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| THE MELANCHOLY OPENING SHOT: One that very much brings to mind the Gothic horrors of Bava (esp. those centering around disturbed children); here we're introduced to Ferruccio (played by Arturo Trina), a staring, spooked child (complete with black cat). Abandoned by his family, an orphan ward of the Catholic church who serves as the confused center of the film, Arturo Trina will be that sometimes rare thing in a Giallo: a child actor who truly carries his role. |
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| Later, when a bouncing, phantasmic marble (indeed an impossible quantity of them) becomes *the* gateway into the film's hidden traumatic past, you can't help but think of this film in terms of another: Bava's KILL BABY, KILL (1966). It is also a quintessential Giallo shot, in that it foregrounds two key obsessions of the genre: the role of voyeurism (esp. how voyeurism spawns the film's crimes) and the role of traumatic events embedded in the lives of doomed children. Think Nicoletta Elmi in DEEP RED, Nicoletta Elmi in WHO SAW HER DIE?, the childhood version of Gabriele Lavia (also in DEEP RED), the childhood version of Cristina Marsillach in OPERA, the whole cast of children in DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING, etc. ... and when the marbles start cascading from the sky, that marbles-on-the-staircase murder in RINGS OF FEAR (ENIGMA ROSSO) suddenly gets a sibling ... |
[This is the thirtieth post in a continuing series discussing and analyzing all the Krimis and Gialli I've seen. AS WITH ALL POSTS ON THE SITE, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]
My Giallo Rating: ★★★★☆
Subcategory (if any):
i. Country Giallo
ii. Giallo Featuring Clergy
iii. Gothic/Giallo Hybrid
iv. Sleaze-Art-Sleaze Giallo
v. Children-as-Victim/Children-as-Killer Giallo
In My Giallo Top 50 (Y/N): Yes (Letterboxd List)
[FINDING IT ON THE GIALLO SCALE]
Some Gialli just don't play out like Gialli. Some of them play out like they're more concerned with layered domestic drama than a stalk-and-slash checklist. Some trade overly realized murder set-pieces for a slowly unfolding, carefully observed pace. Some set their main action not in a girl's boarding school (always with the shower scenes!) or a back-stabbing theater production (always with a director trying to sleep with the star!) but in an understated, religiously conflicted, working-class convent. And though more of them than I can keep track of feature child actors in prominent roles, very few include the child actor's role in such an effective, emotionally draining, and (actually) suspenseful way. 1972's THE WEAPON, THE HOUR, THE MOTIVE is one that fits into this latter category.
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| "IF YOU DO THAT AGAIN, I'LL CUT YOUR HEAD OFF": Don Giorgio's car runs over flowers that the parish handyman has been cutting. He's so angry that he threatens Don Giorgio with his blade, giving us our first red herring—and our first sense of the unease and hostility churning beneath the surface of the film's community—all less than two minutes into the film. |
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| In the reverse shot we get our first good look at two of the film's star-crossed lovers: Bedy Moratti as Orchidea (she kept reminding me of Esperanza Roy, who I first saw in RETURN OF THE EVIL DEAD), and Maurizio Bonuglia as the much-lusted-after "Father" Don Giorgio. |
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| We also get the first appearance of actress Claudia Gravy, as Sister Tarquinia. I first saw her in the decidedly weird Gothic/Giallo Hybrid BYLETH (1972). Her exact motivations toward Don Giorgio remain murky for most of the film, and perhaps count as the second red herring introduced in the first two minutes of the film. |
Maurizio Bonuglia plays Don Giorgio, the young, handsome, charismatic priest who volunteers his time teaching underprivileged children and fighting all the women connected with the convent off with a stick. This sounds like the sort of role that you'd see Bonuglia play in his other genre movies, i.e., the cocky and/or charming love interest whose agency as a character has to do with how many (and how much) other characters want to sleep with him:
In TOP SENSATION he's Rosalba Neri's wandering-eyed lover who is also irresistible to the Grand Dame widow financing the film's boat trip (as well as the trip's hired "escort" Edwige Fenech); IN THE EYE OF THE HURRICANE finds him as Jean Sorel's partner-in-crime, a mischievous layabout who owns a local club and is one of several people in the movie with professional bedroom eyes; in PERFUME OF THE LADY IN BLACK he's the dickish, pouting archeology professor who treats lover Mimsy Farmer like he wants, more than anything, to emotionally wreck her.
