Film Review: The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) and The Corruption of Chris Miller (1973)

The giallo genre is the gift that keeps on giving. Just when I thought I'd seen all the famous ones, and a lot of the obscure ones, along comes The Girl Who Knew Too Much and The Corruption of Chris Miller. The former is a sort of mash-up of Roman Holiday and a Hitchcock thriller, and the latter is a riff on Polanski's Repulsion. And both bear one of the hallmarks of gialli; they're heavily influenced by more famous films and directors. To be even more specific, the entire giallo genre probably doesn't exist if Psycho and Diabolique hadn't come before. In the 1960s and early 70s, Italy was the counterfeit designer label purveyor of the film world, churning out ersatz westerns, spy films, and toga (called peplum in Italy) epics, all of them low budget versions of costlier, starrier, made in Hollywood (mostly) films. But here's what's so remarkable and enjoyable about these Italian B-movies, especially the gialli: cinematically speaking, they were frequently better than their major league progenitors. For proof, look no further than Vittorio Storaro, the 3-time Oscar-winning cinematographer, who also shot two notable gialli, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and The Fifth Cord. 

The Girl Who Knew Too Much and The Corruption of Chris Miller are both good examples of gialli that look better than they have to. Girl is directed by Mario Bava, who is usually credited with kick-starting the genre with this film and Blood and Black Lace (1964). Bava did amazing things visually on low budgets, and this is a fine example. Shooting in black and white, he uses Roman locations like the Spanish Steps to striking effect, and one sequence set in an empty apartment lit by bright, bare lightbulbs is stunning. Corruption is in colour and pays close attention to wardrobe and interior design. It was shot by Juan Gelpi who gives the film a glossy look that might be a homage to the Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk, which fits, roughly, the subject of the film. Gelpi also did fine work on They Came to Rob Las Vegas, a heist film shot in Nevada, California and Spain. The director of Corruption was Juan Antonio Bardem, who, it turns out, was Javier Bardem's uncle.                                                                                                                      

As good as both films look, they suffer from faults common to gialli. The plots are twisted and ambitious, but ultimately don't hang together. Girl starts with a bang with the eponymous heroine, an American tourist, encountering a drug smuggler on her flight to Rome, followed in very short order by witnessing her aunt's death, meeting a hunky doctor, becoming the victim of a mugging, and then witnessing a murder that may have happened ten years previously. It doesn't really add up in the end, but it's fun to go along for the ride and the tone is more whimsical than murderous. Corruption revolves around a rich woman, Ruth, who lives in a big house with her step-daughter. The man of the house ran out on them some years ago, and now his abandoned wife has some vague plan to corrupt his daughter, Chris, in revenge. This side of story is rather confused, especially since Ruth seems to have the hots for Chris. A handsome drifter turns up and Ruth hires him to be a handyman, and he takes an interest in both women. Chris, however, is terrified of sex. People start getting murdered in the area, suspicion falls on Barney the drifter, and the film ends with the most spectacular knife attack scene since Psycho. And, like many gialli, the acting is a mix of dodgy and competent. 

So why did Italian B-movies look so much better than their American equivalents? The answer, I'd theorize, comes from the two countries contrasting experiences with television production. In Italy, television only began in 1954 and there was only one channel, RAI, the state broadcaster. A second channel was added in the 60s. Variety shows dominated the limited programming time available, and this meant that TV was not a deep or varied source of talent for film production. In the U.S., TV employed a relative army behind the camera, and these people, with their training in the style and look of TV, were the ones who often made the B-movies. Italian films, then, were largely made by people who drew their influences and experience from films, not the TV industry. The Italian film industry remained vibrant and prolific until more TV channels were allowed on-air in the late 70s and 80s, after which the domestic box office for Italian films cratered. Like I said, it's a theory.

Gialli Good Fun

You simply can't beat a giallo film for tawdry entertainment value. Gialli were one of the staples of Italian cinema from the late 1960s to the mid '70s, offering a lurid mix of violence, sadism, voyeurism, sex, and deeply twisted plots. They were what Alfred Hitchcock might have made had he let his freak flag fly. In Italian, giallo means yellow, and the films were given this name as a reference to a publisher who reprinted English mystery/thriller novels with distinctive yellow covers. The films themselves owe a big debt to Hitchcock, Psycho in particular. Many of the films feature heavily disguised killers who attack beautiful women (always with bladed instruments) for a variety of warped or mercenary reasons.

Exploitation elements aside, gialli deserve appreciation for their cinematic qualities and enthusiastic attempts to befuddle the audience with devious plots. These were low to middling budget films, but they certainly tried to put on a good visual show. The interiors and women's fashions in gialli are usually the epitome of '70s style, which is both good and bad, but always eye-catching and/or eye-watering. The musical soundtracks are a mix of the weird and the overblown, and even a big name like Ennio Morricone did work on some gialli. What really keeps these films worth watching are the plots. The producers couldn't invest much money in stars or stunts, but they certainly urged the scriptwriters give it their all. The mystery at the centre of each giallo may be highly improbable, but the plotting is often surprisingly clever and keeps the audience on board, which is crucial since gialli also suffer from some pronounced defects.
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You don't watch these films for the acting. Or the dialogue. Some performances are respectable, the remainder range from wooden to overwrought. Interestingly, it's usually the women who give the better performances. The men often seem more interested in modeling their turtleneck sweaters (a fashion staple in gialli) than doing any actual acting.

