The Two Faces of Fear

Tulio Demicheli’s ‘The Two Faces of Fear’ doesn’t enjoy much of a reputation, despite ticking quite a few boxes:

J&B? Check.

Spiral staircase (beleaguered heroine chased up same)? Check. 

Prowling subjective camerawork? Check.

Heavy dose of lifestyle porn? Check.

Genre stalwarts in leading roles? Check – George Hilton and Anita Strindberg.

Vastly overqualified actor slumming it? Check – Fernando Rey.

Former Bond girl in key role? Check – Luciana Paluzzi, she of ‘Thunderball’ fame.

What it doesn’t feature is a black gloved killer (the perp has a preference for surgical gloves instead) or extended operatic death scenes. ‘The Two Faces of Fear’ has the lowest body count I’ve ever seen in a giallo, a very small self-contained cluster of suspects, and a reasonably vigorous examination of motive and interrelationships rather than the usual glut of red herrings that get thrown about it these movies.

The script sets things up with commendable economy in the first seven minutes (including open credits): Professor Michele Azzini (Luis Davila), a senior member of the board at an exclusive private clinic, is considering a job offer with another institution, much to the chagrin of Elena Carli (Paluzzi), whose father founded the clinic and gave Azzini his big break. Elena’s married to the penniless Dr Roberto Carli (Hilton) and fully enjoys the lifestyle her money allows; he doesn’t want to see custom migrate with Azzini or any of Elena’s fortune dissipate in having to buy him out. Azzini’s fellow cardiac specialist Dr Paola Lombardi (Stringberg) is engaged to Azzini, used to have a thing for Carli and is lusted after by the clinic’s administrator Luisi (Eduardo Fajardo). Other titbits thrown out during these first few minutes: Elena has a heart condition which will eventually require surgery; Carli shoots pistols; and Azzini owns a parrot.

Azzini’s office is burgled. He almost disturbs the intruder, but an answerphone message regarding a surgical procedure summons him back to theatre. (They had answerphones in 1972! I was born in 1972. Man, I feel old.) Later, after a full and frank discussion with Elena about the future of the clinic, he finds himself looking down the barrel of a pistol. Three shots, and Professor Azzini exits the narrative.

Enter Inspector Nardi (Rey), who focuses his investigation on Elena, Carli and Paola. “One of those three must be the killer,” surmises, demanding of his sergeant, Felix (Manuel Zarzo), “don’t you agree?” With consummate ingratiation, Felix responds “I agree with everything you say.” There’s plenty of droll interplay between Nardi and Felix – Rey and Zarzo bounce off each other quite well – as well as a running joke about Nardi’s attempts to quit smoking and how irritable it makes him. “I don’t appreciate your approach,” a medico snarls at him as he lights up, prompting Nardi to respond “And I don’t like yours, either – telling the rest of us to stop smoking while you all puff away yourselves.” Demicheli immediately cuts from a roomful of suddenly abashed clinical staff, every man jack of ’em toking on a ciggie, to Felix slumped in the police car outside hastily sitting up straight and pitching his own cigarette out of the window as he sees his boss approaching.

Bucking the trend of incompetent coppers in gialli, Inspector Nardi approaches the case logically and is attentive to ostensibly minor details. With the limited number of suspects, and only so many mileage to be got out of casting aspersions of them, it was inevitable that Demicheli would give over a large chunk of screen time to Nardi and Felix. Casting-wise, he played a blinder. ‘The Two Faces of Fear’ is very talky – virtually every aspect of the power play between the three leads is worked out via dialogue – and there are only two car chases and an on-foot pursuit by way of traditional action scenes. Set design not being as baroque as the genre usually vouchsafes, and off-kilter visuals restricted to just one scene (a shot from underneath a glass topped table of the dying Azzini thrown back by the impact of the bullets), the film has a tendency to the static. The moment Nardi and Felix appear onscreen, though, things pep up immeasurably.

All in all, it would be easy to call ‘The Two Faces of Fear’ a bloodless giallo except that Demicheli saves his big, icky set piece for the final reel. Remember Elena’s heart condition? A tense pursuit by an unknown stalker, which starts on the subway and ends only as she plunges terrified through the door of her apartment, triggers an episode which sees her in intensive care and scheduled for surgery. Carli and Paola undertake the surgery. Suspicion and paranoia have been ramped up to the max. Elena is terrified that she’ll die on the operating table. Nardi, called away to examine a crucial bit of evidence, is powerless to halt the procedure. Demicheli documents the preparations for the operation and its early stages in cold-sweat-inducing detail, only cutting away when Nardi puts the last pieces of the puzzle in place.

There are only two murders in ‘The Two Faces of Fear’; both happen suddenly and aren’t lingered on. There is, however, a cardiology operation and it’s as queasy as anything Argento or Fulci put on the screen.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key

Okay, let’s get the checklist out.

Magnificently ludicrous title? ‘Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key’. Check!

Genre stalwart in the director’s chair? Sergio Martino. Check!

Twisty turny plot? We’ll attempt a synopsis in a minute (minor spoilers will apply), but for now: Check!

