Your Vice Is A Locked Room And Only I Have The Key

Your Vice Is A Locked Room And Only I Have The Key (1972)

Dir. Sergio Martino

Written by Adriano Bolzoni, Ernesto Gastaldi, Sauro Scavolini, loosely ripped off The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe

Starring Anita Strindberg, Luigi Pistlili, Edwige Fenech

As you know, I usually stick to period-accurate posters here, but I love this Arrow Video blue-ray cover too much to hide it from you.

YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY (or, YVIALRAOIHTK, as it’s affectionately known around these parts) has one major thing going for it, and you already know what it is. The best title of any work of art, ever, of any medium, any genre, any era.* You agree on that, I agree on that, let’s move on. But what does it mean, you ask? Wrong question to ask of an Italian movie. The answer is just that it’s a line from THE STRANGE VICE OF MRS. WHARDH (aka BLADE OF THE RIPPER), a 1971 giallo from the same director, one Sergio Martino (TORSO, ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN). What does that have to do with anything? Again, wrong question. The answer is nothing. What’s the right question? Wrong question again. There is no right question. The right thing to do is not to ask questions, and just acknowledge that it’s Italy and go with it.

What you’ll be going with in YVISLRAOIHTK’s case is something of a chimera; part giallo, part Edgar Allan Poe adaptation (particularly of his 1843 short story The Black Cat), part Postman Always Rings Twice erotic noir, and part freewheeling softcore romp. While mixing violence, gothic horror, crime fiction and lurid sex is so common it might as well just be called “Italian cinema,” YVISLRAOIHTK stratifies those impulses apart from each other to a distressing degree, resulting in a rigidly segmented narrative structure that almost feels more like an anthology film than a cohesive story. It’s a bit of an awkward beast, and there are definitely parts which are pretty tedious and plodding, but I gotta admit: the big reveal, when it finally arrives, is surprisingly strong, boasting a cornucopia of pulpy noir twists welded gracelessly --but effectively-- to Poe’s misanthropic poetry of misery. And giallo mainstay Edwige Fenech (STRIP NUDE FOR YOUR KILLER**, PHANTOM OF DEATH) is constitutionally incapable of keeping her clothes on, so once she shows up you’re unlikely to be too bored.

Yeah, you see what I mean.

She doesn’t show up for a surprisingly long time, though, considering she gets top billing. The story is mainly concerned with Irina Rouvigny (Anita Strindberg, Fulci’s LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN), the miserable wife of Oliviero (Luigi Pistilli, THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY, THE SEXORCIST [yes, that’s a real title, and it’s not even a porno***]) who, if I may be permitted to editorialize for just a moment, is a real piece of dogshit. He’s a abusive alcoholic writer obsessed with his dead mother, and spends most of his time holding debauched orgies where he humiliates his wife, racistly molesting his black maid (Angela La Vorgna, EMANUELLE AND JOANNA, a rogue non-Lara-Gemser EMANUELLE movie), nailing his former students, or just generally being a hateful fuckbag to everyone he encounters, with the sole exception of his beloved black cat, imaginatively named ‘Satan.’ When one of the many beautiful young women who are inexplicably having affairs with this irresistible catch of a man is murdered, he’s an obvious suspect, and becomes even more so after the maid is murdered and he gets Irina to help him cover it up.

So far so good for a standard giallo, but things take an unexpected twist near the start of the second act which pushes the plot in an entirely different direction-- especially once Oliviero’s sexually provocative French cousin Floriana (Fenech) shows up, and starts to systematically sleep with every established character and a few newly introduced ones, for reasons which are probably less than honorable. In fact, by comfortably the second half of the film, the most obvious elements of a giallo are entirely gone, replaced first a lengthy section of pretty much just different sex scenes, and subsequently with what turns out to be an agreeably nutso erotic noir with some wild twists, which even manages to generally hold together with some semblance of logic (I mean, compared to other sleazy noirs and giallos, not compared to reality. But still).

The first section --the standard giallo part-- is the worst, with one massively unlikable character, one passive victim, a good bit of cringy racism, and (SPOILER! what turns out to be a completely extraneous red herring killer -- the whole murder plot turns out to be completely unimportant and gets tidily resolved and forgotten about at right about the ⅓ point! END SPOILER). Once Floriana enters the picture, though, things pick up a bit as she brings a large dose of puckish chaos into the proceedings, while we’re left to guess at what game she’s playing. Fenech is certainly most known for being successfully naked, and she does not challenge that characterization here in any way, but I also note that she’s an unmistakably compelling screen presence, and her provocative, nebulous role is perfect for her to show off something other than her body. Her alert, calculating eyes and barely-submerged smirk bring some much-needed vivaciousness to a movie which up ‘til this point has trafficked only in one-dimensional downers.

