GIALLO IDENTIKIT #007 [AMUCK! vs MANIAC MANSION (comparing two cuts of Silvio Amadio's film from 1972)]

US label Code Red recently released a shortened version of Silvio Amadio's AMUCK!. Unlike the previous Eurovista DVD, it restores the film to its 2.35:1 OAR, but the cut provided, entitled MANIAC MANSION, is about 13.5 minutes shorter than the Eurovista version.

Title card and example of the 4:3 cropped image from the Eurovista DVD (more comparisons below).

[This is the twenty-fourth 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.]

Shortly after I reviewed Silvio Amadio's AMUCK! (via the horribly cropped Eurovista DVD), I heard about the release of an OAR version of AMUCK! by Code Red. The additional wrinkle, though, is that the Code Red release was an alternate cut of the film (titled MANIAC MANSION) and had no restoration done to the a/v (though having it in the original 2.35:1 is a huge bonus). For a while now I've been meaning to sit down and catalogue the differences between these two cuts. I've now finally sat down and watched the two discs side-by-side in their entirety. The rest of this post is devoted to a list of the differences between the two cuts of the movie, with accompanying description of the material missing from the shorter, MANIAC MANSION version of the film.

For the record, the running time on the Code Red MANIAC MANSION cut is 1:24:46. The Eurovista AMUCK! cut runs 1:38:21. And please note that the timestamps below are approximate, as close as I could get them using two different laptops running both discs simultaneously. The timestamps below refer to the footage (and the duration of that footage) that appears on the Eurovista full-frame DVD but that DOES NOT appear in the shortened MANIAC MANSION cut that has been released by Code Red.

As a rule, the cuts do not involve any of the infamous scenes between Barbara Bouchet and Rosalba Neri (or Bouchet and Patrizia Viotti), but generally follow the pattern of removing not censored material but narrative texture, nuance, and whole chunks of characterization. The net effect of these cuts is to present a film that feels like it adds up to less than it otherwise would. Here's hoping somebody like Camera Obscura will have the means to do one of their signature, extras-laden restorations and finally give this great, lost Giallo the release it deserves.

Eurovista cropped image.

Code Red image.

[CUTS]

1:18-1:29 (~11 sec)
On the Eurovista AMUCK! cut, Barbara Bouchet's arrival at Rosalba Neri and Farley Granger's villa cuts to a closeup on a reel-to-reel playing inside the villa. We hear Granger's voice dictating his latest novel, and the sound of (presumably) Bouchet typing off-screen. The camera swings back a bit from the reel-to-reel and then closes in on Bouchet at the desk typing.

In the MANIAC MANSION cut, this scene is missing these seconds and begins instead with Bouchet at the typewriter. The MM version also omits that portion of Granger's dictation that we hear when we see the reel-to-reel.

2:44-4:00 (~1 min 16 sec)
In the MANIAC MANSION cut, Granger's cocky, self-congratulating introduction to Bouchet is shortened. It loses a discussion that Granger has with her while showing off a piece of art that he's been hunting for five years ("The Bacchanale").

The cut comes just before he says to her: "Come, I'll show you something ... Now you see that nail? I placed it there exactly five years ago. I knew what I wanted then, it's taken me five years but I've got it now." As his dialogue continues, he hangs the compact piece of art (it looks like a drawing or etching in the Eurovista print).

Interestingly enough, we not only lose Granger's lecture to Bouchet on art and aesthetics, we also lose the transition to the next scene, which finds Granger, Neri, and Bouchet eating a meal (being served by butler Umberto Raho). They playfully discuss Granger's literary reputation (and work) and Bouchet's opinion of it.

In the MM cut, we lose all of this and instead go straight to a scene that starts with a closeup on a fireplace. When the camera shifts, we see that its fire is being watched by a seated Rosalba Neri. Outside the villa, the gurgle of a boat can be heard. In the AMUCK! version, this fireplace shot follows directly on the short dinner conversation that occurs between the three.