Black gloved killer? Uh-huh, and with a penchant for using a scythe. Check!

J&B? Let’s put it this way: play the giallo drinking game (rules here) while watching ‘Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key’ and you’re liable to be carted off to get your stomach pumped long before the viciously ironic denouement. Check!

Edwige Fenech? Present, correct and indulging in mucho plenty kit-offery. Check!

I stumbled across this movie on a video sharing site last night. Never released in the UK and with the Region 1 DVD out of print and changing hands for stupid amounts of money (anywhere between £50 - £70; ie. $80 - $110), I’d pretty much written off any chance of seeing it in the near future. Then, having cruised said site for ‘Black Mama, White Mama’ and a certain notorious Ruggero Deodato film, I decided to chance my luck and fed Edwige Fenech’s name into the search box. Like the Promised Land revealed to Moses, like the doors of perception cleansed to Aldous Huxley, like Hugh Hefner surveying the Playboy mansion and reflecting smugly that he ain’t doing bad for an old dude who wears his dressing gown all the time, I beheld the glory and majesty of … oh well, fuck it, let’s just call it a midweek Something For The Weekend and post these three shots:

Okay. Now before you rush out to splurge that £50 (or $80) you saved for a rainy day/found down the back of the couch/mugged a little old lady for [delete as applicable], let me just mention that there is a very slight downside to this movie. La Fenech doesn’t put in an appearance until almost the 40 minute mark. In a 97 minute flick, this presents something of a test of the patience. Particularly since we have to spend that first third in the company of the resolutely shitty Oliviero Ruvigny (Luigi Pistilli) and his brittle, much put-upon wife Irene (Anita Strindberg).

Oliviero is a once-successful writer whose books are now out of print and who uses his grumblings that “the novel is dead” as an excuse that he hasn’t been able to write worth a damn for years. When Hemingway decided he couldn’t write worth a damn any more, he chewed on the business end of a shotgun. Oliviero channels his failure differently: he hosts decadent parties for beatnik friends, obsesses borderline Oedipally over his dead mother, sexually harasses his maid and humiliates his wife. That’s on a good day. On a bad day, he beats her. Oh, and he runs around with other women, too. Like bookshop assistant and his former student Fausta (Daniela Giordano). When she meets a nasty fate (business end of a scythe) while waiting for him at a tryst, the police come calling. There’s no hard evidence and, of course, Irene takes his side during questioning. She’s too scared to do otherwise.

Then the maid buys the farm (same modus operandi) and Oliviero panics and hides the body. He insists that he didn’t kill her but daren’t risk the police discovering she was killed in his house. He demonstrates his innocence and deep-cleaned conscience by walling her up in the wine cellar. By now, Irene is fearing for her life and freaking out every time Oliviero’s cat, the charmingly named Satan, leaps out at her or gets nasty with its claws. (‘Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key’ is nominally based on Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’. As in: there’s a cat, it’s black and somebody gets walled up in a cellar. Oh, and the mechanics of the denouement follow Poe’s template as well.)

It’s not a happy household and these aren’t particularly likeable people. Mercifully, it’s at this point that Oliviero’s sexpot niece Floriana decides to pay them a visit and all kind of shenanigans ensue. Turns out that Floriana’s not exactly a nice person either, but what the hell, she’s played by a never more gorgeous Edwige Fenech and she’s often naked. I hate to sound shallow, oikish or hairy-palmed, but in the world of gialli this is the kind of thing that can make or break a film.

What follows is kind of like ‘Knife in the Water’ without the boat and with the pressure cooker atmosphere of sexual tension actually resolving itself. In short order, Floriana worms her way into Irene’s confidence via the simple expedient of worming her way into her bed (thank you, Sergio Martino, you are great and wonderful man); catches the eye of local delivery guy and motocross rider Dario (Riccardo Salvino) and gives him an altogether different form of ride (Christ, my usual cerebral standards of film writing are taking a nose-dive!); and finally gets Oliviero hot under the collar in a scene that’s as sexy as hell so long as you keep your eye on Fenech and don’t remind yourself that Pistilli (grey-haired and wearing a crap sweater) is actually onscreen as well.

Then there’s a surprising revelation about the murders and the film takes a different turn. Martino has fun playing with convention and pulling the rug. What starts out as a study of a dysfunctional and sado-masochistic relationship, with the odd sidestep into the more easily recognisable giallo territory of fetishistic death scenes, suddenly veers into the realms of the erotic thriller, while teasing the viewer with subplots about the black cat and Oliviero’s mother which weave in and out of the narrative seemingly at random, before a series of reveals paint the last 15 or 20 minutes in the darkest shade of black. As well as the brightest shade of red.

Even in a genre not renowned for happy endings, redemptive character arcs or a sunny depiction of human nature, ‘Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key’ is singularly cynical and mean-spirited. You can’t empathize with or root for anyone. If Fenech wasn’t so throat-tighteningly beautiful, you’d lose interest in Floriana pretty quickly. More than one character gets their just desserts, but there’s no catharsis. ‘Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key’ is a damn good giallo – arguably one of the greats – but fuck me, it’s bleak.