In case you needed any more hints that this is pretty intense, the subtitles ensure even deaf viewers won't be left out of the crackling suspense:

Even so, I cannot tell a lie, it’s plotless softcore nonsense for a very long time before the other shoe drops, made much worse because the giallo-negating twist is dropped so early, leaving you to wonder “what exactly is this movie about, anyway?” for an uncomfortably long time. It gets there, but it would be better to get there a lot sooner. 96 minutes isn’t absurdly long for a giallo, but it can feel that way this time unless you’re significantly more absorbed in basic nudity than I am capable of being at this point in my life. Still, particularly in the beautiful Arrow Video blu-ray, the film looks nice, boasts a pristinely perfect giallo score by Bruno Nicolai (ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK, EYEBALL, CALIGULA [!]), and features exactly that groovy mix of art and trash that you’d want in something like this. If it reserves most of its eccentricity for the final act, well, it’s an act worth waiting for, right down to the long-simmering reveal of in what possible way Poe could have influenced this freewheeling tale of amoral cousin-fucking. For a normal human being, it would probably be unbearable, but to the giallo faithful… well, you knew you were going to have to see it from the title alone, so the fact that it’s borderline watchable is just icing on the cake. My vice should be obvious by this point, and if YVIALRAOIHTK isn’t exactly holding the only key, it at least manages to force the lock effectively enough.

One final note of interest: Towards the end of the movie as things are spiraling out of hand, Irina walks into a room to discover the word “vendetta” typed over and over obsessively on a typewriter. I’ve never read King’s 1977 novel The Shining, but I just learned from what I can only assume is a meticulously well-researched and soundly-sourced online listical that the famous “all work and no play make jack a dull boy” scene from Kubrick’s movie version is not in the book. Which leaves only one possible explanation: Stanley Kubrick was a lifelong fanatic for YVIALRAOIHTK and basically made THE SHINING as a loving tribute to the beloved original. That’s a fact, kids, write it down. 

*It is also the namesake of my friend Dan P’s anual horror movie marathon, YOUR VICE IS A HORROR MOVIE MARATHON AND ONLY I HAVE THE NETFLIX QUEUE.

**Also producer for the 2004 MERCHANT OF VENICE starring Al Pacino?

***Although from what I can gather online, it is also, like most Italian films, not exactly not a porno. IMDB calls it straight horror though, so we’ll stick with that.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	None apparent
TITLE ACCURACY	Absolutely meaningless, and I love it
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Very vaguely incorporates the one major plot point in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat, but at least it admits this in the credits
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No, unless you count THE SHINING
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Italy!
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Partial giallo, partial noir
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Edwidge Fenech, to some degree her co-stars as well, all of whom had more than a passing association with the giallo genre (though they also worked in Westerns and, uh, “erotic comedies” and stuff)
NUDITY?	Oh yeah
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Totes
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Cat attack, then attack on cat, then eventually counterattack by cat.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	There’s an implication that there may be something ghostly going on, but its not explicit
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Yes, Oliviero peeps at Floriana getting down with some dude in a filthy abandoned hayloft (did people not have beds or rooms back then?)
MORAL OF THE STORY	If you’re going to name your film YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY, I’m going to like it pretty much no matter what.

The Naked City

The Naked City (1948)

Dir. Jules Dassin

Written: Albert Maltz, Malvin Wald

Starring Barry Fitzgerald, Howard Duff, Dorothy Hart, Don Taylor

What we got here is an interesting little crime story from 1948 which isn’t particularly well-remembered today, but stands out as something a bit unique. It’s primarily a film noir from just around the time that genre was starting to crystallize the elements which would eventually become iconic of it. But it’s also sort of influenced by that whole Italian Neo-Realist deal, so along with the gothic cinematography, hardboiled lawmen and femme fatales, you’ve got the self-conscious use of real locations, non-actor extras, and documentary-style narration. Mixing the high stylization of film noir with realism isn’t a perfect fit, but it’s worth a look because this kind of genre hybrid is rare, and particularly since the two genres it hybridizes were both in their infancy at the time. It’s fun to see director Jules Dassin playing around with the rules of genre while those rules are still being formed.

Even though it's all or mostly shot on location, Dassin doesn't miss the opportunity to turn the geography into an expressionistic abstraction. This image has almost a Gustav Klimt quality to it.

