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The Fragility of Sanity: The Gialli of Sergio Martino

Tuesday, January 3, 2023 | Deep Dives, Opinions

By MATT CARLIN

Too often, discussions of Giallo cinema are nearly synonymous with the work of Dario Argento, and the remainder of the eclectic genre’s output is relegated to the works of hacks and journeymen. Sergio Martino is one such journeyman. His six Gialli complete a dark statement concerning human nature and rival the classics of the genre.

Martino began his career as a screenwriter, quickly transitioning to director, and after several films embarked upon his first Giallo in 1971 with The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh. He assembled a troupe of actors, including Edwige Fenech, George Hilton, and Ivan Rassimov. They would build and play upon their screen presences in the ensuing films. This diabolically perverse mystery also features a script co-written by Ernesto Gastaldi, who would write all of Martino’s Giallo. His brother Luciano produced.

Two inescapable inspirations are encountered when one confronts Martino’s Giallo: Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques, with its twists and deceptions; and the criminal trial of Giovanni Fenaroli, who in 1958 sent a killer to Rome to murder his wife while he himself established an alibi in Milan to obtain insurance money. Martino was fascinated by this case. He was also fascinated with people plummeting to their deaths, a preferred Martino method of getting offed.

Martino immediately stakes his claim as a Giallo artist. The film begins with a figure in black; a hooker gets in his car. He drives her to an airport. Airplanes roar on the soundtrack. He takes out a knife and slashes her nude body. Geysers of blood on black. She flails her hands. He slashes. A shot of an airplane. All within the first two minutes of the film.

The number of murderous set pieces in Mrs. Wardh alone is impressive. The garden, the parking garage, the Wardh residence, each scene a showstopper unto itself. Then there is the attempted killing of an airline stewardess resulting in the killer’s death. With half the film still to go, we know we are on shaky grounds. This is not merely the story of a gloved psycho, it is the story of a woman, her husband, her ex-lover, and her cousin – who are all conspiring to kill her. It is the story of a world of evil, something that would continue to pique Martino’s interest. The razor-wielding killer was incidental in his exploration into an advantageous time in an ugly world for others to do crime while crime is being done.

Much of the beginning of Mrs. Wardh deals with Mrs. Wardh’s fragile psyche. The viewer learns that she had a sadomasochistic relationship with her ex-lover. It is this history that the trio of men will prey upon, and it is her inability to put the past behind her which will make her such an unreliable narrator. Martino leans into surrealism and dreams; flashbacks. The unreal and surreal will be as important to his cinema as straight facts, for the cinema of Martino is the cinema of the fragility of sanity. He examines the veneer of normalcy that individuals utilize as masks.

During the film’s climax, we witness the death of Jean – the sadomasochistic former lover – shot as a reflection in sunglasses. Then, the camera takes Jean’s POV as he wobbles, loses focus, and falls. The killer and the killed: all are guilty. No one is innocent. And no one can escape this world unhurt. This is further seen in the last shots of the movie, where yet another man makes a pass on the completely shattered survivor, Mrs. Wardh. The cycle continues.

Martino would continue his Giallo cycle the same year with The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail. Gastaldi co-writes, Luciano produces, and George Hilton returns in a cast featuring Anita Strindberg and Luigi Pistilli.

Much of the plot returns as well. A razor-wielding killer, dressed in black is on the loose while a wife is also being investigated for potentially murdering her husband for insurance. Case, similar to Mrs. Wardh, is an Agatha Christie-style thriller with a lot of suspects and an unofficial investigation.

With the plot a similar template to that of Mrs. Wardh, Martino seems more interested in style and structure.  Mood and symbolism easily outweigh the plot, which becomes more and more outlandish as the film proceeds; in one scene, a man pretends to blow himself up in an airplane. Yet under Martino’s direction, the audience rarely has a moment to reflect on how deeply bonkers the whole affair is. He plays the film completely straight and keeps each sequence invigorated with life and energy. Martino has been accused of fusing into the genre he works in. While Martino may indeed remove personal affectation in order to serve the work, there is no denying the sweep and feel inherent in Martino’s films.

