Review of Perversion Story

[Images: Jean Sorel stares blankly while Lucio Fulci’s camerawork does the expressivity.]

It’s almost embarrassing to admit (in giallo circles) that I’m not a huge fan of Lucio Fulci’s gore. It’s not that his maggoty make-up and crimson syrup are poorly sculpted, oozed or splattered, per se, but something about the way he films his money-shots. He goes after his effects so directly and shoves our face into his work so unceremoniously. There is very little coyness; no playful dancing in and out of shadow as the full horror gradually unfolds. A cut-in to a close-up, or more likely a zoom, too often trades tension for revulsion.

As a reviewer who is addicted to horror, but remains fairly uninterested in shock value, I find Fulci’s zombie movies to be consistently less rewarding than his giallo work. His imagination is wasted trying gross me out. Where his creative genius really shines, in my mind, is not in the gore itself, but in the absurd situations and macabre contrivances that bring about such grotesque mayhem. There is something cleverly humorous, horrifying and audaciousness in his best scenes. “Zombi 2,” for instance, is an ugly and bumbling film that fans claim is redeemed by its impressive zombie make-up and vigorous violence. The moments I find compelling are the near-whimsical boldness of the underwater swimmer-zombie-shark battle and the hilariously mellow “assault” by ranks of skeletal conquistadors.

I say all this first to make it understandable why Fulci’s “Perversion Story” (1969) is right up my alley. It predates most of his famous horror work and focuses primarily on the mystery plot and character development. There are only a couple of murders and they are both very near the end. Fulci still suffers from pacing stinginess, refusing to give us any real satisfaction until he is ready to unleash the storm of final twists, but his steady psychological approach makes us care for his characters far more than in his later films.

George Dumurrier (Jean Sorel of “Short Night of the Glass Dolls “ and “Lizard in a Woman’s Skin”) is married to Susan (Marissa Mell of “Danger: Diabolik” and “Seven Blood-Stained Orchids”), though he spends most of his time running a medical clinic. Susan feels neglected and considers her marriage a failure. George agrees, secretly wishing to openly pursue his long-time mistress, Jane, but unwilling to abandon his wife while her health is poor. It seems providence has done him a service when she dies, but his new-found bachelorhood is soon turned upside-down when he encounters a stripper who looks strikingly similar to his late wife.

[Image: (from left to right) Susan Dumurrier, a slightly larger Susan Dumurrier and look-alike stripper Monica Weston.]

The film is clearly an attempt to do “Vertigo” as a giallo (set, as usual, amid the decadent fashion industry) , with a little extra sex thrown in for good measure. The talented team of Sorel & Mell actually pulls it off, their contrasting personalities making the prolonged state of confusion and frequent errands down blind alleys more bearable. Sorel’s character gets to go further into Freudian territory than Jimmy Stewart’s, with his red light district rendezvous leaving him unsure whether he is desecrating or reliving his wife’s memory.

Meanwhile, Marissa Mell weaves together a femme fatale whose off-the-cuff sexuality and seeming simplicity keep us unsure even as the evidence points undeniably towards foul play.

[Image: I’m hoping this performance piece is satire, because it’s scary to think this might be an image from someone’s actual sexual fantasy. My favorite outrageous outfit from the film? A pair of black gloves being used as pasties. Sadly, I couldn’t get a PG-13 screenshot.]

Lacking a herd of character ripe for the slaughter or any appetizer subplots to tie us over, the bulk of “Perversion Story” is slow even by giallo standards. Hanging out in front of the screen while Fulci sets up all the clues that will fall into place in the final act is a bit like trying to pretend you aren’t aware of the preparations going on for your own surprise party.

When we finally get to the scene where the villain reveals how the show was run, the film picks up. The evil plan itself might be plain ridiculous (or perhaps just meticulous), but the delivery is so clearly relished by the writer-director that the audience can’t help but share his enthusiasm. The ending twist is obvious enough (if you’ve seen “Vertigo” and/or any giallo ever), but there is genuine tension in the death-row finale and delicious irony in the final few minutes. It’s a touch of good drama where I was expecting a by-the-books final chase/battle, and the change of pace left me grateful.

