the original music credited to Felice and Gianfranco Di Stefano can be intrusive, and its use is sometimes heavy-handed. Given all these limitations, it would have been a miracle if Espinosa had created a truly memorable Giallo, and it’s no surprise that the results are acceptable but nothing more.
This movie was Espinosa’s only directorial credit, but he hovered around the outskirts of the Italian film industry in a variety of creative roles. It began promisingly as assistant director to Michelangelo Antonioni on a segment of the documentary ‘Love in the City/L’amore in città’ (1953). While Antonioni went on to fame and fortune, Espinosa fulfilled the same role on ‘Gli sbandati’ (1955) but would not work in a directorial capacity again for 20 years. Instead, he filled various roles on various projects as a sometime writer, editor, script supervisor, continuity guy and production manager. Most prominently, he co-wrote Spaghetti Westerns ‘Vengeance Is My Forgiveness/La vendetta è il mio perdono’ (1968) and ‘It was a Crazy Crazy West/C’era una volta questo pazzo, pazzo, pazzo West’ (1973). After his one turn in the directorial chair, he worked as a writer on one more project, the adult drama ‘La spiaggia del desiderio’ (1976) and has a ‘general manager’ credit on an obscure picture called ‘Love Machine (La Macchina Dell’amore)’ (1973).
A minor entry in the Giallo pantheon. Hardcore fans will probably get something out of it.