‘Maybe you shouldn’t have married a clairvoyant.’
A young woman has a vision of a murder. Later, she discovers a skeleton walled up in her husband’s old house. He is arrested, but she is determined to prove his innocence…
Superior Giallo experience with a touch of the supernatural from veteran director Lucio Fulci. Jennifer O’Neill takes the title role, with support from Gianni Garko, Marc Morel and Gabriele Ferzetti.
Back when she was a child, decorator Virginia Ducci (O’Neill) witnessed her mother’s suicide despite the event happening hundreds of miles away. Other psychic experiences followed over the years, and she’s worked with parapsychologist Luca Fattori (Porel) to try and understand them. However, she’s now married to wealthy businessman Francesco (Garko) and is happy to forget that part of her life. However, after seeing Garko off on a flight to London, she experiences a vision of an old woman being murdered. When she visits Garko’s old palazzo with the idea of redecorating it as a surprise for him, she is astonished to recognise the room from her vision. She tears down the wall where she saw the body hidden and uncovers a human skeleton.
The police, led by Commissioner D’Elia (Fabrizio Jovine), tag the remains as belonging to a young woman killed five years earlier, which does not agree with O’Neill’s experience. When the body is identified, Garko admits the victim was an old lover, and he is remanded in custody on suspicion of murder. O’Neill sets out to clear him with the aid of Porel, his resourceful secretary Bruna (Jenny Tamburi) and Garko’s bitchy sister Gloria (Evelyn Stewart). They soon zero in on art expert Emilio Rospini (Gabriele Ferzetti) as a likely suspect, but something’s still not right, and O’Neill discovers that there’s more to her vision than she thought.
Director Lucio Fulci tackled the Giallo on three highly memorable occasions during its heyday in the early 1970s. However, the craze had pretty much played out by the time this production hit screens. That likely prompted the introduction of the film’s supernatural theme, which anticipates the general shift toward horror that overtook the industry with the advent of home video, a path Fulci embraced so wholeheartedly that it now defines his career as a filmmaker. Fulci went on record as disliking this film, principally because he found its ‘mechanical’ plot restricting, which is ironic considering that he has a co-writing credit. After more than 30 years in the director’s chair, perhaps he’d had enough of being a slave to logical narrative. It would certainly seem so, given the surreal, cinematic fever dreams of horror that followed, such as ‘The Beyond/…E tu vivrai nel terrore! L’aldilà’ (1981).
The idea of extra-sensory abilities has always been with us, from religious prophets and medieval seers to modern-day fortune tellers and mystics. Its cinematic history goes back to the silent days, but such practices were usually portrayed as a mechanism of fraudsters and con men. However, productions such as ‘The Clairvoyant’ (1934) and ‘Night Has a Thousand Eyes’ (1948) presented the protagonist’s talent as genuine, the latter film, in particular, tying the visions of protagonist Edward G Robinson to a murder. It may be a stretch to call Fulci’s film a belated mainstream trendsetter in this regard when it appeared three decades later. However, the big-budget Hollywood movie ‘Eyes of Laura Mars’ (1978) followed hot on its heels and by the 1980s, young women having psychic visions of a killer was well on its way to becoming a familiar thriller trope, if not yet a worn-out cliché.
Fortunately, despite Fulci’s misgivings, the story and its twists and turns are strong enough to make for a fairly compelling watch. O’Neill is an appealing heroine despite getting little help from a script which casts her as nothing more than a one-dimensional ‘woman in peril’. The relentless succession of events requires her to react and little more, providing no significant opportunity for depth or character development. Yet the mystery itself is engaging, with reveal after reveal of facts that almost fit together but not quite. If the audience inevitably gets ahead of the big plot twist regarding O’Neill’s visions, it’s probably because such a development is far more familiar now than when the film was made. It’s also good to sense the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe haunting the proceedings from somewhere just off-screen throughout.
Stylistically, the film may disappoint Fulci’s followers as it is largely bereft of the more outlandish stylistic touches of his more celebrated films. There is a scene where O’Neill tries to evade pursuit by climbing some scaffolding within a church undergoing restoration. This sequence certainly has a flavour of the director’s finest work, but rather than milk the scenario for maximum suspense, it’s resolved all too quickly, perhaps a sign that the filmmaker wasn’t fully engaged. At the onset of one of O’Neill’s visions, the camera zooms quickly into a tight shot of her eyes, and whereas this is an understandable artistic choice, by the end of the film, it’s been so over-used as to become tiresome. The audience is also treated to another hopelessly fake ‘dummy down a cliff’ moment, echoing the climax of ‘Don’t Torture a Duckling/Non si sevizia un paperino’ (1972). Despite all that, there’s still a high quality to Fulci’s shot compositions, and married to Franco Bixio, Fabio Frizzi and Vince Tempera’s disquieting score, there are still some very effective moments.
The supporting cast around O’Neill is also quietly professional, with husband Garko given the most to do. At first, he seems smooth and unflappable, even when accused of murder by Commissioner Jovine. However, he begins to unravel once incarcerated, treading a nice line between obvious suspect and innocent man. The baby faced Porel is somewhat miscast as the parapsychologist, lacking the authority that the role would have inspired if played by an older man. However, he and O’Neill were an item in real life at the time of filming, so that may have had some influence on his casting. It’s also a pleasure to see Giallo stalwart Evelyn Stewart and her Dietrich cheekbones, but best of all is the perky Tamburi as Porel’s super-capable Girl Friday. She lights up the screen in a couple of scenes, and it’s a shame that her presence isn’t more integral to the unfolding drama.
O’Neill was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1948 and, after moving to America as a child, began riding horses at the age of 9. Success in the equestrian field was soon followed by success as a teenage model as she appeared on the covers of prestigious fashion magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Vogue as part of what would become a 30-year contract with Cover Girl cosmetics. After a couple of small movie parts, she was cast opposite John Wayne in Howard Hawks’ ‘Rio Lobo’ (1970), but her breakthrough came as one of the stars of the box office hit ‘Summer of ’42’ (1971). Roles followed in notable projects such as Otto Preminger’s ‘Such Good Friends’ (1971) and ‘Lady Ice’ (1973) with Robert Duvall and Donald Sutherland.
After filming Luigi Zampa’s ‘The Flower in His Mouth/Gente di rispetto’ (1975) with James Mason in Sicily, she began appearing regularly in Italian films, such as Luchino Visconti’s final film ‘The Innocent/L’innocente’ (1976). She was slated to appear in Disney’s big-budget adventure ‘The Black Hole’ (1979) but was unjustly fired after a car accident, instead making her science-fiction debut in David Cronenberg’s startling cult classic ‘Scanners’ (1981). She has been married nine times to eight different husbands, has three children, and shot herself accidentally in 1982, leading to her fifth husband being charged with illegal gun possession. Mainly switching to television in subsequent years, she became a Pro-Life activist after becoming a born-again Christian in 1988. O’Neill has also authored several books, including an autobiography ‘Surviving Myself’.
It’s a little disappointing when compared to Fulci’s previous excursions into the Giallo but, if you can put that to one side, it’s still a quality, entertaining experience.