6:38-7:36 (~58 sec)
After we get the scene of the Venice Police Commissioner quizzing Granger about the disappearance of his previous secretary (and Bouchet getting caught eavesdropping on the conversation by the red herring butler played by Raho), the AMUCK! version cuts to a shot of Neri and Bouchet walking through the streets of (presumably) Venice. During this scene Neri decides to go to the hairdresser, and Bouchet leaves to go run errands before meeting back up with Neri in "two hours". After she splits up with Neri, we see Bouchet mail a packet of letters and make a phone call to an unknown party. We then watch her, along with a crowd of people, climb the stairs to one of Venice's walkways that are built as bridges over the canals.

In the MM cut, Bouchet on the bridgeway is the next scene we get, a few seconds after it has already started. We cut to Bouchet halfway up the bridge. There she stops and asks a man for directions. After that she proceeds to another bridgeway, where she meets the Police Commissioner, shows him a picture of the missing secretary (her friend, and the real reason she's taken the secretarial job in Granger and Neri's villa; her role is played by Patrizia Viotti), and relates the contents of the last letter the woman sent Bouchet before she disappeared.

Eurovista cropped image.

Code Red image.

8:50-9:17 (~27 sec)
The cuts here involve the voice-over that occurs as the Police Commissioner reads this last letter. The v.o. is the missing woman reading the contents of the letter while the camera cycles through abstract (and upside-down) reflections of Venice in the waters of the canal. A whole chunk of the letter (and accompanying v.o. and reflected shots) are simply missing from the MM cut.

20:55-20:28 (~33 sec)
During the party scene (in which Bouchet's character gets a glimpse of her lost friend, via the homemade "Little Red Riding Hood" stag film that's being shown), we lose the dialogue between her and Granger that starts: "It's about time I introduced you to Eleanora's friends" that leads to his "I'm just a composite of what they are" speech, in which he compares himself to the "doomed" city of Venice. As with the other cuts in the MM version, they don't seem down to censorship, but instead serve to remove narrative texture, nuance, and whole chunks of characterization. The net effect is to make the film add up to less than it otherwise would.

26:36-27:11 (~35 sec)
In the AMUCK! cut, the second dinner conversation between Granger, Neri, and Bouchet is extended. This extension begins at 26:36, with a shot of Raho (as butler) serving more dishes on the table and Granger asking Bouchet, "You're a New Yorker, aren't you?". And then proceeding to ask Bouchet if she knew the missing girl, who worked for the same publisher as Bouchet's character. This dinner scene goes on for ~35 seconds longer all told, until the scene cuts to a shot of Granger and Neri boarding their boat to go into Venice (which is where the MM print picks back up).

29:01-29:56 (~55 sec)
Bouchet's search through the villa's locked basement (while Granger and Neri are gone in the city) gets truncated starting at this point. The cuts include footage of Bouchet discovering a woman's dress and knocking over a taxidermied owl as she wends her way through the items stored in the basement. As is the tendency with the cuts, the flashback featuring Bouchet and Viotti dallying naked under the waterfall isn't cut from this sequence.

38:47-40:22 (~35 sec)
In the MANIAC MANSION version, Granger finding the keys that Bouchet stole cuts to another scene with the reel-to-reel, where Granger dictates his "new story" (that is actually a description of how he's going to kill Bouchet, and how he did kill Viotti's character). In the AMUCK! version, the movie at this point cuts to Bouchet trying (and failing) to use the boat to get into the city (presumably to tell the Police Commissioner what she found in the basement), trying (and failing) to use the phone in the villa, and watching from a window as Granger and Neri themselves leave in the boat.

42:40-43:50 (~1 min 10 sec)
The MANIAC MANSION makes a strange cut here that seems to be a mistake. Bouchet, listening to the reel-to-reel, looks up when she hears a ringing phone. Before she can answer it (or see if anybody else has), we cut to what looks like the same scene of Granger and Neri leaving the boat dock from earlier (I can't confirm it's the same, but it looks very, very similar). After they leave, we get Bouchet, no longer sitting in a chair and listening to the reel-to-reel, but at the phone and dialing again, trying to contact the Commissioner.