Here, he's the object of at least two characters' affections. We're first introduced to the married woman he's sleeping with, Orchidea (played by Bedy Moratti). This relationship is one he seems compelled to stay in (by lust if nothing else), but one that also wrecks *him*: We watch as he pulls a cat o'nine tails out of a cabinet in the sanctuary and whips himself until his back is full of bleeding welts. (It's a moment that feels like the one I picture of Reverend Dimmesdale whipping himself in his closet because he can't find a way to stop sleeping with Hester Prynne in THE SCARLET LETTER [or, a way for himself to just accept it, even celebrate it].)
When he ends the relationship with Orchidea, she promises to destroy him (either by exposing his sexual sin or murdering him). And, not long after they part, while playing the organ in the sanctuary late at night, Don Giorgio is viciously stabbed to death.
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| While watching the scene that will become the killing of Don Giorgio, Ferruccio accidentally lets one of his marbles fall through the peephole, down to the floor of the sanctuary below. The next day, while police are investigating, people begin to wonder what the marble might have to do with the killing. What it has to do with it: it's the dream-logic object that makes the ending of the movie possible. |
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| With Commissario Franco Boito also comes more Giallo conventions. Don Giorgio's burial gives the police an opportunity to videotape a "funeral lineup" of possible suspects. A device (both plot- and tech-wise) that shows up repeatedly in the Giallo. It's used, almost to the T, in the art-sleaze masterpiece SO SWEET, SO DEAD; likewise in Umberto Lenzi's Krimi/Giallo hybrid SEVEN BLOOD-STAINED ORCHIDS. |
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| Shaggy Shia LaBeouf himself, Renzo Montagnani. |
Boito's status as a replacement Giorgio gets spelled out for us when he appears in a re-do of an earlier scene, literally sitting in the same seat that had been occupied by G. Early in the film, we're introduced to all the people who orbit around G. through the course of an outdoor lunch. Director Francesco Mazzei takes his camera and rotates it 360 degrees around the lunch table, allowing snatches of dialogue and key, caught expressions to establish the role of each character in the cast (and their specific relationship to Giorgio). This scene gets done a second time, with Boito in the Giorgio seat, and the same characters flirting with him (and the novelty of his new-found presence). It's low-key style and staging in comparison to, say, the Louma Crane shot in TENEBRAE, but it not only matches the film's tone, it elevates it.
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| 360-DEGREE STYLE, TAKE 1: All the character's in Don Giorgio's orbit cycle through. First is Orchidea's husband, who suspects the parish priest of sleeping with his wife. |
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| Then the aforementioned Eva Czemerys, skilled in both tarot readings and blackmail. |
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| This version of the scene ends with one of the most brazen instances of sleaze in the film. As Don Giorgio makes small talk with everyone around the table, Orchidea appears to give him a hand job beneath the table, completely unfazed by risk of being discovered by her husband sitting across from her. |
And then there's the child actor who, for once, carries off the weight of his role from start to finish. Arturo Trina plays Ferruccio, an orphan who has been collectively adopted by the nuns. Though their daily devotional duties apparently keep them so busy that Ferruccio is mostly left to wander (and spy on the goings-on in the convent) on his own. Through a secret passage in his drab, otherwise featureless room, he's able to climb into the church's rafters and spy on people through peepholes in the ceiling. He also spends a fair amount of time sorting through abandoned religious relics; in one scene, he pastes pictures of his and Orchidea's over the iconography of a painting of Mother and Child. He clearly desires Orchidea as his mother, as his emotional support, as his own.
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| THE SECRET INSIDE THE WALLS: Not unlike the neighbor kid using the abandoned ventilation ducts to save Betty from the killer in OPERA, Ferruccio uses a small door built into the wall of his parish room to sneak through the forgotten spaces of the church. This secret passage gives him time to further his parental fantasies—pasting the photos over the faces of a Madonna and Child he finds in the crawlspaces—and to spy on the murderer of Don Giorgio. These abandoned, ruined spaces, existing unremembered inside the church, could also be read as a commentary on the moral and ethical health of those characters whose existences are inexorably (hopelessly?) tied to that church. |
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| Ferruccio stalking through the broken beams and dark shadows inside the church's walls also made me think of Mark crawling through the likewise rotten spaces of the supernatural building in Argento's INFERNO. |
From the start of the film, Ferruccio clearly sees Orchidea in this surrogate role. Her regular visits to his room to administer medicine give him his opportunity to try to add layers, add a close and happy familiarity, to their relationship. During her first visit, though, the problems that underlie all relationships in the film are already on display. It's implied that she's just had an argument with Don Giorgio, and she takes her frustration out on the child as she hurries him through his shot:
And it's this want that, for a while, actually casts him as a credible suspect. Perhaps he used his secret knowledge of the priest's routine to murder him when he was most vulnerable? Perhaps he saw this as his only chance to force Orchidea to finally accept a role as his mother?
