WINTER OF DISCONTENT: So Sweet, So Dead

It’s a subject that’s been covered in these pages several times before: Italian exploitation movies and their multiplicity of alternative titles. But in the case of Roberto Montero’s ‘So Sweet, So Dead’, it’s worth revisiting. The indigenous title is ‘Rivelazioni di un maniaco sessuale al capo della squadra mobile’, which even the non-linguist should automatically be able to intuit as definitely not translating to ‘So Sweet, So Dead’ based on nothing more than the sheer amount of words in the original title.

Known in Britain as ‘So Sweet, So Dead’ and in America as, variously, ‘Bad Girls’, ‘Penetration’ (a heavily re-edited hardcore version) and ‘The Slasher … is the Sex Maniac’, its original title translates as ‘Revelations of a Sex Maniac to the Head of the Criminal Investigation Division’. Which is not only magnificently unwieldy (it’s up there with ‘What Are These Strange Drops of Blood Doing on the Body of Jennifer’ and ‘The Corpses Presented Traces of Carnal Violence’) but a spoiler of the highest order, happily giving away what should have been an out-of-the-blue final act rug-pull where Inspector Capuana (Farley Granger), having embarked on a risky strategy to flush out the killer, receives a phone call from said nutjob and discovers that … But I’m getting ahead of myself.

‘So Sweet, So Dead’ opens in lurid fashion with a police photographer taking his time snapping the dead body of a naked woman whose throat has been cut (this on top of the multiple stab wounds). Snapshots of a compromising nature were left at the scene. Capuana tries to get a handle on the case: jealous husband, impotent psychotic, voyeur? Is the murder connected to the woman’s husband, a senior army officer? Forensic psychologist Professor Casali (Chris Avram) posits that the murderer is gay, though no real reason is expounded on; besides, Capuana is more concerned about Casali’s protégé Gastone (Luciano Rossi), a mortician whose interest in corpses seems a little unhealthy.

Further killings occur, always of society women, all of whom are conducting affairs. Always the slashed throat and stab wounds; always the photographs. Always the closing of ranks by the elite so that Capuana’s investigation never gains traction. His superiors demand results but are quick to upbraid him when he ruffles feathers. At home, he bitches about the job to long-suffering wife Barbara (Sylva Koscina) but refuses the easy way out of a job with her father’s manufacturing firm.

Dario Argento once famously remarked, when quizzed about the incipient misogyny of gialli, that it’s more aesthetically pleasing to watch a beautiful woman menaced by a killer than a man – an argument that’s as intellectually facile as defending the use of the word “fuck” in front of a group of five-year-olds by dint of it being marginally less offensive than saying “cunt”. Let’s consider the Argento protocol at a slightly – and I mean nanometrically – deeper level: it’s okay to be misogynistic about your choice of victim because women are nicer to look at. So much face; so much palm.

If ever there was a film that bowed, curtsied, fellated and generally loved Argento’s dictum long-time (even more so, I hasten to add, than ‘Strip Nude for Your Killer’ or ‘The Sister of Ursula’) then that film is ‘So Sweet, So Dead’. It doesn’t just want its share of eye candy – the female cast extends beyond the frankly gorgeous Koscina to include Femi Benussi, Annabelle Incontrera, Krista Nell and Susan Scott – but paints them as shameless adulteresses and engineers their death scenes to incorporate as much gratuitous nudity as possible.

Not only is the lack of a proactive heroine frustrating – the film flirts with lawyer’s daughter Bettina (Angela Covello) as witness to the killing and therefore potential amateur sleuth or next victim, only to completely abandon either narrative possibility – but to stuff a movie this full of genre icons and not give Benussi or Scott or Koscina or Incontrera a single fucking interesting thing to do is just criminal.

So, with the ladies of the cast devalued, the film’s giallo credentials rest on two things: the efficacy of Capuana’s investigation and the film’s effectiveness as a mystery. The former can’t be overstated: gialli are rife with fucking useless coppers. Any giallo drinking game would perforce include: number in the title, colour in the title, eyeball searing interior decoration, architecture porn, amateur sleuth, all-important clue that said amateur sleuth just can’t quite put their finger on, bottle of J&B, killer who favours black gloves and fedora, useless fucking copper. Capuana isn’t necessarily a useless copper, just an unengaging one. Farley, either a scenery-chewer par excellence or a somnambulist of the highest order, is on sleep-walk mode here. (Granted, I’d rather have a subdued Farley performance than one in which he mistakes the interior design for a mixed grill.)

As a mystery, ‘So Sweet, So Dead’ sucks donkey balls. In fact it sucks the balls of those depraved enough to suck donkey balls. I’d even go so far as to say it sucks donkey balls while reading The Daily Mail and listening to Justin Bieber. As a mystery, it’s fucking pathetic and hinges on Capuana’s final reel recollection of something that surely to God he’d have reflected was significant waaaay earlier in the movie; something, moreover, that hasn’t even been referenced by the lazy-assed script. The resolution of ‘So Sweet, So Dead’ hinges on a shoehorned-in series of flashbacks utterly uncontextualised by anything that has gone before. It’s like reading Conan Doyle’s ‘The Final Problem’ and only having one reference to Moriarty in a footnote appended to the last sentence. It’s not a twist, it’s a toss off.

