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This is the third film by director Aldo Lado I've reviewed this month--I've exhausted the supply for the time being, so it will be the last I review for a goodly long while, too. Like the other two films I've screened in the last month (Short Night of Glass Dolls and Night Train Murders), this one is an examination of power and how the powerful destroy the young in order to maintain their dominion or to please themselves. If Lado is an auteur--something he himself denies in the interview material on Anchor Bay's edition of Who Saw Her Die?--then his major theme within the giallo subgenre is not notably different from Goya's Saturn Devouring His Children. In Who Saw Her Die?, this theme is amplified by an overt hint of pedophilia and by the nature of the target of Lado's criticism. What follows is heavy on spoilers, so a word to the wise...

The story here follows a sculptor in Venice whose daughter disappears, only to be found floating in the canal. The sculptor is not satisfied by the way the police are handling the investigation, so in the tradition of all giallo amateur sleuths, embarks on an investigation of his own. And like most of the heroes of gialli, he soon finds himself in a world darker than he imagined. It's a stock giallo scenario, enlivened by location shooting in Venice. Lado hails from Venice, so his film wanders into the back alleys and hidden courtyards of the city. He knows that the canals of Venice reek of corruption, and he finds a way to communicate that in the film. Corruption is also at the heart of the film's mystery. Invariably, the wealthy and powerful, whether it is a philanthropic lawyer, a patron of the arts, or a priest, are shown to be perverts at best, and sex murderers at worst. The identity of the killer is a rare kind of indictment of the Catholic Church--almost unheard of in Italy--that reverberates to the present day with the American sex scandals involving pedophile priests. This is undoubtedly Lado's most damning indictment of the haves in the haves/have nots equation, in large part because it has proven to be so prescient.

The formal elements of the film are generally very good. The lead performance from ex-James Bond George Lazenby is surprisingly committed, even underneath the dubbing. One wonders whether or not Lazenby could have had a long career as an actor had his fortunes not been weighed down by his turn as James Bond because he's not bad in this film. It's appropriate, I suppose, that one of the film's other characters is played by Adolfo Celi. Celi played Largo, the villain in Thunderball. Anita Strindberg is fairly good as Lazenby's wife. Nicoletta Elmi, who plays Lazenby's daughter, has the most interesting pedigree of the remaining cast. She appeared in Death in Venice for Luchino Visconti, Bay of Blood and Baron Blood for Mario Bava, and, later, in Deep Red for Dario Argento. It's plain to see why she was a popular choice for these films: a startling red head with eyes that are alternately beautiful and creepy, she could play either an innocent or a diabolical child without changing much of anything in her performance. Lado choses to cast her as an innocent (how could he not, given his major thematic concern?). But the real star of the film is the city of Venice itself. Venice has an ambience of decay that makes it seem like the entire city is haunted to one degree or another. Even during the day, the city is shrouded in mists. Cinematographer Franco Di Giacomo does an admirable job of filming the city without turning it into a postcard (Nicholas Roeg's similar Don't Look Now would fail at this a year later). Ennio Morricone's score for this film is a standout, too, and very different from the scores he provided for Lado's other films. To an extent, the score for this film prefigures the electronic scores Goblin would later record for Dario Argento. This score is almost entirely choral, but Morricone manipulates it so that it has an electronic texture to it. Once again, Lado proves himself a student of Hitchcock, and the unmasking of the crossdressing killer bears more than a passing resemblance to the unmasking of Norman at the end of Psycho; this film's nod to The Birds is more carefully veiled, though. There are a couple of egregious false scares in the film, which is unfortunate, though it doesn't abuse them the way films of more recent vintage do. Some of the sex scenes seem gratuitous, too, though some of them near the end are indicative of a cabal of pornographers and perverts, so I guess they aren't all that out of place.

The harshest criticism I can level at this film is that it doesn't have the strength of its convictions. The very last scene in the film smacks of tampering by the censors. Having provided a film in which the murderer turns out to be a pedophile priest, Lado and his producers were stuck with the problem of getting it released in Italy as its primary market. "All of my films had problems with the censors," Lado laments on the interview on the DVD. "All of them had to be cut." The last scene of Who Saw Her Die? isn't so much cut as it is compromised, as one character reveals that the murderer "wasn't really a priest at all. He was an imposter!" This is a cop out, of course, and completely torpedoes the main theme of the film. Fortunately, it's clumsy in its execution and placed after the movie should logically end anyway. A forgiving viewer might even pretend that it doesn't even exist.

2/1/2005