So the reason for this post is that I recently got a Roku attachment to my TV, which means I can stream films from YouTube onto the big screen, and the first thing I did was have a giallo film festival with myself as the guest of honour. Herewith are some of the better ones I've seen.


Death Walks on High Heels (1971)

Did I mention that gialli often have ludicrous titles? This one starts out as a standard story of a beautiful woman pursued by a masked madman, but then gets progressively more complicated and surprising. When the mystery is finally unraveled you'll be applauding the scriptwriter for his amazingly intricate and logical, if  bizarre, plotting. The acting here is mostly over the top, at times leading to unintended laughter, but everyone attacks their roles with gusto, especially the actor who utters the immortal line, "Porco!" when confronted with a transvestite.

Who Saw Her Die? (1972)

The young daughter of a sculptor living in Venice is murdered and he tracks down her killer. The plot isn't much to speak of, but the location photography is stunning. The director, Aldo Lado, was from Venice and he clearly knew all the best locations for capturing the spooky oddness of the city. I can't help wondering if this film somehow inspired or influenced Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now which came out a year later.

Death Walks at Midnight (1972)

Another Byzantine plot from the director of Death Walks on High Heels. This time a fashion model witnesses a murder in the building across from her apartment but can't prove that it actually happened. There are some plot holes in this one, but it's still very intriguing and the look of the film is '70s to the max. A sidenote: based on all the gialli I've seen, 80% of the Italian female population at this time were models with the remainder strippers and/or homicidal maniacs.

The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972)

If you're going to dive into the giallo genre you have to see at least one starring the gorgeous Edwige Fenech. Fenech is to Italian B-movies of the '70s what the Virgin Mary is to Catholicism. She starred in gialli, cop movies, horror films, and lots and lots of sex comedies. In Iris she wears a variety of improbable outifts, including body paint, and spends the rest of the time forgetting to lock her windows and doors, thus allowing maniacs access to her at all hours of the day and night.

Footprints on the Moon (1975)

This is the outlier in the giallo genre. It begins like many gialli, with a beautiful woman facing a seemingly impossible puzzle: she appears to be missing two days from her life. It's soon clear that this isn't any kind of exploitation film. Florinda Bolkan plays the lead character and she's a superb actress. More importantly, the cinematographer is Vittorio Storaro, the genius behind the camera on films such as Last Tango in Paris, Apocalypse Now, and Woody Allen's latest, Cafe Society. The look of the film is amazing, and the story is an elegant, mysterious, subtle attempt to visualize a kind of waking dream. There's no big pay-off to the film, but it's a crime that it's not more widely known or available on DVD. Are you listening, Criterion Collection?

Film Review: Delitto d'amore (1974)

In the 1960s and '70s Italian cinema seemed to specialize in reinventing film genres from other countries. The spaghetti western was a deconstruction of the American western with an added dollop of Japanese samurai films; giallo films were Hitchcock with more blood and less humour; and poliziotteschi were American cop noir films like The French Connection given a frenzied and feverish makeover. Or to look at it another way, Italians were the counterfeit designer label purveyors of the film world. But this ersatz cinema was always vastly entertaining.

Delitto d'amore is Love Story (1970) redone with bonus Marxism, environmentalism, political violence, labour activism, and angry debate about Italy's north-south divide. The lovers are Nullo and Carmela, both of whom work in a noisy, smoky metalworks factory in Milan. Nullo is a northerner whose family are all anarchists. Carmela and her very traditional Catholic family are recent arrivals from Sicily. They live in a crowded hovel in a part of town that looks as if it would be more habitable if it was bulldozed. Carmela falls in love with Nullo at first sight, he takes a little longer to come around to her charms. They want to get married but fight over her demand for a religious marriage and his insistence on a civil marriage only. Carmela gets a fatal illness from toxic fumes in the factory, and marries Nullo in a civil ceremony on her deathbed. The last shot of the film has Nullo walking through a crowd of workers protesting the factory's working conditions, and as he goes off-camera we hear a pistol shot as he shoots (we assume) one of the factory managers.

There are a lot of raw edges in this film, but it's charm and power comes from its dogged enthusiasm in embracing every hot button issue of the day, and subtlety be damned. Pollution? How about a scene by a river that was once pristine (according to Nullo) but is now foaming with industrial effluents and bordered by trash heaps. Poverty? Carmela's tenement is horribly overcrowded and surrounded by wasteland. The screenwriter was Ugo Pirro, who, not surprisingly, also did the script for Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (my review). This was a guy who knew how to tackle themes like social injustice and make them entertaining.