The specific plot here isn’t that important. There’s a murder, so a wildly stereotypical Irish detective (Barry Fitzgerald, a green bowler short of a leprechaun*) and his young colleague (Don Taylor, later director of ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES) rope in some suspects (Ted de Corsia, Howard Duff, others) and begin to unravel a fairly mundane web of foul play which eventually leads to lies, clues, exciting chases, and so on. Pretty standard stuff. The fun of it, though, is watching Dassin labor to fit the noir conventions into a world which feels very real and alive. It opens with a typically hollywood bullshit production-code era murder of a young woman, her murderers lurking in the shadows or obscured by giallo hand-cam angles. It’s exactly the kind of thing you’d expect in any film noir, except that it’s cut together with scenes --real and staged-- of other stories transpiring at the same time throughout the city. We see a couple with a young kid, a morning DJ spinning records, even our yet-to-be-introduced protagonist Det. Muldoon eating breakfast. These juxtapositions serve to remind you that these stories extend beyond the narrow confines of our central murder mystery, out into the vast sea of humanity roaring all around it.

The long, slow plod through the false leads, lies, femme fatales, and colorful New York locales that the movie has to inevitably take to draw our trusty lawmen to their quarry has plenty of the usual landmarks of such narrative terrain, but also feels peppered with details intended to flesh it out, make it more real. Eschewing most of the dramatic denouements common to the genre, Dassin and writers Maltz and Wald instead seem to particularly delight in showing their hard-nosed detectives grinding their way through mundane details. Minute clues require hundreds of hours on-foot to follow up on -- at one point, they show dozens of officers painstakingly canvassing every gym in New York City to ask if anyone there remembers a wrestler who liked to play harmonica. Lt. Muldoon’s command of the crime scene clues almost evoke a CSI:1948 fixation on the not-yet-common-practice field of forensic science.

Top o' the morning to ya.

Dassin may have hoped that infusing his Hollywood film noir with little pieces of reality would make it more believable, but actually it has the opposite effect, starkly pointing out how arch and stagey acting and writing were at this point. Occasionally the two world do meet happily --as in the memorable and strikingly shot final chase sequence through the rafters of the Brooklyn bridge-- but mostly the movie’s serviceable fiction can’t stand up to the bursting-at-the-seams liveliness of the reality it’s juxtaposed against. But that’s OK, because it still has the more interesting effect of evoking the story’s tiny place in the vast tapestry of New York City life. Even if this particular story stands out as being a bunch of Hollywood nonsense, it feels vastly richer for taking place in a city where every outdoor frame finds a million tiny signs of multitudinous humanity. If it doesn’t exactly make the details feel more legit, it does blur the lines in a way which was certainly unusual for the time and still feels rewarding today. There really do seem to be, as the closing narration tells us, “eight million stories in the naked city. This [is] one of them.”**

*Fitzgerald, interestingly, is the only actor in history to be nominated for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor for the same role (in 1944’s GOING MY WAY). Shame he couldn’t get nominated for Best Actress too, but I guess two outta three ain’t bad.

** I'd wondered why one of my favorite movies of all time, Spike Lee's SUMMER OF SAM, ends with Spike standing in front of the camera saying this line. Now I know, and I approve wholeheartedly. SUMMER is a very different film, but it has the same broad interest in the city of New York as a living, breathing entity all of it's own.

The Woman In the Window

The Woman in the Window (1944)
Dir. Fritz Lang
Starring Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Raymond Massey, Dan Duryea

What we got here is one of the early Film Noirs to hit (along with MALTESE FALCON, DOUBLE INDEMNITY, and LAURA, to name a few) before the term had even been coined, directed by one of cinema’s all time great masters (Fritz “M” Lang) and starring one of the most iconic actors of the era, Edward G “SOYLENT GREEN” Robinson. That’s a lot of pressure to live up to, and it’s not quite the classic that it ought to have been, but it’s still a damn good reminder of just how good these early film noirs were, before they had exactly solidified into a genre.

    
           Robinson plays Richard Wanley, bespectacled professor of criminal psychology who has just sent his family away on vacation and is, in some small way, lamenting his highly domestic life with his friends over literally dozens of cigars and old fashions. Besotted by a painted image of a beautiful woman in a store window, he ignores the advice of his friends that “adventure doesn’t suit old men” when he unexpectedly meets the young woman in person. One thing leads to another, a wealthy interloper gets murdered with a pair of scissors, and suddenly the professor and his young consort Alice Reed(Joan Bennett) are trying to fend off the police and a mysterious blackmailer before the murder can be pinned on them.

