Two Titles

I watched two giallo movies this week. The first one has the suggestive title:

The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion (1970).

Minou (Dagmar Lassander) is the young wife of businessman Peter (Paolo Capponi) and one night while out by herself, she is attacked by a sinister man. He threatens her with a stick that has a knife blade in it, but instead of violating her, he tells her that her husband is a fraud and a murderer, then lets her go. Minou is understandably terrified and confides in her best friend Dominique (Nieves Navarro), as she feels that she can't got to Peter with this. Soon the man is back, this time with a audio recording of Peter and another man talking about disposing of a mans body. In return for the tape he demands sex. Once Minou gathers up the courage to tell Peter, she finds it impossible to prove anything and everyone including her starts to doubt her sanity.

That's as much as I can tell without going too far into spoiler territory. Overall, The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion is not a bad movie. It is well shot, the actors are fine etc. The problem is that everything that transpires is to set up the ending, which I won't spoil. It's not that it is boring, it's just a pretty average journey until the end, which was quite good.

This realization left me with a problem. What now? Clearly this isn't enough so I sat down and randomly chose:

Amuck (1972).

Greta Franklin (Barbara Bouchet) arrives at a large villa in Venice to work as secretary to a big time writer, Richard Stuart (Farley Granger), as his previous secretary has disappeared. At the villa she also meets Eleanora Stuart (Rosalba Neri), Richards wife and their butler Giovanni (Umberto Raho). The real reason Greta is there is because the previous secretary, Sally (Patrizia Viotti) was Greta's best friend since school. Once settled in, she quickly discovers that the Stuarts like to host drug fueled sex parties, and she is equally quickly drawn in with some spiked drinks. She wastes no time in her investigation, getting into one scrape after another.

Amuck is really interesting as there are very few possible suspects, but with its 100 minute run time, you have all the time in the world to suspect them all, dismiss half and then suspect them again. Ultimately it isn't the truth that is the important part in Amuck. It is the journey. Barbara Bouchet does sterling work as the scared but determined heroine that takes risk after risk to find out what happened to her friend. The atmosphere is a great mix of tension and relief that actually sustains you throughout the whole movie.

Both movies do what they set out to do with Amuck doing it considerably better. Both movies have a good share of nudity, but very little gore overall. Nothing too bad for sensitive audiences, but I wouldn't watch either movie with your kids or parents in the room, if you know what I mean.

So, would I recommend these films? Concerning The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, maybe. As I said, it isn't bad by any means, it's just that this story has been told by other better movies. Watch it if you like, no harm done. What about Amuck? Yes, this is a really nicely done giallo. Quite racy but that does not get in the way of the plot, and is not used to cover up a lack of ideas or story. A well crafted movie, no doubt about it.

That's that and all that. Join me again next time and until then, have a great and safe week!