In the AMUCK! cut, the initial ringing of the phone continues and Bouchet leaves her seat to answer it. She watches Raho answer it instead, and is called to the phone to talk to Granger. He tells Bouchet that he and Neri will be staying in Venice for dinner and won't be returning to the villa until late. And *then* we get Bouchet back at the phone, trying to contact the Police Commissioner. But the repeated "connecting" scene showing Neri and Granger leaving by boat does not appear in the sequence on the Eurovista DVD. (It seems like the boat footage was clumsily reinserted and/or reused in an attempt to cover the cuts that were made.)

Eurovista cropped image.

Code Red image.

51:49-51:53 (~4 sec)
Just a few seconds of a reaction shot (including dialogue) from Dino Mele (who plays a friend of Neri and Granger) is missing from this "seance" scene. Mele says "We all have to die," and Granger, somewhat annoyed, responds "Very funny." Though these few seconds are missing from the MM cut, it almost seems like they haven't been cut, but that the reaction shot and dialogue merely weren't spliced in, so that the shot that gets interrupted by the dialogue in AMUCK! just ends up running without those interruptions. It happens so quickly, it's a little hard to tell.

52:51-54:15 (~24 sec)
In the MM cut, Neri is taken to her room after the seance and Bouchet gets up and examines a gun that mysteriously moved across the room while Neri was having her episode. There is a cut here, and we get a shot of Granger in a boat throwing duck decoys into the water (before Neri's episode, he was insisting that Bouchet go duck hunting with them the next day; this is also the reason why the gun was in the scene).

In the AMUCK! version, Granger returns to the drawing room after putting Neri to bed. He lights a cigarette and the camera cuts back to Bouchet, still examining the shotgun. He tries to brush off Neri's strange behavior (she channeled the spirit of the missing woman and warned Bouchet that she would soon die) by giving Bouchet a mini-lecture on "parapsychology". The scene ends with Granger making a pass at Bouchet and Bouchet telling him goodnight.

1:01:05-1:01:16 (~11 sec)
The AMUCK! version has the Police Commissioner, who has just rescued Bouchet from the swamp, toweling off his head before going over to Bouchet, in bed, to tell her why he knew she'd be out there duck hunting. The MM version omits the toweling off and begins the scene with him already on the bed, talking to Bouchet.

1:04:58-1:06:17 (~1 min 19 sec)
The AMUCK! version includes a scene here of Granger, Neri, and Mele arriving in Venice by boat. At the dock they discuss a vacation to the Red Sea. This cuts to Granger and Neri walking by the water and discussing the Commissioner's interest in Viotti's disappearance.

1:07:17-1:07:29 (~12 sec)
The MM version omits a short return to Granger and Neri walking through the streets of Venice.

1:07:46-1:07:51 (~5 sec)
The MM version cuts short a scene showing the Commissioner saying goodbye to Bouchet on the dock. In the AMUCK! version, we get a closeup on Bouchet's face as she looks, defeatedly, toward the ground. And then a zoom past the retreating boat and toward the skyline of Venice.

1:09:31-1:09:51 (~20 sec)
Here the AMUCK! version shows a suspicious glance being exchanged through a doorway between Bouchet and Raho. The MM version omits this and cuts to Bouchet putting Granger's latest tape on the reel-to-reel.

1:11:03-1:11:40 & 1:11:42-1:12:15 (~1 min 10 sec total)
The AMUCK! version shows Bouchet, wet from just coming out of a pool, toweling herself off. She has a conversation with Granger (he is at the pool with her), and he talks of falling in love with her. The MM version skips this part of the conversation and begins the scene a bit deeper in. It also omits a reaction shot of Granger laughing after a couple at the pool shoves Neri into the water, which leads to more dialogue on his part about the "role" that Neri plays in his life (and his suggestion to Bouchet that Neri was really behind the murder of her friend).

1:13:00 & 1:17:10 et al.
NOTE: During the flashback to Viotti's death (which begins right around the 1:13:00 mark), there are a handful of instances that seem to be second-long (or less-than-a-second-long) cuts that show up in the MM version. They happen so quickly (and sporadically) that they're a bit hard to pinpoint.

