While the Italian film industry churned out numerous great (and some not so great) giallos during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, there are only a few maestros who were able to repeatedly produce quality giallos. Dario Argento and Mario Bava are rightfully two of the most famous giallo directors, known for their fantastic, black-gloved, blood-spattered films but there is another, less praised director who belongs in that pantheon of giallo greatness: Sergio Martino.
Martino’s first directing credit came in 1969 and he directed over 60 films (counting TV productions) and continued working into the 2000s. During that time he directed movies in almost every genre, spaghetti-westerns, crime (known as poliziotteschi), exploitation, comedy, adventure, dystopian sci-fi, and horror. While he did produce enjoyable films in a variety of genres, he excelled at both the giallo and the poliziotteschi films that were also popular in the ‘70s. Between the years of 1970 and 1973, Sergio Martino directed five giallos, and while he rarely returned to the genre after that (and never at the same level of creativity), these five films are some of the best giallos made during the heyday of the genre.
The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (1971)– Martino’s deft first giallo shows he can handle all the expected conventions of the genre in an original and compelling way. Although made in 1970, the film was released in Italy in January of 1971 and was retitled in the U.S. (to emphasize the violence instead of the sex) as Blade of the Ripper. To be sure, this is a film that has plenty of both violence and sex, as you should expect from a classic giallo. The beautiful Edwige Fenech stars as Julie Wardh, the neglected housewife of an ambassador. The couple returns to Vienna from an extended period away to discover that the city is living in fear because a serial killer has been preying on women. Adding to the tension, Julie soon becomes stalked by a sadistic ex-lover. She also begins an affair with her best friends’ cousin (George Hilton), and it is not long before she is entangled in a sinister web of sex, intrigue, violence and double-crosses, caught between all three of the men in her life.
This giallo is told entirely from the woman’s perspective and that perspective is a refreshing change of pace. Along with its setting in Vienna and the (legitimately) surprising series of twists at the end, these elements provide some enjoyable enhancements to the plentiful sex and knife-slicing violence we expect from the genre. But, Martino was just getting started ….
The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail (1971) –In his sophomore giallo effort Martino hews more closely to the conventions of the genre. Although somewhat more conventional than his other thriller films, The Case of theScorpion’s Tail is a first-rate giallo and a prime example of the genre at its best. This time the wealthy wife of a successful London businessman becomes a widow in the first moments of the film when her husband’s plane explodes. She wastes no time grieving and instead makes immediate plans to go to Athens to collect the life insurance money and run away with her secret lover. However, in a giallo schemes never go as planned and soon she is involved with the insurance company investigator (George Hilton, again), her dead husband’s jealous lover, an Interpol agent, a local journalist (Anita Strindberg) and the obligatory black-gloved killer.
The movie takes its time getting to the murders but when it does Martino directs some of his best suspense sequences here, going more for the violence than the sex in this outing. The mystery is a McGuffin for sure but it maintains interest and there is a nice sting in the tail of this scorpion. The score by Bruno Nicolai is a masterpiece and rightfully acknowledged as one of the best of the genre. The great soundtrack combined with tight direction, good performances and intriguing locations in London and Greece make this film an enjoyable ride all around. The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail shows Martino engaging more with the genre conventions and succeeding at creating a stylish, thrilling and suspenseful film.
All the Colors of the Dark (1972) – In his next outing Martino really pushed the giallo conventions. All the Colors of the Dark might not even be strictly classified as a giallo but as more of an occult thriller. However, it has plenty of giallo style and is a classic of ‘70s Euro-trash cinema so qualifies for this list in my opinion.
The superb duo of Edwige Fenech and George Hilton are back, this time as a husband and wife living in London. Fenech’s Jane is in bad psychological condition, distraught by a recent car accident that killed her unborn child and haunted by that as well as by an earlier childhood trauma. Hilton’s Richard is a pharmaceutical executive that tries to solve Jane’s problems and her reoccurring nightmares by sedating her with drugs. On top of all that, Jane believes Richard may be having an affair with a neighbor in their building and believes she is being stalked by a strange man she sees everywhere. But is that real or is she being paranoid, or even worse losing her sanity? Since neither the sedatives nor a psychiatrist seem to be doing anything for her, when a neighbor suggests that attending a satanic ritual will help Jane agrees to give it a try. Why not – it is Swingin’ London in the early ‘70s after all.
