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The first murder is staged inside a car parked in the dark, barely illuminated by passing headlights. Add Edwige Fenech's introduction on the escalator and the marvelously gratuitous fashionista soirée (where models wrestle and tear apart each other's paper dresses) and you have the mise en scène of Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town, and Sergio Martino is just getting started. The heroine is a sort of jet-setting Hérodiade (Mallarmé's), suspended between the stability of a diplomat husband (Alberto de Mendoza) and the "ecstasy and fear" of a sadistic ex-lover (Ivan Rassimov). A greasy lothario (George Hilton) unites the opposites during her stay in Vienna, where women are mysteriously slaughtered. "We should be grateful to this maniac, he's eliminating the competition." The longings of the disinterested wife, funneled into brutal fantasies shot with unnerving lyricism: Fenech's broken-glass tryst with Rassimov glows in her memory, slow-mo and ululated to "Dies Irae" until she's awakened from her reverie to face the leather-gloved culprit's switchblade. Barcelona becomes the illicit lovers' Eden, though, as somebody says, "Adam and Eve lost Paradise because they knew too much." (And then later: "Your vice is a room locked from the inside, and only I have the key.") Martino's study of deep reds and blacks benefits grandly from inventive lighting, as when the couple stumbles around a darkened studio and a lighter flipped this way and that becomes a compositional tool. The camera tilts down from the killer reflected on aviator shades, and suddenly the Spanish desert from the Leone westerns is recognized. The denouement tips its hat to both The Wages of Fear and Diabolique. With Conchita Airoldi, Carlo Alighiero, and Bruno Corazzari.
--- Fernando F. Croce |