The style definitely anticipates future giallo excess, which I’ll simply point out in the following screenshots:

[Image: Some intense deep focus, possibly matted, with eye lines (both directed and vague) used to convey meaning. I love the way the candlesticks add additional theatrics to Mrs. Dumurrier’s already elaborately staged framing.]

[Image: Lombard Street (also known as “that famous curvy street in San Francisco”) demonstrates the trusty giallo penchant for memorable settings, while also further connecting us to “Vertigo.”]

[Image: Color and camera placement designed intentionally to turn the mundane lurid.]

[Image: Oh, and before I forget: there is a brief moment of Fulci‘s classical rotting corpse antics. You can’t blame the man for a little indulgence.]

There may not be any trench-coated killers with black gloves and festering childhood traumas, but “Perversion Story” does have one thing most giallo’s don’t: five-way split-screen. And who doesn’t love that?

[Images: Sophisticated science and steamy eroticism; two things that movie-makers everywhere agree are best conveyed by a lot of random, disjointed angles.]

Walrus Rating: 5.5

Review of Short Night of the Glass Dolls

Imagine you are found lying prone in a park. As you come to your senses, you realize that you are utterly paralyzed, unable even to blink, breathe or twitch. You are mistaken for dead. You watch in horror as you are taken to a hospital, your vitals are read and come up blank and you are then transferred to a morgue. Only your anomalous body temperature and absence of rigor mortis gives the doctors any clue that you are not yet ready to be buried. Will it be enough to save you? As you scream within your head to be acknowledged as alive, you cast back into your memories. How did arrive here? How did you come to be this way?

This is the horrifying position that Gregory Moore (Jean Sorel) is place into during “Short Night of the Glass Dolls” (1971). Giallo director Aldo Lado takes the “Sunset Blvd.” (1950) device of a man narrating his story from the recent afterlife and gives it a tense and compelling twist, relating a mystery through flashbacks even as the protagonist creeps ever closer to a hellish fate: an autopsy while he is still conscious! The key to Gregory’s future, so he believes, is lies in his past.

[Image: For the proper effect of traveling into your past, zoom in on this picture and then hold up your monitor to your face while rotating it.]

Several days earlier Gregory, a reporter in communist Prague, had met Jessica (Barbara Bach). After quickly falling in love, he promises to help her escape to the west, but Jessica suddenly disappears without any warning. Angry at the police’s lack of progress or commitment, Gregory begins an investigation of his own and soon new bodies are piling up.

“Short Night of the Glass Dolls” has one absolutely incredible premise. Where it bogs down is in the flashback mystery investigation that crawls along dryly as one red herring and minor leads stretches into the next. Similar to Lado’s other well-known giallo, “Who Saw Her Die?” (1972), the one-man investigation with its interviews, false starts and rising conspiratorial opposition plays out like mildly entertaining filler material. The problem is that Lado treats it like its well worth our time (as opposed to a skeleton from which to hang an elaborate story, gruesome deaths and tense action pieces) and has a rather sincere love of realistic gumshoe tactics like exhaustive determination and footwork. We do witness two murders/attempts that involve fairly pedestrian falls, but most of the deaths take place off-screen.

The full story, once revealed, leaves us begging for more. There is a surprisingly patriotic message to be found in the heavy-handed finale, that works due to surrealism if not realism (or explanation). It’s tough to deny that the ending is powerful, but I was left wishing the full 92 minutes had the same impact.

[Image: The next time you see this room, it will have a lot more crazy.]

The acting isn’t bad, with Jean Sorel putting in a good turn as the handsome protagonist. As a real, legitimate actor it’s kind of a shame that he lies comatose for about 1/3 of his performance, but what can you do? Barbara Bach fares fine as the love interest, but she’s more a pretty MacGuffin for driving the plot than a real person. Gregory’s friend and investigative ally, Jacques (Mario Adorf), is difficult to take seriously with his white-suit-over-magenta-shirt and dubbed voice with an accent that can’t make up its mind between German, Irish or English.

Lado’s direction is not exceptional and it isn’t hard to see why he never made it to the ranks of Argento, Bava, Fulci or Martino, although it does have moments of insight. Pacing and editing aren’t really Lado’s weapons of choice, but one edit worked for me brilliantly: A hospital scene ends with doctors discussing Gregory’s body and the chilling possibility of dissecting it in front of a medical class. The camera slowly zooms in on Gregory’s feet, visible in the background, before cutting to a matching flashback shot of his feet when he was alive and, indeed, having sex. The death/sex juxtaposition has rarely been so efficiently, and so ironically, posed.