The MM version also cuts some split-second inserts (like repeated closeups on an ashtray [which occur first at ~1:17:06], an empty glass [first at ~1:17:10], and repeated closeups on Neri's face as she makes love to Viotti's killer). It also omits several seconds of Viotti sinking to the floor as the music from the playing record ends (this omitted section starts at ~1:17:21 and ends on the Eurovista disc at 1:17:31).

1:21:59-1:22:31 (~32 sec)
Part of the scene of Granger restless in his den (before he goes to Bouchet's bedroom and makes love to her) is cut in the MM version. It consists of him pouring himself a drink as the camera closes in on his face. Additionally, we get a cut back to Bouchet sitting up in bed, lighting herself a cigarette.

1:29:11-1:29:35 (~24 sec)
Bouchet goes to the door of her bedroom to investigate a scream she just heard. In the AMUCK! version, she hesitates at the door when her phone rings. Neri is on the phone and asks Bouchet to come to the living room. The MM version omits this altogether.

Leonard Jacobs

February, 2015

ADDENDUM 02.08.14: The ever-reliable Mondo Digital has a review up of the Code Red disc. Their review provides a number of interesting tidbits about the history of AMUCK! on home video. Well worth a read.

GIALLO IDENTIKIT #006 [AMUCK! aka ALLA RICERCA DEL PIACERE (1972)]

Barbara Bouchet (top) and Rosalba Neri (bottom) are the two poles that the film's movement most famously revolves around. Their various love scenes have granted the film a certain infamy among exploitation fans (esp. those most interested in the Italian tradition of exploitation), but in the larger realm of Gialli the question remains: Is it any good?

[Note: This is the eighteenth post in a continuing series discussing and analyzing all the Krimis and Gialli I've seen. It is also the second in a series examining the sleaze end of the Giallo spectrum. As with every post on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED. THIS POST ALSO CONTAINS NSFW IMAGES (YOU'VE BEEN WARNED).]

My Giallo Rating: ★★★★☆ 
Subcategory (if any): 
     i. Sleaze-Art-Sleaze Giallo (aka, Exploitation Giallo)
     ii. Giallo/Gothic Hybrid 
     iii. Country Giallo 
In My Giallo Top 50 (Y/N): Yes (Letterboxd List)


Like any other Giallo that finds its stock-in-trade inexorably tangled up with the overt sexploitation elements gaining traction in the 70s—say, SO SWEET, SO DEAD (the first film I covered in this just-beginning examination of the "Sleaze-Art Giallo"), or LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN, or DEATH WALKS ON HIGH HEELS—Silvio Amadio’s AMUCK! is impossible (or at least very difficult) to assess without writing about it on those terms. Without addressing those issues repeatedly and up front.

Conversely, you could fill book chapters (plenty of people have) on a Giallo like THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, talking only about the movement of Argento's camera. Or how he's restaged the film’s source material (Fredric Brown's THE SCREAMING MIMI). Or how the innovative and experimental cinematic techniques he employed came to define the Giallo genre (even in its knockoff form) for decades  ... you can cover all that without ever broaching the topic, e.g., of a drugged, slow-motion softcore scene between Barbara Bouchet and Rosalba Neri.

Then another one, in flashback, not 20 minutes later, showing Bouchet and Patrizia Viotti dallying under a waterfall.

Then a decadent sex party with homemade LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD stag films. Drug-taking and swinging. Plus an OF MICE AND MEN-type local farmer who is both the prize sideshow at the evening swinger’s parties and the “simple-minded brute” who may have committed all the murders.

The infamous Bouchet/Neri scene begins with Neri giving Bouchet the once-over.

Rewatching this now after recently watching dozens of Gothic/vampire flicks (the Hammer films chief among them), it struck me that Neri's posture and embrace of Bouchet here feels more than a little vampiric. Considering all the other Gothic overtones infused into the film—decaying and isolated villa; mysterious excursions at night on a reed-choked body of water (at which time the dead bodies of women tend to dissolve into watery oblivion); Granger as macabre horror author whose fictional horrors have taken to intruding into the daily, "real" lives of the characters; taboo relations unleashed inside the walls of an ancestral home; etc.—it seems an appropriate echo.

