The first point to make about this 1992 volume from Granata Press is the obvious one: it is in Italian, not English. Following from this, the question, as an English speaking reader, is what value the book has, beyond being attractively illustrated – albeit in monochrome rather than full colour – with posters and stills. The answer, I think, is in providing an overview of the giallo in an Italian cultural, linguistic and cinematic context that provides a useful combination of corrective and additional perspective upon the more familiar English language material such as Adrian Luther-Smith's Blood and Black Lace encyclopaedia and Craig Ledbetter's European Trash Cinema special issue.
This theme, at least, was what I took from the foreword, which immediately identifies a number of terms by which the genre (itself something of a problematic term here, when what we are arguably dealing with is really the related but distinct notion of a filone) has been labelled, including “Spaghetti-thriller”, “thrilling alla Dario Argento” and “giallo all'italiana” While the first two terms are somewhat self-explanatory, the first suggesting a thriller analogue to the Spaghetti western of Sergio Leone and company and the second a style of thriller in the manner of the director most associated with the form, the last seems confusing and requires some explanation. Given that the term giallo is used outwith Italy only by aficionados of the form, it seems somewhat oxymoronic to refer to something intrinsically Italian, done in the Italian style, as a comparison with the notion of the western all'italiana confirms. The answer perhaps lies in the history of the giallo as both a literary and a later cinematic form. The first giallo novels, as issued by Milanese publishing house Mondadori in the distinctive yellow covers that gave the genre its name, were Italian translations of English-language authors, with indigenous giallo authors only appearing later and, even then, sometimes attempting to pass themselves off as American or British via the use of Anglo-Saxon sounding pseudonyms. (This situation was paralleled in the Italian horror and western cycles of the 1960s within which many prominent giallo filmmakers, such as Mario Bava/John M Old, Antonio Margheriti/Anthony Dawson and Riccardo Freda/Robert Hampton also figured.) As such, perhaps the giallo can be understood as something that only gradually became Italian, as first Italian writers and then Italian film-makers worked openly as Italians producing works for an Italian audience, more likely to be situated against Italian backdrops. (A useful exercise here could be charting the use of pseudonyms and how their presence or absence relates to the emergence of the giallo as something distinctively recognisably Italian.) In other words, the seeming contradiction perhaps resolves itself in terms of there being some giallo texts/works, especially early on, that are not particularly Italian, and others, especially later, that have been 'naturalised' such as to be distinctively and recognisably Italian compared to their still-foreign parents.
The first chapter deals with the precursors of the giallo film. Acknowledging that it difficult to identify a precise point of origin, it cites a number of obscure and well-known titles in passing dating from 1942's Labbra serrate and Ossessione onwards as exhibiting giallo elements, before pointing to Mario Bava's 1962 entry La ragazza che sapeva troppo / The Girl Who Knew too Much as “the first authentic Italian giallo”. The account, in other words, appears conventional rather than revisionist, and in accord with the more familiar English-language histories.
This impression is confirmed by the subsequent discussion of Bava's film, as one that emphasises key themes such as “testimone oculare” (i.e. visual evidence or the eye-witness, also identified by Gary Needham in his useful genre primer) and the psychopathology of the murderer, both of which would recur in such films as Dario Argento's L'Uccello dalle piume di cristallo / The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Profondo Rosso / Deep Red – and its successors. Here Sei donne per l'assassino / Blood and Black Lace is identified as absolutely essential to understanding the form for its aesthetics of violence and paring down of narrative, with Il rosso segno della follia / Hatchet for the Honeymoon and Cinque bambole per la luna d'agosto / Five Dolls for an August Moon – significantly identified as the director's last pre-Argento film, of somewhat lesser importance.
The discussion of Bava's films is followed by one of Margheriti's La Vergine di Norimberga / The Virgin of Nuremberg, which the authors rightly identify as a Gothic/thriller crossover, and Nudi si muore / School Girl Killer, with its use of the familiar black gloved killer motif – “l'assassino con i guanti neri” – and of various less-well known examples such as Libido (an early genre outing for prolific screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi) and Il monstro di Venezia / The Monster of Venice which, together with the likes of Michaelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up and Tinto Brass's Col cuore in gola point to the emergence of an identifiable genre. This said, these two films, like Giulio Questi's La morte ha fatto l'uovo (which a quote cites as being something like Godard doing a thriller on LSD) perhaps also indicate an aspirational quality, that of making films that were more than genre pieces, which would reach its fullest fruition in the shape of Argento. Turning back to the more artisan like approach and films, the authors continue with a discussion of Il dolce corpo di Deborah / The Sweet Body of Deborah, Orgasmo, Così dolce, così perversa / So Sweet, so Perverse, each featuring emergent genre star Carroll Baker and showcasing more psychological and erotic thriller (“psico-gialli sexy”) aspects, which were also evident in Lucio Fulci's genre debut Una sull'altra / One on top of the Other.