One need look no further than The Case of the Bloody Iris, an Ernesto Gastaldi scripted Giallo directed by Giuliano Carnimeo featuring Hilton and Fenech. All the elements of a Martino film are here, except Martino, and it is instantly apparent. The film is directed by numbers; there is nothing new in it. It is Martino without the verve; without his eyes and instincts for sequences that could otherwise be staid and forgettable.

Martino’s follow-up to Scorpion’s Tail, All the Colors of the Dark commences with a long shot of a lake at sunset. Martino evokes “all the colors” by having the day pass into night, refraining from utilizing score and instead opting for the noises of the landscape.

He lulls us into this English countryside right before all hell breaks loose, the peace surrendering to a nightmarish sequence filmed with gelled lenses and jarring lights. A man in drag floats in the air and a pregnant woman bleeds. Then the camera cuts to a negative image: A car drives fast toward a tree. Martino says that he knew for his third Giallo he wanted to leave the world of reality and enter the world of dreams. He had previously only leaned into the surreal; now he would let himself fall. This opening dream sequence is the entire setup for the movie – the trauma of a woman who lost her unborn child in a car accident. She is broken and must rediscover herself. Martino is investigating his characters, not his plot. What results is a nightmarish fever dream in the wrappings of Giallo.

Martino’s Gialli are as well known for their nudity and eroticism as they are for their violence and style, something that does not exactly sit well with Martino when viewing his restored works. During the period, this kind of cinema was contentious with censors. In a form of gamesmanship, explicit scenes beyond what was intended for the motion pictures were created, providing extraneous material for censors to cut, while allowing Martino to deliver his intended product. This explains why certain sequences play without passion, eerie and offkey: They were fodder for censor’s scissors.

Martino would lean into the erotic and carnal with his follow-up, Your Vice Is a Locked Room And Only I Have The Key. Martino’s work was always full of vile characters, but he doubles down in Vice: nearly all the male characters are leering animals sexualizing women. Any could be a killer or rapist. If his previous Gialli alluded to a world where anybody could kill given the proper reason, starting with Vice, Martino suggests that it might just be in the human character to destroy one another.

Vice is darker than his previous pictures. The 2.35.1 aspect ratio of the previous Gialli is switched to 1.85:1 for this insular claustrophobic tale set in the provinces. The camerawork is slick and fluid. The blood is sticky and darker. The sex uglier and sweatier. It is as if Martino felt that death was too easy and fun in his previous films.

Having already tested the boundaries with his previous psychological horror Giallo, Martino again expands the scope and limits of the genre with Vice, which is based on “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe. It is very much a haunted house tale under the guise of a Giallo. Characters lurk around shadowy corners. Rooms are dark, stairways wind up into diminishing shafts of light. A black cat named Satan appears ever-present, meowing and jumping out at people. And somewhere in the chateau is a killer, annihilating all the women in the masochistic writer’s life.

The pace is much more languid, the music following suit. You can feel the long lazy days unfold into dark mysterious nights. The film is in no rush, wallowing in the lives of its despicable characters.  The camera often looms, dollying in towards the cat’s eyes, or the broken wires of a chicken coop, or a doorway. Martino loves the zoom and dolly, perfecting the ominous here, creating real fear in the way he frames the world of these characters.

Like Mrs. Wardh, Vice throws a wrench into the traditional Giallo when, during a killing, the murderer gets whacked over the head and dies. The murderer is revealed in closeup. He was the bookstore owner, a minor character seen earlier in the film.  Like Mrs. Wardh, the killer was incidental. Once the killer is killed, the film turns into a disturbing story of lovers wanting to off one another – a tale of a writer who wants to kill his wife and run off with his niece.

The film ends as cynical and misanthropic as ever. Fenech, playing the niece, attempts to escape on a motorbike and is murdered by oil slick in front of a lingerie highway ad. As Martino states in the film’s Blu-ray, he had her escape only “to die right in front of an image of happiness.” Nobody gets out alive, nobody is happy, and nobody wins.