[Images: Mastershot, zoom and then cut on graphic match. Death to sex in under ten seconds.]

Some visual elements that stick out in memory are the POV shots that appear throughout the film, staring up at the ceiling into the faces of doctors or the spinning crystals of chandeliers. Another scene (shown in a previous screenshot) takes place with the nourish lighting of window blinds taken to the ultimate extreme. Eloquently long shots and glutinous pans over the Prague cityscape do help pass the time, although this could just be my bias towards all things Czech. Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack is also there to stir the mood, but this isn’t his best work.

As regular giallo watchers will know, or those who read the Film Walrus, there are often fun connections between great paintings and giallos. I enjoy pointing them out when I catch them or making them up when feel like it. “Glass Dolls” has a quite explicit example (for those with sharp eyes or good memories), but I’ll save it for the end since it constitutes a spoiler of sorts. Let’s get the Walrus Rating out of the way first:

Walrus Rating: 6.0
(An impressive directorial debut that many will probably think better of. While definitely worth seeing, it is just as certainly second tier.)

[SPOILERS]

[Images: If only Gregory had looked a little closer at the painting above the fireplace (click the image to zoom in). Is art imitating life or vice versa?]

Review of The Last of Sheila

Every once in a while I come across an American thriller that has the feel of a good giallo. “Alice, Sweet Alice” (1977) is perhaps the best example. “The Last of Sheila” (1973) also has the magic touch, likely due to its cynical tone, convoluted plot, extended twist ending and lead actor Richard Benjamin’s resemblance to Jean Sorel.

Alternatively you could see the minimal settings (most of the action takes place aboard a yacht) and single murder as heralding back to the golden age of detective fiction when detectives ushered mansions full of upper-class suspects into parlor rooms and announced shocking revelations. Certainly the all-star cast, tasteful lack of nudity and the complete absence of through-the-harp shots [1, 2] sadly mark this as a non-giallo film.

James Coburn plays Clinton Green, a successful producer who claims to be planning a feature film on the final days of his late wife, to be titled “The Last of Sheila.” He’s assembled a group of down-on-their-luck Hollywood talents including a writer (Richard Benjamin), his wife (Joan Hackett), an actress (Raquel Welch), her manager (Ian McShane), a director (James Mason) and a casting agent (Dyan Cannon). They are desperate enough for work that they agree to board Clinton’s yacht (named Sheila, of course) and submit to his elaborate week-long game titled “The Sheila Green Memorial Gossip Game.” It should go without saying that each guest knew Mrs. Green and was in the vicinity when she was killed in an unsolved hit-and-run accident exactly one year previous.

Clinton’s game involves issuing each player a “fictional” secret in the form of “I am a ______” where the blank might be shoplifter, homosexual, etc. Each night the players are given a clue and let loose at a port or island to try and find a piece of evidence that identify the owner of a secret. Once the person with that secret gets to the evidence, it is assumed that they destroy it and the round ends for that night.

The novel entertainment has all the requisite clever riddles and inter-player plotting, but the guests soon guess that it’s more than just a game. On the second night, someone takes it deadly serious. The resulting murder investigation hinges on Clinton’s intentions for how the week was supposed to unfold and the truth behind Sheila’s death.

“The Last of Sheila” can be divided pretty equally into four sections: the set-up, the game, the investigation and the twist. Unlike the typical murder mystery which lulls, often from the get-go, until the final act, “Sheila” pulls you in with its promise of intrigue and keeps things escalating. The game itself would make for a decent movie, but cutting it off with an unusual murder case ensures that things will stay interesting. The coup de grace comes just when things seem all wrapped up; in the final 30 minutes all the little hints and inconsistencies come together to reveal a really exemplary scheme.

One should expect no less from the surprising screenwriter pairing of actor Anthony Perkins (“Psycho,” “The Trial”) and composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim (“Into the Woods,” “Sweeney Todd”), whose efforts were rewarded with a best mystery film Edgar Award. They based parts of the film on their experiences arranging scavenger hunts for celebrities in New York.