In their discussion of these and other films – the major films also get a separate synopsis – the authors prove particularly good at bringing out the various influences upon and of the pre-Argento giallo, to which they next turn through a discussion of the director's animal trilogy – L'Uccello dalle piume di cristallo, Il gatto a nove code / Cat o' Nine Tails and Quattro mosche di velluto grugio / Four Flies on Grey Velvet.
The trilogy emerges in the second chapter – the 1970s and the Argento-style thriller (“il thrilling argentiano”) – as the spur to innumerable gialli. Many of these endeavoured to follow the example of Argento, even if some succeeded only in terms of their sound-alike titles. The authors, however, focus much of their attention on those films that exhibited sufficiently distinctive personalities in their own right, including Una farlalla con le ali inanguinate / The Bloodstained Butterfly, La tarantola dal vente nero / The Black Belly of the Tarantula, La bestia uccide a sangue fredo / Slaughter Hotel and Giornata nera per l'ariete / The Fifth Cord. What's perhaps most useful here are the little details and the cross-references with other films – how, for instance, the first murder in Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer prefigures that in Dressed to Kill, while the second plays like a homage to that of Claude Dantes in Blood and Black Lace – and the placing of more obscure titles like L'uomo dagli occhi di ghiaccio / The Man with Icy Eyes and and Lo stranglatore di Vienna.
Concluding their overview of 1970s production with another safe bet, by way of identifying Argento's Profondo rosso as the masterpiece of the genre, the fourth chapter turns its attention to prolific genre specialists Sergio Martino, Umberto Lenzi and Luciano Ercoli, charting their contributions over the course of the early 1970s and picking out their distinctive qualities, noting – for example – the Psycho-like element of Ercoli's Death Walks in High Heels in killing off its protagonist and audience identification figure part of the way through and the cold economic motive of the killers against Argento's madmen and women. It's also interesting to read how Lenzi envisaged the family in Spasmo to be something like the Krupps – the same industrialists who had earlier inspired Visconti's Essenbecks in La Caduta degli dei / The Damned.
The fifth chapter focusses its attention on more maverick talents and films, including Bava's post-Argento entry Reazione a cateta / Bay of Blood, whose quasi-surreal qualities are noted, along with its influence on the American splatter film; Maurizio Lucidi's La vittima designata, identified as more “hitchcockiano” than “argentiano”; Freda's L'Iguana dalla lingua di fuoco / The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire; and Fulci's Una lucertola con il pelle di donna / Lizard in a Woman's Skin and Non si sevizia un paperino / Don't Torture a Duckling, with its display of the killer priest trope; Amando Crispino's L'Etrusco uccide ancora / The Etruscan Kills Again and Macchie Solari / Autopsy and others. Again, the main points of interest are the little details and the way in which the giallo is presented as being heavily indebted to Argento, but not completely in thrall to the models he provided.
The final chapter picks up the chronological narrative after Profondo Rosso, covering a period within which Argento turned his attentions away from the giallo somewhat with his more supernaturally oriented horrors Suspiria and Inferno before returning to the form with Tenebre. As the authors note, however, Argento's influence remained such that a number of other productions also exhibited gothic or horror elements, including Pupi Avati's La casa dalle finistre che ridondo / The House with the Windows that Laughed and Fulci's Sette note in nero / Seven Notes in Black, while other directors, such as Antonio Bido with Il gatto dagli occhi i giada / The Cat with Eyes of Jade and Flavio Mogherini with La ragazza di pigiama giallo continued to produce worthwhile 'realist' gialli. Also represented within the discussions here are some of the more excessive hybrids, such Buio Omega, Giallo a Venezia and – albeit more in passing – La sorella di Ursula.
Equally, however, the inclusion of these leads one to wonder as to why – for example – Freda's L' Orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock and Lo Spettro were excluded from the discussion of 1960s gialli when The Virgin of Nuremberg was included. The answer, one supposes is that whereas Freda's films were situated in the late 19th century past, Margheriti's was in the contemporary. Against this, however, we could note that Aristide Massaccessi's later, and decidedly more supernaturally-inclined La morte ha sorriso all'assassino / Death Smiles on a Murderer was included, while Margheriti's non-supernatural gothic La Morte negli occhi del gatto / Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye is absent. But, returning to the theme of the preface and opening chapter, perhaps all this again points to the difficulty in pinning down exactly what the giallo film is away from its best known exemplars.
I got a lot out of this book besides the pretty pictures and a handy appendix listing around 170 titles and would wager that any reasonably knowledgeable genre enthusiast will do so as well.
To conclude, I'd just like to make a comparison with the British horror film: there, the critic Robin Wood once suggested that an alternative history could be written in which the predominant studio, Hammer, was cast as the villain of the piece on account of the influence exerted by its comparatively conservative production against that of more maverick sensibilities. With the giallo that doesn't seem the case, insofar as the best known practitioners of the form also by and large emerge as the best. What is also apparent, however, that just as with the Italian western one needs to really look beyond Sergio Leone as the alpha and omega of the form, with the giallo one needs to go beyond Argento as a filmmaker who is at once both typical/representative on account of his influence and atypical/singular in terms of not necessarily representing the lesser known, but equally distinctive productions of a Martin or a, Lenzi.
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
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