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Lucio Fulci on Vertigo like Argento on Blow-Up years later, San Francisco like Kokoschka's Polperro, a corkscrew view from Lombard Street. The doctor named Dumurrier is another nod to Hitchcock, though Jean Sorel's casting reflects on Belle de Jour to point up the delirious switcheroo to come. As the rich asthmatic wife, Marisa Mell is brunette and stringy; doffing motorcycle gear and fondling pistons under the Roaring 20's spotlight, she's lustrously blonde while barely stifling a yawn at "la città del peccato" around her. "A very interesting coincidence" composed out of jangling contrasts: The dead and the living, funeral blacks and psychedelic colors, a cold body loaded into an ambulance and a warm one adorned with firefly pasties by the modish photographer (Elsa Martinelli). (Overheard at her studio: "Nude isn't enough, it has to be nasty.") Inheritances and reincarnations, overlapping betrayals in a formulation to arrive at a leisurely San Quentin stay. Deep-focus arrangements splintered by handheld swoops, a camera lurking behind medicine cabinets or under translucent mattresses as the lovers roll on them. Fulci eyes as treacherous lenses in a bathroom sink (cf. Chabrol's The Champagne Murders), a decomposed greenish cadaver for a zombie foretaste. "Not hate but madness... A brilliant madness." Trials are curiously elided in favor of Death Row minutia, the denouement (including a jilted-john-as-avenging-angel whammy) is laid out as a TV newscast in the gas chamber. The joke is that the supernatural has nothing on human venality, richly elaborated in A Lizard in a Woman's Skin. With John Ireland, Alberto de Mendoza, Riccardo Cucciolla, George Rigaud, and Faith Domergue.
--- Fernando F. Croce |