The writers also took care to assume their audience would be mystery aficionados already familiar with the usual tricks, and so they laced the screenplay with morbid and self-referential humor (thankfully free of slapstick). Highlights include a murder victim in double-drag (a man made up as a woman dressed up as a priest) and a meticulous strangler who, unable to find gloves, dons a pair of garish sock puppets. Though the final answer is marvelously contrived, so many clues have been left for the audience that much of the mystery can be solved in advance and shouldn’t leave viewers feeling blindsided or cheated.

The key here is that the clues are not sealed away by a taciturn detective nor broadcast to everyone as dead giveaways. Hardly anyone fails to pick up on a minor character “casually” mentioning their a reclusive identical twin or an investigator surreptitiously noting that a suspect is left-handed or, really, a zoom shot on anything no matter how seemingly irrelevant. It’s an issue of efficiency: if a writer/director puts something in and the editor didn’t take it out, odds are that it’s important.

Good mystery writers know how to get around this problem. Weak solutions involve trying to do things really inconspicuously (which many people will still see through) or saturating the story with red herrings and irrelevant details to provide cover fire (risking leaving the audience confused, frustrated or bored). Stronger solutions involve giving the clues double purposes, one that has a direct application to the current action and one that has deeper meaning when placed in its final context. The Perkins/Sondheim team is quite adept at working in these dualities, ensuring that attentive viewers will pick up at least a few, but not without a little work.

By structuring the film as a puzzle game about a puzzle game, director Herbert Ross openly invites us to play along. For someone like myself, who enjoys riddles, lateral thinking puzzles, detective stories, gialli and ending twists, this is prime entertainment. But does it succeed as a movie?

I’ve already mentioned that the steady setup->game->investigation->finale division makes the pacing work, while the plot is well above-average for the genre. The seven diverse characters monopolize the screen, the better to carry out their primary duties of keeping the story rolling and the suspicions balanced. The quality of acting is clearly a secondary concern, despite the big names.

James Coburn is great as the self-satisfied sadist in charge of the show. You can tell that Dyan Cannon and him are both having a lot of fun while the others are a bit too serious. Raquel Welch is just there for eye-candy and Joan Hackett is around as the straight foil, both in dangerously dull roles, though not without necessary functions. Ian McShane is the most forgettable of the bunch while James Mason is disappointingly the most wasted. It’s Richard Benjamin, star of the short-lived SF TV show “Quark,” who provides the necessary core as the sharp, inquisitive lead.

Herbert Ross’s unadventurous directing is a good example of why the Italians had such an edge over American thrillers in the 1970’s. It gets the job done, employing zooms, POV sequences and flashbacks as a matter of functionality rather than style. Ross was never a great director, but he is clearly capable of handling a complicated script: telling the story with just the right amount of attention on each detail to keep the action clear and the filler concise.

If it lacks the excess of style that makes gialli such a treat, it does at least share one Italian hallmark: great set pieces. Despite the relatively small number of locales, Ross makes the most of them. The yacht is a good substitute for the traditional inaccessible manor, and the art director keeps it thematically stuffed with board games, puzzles and hidden clues. The two major landward excursions are suitably seasoned with local flavor, especially a crumbling monastery where hidden James Coburn recordings harmonize Gregorian chants. In fact, one area where Ross may exceed his European genre contemporaries is his staging. When he’s got nothing better to do, Ross moves his characters around the main deck like chess pieces preparing for a surprise mate.

All told, this is a mystery for the mind, a perplexing confection where dialogue, motivations and camerawork all kneel before and wait upon the enthroned plot. This type of single-mindedness usually bothers me when it is employed for the sake of emotional manipulation, but somehow I feel more forgiving when it’s done in the name of intellectual manipulation. Perhaps it’s because Perkins, Sondheim and Ross never forget to entertain.

“The Last of Sheila” belongs to the same postmodern comedy-mystery family as “Sleuth,” “Deathtrap,” “Murder by Death” and “Clue.” I think it’s one of the best of the breed, up there with another one of my favorites, “8 Women.” Don’t let me inflate your expectations beyond guilty pleasure limits, but do check this one out if your want some safe and reliable fun.

Walrus Rating: 8.5