The film really has a bit too much on its plate, but that's par for the course in Italian films of that era. Some of the giallos of that period (Death Walks on High Heels comes to mind) had enough plot for three or four movies. Considering how politically-neutered Hollywood filmmaking has been over the years, it's always refreshing to watch a film that sinks its teeth into big issues and won't let go. The location photography is great. Milan in winter is wrapped in perpetual fogs and mists, and as is usual in Italian films of that time, the cinematographer seems to go out of his way to avoid locations that show the country's natural and architectural beauty. The acting is all over the map. Stefania Sandrelli is very good as Carmela, but Giulano Gemma is a bit meh. Like too many leading men from '70s Italian cinema, Gemma is a pretty face and a cool haircut in search of an acting class. He tries, though.

Delitto d'amore (Crime of Love in English) isn't a classic, but it's energetic, angry and clumsily entertaining. The gold standard for films about the Italian proletariat and labour strife has to go to The Organizer (my review), but there are several other films in a similar vein (1900, The Working Class Goes to Heaven, The Railroad Man) so I'm thinking there needs to be a genre classification for them. How about classe operaia films?

Related Posts:

Review of Plot of Fear 
Review of Almost Human

Film Review: Plot of Fear (1976)

Do you have one of those co-workers who pulls you aside to tell you jokes that are so filthy you wouldn't repeat them in a Tijuana holding cell? Or maybe he likes showing you "interesting" things he's found on the Internet. And you can count on him to make the least PC comment at the worst possible time. This Italian giallo thriller is that guy. It's one hot mess of a movie, and it's so eager to be edgy and transgressive (by 1976 standards) that it's practically quivering with delight.

Giallo films are one of the sinful, sleazy delights of Italian cinema in the 1970s. Basically, a giallo film combines a murder mystery with graphic violence and sex, preferably something kinky. These films certainly served up a healthy dose of lurid entertainment, but they were also a nervous by-product of the massive changes and stresses Italian society was experiencing. In 1976 Italy was deep into the so-called "Years of Lead." Terrorist groups from the the left and right were carrying out bombings and assassinations, and many Italians were preparing for either a fascist coup or Europe's first elected Communist government. On top of all this there were the stresses of a once conservative, priest-ridden country moving rapidly in a more secular and hedonistic direction. It's no wonder so many of the Italian B-movies of that era feel like everyone involved in their production was either drunk or on amphetamines. Their corner of Europe looked set to explode or implode at any moment, and the giallo films reflect that nervous fear and energy; they're trying to be as volatile and transgressive as the society around them.

Plot of Fear ticks all the giallo boxes. It's got technicolor blood spilling out of bodies, gratuitous sex and nudity, and decadent upper-class types indulging in sex games and crimes. And like the better giallos this one actually has a plot that's cleverer than you might expect. The film starts out as a serial killer story, with the murderer leaving illustrations from a children's book beside each body. The victims were all once members of The Fauna Club, a group of animal lovers who met at a villa outside of Milan. Commissario Lomenzo heads the investigation and soon finds that the club's members were not really all that interested in animals.

But enough about the plot. It's good, but it's not the reason to watch the film. I love the look of this film: the fogs and mists filling the streets; Milan's grungy, decrepit urban architecture; the garish decor of the haute bourgeoisie homes; and all those boxy Fiats zipping around Milan, their drivers working the stick shifts like one-armed bandits as they nip past trams and trucks. And then there's the sex. To fulfill the kinky quotient we get a masochistic sex game (it ends badly), and some goings-on at the villa that include a seriously filthy cartoon and a prostitute plying her trade under a dining room table. But wait, there's more! Lomenzo is given a black girlfriend, which was pretty wild stuff for the time and place. She dumps him and he immediately takes up with a model who's connected to the Fauna Club. Of course, this being a giallo we get to see him have sex with both women, and they are two of the most awkward sex scenes you'll ever find. Nobody looks like they were enjoying themselves. And finally, we also get a whiff of politics. The film's political stance is a bit opaque (undoubtedly less so for Italians), but there seems to be an anti-fascist tone to the story.

The acting is pretty wonky. Michele Placido plays Lomenzo, and he doesn't appear at all comfortable in the role; in one fight scene I could swear he actually appears to be terrified of being hit for real by the stuntman. The others actors range from mediocre to weak,, but they make up for it by attacking their roles with gusto. They all have energy, that's for certain. Eli Wallach also has a supporting role, which isn't as strange as it sounds. He got a lot work in Europe in the '70s thanks to appearing in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. What's odder is that Tom Skerritt turns up in an even smaller role. This was three years before he played Dallas in Alien, so how he ended up in this is anyone's guess.

There's nothing quite like a giallo. B-movies from other parts of the world were usually all about the violence or all about the sex. Only the Italians had the bright idea to throw everything in the pot along with perviness, frenzied acting, twisted plots, and some seriously demented interior decoration. Films like this aren't for everyone, but I have a mile-wide weak spot for Italian cinema from this era. Finally, if you're a regular reader of my blog, and you're an eccentric millionaire who loves to give gifts to lovers of Italian culture, I'd really, really, really like to get one of those Fiat 500s this Christmas. Just saying.

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Film Review: Almost Human
Film Review: The Best of Youth