[PULP ART IDEA MILL #3: Sourcing the Giallo from Woolrich and Brown]

Last year I spent time reading both Cornell Woolrich's BLACK ALIBI and Fredric Brown's THE SCREAMING MIMI. First and foremost I was driven by the fact that both served as source material for later Giallo films. BLACK ALIBI was adapted, to a fairly straight (if truncated) extent, in Jacques Tourneur's 1943 proto-Giallo THE LEOPARD MAN (one of those indelible Val Lewton-produced "B-movies" that were nothing but sublime). Argento later adapted certain sections of it for 1971's FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET. Luigi Cozzi confirms this in (if memory serves) an interview on the Shameless (UK) Blu-ray of the film, discussing how the murder in the walled cemetery in Woolrich's book was the template for the murder of Roberto and Nina's maid in the park scene in Argento's film.

Fredric Brown's SCREAMING MIMI is even more utilized in Argento's debut, BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE. Though alterations are made—the Screaming Mimi statue is converted to a Screaming Mimi painting; Yolanda's confidante-slash-personal-psychiatrist Dr. Greenwood is altered to be Monica Ranieri's art-gallery-owning husband; etc.—the core of the story, including the plot-twist identity of the film's deranged, trauma-tweaked killer, are largely the same. Like the book, Argento's film succeeds from a plot perspective because it withholds the “traumatic attack from the past” for as long as it can. The fact that the eventual reveal only reaches the audience in the form of a mysterious painting of that traumatic event pushes it that much further into the aesthetic world of the Giallo.

Conversely, Gerd Oswald's 1958 adaptation chooses to start the film with the attack. And though it’s startlingly suggestive, twitchy and “mad”—the attack is moved to a beach-side, outdoor shower and presents an aggressively sensual Anita Ekberg on the verge of undress, attacked by a killer who seems to come lumbering out of a dream—it ruins all mystery from the rest of the film, as there’s no possible suspect besides Ekberg re: the identity of the NYC serial killer. If you’ve watched the first 10 minutes of the movie, there’s no believable conclusion you can come to except that she’s the one staging all the attacks (as a way to, sleepwalker-like, attempt to work through the trauma of her own attack). Then the movie becomes all about the extended striptease scenes with Ekberg and her trained Great Dane. Which, though they feel a bit explicit for the time period, wear thin their welcome pretty fast.
 
In the book, the character of Monica/Yolanda's husband/lover is much more of an evil-eyed Svengali, and it seems likely (much more likely even than in BIRD) that he is the killer and not Yolanda. The book also spends an inordinate amount of time with its main character, an alcoholic reporter who is smitten with Yolanda and so obsessed with discovering who her attacker is that he's willing to risk his own life over and over (a much more obvious reason for being obsessed with the mystery than Tony Musante’s slightly amorphous one). Unfortunately it begins and ends on a gag, and gets a bit bogged down in the red herrings of the plot, two things that weaken its overall impact as hard-boiled, nightmare Noir.

The gag consists of a character named "God" (Godfrey) who sits drunkenly on a park bench and gives sage life advice to the reporter character. This constitutes the additional cross-pollination between Brown's book and Argento's filmography, as Argento transplanted this character into FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET, where he served as Roberto's cohort. In Brown's novel he's much more a bookending presence, showing up in the opening and closing chapters in, essentially, a somewhat jokey prologue/epilogue role.  

As far as Woolrich's BLACK ALIBI, I just want to quote this passage from the end, after the book's heroes confront (and conquer) the book's mind-boggling killer. His writing, the extremities he's willing to invoke here, make me want to do nothing but read more Woolrich asap:

"When Belmonte came back presently, Manning was standing beside the kiln, thrusting a small deep-curved shovel down into it. Before Belmonte knew what he was about, he had tipped it up again, overturned it. A freshet of live coals spilled down over the exposed face [of the killer] on the floor, forming a glowing puddle, blanketing it. They only darkened momentarily, then almost immediately they had brightened again as fiercely as ever. Dank steam struggled up between the livid nuggets, like thin snakes. Manning threw down the shovel and they both came away fast."

