GIALLO IDENTIKIT #015 [THE SWEET BODY OF DEBORAH aka IL DOLCE CORPO DI DEBORAH (1968)]

Jean Sorel and Carroll Baker, idyllic at the opening of Romolo Guerrieri’s SWEET BODY OF DEBORAH (1968). Sorel and Baker were to 1960s’ Gialli what George Hilton and Edwige Fenech were to the 1970s’: sometimes together, sometimes apart, they populated the ’60s/early ’70s Giallo landscape like no other couple. This essay on DEBORAH will spend time covering some of those examples, and setting up some kind on context for the particular strain of Gialli they participated in, what Kim Newman calls the “pre-Argento” Giallo.

[This is the thirty-sixth post in a continuing series discussing and analyzing all the Krimis and Gialli I've seen. As with every post on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]

VERSION WATCHED: German X-Rated Eurocult Collection Blu-ray 
My Giallo Rating: ★★★½ (out of 5)
Subcategory (if any):
     i. Inheritance Giallo (aka, Pre-Argento Giallo)
     ii. Proto-Giallo
In My Giallo Top 50 (Y/N): No   


Kim Newman, in his commentary for Argento’s BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, spends some time discussing the difference in Gialli that come before Argento and after. According to Newman, the bulk of the “pre-Argento” Gialli had plots, and killers, driven not by some psychosexual trauma embedded in the past, but by something more rational and mundane: greed.
 
The pre-Argento Gialli are, in general, *not* obsessed with seeing, with the nature of perception, with a dread generated by the sense that the real world is being overcome—overwritten—by dream logic and irrational urges. Etc. They are not, in short, defined by the obsessions that would come to dominate the genre in the wake of Argento’s success. 

(It’s true, of course, that part of the reason Argento’s artistic vision changed the shape of Gialli is because it made money—his imitators latched on to his patented illogic and oneiric concerns because it was the thing they needed to *at least try to* imitate, in order to cash in. But I think it could also be argued that his concerns loomed so large, possessed such a gravity to begin with, that they endured in the genre even as box office receipts trailed off.)
 
So, most of these early Gialli had plots that could be boiled down to one killer (or set of killers) committing the murders only and in order to steal someone else’s inheritance. Even lurid, pathologically violent Gialli like Bava’s BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (1964)—with their baroque and highly stylized layers of sex and gore, dream and nightmare—are, after all, down to nothing but a scheme to keep (or steal) someone else’s money. No matter how much nudity or sensuality might feature—no matter how psychotic, even supernatural, the plot *appears* to be—most often, it’s just lust for money that explains the film.

And what Newman doesn’t mention during that particular commentary—but that’s just as key to understanding this version of the genre—is that this “Inheritance Scheme” model comes, almost fully formed, out of the German Krimi. It is one of several Krimi conventions—plot mechanics, stock characters, visual tropes, thematic concerns, iconography—that were bred in the Krimi and then “spliced off” into the new root that would make the Giallo*.

So:

Romolo Guerrieri’s 1968 Giallo THE SWEET BODY OF DEBORAH—starring Jean Sorel and Carroll Baker as leads—is one such example of this pre-Argento, “Inheritance Scheme” Giallo. Despite a few irrational trappings—despite regular dollops of Baker’s naked backside and sort-of sex scenes—it is not part of the psychosexual template that so many now associate with the Giallo’s DNA. And it is not, on a thematic level, about challenging the rational order of the characters’ world—there is no anxiety (as David Sanjek put it, in discussing the worldview of the Giallo) that the resolution of the mystery will “fail fully to restore either the viewers’ or the characters’ faith in a coherent moral or perceptual universe”.

A LOT OF TIME SPENT ON THE TRAVELOGUE: After the opening credits (and lover’s embrace) on an unidentified beach, the action moves to a wintry, mountain clime, with Sorel and Baker on their honeymoon (the visuals remind me both of the opening of PHENOMENA and the killer’s painting in BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE). This travel-as-plot is a device that shows up quite a bit in the pre-Argento Giallo. 