Like Vice, Martino’s personal favorite, Torso, begins with out-of-focus lovemaking – this time during a photo shoot. The eye of the voyeur leers from these early moments making images out of bodies. In his fifth Giallo, is Martino suggesting that he is tired of shooting bodies naked and mutilated for our sheer entertainment? Thematically, Torso might suggest this—but what is portrayed on screen is nothing if not a doubling down of said elements.

Torso sees Martino further grow out of the genre, and it should serve as no surprise that this is his last “official” Giallo. Gone are his interests in the morals of the decadent urbane and rich, instead he drops the viewer into the world of a group of college students, led by Suzy Kendall. Martino also switches things up behind the camera, keeping Gastaldi as screenwriter, but dropping his stock cast and even his brother as producer.

In a lot of ways, Torso is a much simpler kind of horror film and would serve as a precursor to the slasher boom that lay ahead: a sick individual preying upon women. What was once a McGuffin or secondary plot for other Martino Gialli, the gloved killer is now front and center. Martino is going to deliver the expected, and he is going to go all out.

As such, the film provides much more typical horror. Dust and fog permeate the milky blackness of the night. No longer concerned with point-of-view shots, Martino makes his killer more of a monster – clad in a menacingly old ski mask and often backlit, he is a figure seen but unknown, a menace.

The result is a film of brute force rather than surprise and misdirection. Whereas the last act of earlier Martino pictures would unveil a killer or two and reveal motivations, here he locks the heroine in a flat with the killer. He has the key and it is up to the heroine to survive. The viewer watches the final showdown occur over the last thirty terse minutes of the film. Torso serves as an exorcism of sorts for Martino, a tour-de-force of sex and violence to sate all viewers and leave nothing on the table in the Giallo genre.

He would never return to pure Giallo, but 1975’s The Suspicious Death of a Minor is a mix of Giallo, poliziotteschi, and comedy. Martino wanted to make a detective story he tentatively called “Violent Milan.” After the success of Argento’s Deep Red, the studio changed the title to make it sound more like a thriller.

Unlike his earlier Gialli, this killer does not hide himself. It is in fact our protagonist who is in a mask. For the first forty-six minutes, we are unsure of who he is or his motivations, until he is chased to the police station and turns out to be a cop. Martino even goes meta here: the cop first meets a person of interest, Gloria, at a theatre where Vice is playing. And, of course, people still fall from high buildings, in sequences that must reinforce some auteristic tendency in his cinema. He also brings back the reflections through sunglasses first seen in Mrs. Wardh, a powerfully stylistic tool allowing insight into a character. Glasses play a big theme in Suspicious Death. The cop consistently breaks his lenses in his attempts at justice.

In the end, the antagonist attempts to buy off the cop – “Does the price of spectacles come that high?” he asks. Our cop takes the bribe (it doesn’t pay not to play in Martino’s dark world) and while he can see clearly in his new glasses when the film comes to an end, what kind of world is it to look at? A world of death and darkness. The Suspicious Death of a Minor ends in the darkness of a statement completed. Martino had utilized the Giallo to analyze human nature, and what he was finding wasn’t pretty. Tilting towards the poliziotteschi didn’t offer any kinder insights.

It may then surprise viewers to learn that Martino found subsequent success in sex comedies. From time to time he would turn to genre fare, including 1982’s The Scorpion with Two Tails, a mess of a film, with a script co-written by Gastaldi that Martino now sees as a mistake. The dark well of Giallo had seemed to officially run dry that year, with Argento’s Tenebre and Fulci’s New York Ripper seeming to be the final statements of the genre. Martino also had nothing new to add; it was time to move on.

In recent years there has begun a re-evaluation of his work, seeing them as important works of genre art with his triumphant six-film treatise on man’s inhumanity to man front and center. What does Martino think of this re-evaluation? When asked in an interview for an Arrow Video Boxset, he said, “I think they were better than the critics thought at the time, but not as good as today’s fans think they are.” Which is a fitting summation for a man never concerned with how people viewed his body of work, but only how they viewed the bodies he photographed on screen.

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