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Zinnemann's Eyes in the Night informs the tale, the "neat equation, Italian style" turns out to be the basic surrealism of not taking things as they seem. The blind puzzle enthusiast (Karl Malden) overhears conspiratorial voices which become flashing mental images as he works on a jigsaw, elsewhere a POV camera knocks out a watchman and breaks into the research institute. Subjective prowling (intercut with split-second ocular close-ups) continues at the railroad, where rapid lateral panning evokes a jumpy assassin timing a rendezvous to the arrival of a train: A scientist is pushed face-first onto the incoming locomotive, paparazzi slide from documenting a murder to photographing a starlet's vanity ("Smile, smile, a man is dead"). The investigation encompasses the uncorrupted gaze of the adopted niece (Cinzia De Carolis) and the jocular prying of the newspaperman (James Franciscus), suspects include the pharmaceutical heiress (Catherine Spaak) who zips through Turin streets like Annie Hall and the laboratory whiz (Aldo Reggiani) fascinated by the chromosome of violence. "To find connections where there aren't any," a task for a sleuth or a director or a critic, Dario Argento has experiments to conduct. (Two glasses of poisoned milk are suspended before the lenses in a jazzy effect from Hitchcock or Leone, prior to that an amorous couple is obscured by pyramidal crimson cartons leaking in the foreground.) Drag bars and locked crypts, a lemon filter over the strangled photographer and the dagger in the white cane. Not "a nice, clean slash" but a bloody melee for the rooftop climax, not a Morricone lullaby but a child's scream echoing down an elevator shaft. With Pier Paolo Capponi, Horst Frank, Rada Rassimov, Carlo Alighiero, Vittorio Congia, and Ugo Fangareggi.
--- Fernando F. Croce |