We learn from their conversation that the pair have come here from America, to visit Sorel’s old stomping grounds in Geneva. As Baker says: “I want to go to Geneva because it’s your hometown. And I want to know all about you, you belong to me.” During this travel montage, we also get subtle but effective physical acting from the two leads, performances that betray a familiarity between them that’s believable. And that gets tested by the suspicions that arise between them as the movie goes on.

[CONTEXT, CONTEXT, CONTEXT]
The other influence on this particular strain of pre-Argento Gialli—an influence that becomes fairly obvious, once you’ve seen the film—is Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1955 love-triangle tensioner DIABOLIQUE. And the important thing to note here:

No matter the increasing “weird” factor, the stylization and degree of theatricality applied to the set-pieces in Clouzot’s film—one thinks of the uncanny, eldritch scene of the husband’s bedraggled corpse, wet clams for eyes, rising dead from the tub—the plot is still the Krimi-familiar one, rational and sane: Money, money, money.

So, in the ’60s, this double-sourced plot—an inheritance scheme that often also contains a toxic love triangle—was what one meant when one said “Giallo”:

The examples most often cited are those films directed by Umberto Lenzi and starring Carroll Baker (alongside a revolving cast of suspicious lovers—Sorel, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Erika Blanc, Horst Frank, Marina Coffa, Anna Proclemer, Lou Castel, etc.). So ORGASMO (1969), SO SWEET... SO PERVERSE (1969), and A QUIET PLACE TO KILL (PARANOIA; 1970). These films, despite their injections of “swinging” ‘60s free love, of bed-hopping bored richies—as Jean Louis-Trintignant intones in SO SWEET SO PERVERSE: “Even more exciting, is knowing that it keeps getting harder and harder to feel excited”—still often feel stubbornly old-fashioned, dated, even juvenile when compared to the Argento-and-afterwards Gialli. 

(A perfect example of this is the interminable “Twister” game that occurs in SWEET BODY OF DEBORAH between Sorel and Baker, a scene that is supposed to be perhaps risqué or sexy—with their bodies draped across each other by the rules of the game—or, at the very least, *fun*, but instead plays as tedious: Baker’s eye-killing lime-green onesie, the voice on the record telling the “boys and girls” where to put their bodies—in fact, just its sheer, padded length ... everything works against it, moving the needle away from DIABOLIQUE and more toward BEACH BLANKET BINGO.)

And there were just as many non-Lenzi versions of this Giallo template: There’s the Italian Spanish co-production—a film which actually crept into the ’70s, completely oblivious to Argento’s influence—IN THE EYE OF THE HURRICANE. Starring Sorel, Maurizio Bonuglia (who himself often played the Sorel role, the rakish, scheming, a-holish gigolo—someone so aware of his own sex appeal that he actively used it to eff people over and steal), KOMMISSAR X’s Tony Kendall, and Analía Gadé. Gadé, whose role comes off as (mostly) nothing more than a ringer for Baker’s trademark, is the source of the money in the plot. To one degree or another she becomes entangled with all three men, her affections changing as her perception of their honesty shifts.

And the film’s staging gives us further example of this difference in type. I.e., in a Giallo like Fulci’s LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN, the inclusion of a swan is made on the strength of its feverish associations. Its menace. Its irrational connections to repressed dreams and bodily terror. The bird first exists in the film as part of a strange, symbolically unsettling painting that rests above Florinda Bolkan’s bed. In it, the swan appears to have its stomach and/or sexual organs replaced by a black triangle. It seems symbolic even though we lack the ability to interpret it. It seems menacing in the way that strange symbols in dreams menace.

Later, the swan appears in Bolkan’s dreams, descending from the sky, its now-ragged black-hole triangle seemingly aimed at swallowing Bolkan's body or head. The almost Muppet-like “angry bird” expression on its face disconcerting despite the fact that it’s obviously fake.