That is, though it only shows up a couple years after BIRD, the emphasis in AMUCK! ("An explosion of sexual frenzy!" as its tagline exclaims) is clearly on pushing the sex envelope much further. It is true that Kim Newman and Alan Jones, in their BIRD commentary, talk about overtly sexual (and overtly, sexually violent) sections of the movie when discussing some of its most-censored moments. When a woman is stabbed to death in her bedroom, Jones addresses the charge of misogyny leveled against Argento, and talks about some of the distasteful yet unavoidable aspects of these films (like the recurring motif in the genre of [as he calls it] "knife as phallus," a motif that was then carried on through to the Slasher genre [and, in the hands of a feminist screenwriter, for the movie SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE, took perhaps its most foregrounded form ... either that, or the use of the giant-safecracking-drill-as-weapon in De Palma's BODY DOUBLE] ... I suspect, if this series continues, we will shortly arrive at De Palma's work). Jones says that when he first saw the scene, censored as it was, he "didn't know what all the fuss was about." Only later, while watching reinstated prints, did he see the most transgressive elements. Elements like (as Newman puts it) that the editing in the scene sets up "a rather squirmy thing about paralleling mouth and vagina."

But: Even these discussions of transgressive sexual imagery are less about softcore sexploitation proliferating under the umbrella of a slackening censorship, and more about the depiction and editing of violence—about the formal and stylistic choices being made to either exaggerate or underplay its explicit, onscreen presence. AMUCK! is a different animal altogether (or, the same animal, but wearing a drastically different coat), with standalone sections that could be mistaken for what would later be used to fill out the running time of Cinemax "thrillers".

So the question then becomes, for Gialli in this category, *why* is the envelope being pushed? If it’s just titillation, then, you know, okay (and AMUCK! succeeds mightily in titillating all those who would be smitten by an onscreen bedroom scene between Bouchet and Neri) ... which, to sound not-so-stuffy for a minute, certainly includes at least a part of me. After all, Gialli persist in the cinematic consciousness precisely because of their two or three most sturdy lynchpins: elaborate staging of hyper-stylized violence; transgressive and/or arousing sensuality-slash-erotica; and (perhaps most importantly) the preferencing of dream logic above all else.

But how do you talk about a Giallo like BIRD right alongside a Giallo like AMUCK? Can it stand shoulder to shoulder with other, more well-regarded Venice-set Gialli (like, say, Aldo Lado's WHO SAW HER DIE?)? If the smut angle really *is* all that's going on here, any enduring interest burns itself out almost before it starts. But if those elements are being used to do something transgressive and weird and psychosexual and super-crazy accomplished, then, well, we might just be cooking.

[SOURCING (is part of) THE PROBLEM]
One problem with trying to locate AMUCK!’s place in this continuum is the lack of a decent home video presentation in which to view it. I’ve watched it three times now, all three viewings being of the Eurovista* release, which appears to be a DVD version of a dupey VHS copy. It is clearly cropped, with the visual composition of dozens of scenes totally destroyed by the fact that the left and right sides of the frame are missing. (The only bootleg I’m aware of seems to use the same source; if there are better copies available online, I’m sadly not in touch with them.)

Because the a/v is so compromised, then, you start off at a disadvantage, unable to even begin to guess how much credit Amadio deserves for his aims as director. When a third or more of the picture is missing in the frame, there’s no way to guess if he was trying anything interesting (even competent) with the composition. With washed-out colors and damage marks galore, how can you suss out any sort of stylistic hallmarks? (For that matter, the at-times choppiness of the editing made me think more than once that the version I watched could very well be missing sections of the movie ...)

