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The foundation of the lacquered style is Chabrol's Les Biches, and there's Jean-Louis Trintignant driving a yellow convertible down the Champs-Élysées with a rifle in the back seat. "Danger brings out a man's true qualities," the bourgeois industrialist nonpareil at the shooting range yet cut down in the boudoir by the neglected wife (Erika Blanc). ("The Victorian image of the dominant male is a little out of place today," she snaps in languorous lingerie, "not jealous, just bitchy.") A new thrill for the bored marksman, the blonde from upstairs (Carroll Baker) glimpsed through the latticed elevator. Her "hint of mystery" boils down to a masochistic bond with a brute (Horst Frank), or perhaps the bait in an entrapment scheme. "The atmosphere here is more libertine every day," Umberto Lenzi wouldn't have it any other way. Illicit Mediterranean frolics, a beach rendezvous sun-blasted one moment and slapped with a red filter the next. Erotic games to break up jet-set ennui, the ebony beauty (Beryl Cunningham) strips down to her pasties and directs the camera at a decadent soiree, "one loooong minute" for the extramarital couple's kiss. "A man who knows what he wants is better off without a conscience," said man torches his factory for the insurance money and ends up himself charred beneath the overturned posh vehicle. "Nothing left to recognize," nothing left for the duplicitous gals but crawling fear as sinister messages materialize scrawled on mirrors and murmured on telephones. The law persists in the end, though not before getting sassed by the comely culprit: "If you want to play Sherlock Holmes, wouldn't you be better off on television?" With Helga Liné, Ermelinda De Felice, Giovanni Di Benedetto, Dario Michaelis, Irio Fantini, and Renato Pinciroli.
--- Fernando F. Croce |