In HURRICANE, the swan instead serves as a kind of decadent or colorful prop, a material example of how extravagant and bored these rich heiresses and preppy gigolos are in life. They’re so bored, and have so much excess income, that they aimlessly buy swans to populate their pools. When they become bored with just watching the swans (these physical manifestations of their money), they don generic “pagan” masks (no doubt traditional masks appropriated, without the slightest respect, from other, less materially wealthy cultures) and terrorize the swans, chasing them around the pool within an inch of their poor animal lives. The swan is not an irrational intrusion from the world of sexual nightmare ... it’s a fashionable accessory that will eventually get thrown away by its owner.

(It is this craven meanness that does set the movie apart from some of the other examples in the same sub-genre. When Sorel and his previously secret lover force their way into Gadé’s home and make it clear that they are, from a mixture of greed and boredom, going to menace her like they did that swan—even as they openly eff and force themselves on her sexually—well, it’s a little startling. And nudges the movie away from Lenzi’s influence and more toward something like a ’70s Martino.)

THE BLUE MOVIE THAT NEVER QUITE GETS THERE: Though there’s some gratuitous use of skin, and Sorel and Baker are portrayed as being healthily in lust for each other, the film’s depictions—whether meant to come off as sleazy or sensual—never quite succeed. Esp. never quite succeed in canceling out the rest of the film’s persistently old-fashioned feel.

One film from the Lenzi/Baker mold that delightfully sheds all pretense to rationality—and ups the sensuality, while aiming for a kind of avant-garde madness—is Giulio Questi’s 1968 DEATH LAID AN EGG. Here we have Trintignant married to money-woman Gina Lollobrigida, and the usually scantily clothed Ewa Aulin as their “house guest” who proves the third in the triangle. Questi’s film, though going through some of the motions of the Lenzi/Baker plot, uses abrupt, elliptical editing, intoxicating sound cues, and a total disregard for “realism” (whatever that is) to plunge face-forward into avant-garde and weird territory.
 
(Note: There are at least two versions of this film, German and Italian, currently available on Blu-ray. At some point I’m going to do a comparison write-up on the differences, and post some caps to give a general idea of the picture quality.)

Other versions of this same Giallo strain include Lucio Fulci’s ONE ON TOP OF THE OTHER (aka, PERVERSION STORY), Luciano Ercoli’s FORBIDDEN PHOTOS OF A LADY ABOVE SUSPICION, the Italian-Spanish co-production DEATH HAUNTS MONICA (also starring Sorel), even the Krimi/Giallo Hybrid DOUBLE FACE (aka, LIZ AND HELEN), which takes DIABOLIQUE’s eerie dance of “is he or isn’t he dead” and transplants it onto Margaret Lee’s character, and her appearance in some blue movies that tantalizingly (also: terrifyingly) seem to show her alive and making sex films after her death ...  

There’s also something to be said for just how many of these movies involve that key DIABOLIQUE construct of the rich but neglected woman who is beset by male hangers-on, who feign a love interest but who only really want her money. I.e., the men, often, are portrayed as little better than gigolos, who have gained their position and wealth by “marrying up” to an heiress or widow, and who now have grown so weary of pretending to be her husband that they are desperate to see her dead.

...
  
Ultimately, this plot would get updated and grafted onto the psychosexual post-Argento Giallo in films like Martino’s sublime STRANGE VICE OF MRS. WARDH, which is, on the one hand, a STRANGERS ON A TRAIN-type murder scheme for money, but is really (i.e., really more effectively) a psychosexual grid of traumatic flashbacks, faceless sex maniacs, S&M dreamscapes, and the pervading sense that all men, even the ones that seem most charismatic or trustworthy, are really as wicked as you can possibly imagine.

THE LOVE TRIANGLE AND THE GHOST: Once Sorel and Baker return to his home town, we learn (through the disapproving and pleasingly grumpy performance of genre great Luigi Pistilli) that Sorel’s former flame committed suicide after he left. While he was away, in America, falling in love with rich heiress Baker, his heartbroken ex (played by Ida Galli) killed herself because of the grief he caused her. This ghostly suicide from the past then becomes the driving force for all those elements that appear supernatural—that appear to be driving Baker’s character mad—but that in the end have that same, entirely rational explanation we’ve been discussing.