Despite this handicap, I'd like to cover a few scenes whose stylistic oomph carry through despite the almost unwatchable version I had access to. And to do that, I'll get a brief plot summary out of the way:

The film opens with Bouchet's character (Greta) arriving by boat in Venice. Her boat ride continues out of the city proper, and arrives at what appears to be a neglected villa that sits, forgotten and dilapidated, on the outskirts of a body of water. She is greeted at the villa by Neri's character (Eleanora), the wife of an arrogant and sordid writer (played by Farley Granger) whose success finances the couple's decadent party lifestyle. On the plot's surface, Bouchet has come to be Granger's secretary/typist. Her true motive, though, goes back to the dispperance of Granger's last secretary, Sally (played by Patrizia Viotti). Greta and Sally were first friends, then lovers, and her disappearance has haunted Greta ever since she received a desperate letter from Sally, hinting that her death might be imminent. As the story progresses, Greta essentially becomes Sally's double, being drawn down the same delirious, addictive, hedonistic path—finding herself increasingly subject to the perverse machinations of her hosts. Will she meet the same murky fate suffered by Sally? And just what, exactly, was that fate?

Bouchet, being drawn down the same, doomed path that swallowed the memory of her friend.

[SCENES INDISPUTABLY UP TO MORE THAN JUST SLEAZE]

1. The Bouchet/Neri scene (sparingly screencapped above) does seem to be up to something other than just the sleaze. Once the two arrive at the bed, Amadio switches over to slow motion. This technique, which at first seems like it might be there only to lengthen the onscreen nudity, eventually makes both a stylistic and narrative sense. It's implied that Neri’s character has drugged Bouchet’s in order to take advantage of her (the bit about the glass of water in the caps above).

The slo-mo, then, can be read at first as the subjective pov of Bouchet’s character (the drugs taking effect), and then later, the next morning, as evidence that the tryst should possibly be read as a dream. When Bouchet wakes up, e.g., she's magically wearing her clothes again, and the glass that Neri had forced on her the night before—which had been broken by Bouchet's flailing—resides again at her bedside, unbroken. (Though, in an undercutting of that "clue," there is still a stain from the spilled glass on the carpet.) The end effect is to at least partially shift the emphasis from the coupling itself, and instead suggest that there is a shifting, dream-logic-y reality that rules the goings-on inside the villa, and that Bouchet's character—as long as she remains inside its walls—will be subject to its hothouse rules and whims. 

2. The scenes in which the film invokes the conventions of the Euro-Gothic. Beyond the vampiric subtext that can be read, pretty easily, into the proceedings, and beyond the "decadent-villa-as-dark-heart-of-the-film" that makes the decaying physical locations in the film an additional character, there are a number of sections shot in a way that evokes the work of directors like Mario Bava and Riccardo Freda:    

The always suspicious Umberto Raho searches for Barbara Bouchet in the Gothic underneath of Granger and Neri's villa. Raho here plays the villa's butler. Eurocult fans probably most know him as Monica Ranieri's husband in Argento's BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE. He also plays Anthony Steffen's butler in CRIMES OF THE BLACK CAT, the shifty hotel owner in TROPIC OF CANCER (aka, DEATH IN HAITI), and cameos as Horst Frank's spurned lover in CAT O' NINE TAILS.

There are also Gothic plot points sprinkled liberally throughout. As Granger/Neri increasingly put the screws to Bouchet by openly menacing her, there is a seance/psychic incident where we learn that Neri apparently suffers "spells" of possession that allow her to communicate with the dead and predict the future. Unsurprisingly, her predictions for Bouchet's future are anything but encouraging.

3. Early in the film, Bouchet confides in a local detective and tells him the real reason for her employment at Granger's villa. The beginning of their conversation proceeds in pretty standard shot selection, back and forth as they talk, detail shots of the photo of Bouchet and the missing woman, etc. They stand in a clearly defined space (on one of the foot bridges of Venice). The whole scene seems likes it's going to unfold in a conventional manner.

But then, suddenly, the camera cuts to a series of abstracted, impressionistic shots of Venice. The point of view becomes unclear—are these the sights Bouchet is taking in while talking to the detective (and, if so, why are they all upside-down)? The camera with a mind of its own? Their editing into the stream of talky, expository shots is disorienting, and one of the first indications that Amadio is up to something, stylewise.

4. And then there's maybe the most impressive set-piece of the film. Bouchet is alone in the villa at night. Granger has left the latest dictation for his novel, which Bouchet proceeds to transcribe. As she listens to the tape, though, it becomes clear that Granger is actually narrating the way that he disposed of her missing friend's body. During the narration, the movie switches to moody flashback, that shows Granger—in full-on Ferryman of Death mode—steering his boat through back channels in the watery sprawl around his home. The body of the missing woman is stowed in the bottom of the boat.

The prow of the boat (as camera) plows through the reeds, on its way to Granger's secret dumping site.

Each time I've watched the movie, it's struck me that though this isn't Bouchet in the boat, she looks enough like Bouchet to make you think this, at least in passing. It proves to be another way that the style in this sequence becomes intertwined with its theme, as the stylistic end point of the sequence visually joins Bouchet listening to the tape to the corpse of the woman disappearing in the water (see caps below).

While Bouchet imagines the scene that we are watching (that Granger is narrating), Amadio stages it so that she is displaced into the scene *as the dead woman*. Layering this sequence so that it effectively becomes an author narrating a scene from his novel, that is in reality his confession of a real-world murder—that is also the foreshadowing of a murder yet to take place. Granger's confession to Bouchet's character is an act of transposing Bouchet and Viotti's places in the plot, superimposing one woman's past fate on top of the other's future.

We watch while Granger tosses Viotti’s body (now with an anchor tied around her ankles) into the sea. The camera watches the churning aftermath, the blue-white reflections playing across the water as the anchor sinks. This cuts to Bouchet back in Granger's house, listening to him narrate the story on tape. And this is where Amadio shoots the scene in a way that literalizes the connection between the two women: We watch the same blue-white light flow across her face like she's staring into water and not at the spinning reel-to-reel (the motion of the reel-to-reel seemingly accomplishing this play of light). Visually, she is the woman who's just been dumped in the water. And the story of her friend's death is made to stand-in for her own death, which is (according to Granger's foreshadowing) still to come.

These are the scenes that convince me the film is worth more than its weight in sleaze. The persuasiveness of these images, as Maitland McDonagh argues about the famous "stuck in glass" art gallery scene from BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, "transcend [their] function within the narrative." This can be said of all good Giallo set-pieces, all embedded chunks of oneiric, weirdo, hyper-realized style that deform (transform) the topography of the film. In short: One of the core criteria defining what is and isn't a Giallo (and what is and isn't a Giallo *worth taking seriously*).

Not to mention: The rotation of Bouchet's position in the frame recalls both the churning whirl of the water and the spinning of the reel-to-reel.

 Leonard Jacobs

December, 2014

[SHOW NOTES]

VERSION WATCHED: The dreadful, dreadful Eurovista DVD (see further notes below) | LANGUAGE: English soundtrack | DIRECTOR: Silvio Amadio | WRITER(S): Silvio Amadio | MUSIC: Teo Usuelli | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Aldo Giordani  | CAST: Farley Granger (Richard Stuart); Barbara Bouchet (Greta Franklin); Rosalba Neri (Eleanora Stuart); Umberto Raho (Giovanni the butler); Patrizia Viotti (Sally Reece); Petar Martinovitch (Rocco); Dino Mele (Sandro); Nino Segurini (Il commissario Antonelli)

*The Eurovista DVD has two very brief interviews with Bouchet and Neri, apparently conducted at their homes (in 2001 they were neighbors?!). Both interviews run less than 5 minutes and thus don’t cover a whole lot. The most interesting anecdote comes when Bouchet claims that director Silvio Amadio retired from directing and “went into a convent” because his obsessive love for the actress Gloria Guida went unrequited. Have no idea if that’s true, but it makes for a good story.

The only other interesting tidbit I have about the disc is that the used copy I picked up some years back was actually listed as autographed by Bouchet and Neri. I have no idea if the signatures on the case are authentic, but it makes for a nifty addendum.