On the Cusp Between Noir and Giallo.
Wow!
Again here is a title where I really wasn't expecting much, and then I get blown away by it's excellent Noir Stylistics. Where the fuck has this one been on Noir Film lists? Its got beautiful cinematography, a good story and a pinch of dark picaresque humor. An American cut of the film was titled The Evil Eye.
Directed by Italian filmmaker and cinematographer Mario Bava.
The story was written by a collaboration of Ennio De Concini, Sergio Corbucci, and Eliana De Sabata credited for for story and screenplay, with additional input from Mino Guerrini, Francesco Prosperi, and Mario Bava. Cinematography was also by Mario Brava. Music by Roberto Nicolosi & Les Baxter.
Its been called the first Giallo, but its for sure a Transitional Noir and a good, very entertaining, one at that.
The film stars Letícia Román as Nora Davis, John Saxon (three Juvenile Delinquent Noirs Running Wild (1955), The Unguarded Moment (1956), The Restless Years (1958), and a Puerto Rican Noir Cry Tough (1959)), as Dr. Marcello Bassi, Valentina Cortese (Classic Noir Thieves' Highway (1949), Malaya (1949), and The House on Telegraph Hill (1951)) as Laura Craven-Toranni.
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| Letícia Román as Nora Davis |
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| Valentina Cortese as Laura Craven-Toranni |
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| John Saxon as Dr. Marcello Bassi |
The rest of the cast was Chana Coubert as Ethel, Dante DiPaolo as Andrea Landini, Titti Tomaino as the Inspector, Luigi Bonos as the Hotel Clerk, Milo Quesada as De Vico, Walter Williams (as Robert Buchanan), as Dr. Alessi, and Marta Melocco as the murder victim.
The beginning of the Jet Age. Though the opening credits have a nice montage of an inflight TWA Boing 707 it is juxtaposed with a somewhat jarringly belted out Italian song by Adriano Celantano, but its over quickly. One of many old films bonuses are that they have very short credit sequences.
On the plane we meet Nora Davis. 20 years old. Cute, Blonde. Petite. On a dream vacation to Rome. She's wearing a cool snakeskin raincoat. Is it a symbol of her individuality?
Her main passion in life is reading romantic murder mysteries. They help her to escape her drab everyday reality. In Rome she will be staying with an old family friend Mrs. Ethel Wignal Bartocci who now resides there.
Nora is sitting with a Mr. De Vico on the plane. He offers her a cigarette, tells her to keep the pack of Kents, He has another. They make small talk on the flight. When they land at Fiumicino the police grab De Vico out of the line just as he is explaining to Nora the places to avoid in Rome. His real name is Pacini and hes getting busted for smuggling packs of cigarettes' laced with marihuana.
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| Marijuana laced Kents |
Nora panics. She accepted one of the packs. She tries to ditch the smokes by clandestinely dropping the Kents from her side. However, a cop sees her drop them, and innocently thinking it was an accident, stoops down and retrieves the pack, returning it to Nora.
When Nora arrives at Ethel's she is greeted at the door by Dr. Marcello Bassi. Marcello likes what he sees. Marcello informs Nora that he his Ethel's doctor, and that she is not well.
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| Dr Bassi, Nora and her Snakeskin Jacket |
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| Chana Coubert as Ethel |
Ethel is happy to see Nora and marvels at how she's grown into a young lady. She tells Nora that as soon as she recovers she will show her Roma. Ethel tells her that the doctor insists that she stay in bed so that he can chaperone her around the city.
When Marcello leaves for the hospital, he explains to Nora that Ethel has a high heart rate and that she should not get excited. Later that night just as Nora is going to bed a thunderstorm knocks out the power and the lights go out. Ethel calls out for Nora.
Nora finds Ethel having an attack. She attempts to give Ethel her drops, but between the time she opens the medicine bottle and gets the dosage right, Ethel is already gone.
She tries to call the hospital number that Marcello gave her but the connections are bad. She throws on her black raincoat over her nightie grabs one of her purses, and heads out into the night looking for the nearby hospital.
On the mezzanine section of the Spanish Steps she is accosted by a mugger who steals her purse, and pushes her backwards. She hits her head on the stone pavement and loses conscience. The clock on the Trinità dei Monti church reads 11; 25 PM.
2:40 AM. Nora comes to. She's been out for over three hours. She grabs a stone balustrade and pulls herself up. Her vision is blurred but she is shocked when she sees a woman with a knife sticking out of her back stagger onto the mezzanine.
The woman drops to the pavement, dead. A man approaches from the same direction in which she came. He pulls the knife from her back and drags her away. Nora again loses conscience.
It rains, we are at just the thirteen and a half minute mark of a hour and 26 minute film.
But Nora's ordeal is not quite over. Early Morning. A man comes upon Nora, tries to revive her by shaking her and patting her face.
He gets out a flask and tilts her head up and pours some brandy into her mouth she sputters and awakens. When the man hears another person approaching he glances up, sees that it is a carabinieri, and he immediately ducks down and runs away.
The carabinieri sees Nora runs to her side smells booze and assumes she's another alike and they cart Nora away to the drunk ward of a nearby hospital.