His otherworldly description of the first, full glimpse of the killer in this same section is, I have to think, as strong as anything else he wrote. When he describes one of the character's senses "trying to darken out" because they cannot rationally accept what they see, lumbering there in front of them, it's a profound displacement of the narrative into a world of oneiric, eye-fluttering, skin-peeling, irrational mystery-horror.

Leonard Jacobs

March, 2015

GIALLO SOURCE CODE [UPDATE: The Perfume of the Lady in Black & Repulsion]

I've been reading the expanded edition of Maitland McDonagh's BROKEN MIRRORS/BROKEN MINDS and I've gotten to the CAT O' NINE TAILS/FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET chapter. One of the strengths of the book is due (to use a phrase I sometimes fall back on) to the depth and breadth of its analysis. Her writing, on Argento films that I'm already well-familiar with, is so impressive because it's so illuminating, shedding light on aspects of the films—thematic connections, visual and narrative codes, production history—in a way that isn't just dry essaying, but that actually adds to my understanding of films I thought I knew inside and out. (In this way, her Argento insights remind me very much of Thomas Rostock's, in his masterful audio commentaries for TENEBRAE and DEEP RED. Reading her book makes me want to seriously re-evaluate those "golden-age" Argentos that I've never been too terribly taken with, with CAT at the top of that list ...)

Making my way through the half of the chapter devoted to FOUR FLIES, I came upon this passage:

"FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET takes from THE CAT O' NINE TAILS some surprisingly specific material, particularly apparent in the way it uses certain sexual motifs; in this respect the films appear almost a pair. Incest, for example, plays a part in each film. While it's not utterly essential to the plot (some other form of aberrant sexuality could have been substituted), it is of considerable formal importance ... FOUR FLIES, of course, is driven by the notion that Nina has married her father in Roberto's guise, and there's a further link to the incestuous couplings of CAT through a tantalizing fragment of conversation between Arrosio and a doctor at the Villa Rapidi, the mental institution to which Nina was confined as a child. 'After her father died,' says the doctor, 'all symptoms of emotional disturbance disappeared. It was our opinion that the patient was completely cured. However, there's one important point I would like to emphasize: we suspected the man wasn't the patient's real father.'"

A few points here, re: the previous Source Code entry linking PERFUME OF THE LADY IN BLACK & REPULSION:

• Mimsy Farmer's appearance in FOUR FLIES in the role of Nina connects this film to PERFUME, where she plays a similar female lead, a character whose traumatic parental past is the lost information underlying (and, ultimately, explaining) all of her otherwise secret and inexplicable actions;
• Further, the "father" in PERFUME that pursues Farmer's character, from half-suppressed flashbacks to her nightmare-mined present day, is also, the flashbacks tell us, very likely not to be her real father (certainly, he is not the father in the photo that opens the film, and that connects it to the end-credit use of the photo in REPULSION).
• Still further: all three films feature key sequences with childhood photographs of their female lead—photographs that hold the submerged legend (legend, as in key to the map) that could allow the viewer (as well as the other characters in the movie) to properly navigate the mysteries in front of them. 

McDonagh describes the image in FOUR FLIES as a "photograph of a child whose sex cannot be guessed." (And though it doesn't seem to follow the pattern of the photo from the other two films—showing a daughter staring off-puttingly at her father—the more I looked at the photo on the right side of the album, the more it seemed that in its smeared background I could see [in the same way you can see faces in clouds] the figure of a man standing behind his child.) Imho, the photos, esp. because of their condition, hold in them something uncanny, unsettling, that exists in the same realm as those in PERFUME and REPULSION.

McDonagh puts it this way: "Mad Nina, caught between conflicting gender messages, trapped in a displaced Oedipal triangle, is the nexus of this disordered state: all roads lead from her, and all roads lead back." In the same way, I'd argue, all roads lead either to or from the photos so key to the understanding of the Barilli and Polanski films. One film opens with the unnerving childhood photo. The other ends on it. What lies between serves as cinematic gloss (in more than one meaning of that word) on the totemic photos themselves.