GIALLO SOURCE CODE [from Vohrer's Dead Eyes of London to De Palma's Dressed to Kill]

Karin Baal in Alfred Vohrer's DEAD EYES OF LONDON. Below, the ghoulish, plodding, force-of-nature Ady Berber, one of *the* most iconic actors in the Krimi-verse.

 [NOTE: Many of the screencaps below contain significant movie gore. And, as with every post on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]

I started this series not only to chart the recurrence of images and sequences in the long and fluid line of Krimi and Giallo movies, but because one of the ineluctable pleasures of watching these films is to encounter the associations bound up with these sorts of recurrences: their associative and dreamy returns. This becomes increasingly true the more links you find in the same visual chain: For this entry, those links (in chronological order) will be Alfred Vohrer's seminal Krimi DEAD EYES OF LONDON (DIE TOTEN AUGEN VON LONDON [1961]), Dario Argento's equally seminal Giallo THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (1970), Giuliano Carnimeo's THE CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS (PERCHÉ QUELLE STRANE GOCCE DI SANGUE SUL CORPO DI JENNIFER? [1972]), and Brian De Palma's "American Giallo" DRESSED TO KILL (1980).

The images linking these four films (and spotlighted here) don't necessarily stay static in each iteration—not just blind copying—but instead I think you can see how the earlier sequences (consciously, deliberately, intuitively, or?) spawned (and evolved into) the later sequences. Elements that exist in the earliest example aren't necessarily retained in the later ones; instead you feel like you're getting glimpses of a shared landscape, an all-inclusive space, whose specific qualities vary and morph and build.

In V.'s DEAD EYES, it starts with the scene of Karin Baal** returning home to her apartment building. She goes to climb the stairs to her apartment, only to find that the stairwell's light is suddenly extinguished. As she climbs, a bit rattled, she finds she has reason to be: Hulking Ady Berber is waiting for her in the shadows:

Argento's BIRD restages this creepy stairwell climb, adding (for one) an almost-obsessive preoccupation with the ornate and repeating architecture built around the stairs (you could argue that the triangular negative space disappearing up into the ceiling recalls, at least vaguely, the beak of a bird), and extending the sequence. Instead of having the woman ambushed on the stairs by a hulking monster, she is cornered in an elevator and attacked by the film's black-coated, black-gloved, razor killer. Argento's repeated focus on the killer's swipes with the blade—punctuated with zinging swipes of sound—amp up the brutality and violence in the scene. And his camera's return, more than once, to the image of the bloody and gashed result of the attack on the woman's face and neck is among the template images of the genre:

The moment when the lights on the floor above go out.

After reaching the elevator, she is cornered by the killer:

 

This last shot is a nice segue to CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS, as that film's alternate title is WHAT ARE THOSE STRANGE DROPS OF BLOOD ON JENNIFER'S BODY?

Giuliano Carnimeo's CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS retains both of these elements (the woman being menaced by a darkened stairwell and a woman being slashed to death in the elevator) but splits them up between two different actresses. The first, played by Evi Farinelli, is introduced in the pre-credit sequence (via a mysterious phone call) only to be murdered on her way to meet the person she spoke with on the phone. The second, played by Carla Brait (fans might recognize her from her role in Sergio Martino's TORSO), is one of three people who discover Farinelli's body:

 

When Brait returns home later that day, the memory of discovering the body is too much for her, compelling her to take the stairs instead (notice what seems like at least a partial nod toward the use of architecture in the scene from BIRD): 
 

And then there's De Palma's DRESSED TO KILL, which stages the elevator murder of Angie Dickinson's character with brutal and delirious abandon. Like Argento's rendition of the scene, De Palma amplifies every stylistic element that he can:

• using multiple mirrored surfaces (the interior of the elevator is reflective; there's also a security mirror in the upper corner of the elevator car),
• slowing and blowing up the film to give it an otherworldly texture (the slo-mo hyper-closeup on Nancy Allen's eyes at the end of the scene is the stuff of dreams),
• editing the scene with sudden interruptions that both increase its pace and make it feel like it lasts for an achingly long time,
• cycling through camera positions that both disorient your spatial understanding of the scene and heighten it, in purely stylistic terms (shooting from the floor, from opposing corners of the elevator car, p.o.v.'s from inside and then outside the elevator car, etc.),
• and borrowing Argento's technique of shooting, from the victim's p.o.v., the almost-too-fast-to-track swipes of the blade:

Notice it's the hand missing her wedding band that she uses to try to fend off the razor's attack. The fact that De Palma splits up this long scene with Dickinson's realization that she's left her wedding ring in the apartment of the man she's just cheated with (a realization that brings her to tears) makes me think this isn't a coincidence. (Or, if it is, it's a happy one.)

 Leonard Jacobs

February, 2015

**Giallo fans may be more familiar with Baal as Fabio Testi's long-suffering wife in Dallamano's WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE?