Like, I suspect, practically everyone else, I'm impatient for summer to be over. The summer heat has broken records two years in a row now here in Japan. So last night I sought an autumnal movie to watch and remembered Criterion has a new Giallo playlist. Is it just me or are these films often set in autumn? I picked the first one I'd never seen, 1972's La morte accarezza a mezzanotte (Death Walks at Midnight, and, sure enough, it's autumnal as hell. The writing leaves something to be desired, becoming a bit tediously repetitive by the halfway point, but star Susan Scott (aka Nieves Navarro) combined with the visuals made it a mostly enjoyable experience.
Like a lot of performers in Italian and Spanish films from the time, Spanish actress Navarro adopted an English name in the interest of fooling people into thinking she was an American star and that her movies were American. Criterion presents the film in its original Italian version, though. These movies were always dubbed regardless of language but I'm glad I was able to hear Navarro's rapid fire, Italian harangues as one guy after another has the gall to doubt that she actually saw a vision of a killer when she was on LSD.
She's also exasperated that her journalist boyfriend, Gio (Simon Andreu), for whom she agreed to take the drug as research for his article, published her name and undisguised photos against her wishes. It's all presented as the hilarious fireworks of a lover's quarrel. Everyone's so amused by how angry she is by being in constant fear for her reputation, life, and safety. No-one ever said these were the most enlightened films in the world.
There are a lot of sequences where she thinks she sees the killer and there's a lot of running through crowds and stairways and corridors. The actual killer's identity starts to shift regularly and I suspect a lot of rewrites were occurring throughout production. It follows no logical pattern and starts to become dull. The colour palette is always nice and autumnal, though, lots of rust, yellow, and black with a splash of blue here and there to make it pop. Navarro's hair is glorious.
La morte accarezza a mezzanotte is available on The Criterion Channel.
No comments:
Post a Comment