So SWEET BODY OF DEBORAH is one of those non-Lenzi pairings of Baker and Sorel, and is very much the same sort of story, a twisty, pseudo-supernatural mystery that threatens the apparent happy marriage of the rich woman and the gigolo man. In this case, Sorel broke it off with his lover in Geneva (genre regular Ida Galli, aka Evelyn Stewart) before meeting and marrying Baker in the US. His happy homecoming gets derailed when he learns that Galli committed suicide out of despair for her lost love. He learns this news from a former friend and confidante, played so disdainfully by Luigi Pistilli, who calls the suicide murder and blames Sorel for the crime.

This sets the rest of the movie in motion, an increasingly menacing quest to find out just what happened to Galli, and just who might be responsible. Baker starts to receive threatening phone calls from an unknown man who promises that she will be killed for her new husband’s crimes (these calls coming presumably from Pistilli). And Baker’s attempt to escape this threat—she rents a villa in the country where the two can be alone—gets further complicated when a Groucho-eyed George Hilton shows up as the nosy, painter neighbor, who makes no secret that he wants to take Baker to bed and builds his easel on a scaffolding so he can spy on the not-so-happy couple as they cavort in their backyard.

(His character, in an exchange with Baker, calls himself, with a kind of mischievous grin, a voyeur. He says it in a way that suggests the term, or that concept, should’ve been a new one to the movie-going public in 1968. Or, if not new, then scandalous. Esp. for one of the male leads to gleefully admit to such behavior. This is another case-in-point for the kind of vibe these old-fashioned Gialli have: I.e., by 1968, after PSYCHO, after PEEPING TOM, after the deep and complicated portrayal those two films made of “bent” voyeurs, DEBORAH’s handling of the term seems quaint. Even immature.)

GHOST OF LOVERS PAST: A series of flashbacks briefly show us the arc of Sorel and Galli’s relationship—from carefree, adventurous lovers to a threatened, hopeless pair whose doomed parting is all but assured.

One’s enjoyment of the film largely depends on what you think makes for the most perfect Giallo formula—and how much variation you can take from the dominant Argento / Fulci / Martino forms ... I will say, rewatching it on the recently released Blu really caused me to re-evaluate the merits of the film, even if it trades in those modes of the Giallo that I value least. For Gialli it seems, presentation really is everything.

Leonard Jacobs

January, 2016

*TWO THINGS: 1. There are other splices, forking paths, major offshoots in the Giallo genre. For more on that, see my thoughts here. And 2. That’s not to say that the Krimi didn’t also have its own version of the psychosexual trauma plot that would come to dominate after BIRD. There are many Krimis that prefigure, sometimes uncannily, what Argento would later make his own: chief among them PHANTOM OF SOHO (1964), MONSTER OF LONDON CITY (1964), ROOM 13 (1964), as well as a slightly later example, Alfred Vohrer’s SCHOOL OF FEAR (1969).  

[SHOW NOTES]

VERSION WATCHED: German X-rated Blu-ray (cap comparisons here) | LANGUAGE: Italian soundtrack with English subs; the Blu-ray does not include the English track | DIRECTOR: Romolo Guerrieri  | WRITER(S): Ernesto Gastaldi, Luciano Martino  | MUSIC: Nora Orlandi  | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Marcello Masciocchi | CAST: Carroll Baker (Deborah); Jean Sorel (Marcel); Ida Galli (Suzanne Boileau, as Evelyn Stewart); George Hilton (Robert Simack); Luigi Pistilli (Philip); Michel Bardinet (Police Commissioner); Valentino Macchi (Garagista); Mirella Pamphili (Telephone Clerk); Domenico Ravenna (Doctor); Giuseppe Ravenna (Maitre d'Hotel); Renato Montalbano (Telephone Man)