When Nora wakes up she is questioned about the murder she claims she saw by Inspector Facchetti. He's a doctor of criminology. Again here we get a dig and a wink at giallo novels. When Facchetti asks her if she maybe dreamt the murder or possibly she imagined it he ends by also asking her if she reads murder mysteries.
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| Titti Tomaino as Inspector Facchetti |
When Marcello finally arrives he gets her out of the hospital. He later explains to Nora that it's natural that after being exhausted after her long flight, the shock of Ethel's death and then being mugged, that she'd have a breakdown.
After Ethel's funeral Nora meets Laura Craven-Toranni, a friend of Ethel's who lives right off the mezzanine of The Spanish Steps, exactly where Nora saw the murder take place. Laura invites Nora to stay now at her house. She also informs Nora that she soon has to travel to Bern, Switzerland, to visit her husband, and that she would be doing her a big favor if she would watch the house while she is gone.
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| Nora meets Laura after the funeral |
Nora calls her mother in the U.S, and tells her about Laura's offer and (naturally with the Nancy Drew/Miss Marple/Agatha Christie, armature sleuth inside Nora coming out) how she wants to prove that there was a murder and that she didn't make it up.
So Laura leaves on her trip and Nora moves in. When the cleaning lady arrives with a form for Nora to sign from the police, they get to talking. She tells Nora that she is glad that she is there because Laura is gone way too often. She then relates to Nora the tragedy that happened ten years earlier. Nora is shocked when she hears that Laura's sister Emily was stabbed to death in front of the house.
Now Nora and we, the audience, are wondering the nature of just what Nora saw. Did the blow on Nora's head make her clairvoyant? Did she actually see something that happened in the past? Not a minute after this revelation, while hanging her clothes up in the closet Nora stubbles and knocks a tin off the top shelf, it falls open, and within are newspaper clippings about the "Piazza de Spagna terzo omicido" (the third murder on the Spanish Steps) by line - Andrea Landini. Also in the tin are a child's alphabet blocks.
Nora reads about what Landini is calling the "Alphabet Murders" all were women all were stabbed in the back, the victims last names were Gina Abbart, Maria Baccarti, and the last, Laura's sister, Emily Craven. The article also mentions apparently crank phone calls the police received just before each murder
Nora coincidentally gets a phone call just then. A voice says "who is this ?" Nora answers "Nora Davis," the voice on the phone asks "Davis with a "D,"... D as in Death?" then hangs up. This is immediately jump cut to carving knife slicing up a turkey. A metaphor for Nora's fate?. lol.
Our one plot possibility of Nora having a vision of a past murder is reinforced by a dinner she has with Marcello and an expert in such matters a professor of meta physics. He tells her it could be a case of "psychic travel." But Nora does not mention the phone call she received at the dinner.
Back alone at Laura's apartment, she uses a repertoire of self defense gimmicks gleaned from countless mystery novels to protect herself. She shakes talcum powder on the floor and a ball of string crisscrossed like a spider web a trap in every open space.
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| Talcum powder |
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| String |
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| Peace |
The string will tripthe intruder, and the powder will make recovery traction impossible. Of course its a setup for another humorous sequence. It's the overly concerned Marcello who gets trapped. He broke a finger in his fall and Nora feels responsible. The finger is in a funny cast and that sight gag may have been homaged somewhat by Polanski with Jack Nicolson's nose bandage in Chinatown.
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| The finger cast |
Marcello takes Nora on a tour of Rome, the Via Veneto, the Colosseum, Piazza Narvona, etc., etc. When Marcello gets Nora finally back to Laura's house she hears the phone ringing says good-bye to Marcello and runs in to answer.
Marcello, a bit dejected by the quick brush off, pauses on his way down The Spanish Steps to light a tar bar and spots Nora running across the mezzanine above.
She hops into a waiting taxi and takes off. He follows. At the address she was given on the phone, on the top floor in an empty apartment she hear s a voice that draws her in.
This sequence is a great stylistic noir treat that is very well done, the stills don't do it justice.
Marcello surprises just her outside the dark vacant room from where the voice emanates. Inside the room they find a tape recorder that warns Nora to leave Rome before its too late.
They take the recorder back to Laura's apartment. Play the tape over again. Marcello finds out from the to-rent sign that an Andrea Landini owned the empty rooms. The name Landini rings a bell with Nora, its the name of the reporter who wrote about the Alphabet Murders.
The next day at 7:00AM Nora and Marcello go to the flop hotel where Landini is staying while the renovation is going on. They approach the desk.
Its another picaresque sequence with Marcello hurting his finger during his indignant reaction to the situation.
When they explain that they just want to talk with Landini the clerk tells them to check at the print shop around the corner. The shop sends them to a restaurant and they go on a wild goose chase that winds up on a beach on the Tyrrhenian Sea at Ostia.
When they arrive back at Laura's they find Landini waiting for them. Landini tells them that he thinks his stories sent the wrong man to the insane asylum. When they go to talk to the man they find he died a few years ago. Then on to find the dead man's daughter.
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| Dante DiPaolo as Andrea Landini |
A few days later when Nora finds Landini dead with a bullet through his head in his hotel flop, with his confession to all the murders neatly typed out it all appears to be over.
However when Nora, the next day, sees the picture of the stabbed woman who was found floating in the Tiber in that days newspaper, and recognizes the victim as the woman she saw die on the Spanish Steps. It all goes Noirsville
Noirsville
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