The Fifth Cord

After an acquaintance is brutally assaulted leaving a New Years party alcoholic journalist Andrea Bild (Franco Nero) is assigned to investigate. There are no real leads and it initially seems to be a simple matter of Dr John Lubbock (Maurizio Bonuglia) being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Then someone starts murdering their way through the other party guests.

Dr Bini (Renato Romano) receives an emergency call and while he is attending the hoax incident someone strangles his wheelchair-bound wife Sophia (Rossella Falk). The only clue is a black glove left on the scene, missing one of its fingers…

Bild finds himself a suspect and his unsympathetic boss takes him off the case. He is then attacked in the park by an unseen assailant, a glove with two missing fingers found on the body…

Seeking to clear his name and ensure he's not next on the killer's list, Bild is compelled to delve deeper into the mystery, soon uncovering a melange of sordid sex games, prostitutes and blackmail….

The Fifth Cord has the right ingredients to be a classic.

While obviously drawing on the black-gloved subjective camera-isms of Bava and Argento, director Luigi Bazzoni also takes welcome and unexpected inspiration from the overt modernism of Antonioni in his choices of locale – their importance confirmed by a thank you in the opening credits – with ace cinematographer Vittorio Storaro's exemplary use of light, surface and texture providing a visual treat in most every shot. A silhouetted live sex show, shot in a manner reminiscent of one of Lotte Reineger's avant-garde animations is one highlight, the fisheye lens and hand-held drunken-cam that introduces the various characters at the New Year party another.

Ennio Morricone's score may be somewhat lacking in invention – you sense that he had established his giallo idiom by now and didn't regard further experimentation as being warranted here – but always contributes to the mood, be it the jazz-lounge organ-led pieces that scream ‘Eurochic’ or the tense, nervous avant-jazz noisescapes that accompany the stalking.

And the supporting cast – Ira von Fustenberg (Five Dolls for an August Moon), Renato Romano (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) and Wolfgang Preiss (Mill of the Stone Women) among them – is a solid one.

But somewhere along the line, the whole thing doesn't quite gel, ending up as a contender for most typical giallo circa 1970 right down to its English language body-count title – taken, at least, from David McDonald Devine's source novel – and its Italian language counterpart as Black Day for Arieans, complete with vaguely nonsensical animal reference.

Perhaps, it's the relatively serious nature of the piece, with little in the way of comic relief, intentional or otherwise – some tasteful sunglasses aside, there are precious few obvious fashion faux pas on display.

Or maybe it's that Andrea is not a particularly sympathetic protagonist, what with his drinking having led to the collapse of his marriage and one decidedly non-PC scene where he slaps his new bitch around after seeing her go into a red sportscar driven, unbeknownst to him, by her brother – "I telephoned your house and your mother says she hasn't seen you for a month. You're a lying little whore".

Then again, he's the best that's available and there's always at least the sense that he knows what he has become and is fighting against it – "You make me puke, the lot of you… I may have become a piece of shit. But you are what you always were. A bastard who sold his soul"

Overall, weighing up the solid direction and visuals of the piece with an uninvolving plot and lack of charm, the scoreline reads ‘form 1, content 0’ – a pretty typical result for a giallo, then.