‘I’ll give you two to one that Martians have landed in her garden again…’
The head of an international corporation dies when his private plane is secretly sabotaged. The company’s Vice Presidents wait to hear who will take his place, but someone seems intent on weeding out the competition…
Giallo murder mystery set in the ruthless world of big business from co-directors Giuseppi Pulieri and Giuseppi Rosati. Veterans stars Joseph Cotten, Adolfo Celi, and Alida Valli rub shoulders with the next generation, represented by Gloria Guida and Leonard Mann.
There are global ramifications when the president of one of the largest business empires on the planet is killed in an apparent accident. He dies without naming a successor, so an election is arranged to pick one of the three vice presidents to take over the reins. Sir Arthur Dundee (Cotten) and Sir Harold Boyd (Celi) are the firm’s elder statesmen, but the wild card in the deck is the brilliant youngster Paul De Revere (Mann). However, on his way to see his mother, Lady Clementine De Revere (Valli), at the weekend, Mann’s car goes over a cliff and bursts into flames. The incident is accepted as a tragic accident, but his cousin, Superintendent Jeff Hawkins of the Yard (Anthony Steel), is sceptical, especially after questioning Mann’s shifty valet, Gibson (Paul Müller). The manservant reveals that Mann was having a tempestuous affair with Celi’s wife, Lady Gloria Boyd (Janet Agren).
Meanwhile, Celi is also somewhat flexible regarding his matrimonial commitments, bedding many women and keeping sexy blonde mistress, Polly (Guida) on the side. Unfortunately for him, Cotten knows all about the long-running affair and has persuaded the reluctant Guida to kill him with a poison ring the next time that they make love. Agren has also had enough of her husband’s shenanigans and threatens to use her voting shares to block his bid to become president of the firm. As the day of the election approaches, events escalate and turn even deadlier as a mysterious, black-gloved figure begins targeting the remaining contenders.
Whereas Italian Giallo cinema had a lot of fun in its heyday taking aim at the idle rich, it’s hardly surprising that eventually, someone would get around to those that weren’t so idle. Yes, the world of international business is almost literally a cutthroat one as these wealthy wannabe tycoons get real busy with their murderous plots and counterplots. The setup offers some fine opportunities for pitch-black satire and social commentary. Sadly, the filmmakers are not interested in such things, delivering a straight mystery thriller instead. Unfortunately, it’s pretty easy to work out exactly what’s going on from an early stage, which proves the undoing of Rosati’s disappointing script and the entire film.
This film was a troubled production, with financing collapsing during the original shoot in 1976. Rosati abandoned the project, but Pulieri, initially working as his assistant, refused to throw in the towel. Eventually securing extra funding, he finished the film using doubles for unavailable cast members cut together with the extant footage from the original filming. To his eternal credit, this salvage operation isn’t evident in the least, which is quite a remarkable achievement, given the fractured nature of films usually assembled under such circumstances. It’s just a shame that the results are completely lacking in any entertainment value.
There’s little actively wrong with what appears on screen, but nothing ever rises above the level of basic adequacy, so proceedings quickly become dull and lifeless. The delivery is competent and professional enough, but the lack of any visual spark or individual filmmaking signature leaves the audience with nothing but the story, which displays a total absence of suspense or excitement. The body count is also low, and there’s little flair to the staging of the murder scenes, although one of these exhibits the film’s only nod to creativity or invention. The killer shocks one victim through his pacemaker, causing him to attempt some impromptu and radical self-surgery. It’s a nice idea, but the scene is presented without any notable style, and the flat delivery robs it of any real impact.
However, the most unforgivable element is the waste of such a notable cast. Heavy hitters like Cotten, Celi and Valli get nothing to work with from the script, and it’s a much more challenging task for the less experienced Mann and Guida to register effectively. The one performer who gets a chance to shine is Agren, who nails it, but it’s little more than a passing moment. The real crime here is that the script finds no way to bring Cotten and Valli together. Seeing the stars of the noir classic ‘The Third Man’ (1949) sharing the screen again, however briefly, would have been the undoubted highlight of the picture. In the end, the entire thing would have worked far better on the blackly comic lines of something like Vincent Price’s ‘Theatre of Blood’ (1973), but, sadly, such a take seems to have been the farthest thing from the filmmaker’s minds.
There are a handful of crumbs for the hardcore Giallo fan, such as the appearance of genre stalwart Franco Ressel and euro-veteran Paul Müller. The former plays Steel’s sidekick, Sgt Phillips, but doesn’t get anything notable to do. Müller has a showier supporting role, but it doesn’t allow him significant screen time. Of course, it’s always a pleasure to see some of the old stars again, but it’s cold comfort for an audience faced with such an utterly uninspiring effort. Perhaps it’s all best summed up by the film’s closing moments, which overplays its final reveal at such a ridiculous length that it’s clearly signposting the imminent arrival of what’s supposed to be a massive twist. Unfortunately, it’s all so blatantly obvious that it couldn’t be a bigger failure.
Cotten was born in 1905 and got his acting start in theatre in Miami before trying his luck on Broadway, where he debuted in 1932. He met a young Orson Welles in 1934 and became part of his inaugural Mercury Theatre Company three years later. Following the ‘boy genius’ to Hollywood, he featured in Welles’ ‘Citizen Kane’ (1941) and ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’ (1942), which provided a springboard for starring roles in several big studio productions, most famously as Uncle Charlie in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Shadow of a Doubt’ (1943). Although still gainfully employed during the 1950s during the breakup of the studio system, he had his first brush with cult cinema when he starred in Byron Haskin’s weary adaptation of Jules Verne’s ‘From the Earth to the Moon’ (1958).
Cotten increasingly turned to television in the 1960s and began travelling to secure film roles. Spaghetti Westerns ‘The Tramplers/Gli uomini dal passo pesante’ (1965) and Sergio Corbucci’s ‘The Hellbenders/I crudeli’ (1967) were shot in Spain and Italy, and he headed to Japan for bonkers science-fiction epic ‘Latitude Zero’ (1969). His starring role in cult classic ‘The Abominable Dr Phibes’ (1971) prompted a handful of similar projects such as Italian exploitation favourite ‘Lady Frankenstein’ (1971), Mario Bava’s ‘Baron Blood/Gli orrori del castello di Norimberga’ (1972) and a couple of US made for TV movies, including the execrable ‘The Devil’s Daughter’ (1972). Later films included ‘Soylent Green’ (1973), ‘lsland of the Fishmen/L’Isola Degli Uomini Pesce’ (1979) and ‘The Hearse’ (1980). His final role was in the supernatural thriller ‘The Survivor’ (1981).
A flavourless concoction that might almost be the definition of a cinematic non-event.