‘Dead people don’t walk around committing crimes.’
An elderly rich man takes his extended family to his private island for their annual holiday. The guests start to be murdered one by one, and it seems likely that their deaths are linked to a 20-year-old crime…
Familiar ‘closed circle’ Giallo whodunnit from Italian director Ferdinando Baldi. Arthur Kennedy, John Richardson and Caroline Laurence are just some of the targets in the firing line.
There’s no chance of happy holidays for the wealthy clan led by ageing patriarch Ubaldo (Kennedy). As usual, he’s dragged all his grown-up children and their partners off to his own small island paradise to lord it over them and be generally unpleasant. Desperate to inherit his fortune when he dies, they all grin and bear it, although resentment and jealousy poison the atmosphere. Worse still, the old man has bagged a young trophy wife, Giulia (Laurence). Sons Lorenzo (Richardson) and Michele (Massimo Foschi) are both trapped in unhappy marriages with partners Greta (Rita Silva) and Carla (Sofia Dionisio). However, Foschi has found solace in a clandestine affair with Laurence. Kennedy’s daughter Patrizia (Loretta Persichetti) has found comfort in alcohol and tarot cards, while her husband Walter (Venantino Venantini) has eyes for the promiscuous Silva. The happy party is rounded out by Kennedy’s sister, Elisabetta (Dana Ghia), who is considered a little unstable but harmless.
Shortly after their arrival, someone in scuba gear sneaks aboard the yacht anchored in the bay, murders the two-man crew and sends it off out to sea. While swimming offshore the next day, Dionisio gets into trouble and vanishes beneath the waves. A frantic search turns up nothing, but when they go to use the radio on the yacht to fetch the police, the group finds the vessel has gone. The motor on the small fishing boat has also been sabotaged. That night, Ghia awakes screaming from a nightmare about her old lover, a sailor named Charlie, whose death twenty years earlier seems to be linked to an old family secret. While fetching a sedative to calm her down, Laurence finds Kennedy dead in their room, apparently the victim of foul play.
By 1977, the heyday of the Giallo murder mystery was well and truly over. New titles still relevant to that label tended to fall into two categories: those only loosely connected to that type of horror-thriller or inferior examples that had been sitting on a shelf somewhere for a couple of years awaiting a release. Pleasingly, Baldi’s film is neither of those, being a reversion to the ‘classic’ Giallo template and yet another riff of Agatha Christie’s tale of ‘Ten Little Indians.’ Producer Mario Di Nardo was probably the reason for this surprise bout of retrospection. He was formerly a screenwriter and penned the original script of Mario Bava’s similar thriller ‘Five Dolls for an August Moon’ (1970). Bava was apparently dissatisfied with Di Nardo’s work and rewrote the entire film. So it’s possible that this film was partially based on that original script by Di Nardo, although the final screenwriting credit on the project goes to Fabio Pittorru.
Whatever its origins, proceedings have a very familiar feel. We’re back amongst the idle rich, so often a target of Italian filmmakers of this period. As usual, they are, by turns, bored, bitchy, backstabbing and randy but always obsessed with money. There’s not a good apple among them, which robs events of any emotional connection but does afford the audience a certain level of satisfaction as they meet their maker in various ways. This killer truly likes to mix it up, favouring murder by blade, firearm, pillow, garrotte, decapitation, immolation and spear gun! Although this sounds ambitious, unfortunately, there probably wasn’t much of an FX budget. It doesn’t help to sell the kills when the only blood that appears is staining clothes after the event, rather than coming at the moment of execution. The spear gun incident is quite bloody, but it’s more likely to provoke a snort of laughter than a scream of fear.
This film boasts an ensemble cast, and they all deliver solid, professional work. Given his top billing, it’s a surprise that Kennedy exits the action so early. However, he’s a seasoned vet who knows how to make a little screen time go a long way. He’s still able to convey the forceful personality and parenting skills that have moulded his offspring into such a bunch of worthless human beings. Richardson was never the most expressive of actors but gives perhaps his best performance here, and Ghia delivers a smart turn as the vaguely dotty aunt who comes under suspicion. The mystery itself may not be all that difficult to unravel, but Baldi keeps things moving and mounts a semi-delirious last 20 minutes where one murder follows another at an almost ridiculous pace.
This film is a satisfactory production that never excels in any particular department, but neither does it fall short. Baldi doesn’t exhibit a great deal in terms of staging or creativity, but combined with Sergio Rubini’s quality cinematography, the audience gets a pleasing visual experience. The sun-baked island and its rocky cliffs make a fine backdrop to the drama, although it is a pity that Baldi could not integrate them more closely into the story. However, it is good to see the reappearance of J & B Scotch, with a bottle featuring prominently in several scenes. Its distinctive yellow label was almost ubiquitous in Giallo films during their glory years, and it’s pleasing to think that its inclusion here was a conscious nod to those films and their legacy in Italian cinema.
Kennedy was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1914, the son of a dentist. After graduating from university in Pittsburgh in 1934, where he studied drama, he headed for New York. There, he joined the prestigious Group Theater, but eventually made his Broadway debut playing in Shakespeare. He soon caught the eye of Hollywood studios and made his screen debut as James Cagney’s younger brother in Anatole Litvak’s hit drama ‘City for Conquest’ (1940). Plum supporting roles followed over the rest of the decade as he appeared in Raoul Walsh’s ‘High Sierra’ (1941), Howard Hawks’ ‘Air Force’ (1943), Elia Kazan’s classic noir ‘Boomerang’ (1947) and opposite Kirk Douglas in ‘Champion’ (1949). A sympathetic villain in Anthony Mann’s ‘Bend of the River’ (1952) launched him into classic Westerns, such as Mann’s ‘The Man from Laramie’ (1955), also with James Stewart. Leading roles were rare, but projects such as Edgar G Ulmer’s criminally ignored ‘The Naked Dawn’ (1954) demonstrated that he could carry a film with conviction and skill. At the same time, he never abandoned the theatre, scoring a Tony for his work in Arthur Miller’s groundbreaking ‘Death of a Salesman’ in 1949 and originating key roles in several of the author’s other celebrated works.
Baldi was a native of southwestern Italy, born in 1917. He was a typical workhorse director of Italian mid-20th Century cinema, whose projects faithfully followed whatever was selling box office tickets at the time. After debuting as co-writer and director on drama ‘Il prezzo dell’onore’ (1953), he soon found himself working on historical epics such as ‘David and Goliath/David e Golia’ (1960), although his co-directorial credits on pictures such as ‘The Tartars’ (1960) with Victor Mature and ‘Duel of Champions’ (1961) with a horribly miscast Alan Ladd may have been to satisfy legal requirements. Although he managed to sidestep the Peplum adventures of musclemen such as Hercules, he was still snagged by the Eurospy craze, delivering the woeful ‘Goldsnake ‘Anonima Killers’/Suicide Mission to Singapore’ (1966). He had better luck with Spaghetti Westerns such as ‘Texas, Adios/Texas, addio’ (1966) and ‘Forgotten Pistolero/Il pistolero dell’Ave Maria’ (1969). One of his final projects was the notorious ‘Comin’ at Ya!’ (1981), which, with its impressive box office numbers, briefly helped revive the 3-D film in the early 1980s.
There’s nothing very startling or original here, but it’s undeniably pleasant to be back in the world of traditional Giallo, even if this film doesn’t match up to the best of the genre.