Martino brings psychedelic style to this film and it is a phantasmagoria of colors, weird camera angles and grooving Bruno Nicolai sounds. The dreamlike (almost Lynchian) style perfectly fits with the setting and the psychological state of Jane, who does not know what is real and what is hallucination. Cribbing a bit of Rosemary’s Baby and a bit of giallo madness, the film deftly straddles the line between the two genres. The murders don’t start until the last half of the film and by then the audience is questioning what is real and what is not as much as Jane. The ending brings all the red herrings together with a lot of schemes and plots exposed in typical fashion, and provides a thrilling final dose of suspense. Martino creates a fun ride for anyone interested in a mix of satanic cults, giallo kills and psychedelic head-trip films.
Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972)– The title of this film is taken from a line in The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh and much of the plot is an updated take on Edgar Allen Poe’s gothic The Black Cat. This time, the heroine, Irina (Anita Strindberg), is the tortured wife of an abusive, racist, alcoholic writer. The writer, Oliviero, lives on an ageing family estate in the Italian countryside where he hosts drunken, sexually-charged parties with groups of hippies and artists. Oliviero is haunted by memories of his dead mother and frustrated by writers block. He is a completely awful person, not only abusing Irina but cheating on her with multiple women as well. The mystery begins when one of Oliviero’s lovers is brutally murdered on a night she was to meet with him. This is just the first of a string of murders to come in prime giallo-style throughout the film. Add to this mix the lovely Edwige Fenech again, as Oliviero’s beautiful, flirtatious niece, and you have the makings of another off-beat and stylish Martino giallo.
In addition to the elements of the story loosely adapted from The Black Cat, the film itself has elements that are very similar to the much later work (both book and film) The Shining. The premise itself, an abusive, alcoholic writer, haunted by his past while living at a remote house and struggling with writers block, is almost identical to that of the book. To make the similarities even more apparent, in one scene Irina steals a look at what Oliviero has been writing on his typewriter and discovers that it is page after page of the same maniacal phrase typed over and over (a scene that only appears in Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining). We do not know if either Stephen King or Stanley Kubrick ever saw this obscure 1972 giallo before creating their works, but it does make you wonder.
Again, Martino delivers some original elements to the giallo formula with Your Vice… and weaves them with a dash of Poe and some genuinely surprising twists in the finale to produce one his best films.
Torso (1973) – Martino ups the ante with his next giallo and, in the process, helps lay the groundwork for what would later become the U.S. teen slasher film. Mario Bava’s earlier Bay of Blood (1971) took the giallo genre into slasher territory long before the well-known U.S. slasher like Halloween (1978) or Friday the 13th (1980) and both it and Torso predate even the oft-acknowledged Canadian forerunner Black Christmas (1974).
Torso (originally titled The Bodies Present Traces of Carnal Violence in Italy) offers a virtual blueprint for later slasher films by offering up a bevy of partying and promiscuous teenage girls as prey for the masked (and of course black-gloved) sex killer. Suzy Kendall (just two years after her role in Argento’s seminal first giallo Bird with the Crystal Plummage) stars as Jane, an American exchange student at a University in Perugia Italy. The University coeds are frightened because several of their female classmates have been victims of brutal sex killings. In what would become a slasher tradition, each one is killed shortly after a sexual encounter, which means that our good traditional values American Jane is sticking around this film for awhile.
This film has a more gritty vibe than most earlier giallos, with Perugia replacing the cosmopolitan Rome, London, Paris, et al. This is also no longer the late ‘60s beautiful people with swinging, psychedelic parties and fashionable clothes, but more the post-Mansion-era ‘70s hippies with old T-shirts and bellbottom jeans sitting in the dirt smoking pot. The soundtrack also has a harder edge incorporating rock sounds instead of the more jazz influenced earlier soundtracks. This is a style that later culminates with Argento's use of the groundbreaking music of Goblin in the iconic Deep Red and Suspiria soundtracks.
The usual red-herring suspects are around and keep you guessing whodunit until the bitter end. Martino’s set-piece killings are all staged masterfully again with great suspense, and here he adds more slasher-style brutality to the mix. With the University gripped by fear, Jane decides to join a small group of her girlfriends at an isolated villa in the countryside outside Perugia. Without giving anything away, the killer also leaves Perugia and the segment at the villa provides a wonderful premise that allows Martino the opportunity for a masterful, prolonged 30-minute suspense sequence. Taking place with almost no dialogue, Martino wrings out the suspense the entire time. This sequence ranks as possibly his best giallo work and is a fitting end to a short but fertile period of filmmaking for Martino.
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