‘Here I was thinking that you hated me for having introduced you to an infallible robot.’
A wealthy woman discovers that her husband is having an affair. When a masked man breaks into her house, she shoots him dead, and her husband persuades her to get rid of the body rather than involve the police…
Bloodless Giallo mystery from Spanish director Ramón Fernández from a screenplay by Juan José Alonso Millán. Nadiuska takes the title role, with support from Jean Sorel, Arturo Fernández and Karin Schubert.
Business is booming at the multi-national property company run by chief executive Federico (Jean Sorel), funded by his rich wife, Mónica (Nadiuska). However, it’s not all smooth sailing for the would-be tycoon, what with keeping his playboy partner Arturo (Fernández) in line and his affair with blonde model Eva Schiller (Bárbara Rey) a secret from his wife. Things only get worse with the reappearance of old criminal associate Diego (Damián Velasco), who had just been released from jail and wants paying off. Unfortunately, ambitious colleague Elena (Schubert) knows all about Sorel’s sexcapades and blows the whistle to Nadiuska, who demands an instant divorce.
Schubert and Rey are secret lovers, plotting to force Sorel to commit to a long-term relationship with his mistress while Schuert cleans up at work once he’s out of the picture. However, the philanderer decides to end the affair instead. One night, when home alone, Nadiuska comes face to face with an apparent burglar and shoots him dead. Knocked unconscious and drugged, she wakes to find Sorel coming home. Unmasking the corpse reveals it to be Velasco, and instead of calling the authorities, Sorel persuades her to dispose of the body and avoid a scandal. They seem to have gotten away with it until Nadiuska receives a mysterious phone call while Soreal is away on business in a neighbouring city.
Who’d be a beautiful young woman with money in late 20th Century Europe? It’s a sure recipe for disaster if the Giallo film is to be believed. Of course, your husband will be unfaithful (that’s a given!), but everyone you know will be plotting to either send you mad or send you to the graveyard. This film is no different, with poor Nadiuska surrounded by various deadly schemes and plots and the perpetrators well-armed with the old double cross and deadly ambitions. Unfortunately, they say ‘familiarity breeds contempt’, and it’s sad to say that this film brings nothing new to the table. What remains is a semi-weary trudge through many of the usual tropes and genre clichés.
That’s not to say there’s anything significantly wrong with Fernández’s film, just that it feels stale and uninspired. In many ways, it resembles a slightly expanded episode of a TV anthology series rather than a full-blown cinematic feature. On the credit side, the cast is solid, and Nadiuska manages well in her ‘woman in peril’ lead, and is only too convincing as someone is pushed to the edge by an escalating series of events. Unfortunately, there’s not much else to her role, and that’s a criticism that can be levelled at all the characters. All are rather one-note and, consequently, never elicit an emotional response from the audience. The casting of Sorel is only too understandable, given his long record in Giallo, but he’d been playing slight variations on the handsome (but suspicious) husband since the late 1960s, and he can’t find any new aspects to it here.
There’s very little here for Giallo aficionados focused on stylish presentation and extravagant kills. Likewise, the exploitation elements are minimal, which heightens the ‘made for television’ feel. There are moments of casual full-frontal nudity but no sex scenes, and Rey and Schubert must be the most chaste lesbian lovers in Giallo screen history. Whether this was a censorship issue because this was a Spanish production rather than one emerging from Italy is a possible explanation, but its absence is very noticeable. In an identical fashion, the body count is meagre indeed, and the deaths are entirely bloodless. There is one shock moment of note, but it’s not particularly well-executed and somewhat unconvincing. However, this does leave the possibility of the scene being staged as part of the plot against Nadiuska, so this may have been intentional.
The real issue here is not the twists and turns of the plot, which are serviceable if not inspired, but the need for more attention to character development. A film that focuses on ‘a woman in peril’ has to engage the audience on her behalf, but here, we get no real sense of Mónica’s identity, who she is, or even what she does all day while Sorel is at work moving and shaking. She sleeps late and pops pills when she wakes up against the advice of maid María (Yelena Samarina), but we never find out why. Given that proceedings only run 80 minutes, it’s possible that some initial character establishment scenes were shot but never made it into the final cut, but the absence of anything like that does hurt the film. Elsewhere, Schubert and Rey are cliché femme fatales who seem strangely indifferent to each other in their few intimate moments, and Fernández just hits on any woman in the same postal zone.
There was likely some German money in the production, or at least a distribution deal in place for that territory, as Nadiuska, Schubert and cinematographer Hans Burmann were all originally from that country. Although most of the supporting cast and the production team were Spanish, the project had a multi-national flavour. Sorel was French, Samarina was a Russian who had married a Spanish movie mogul, and Yolando Ríos, who plays Fernández’s secretary, was born in Venezuela. Argentine composer Adolfo Waitzman cemented the South American connection by providing the music.
The striking Nadiuska was born Roswithka Bertasha Smid Honczar in 1952 to a Russian mother and a Polish father. Her beauty prompted a swift entry into Spanish cinema after she moved to Barcelona in the early 1970s. Early roles were usually as objects of desire in popular sex comedies, for which she would often shoot extra nude scenes for inclusion in overseas releases. After the fall of the Franco regime in 1975, she became the literal poster girl for the new free Spain, appearing in numerous magazine layouts where she was often naked. She courted scandal with her affair with sometime actor Damián Rabal, who also worked as her manager. Not only did he already have a wife, but it came to light that she had also tied the knot years earlier in a ‘marriage of convenience’ to legitimise her entry into the country.
However, her career continued to blossom, and she appeared as part of the noteworthy cast of the controversial Mexican production ‘Guyana: Crime of the Century’ (1980), along with Joseph Cotton, Yvonne de Carlo, John Ireland and Gene Barry. Perhaps her most famous role followed as the mother of the youngster ‘Conan the Barbarian’ (1981) before he grew up to be Arnold Schwarzenegger. Her life began to unravel in the following years as her career went into a tailspin and various business ventures failed. Eventually admitted to a hospital and diagnosed with schizophrenia, she was discovered living rough in 2002, often sleeping in the doorway of a cinema where her films had once played. At the time of writing, she resides permanently at the Ciempozuelos psychiatric hospital.
A solidly unremarkable, forgettable effort that need only concern hardened Giallo enthusiasts.