(SPOILER FOR ENIGMA ROSSO: Knowing that a child played the unlikely [also logistically impossible] murderer in this last entry in the SCHOOLGIRLS IN PERIL TRILOGY makes it seem all the more feasible that the kid here will be the killer; add that both films have the kids using marbles as key clues and it just cements this likelihood.)
Above all, he's a human character, one whose unwanted solitude, repeated desertion, and basic unanswered yearning for a family "harshes" much of the thrilling buzz you'd expect from a Giallo. He's also a jerk—deceitful and backstabbing and childish depending on whatever way the wind's blowing. When Boito and Orchidea plan their marriage (after the first, false solution of the mystery comes about), they adopt Ferruccio and it feels (in a naive, not-realistic, too-good-to-be-true way) that this traditional picture of a loving nuclear family is going to emerge from the murders in the film.
Instead, we get a series of cynical power games between the new mother and child, that play out as cat-and-mouse suspense that constantly makes us question how much Ferruccio knows—did he really see the killer of Don Giorgio, or is he just pretending?—and how guilty Orchidea might be (could she, after all, have followed through on her threat to kill the priest?). More than anything, these exchanges feel like they're taken out of the Hitchcock playbook, the stuff of Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine—of raised eyebrows and loaded exchanges—in SUSPICION.
The finale of the film sees Orchidea laying all her cards on the table, just minutes before her marriage to Boito. She finds Ferruccio packing his bags in the crawlspace, about to leave an incriminating note naming her as the Father's killer. Shockingly (in the same way that the murders of the children in DUCKLING or WHO SAW HER DIE? are shocking), Orchidea drops all pretense and, apparently, decides the only way to silence this child blackmailer is to shut him up forever.
[AND THEN THE DREAM LOGIC COMES]
The finale that immediately follows this attack, taking place during the wedding ceremony, is both the most direct intrusion of dream logic in the film *and* the section that most feels like a Gothic/Giallo a la KILL BABY, KILL:
With Ferruccio nowhere to be found, the couple proceed to the ceremony, surrounded by the parish nuns and their shared friends. Boito has put Don Giorgio's death behind him, as he believes that he's already captured the killer, Orchidea's husband, who was found dead in a locked room where he apparently committed suicide, unable to deal with his overwhelming guilt.
But as the couple begin the ceremony, a sharp sound rings out in the sanctuary: The sound of a marble bouncing on the stone floors ... when the source of the sound isn't immediately obvious, the assembled crowd turns back to the ceremony. But then it occurs again. And in a way that makes no rational sense. There is an eruption of marbles suddenly raining down from the ceiling, almost an ectoplasmic manifestation of them—after all, if the poor child was murdered as we suspect he was, he couldn't be pouring these marbles through the ceiling.** And: where the heck did he get so many? It feels eerie; all the more so because this eruption causes a pained look on the bride's face, one that ushers us finally into how (and by whom) the Father was murdered. The sheer volume of marbles, the timing, the brutal details of the flashback, the absolute nuking of the promised nuclear family—it all amounts to one of the most satisfying (and gut-punch-felt) reveals in the genre.
Leonard Jacobs
April, 2015
[SHOW NOTES]
VERSION WATCHED: Low-quality bootleg | LANGUAGE: Italian soundtrack with English subs | DIRECTOR: Francesco Mazzei | WRITER(S): Marcello Aliprandi, Francesco Mazzei, Mario Bianchi, Bruno Di Geronimo, Vinicio Marinucci | MUSIC: Francesco De Masi | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Giovanni Ciarlo | CAST: Renzo Montagnani (Commissario Franco Boito); Bedy Moratti (Orchidea Durantini); Eva Czemerys (Giulia Pisani); Salvatore Puntillo (Moriconi); Claudia Gravy (Sister Tarquinia); Alcira Harris; Arturo Trina (Ferruccio); Adolfo Belletti (Anselmo Barsetti - The Sacristan); Arnaldo Bellofiore; Francesco D'Adda (Pisani - Giulia’s Husband); Filippo Pompa Marcelli; Gina Mascetti (Mother Superior); Lorenzo Piani; Maurizio Bonuglia (Don Giorgio) **There is a "rational" explanation given, but it collapses under its own weight: Once Boito finds the hidden crawlspace he discovers ... the cat did it?! Somehow Ferruccio's black cat knew to open the sack of marbles and dump them all through the one hole in the entire crawl space that led to the ceremony below? Nothing about it makes "sense".
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