Strangers on a Train

Trains feature prominently in some of Hitchcock’s best work: ‘The 39 Steps’, ‘The Lady Vanishes’, ‘Shadow of a Doubt’, ‘North by Northwest’. So when he sticks “train” in the freakin’ title it’s gonna be good, right?

Oh, yeah. Abso-bloody-lutely!

Hitchcock had already made a name for himself as cinema’s most accomplished purveyor of suspense films and thrillers before the war with a string of British films that delivered pacy narratives, tense set-pieces and brilliantly executed chase scenes. Then, in the ’40s, his integration into the American studio system saw him at the helm of some stagey, static productions such as ‘Rope’, ‘The Parradine Case’ and ‘Lifeboat’, as well as a couple of projects that took him out of his directorial comfort zone – costume (melo)drama ‘Under Capricorn’ and prestige literary adaptation ‘Rebecca’.

Of course, there were masterpieces during that decade: ‘Foreign Correspondent’, ‘Shadow of a Doubt’, ‘Spellbound’, ‘Notorious’. But as the ’40s ended and Hitchcock greeted the next decade with one the tired and creaky ‘Stage Fright’, there were definitely signs of depletion in the quality control department.

Then he scored a triumphant return to form with ‘Strangers on a Train’, kicking off the second half of his career and a decade-and-a-half run of classic films that would only occasionally flag (the remake of his own ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’ is neither here nor there), and not stall until the twin disappointments of ‘Torn Curtain’ and ‘Topaz’.

‘Strangers on a Train’ is an adaptation of the debut novel by Patricia Highsmith, a writer who specialised in dark psychology, compromised morality and tangled webs. The set-up is ingeniously simple: two strangers meet on a train (the clue’s in the title) – Guy Haines (Farley Granger) is an up-and-coming young tennis player saddled with a two-timing wife who won’t agree to the divorce that would enable him to marry his new love Anne (Ruth Roman); Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) is the layabout heir to a family fortune that his father is unwilling to subsidise him with.

Bruno posits a solution that rids them of the respective thorns in their side: he kills Guy’s wife; Guy bumps off Bruno’s dad; the perfect, motiveless murder. Guy humours him, agrees that it’s a fine idea and gets off the train PDQ.

It’s not long, however, before his wife is dispassionately murdered. Guy, horrified, keeps quiet; after all, as Bruno reminds him, he’s complicit. Furthermore, Bruno’s got his hands on a bit of evidence that would fit Guy up quite nicely were he to plant it at the murder scene. From hereon in, Bruno becomes a constant in Guy’s life, showing up at tennis matches, society parties, lurking outside his house … Waiting for Guy to fulfil his part of the bargain.

From an audience point of view, you can pick the level you want ‘Strangers on a Train’ to function on – straight thriller, black comedy, cynical character study, meditation on the nature of guilt and complicity, or all of the above – and it delivers the goods. Just after 101 minutes of entertainment? You got it! Want something more, something that makes you think, something that sneakily subverts audience expectations? Right there, same movie!

For me, the key scene is Bruno’s stalking of Guy’s wife (Laura Elliott) at a fairground. The juxtaposition of bright lights, chirpy music and gaudy spectacle with the dark business at hand is archetypal Hitchcock. Guy’s wife is running around behind his back with a couple of football jocks; on top of this, she catches a glance of Bruno and mistakes his stalking of her for flirtation and responds implicitly. (A key theme of the film is complicity; to what degree people determine their own fate, even if things then spiral out of their control.) Hitchcock manipulates audience expectation using shadows and suggestion, a scream heard offscreen, to imply a staging of the murder, before gleefully revealing it as a bit of misdirection. He allows you to laugh, almost lets you off … then hits you with the real murder scene. And it’s brutal. Not explicit, but cold and harsh. Then, rather than make a hurried getaway, Bruno deferentially stops to help a blind man across the road, accepting his thanks with a smile and a pat on the shoulder.

In contrast we have Guy: petulant, weak-willed, a man who – through his silence – puts Anne and her family at peril. A man who, with time running out when he needs to recover the vital piece of evidence, instead of throwing a tennis match wastes value time in his determination to win. A man who wishes his wife dead, gets his wish, endangers his new girlfriend and gets to keep her. A man who, for all that his wife is a two-timer, has himself taken up with someone else while still married.

Bruno’s a villain, no doubt about it. But he’s not always villainous. He certainly doesn’t kill for the sake for it. And he’s arguably one of the few characters in the film with any integrity. Ultimately, he does what he says he’ll do.

The fairground scene also lays the groundwork for the finale, a revisiting-the-scene-of-the-crime set-piece that’s a textbook example of Hitchcock’s mastery of suspense. That the out-of-control carousel is set on its destructive course when a trigger happy cop plugs the operator instead of Bruno is another indication that, as M. Night Shyamalan puts it in his appreciation of the film on the DVD special features, “the rules don’t apply”.

That’s an excellent summation of the film, and one steeped in Hitchcockian irony given how flawlessly ‘Strangers on a Train’ operates as mainstream entertainment.