It’s a simple setup, but with a few twists I really appreciated. For one, the whole murder thing was really a misunderstanding. This guy bursts in on Wanley and Reed and Wanley stabs him in clear self-defense. They could have just gone to the police and been done with it, but they’re afraid of the embarrassment of being caught together (they’ve just been sitting on the couch, of course, because this is 1944) and decide to try and hide the body instead. So as the whole thing spins out of control, there’s an unspoken desperation over the fact that now they’ll definitely look guilty even though they’re not.

Another great twist is that one of Wanely’s drinking buddies is none other than the DA who’s investigating the case (Raymond Massey). He happily babbles on about the fabulous new forensic techniques the police have been using, and even takes his friend on a tour of the crime scene itself to show just how much evidence they can glean from a few small details. So you’ve got several great scenes of Robinson trying not to look overwhelmingly sick as he gingerly pries for more details. They keep joking how Wanley perfectly fits the profile of the killer, and it’s hard to tell if they’re trying to make him crack or just unaware of his sudden, profuse sweating.

I also love the relationship between Wanley and Reed. Bennett is, of course, utterly delectable as the femme fatale here, but unlike many actresses who came after her in this mold she has a great sweetness and decency to her. It’s 1944 so they can’t come out and say she’s a prostitute, but come on, you can put two and two together. Even so, duplicity isn’t in her nature, and she and Wanely have a genuinely sweet rapport. It’s interesting because of course we know that Wanley’s a married man, but he seems like he’s definitely toying with the idea of cheating on his wife with this young woman before everything goes wrong. It’s probably the production code that stops him more than the requires of the narrative, but it makes for a surprising dynamic. These two were drawn together by sex which never materializes, but they’re bound together by their unfortunate predicament -- and yet, they end up being very loyal and supportive of each other anyway. The tentative way they grow to trust each other and care for each other in an (apparently) purely platonic way is one of the film’s real graces. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a film relationship quite like it.

 

                                       You're god damn right I would.

But the cops aren’t their only problem. The final piece of the puzzle is the mysterious blackmailer, played by Western staple Dan Duryea. Duryea’s a low-life thug, but a devilishly smart one. He’s physically intimidating and prone to violence, but sharp enough to easily dismantle any attempts to trick him. The way he bemusedly walks around Reed’s apartment, demolishing every argument she makes piece by piece while simultaneously searching the area for material to use against her is genuinely chilling. Duryea’s not an actor I ever noticed in anything else (he’s in SCARLET STREET, CRISS CROSS, and the 65’ FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX too, but I can’t say I remember him in any of those) but he’s dynamite here. He so easily outmatches Reed in every way that he almost has a Hannibal Lecter quality to him, manipulating her for his own amusement as much as for monetary gain. The way he allows Reed to think she’s got the drop on him, only to suddenly turn things around on her, is simply dripping with grinning sadism. It’s pretty awesome.

Not everything is quite as effective as Duryea’ performance, however. Fritz Lang --arguably the biggest luminary here-- is kind of coasting on this one, making a straightforward but not especially stylish picture mostly set in unimaginatively photographed apartment rooms. It’s not bad work by any means, and he and editor Gene Fowler Jr (who also worked with Sam Fuller and John Cassavetes and directed I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF) do successfully cultivate an atmosphere of crushing paranoia, where every side glance seems like it might have sinister implications. But I feel like he could have tried a little harder to make it as visually striking as his earlier work.   

Still, it’s not lack of style which has kept this one from being regarded quite as highly as the legendary company it keeps -- it’s the ending. Lang and writer Nunnally Johnson (THE DIRTY DOZEN, a ton of other legendary scripts) obviously set up the perfect tragic ending, tease you with it, pull the trigger, give you reason to believe they’re going to resolve things, and then fucking have the balls to go all the way with it. It’s a perfect ending. And then out of the blue they rescind it and turn the whole thing into a joke. I’m going to spoil it for you, because better you find out from me and go into this thing knowing what to expect. Basically, after the film ends exactly the way it needs to end, they suddenly reveal it was all a dream. The whole movie. He fell asleep after his friends left, and dreamed the whole god damn thing, even the multiple scenes which he is not present for. He leaves the club to find that, WIZARD OF OZ-style, the characters in his dream were all faces he’d seen on the street. And when approached by a young woman a la the start of his dream, he bolts off accompanied by cheerfully whimsical musical cues assuring us that he’s learned his lesson about not being adventurous at his age.

What a fucking tease. Obviously a concession to the production code to offset any ruffled feathers over the danced-around but still somewhat scandalous sexual nature of the film, but still. It’s so maddeningly counter to all the film’s obvious good instincts that you almost have to wonder if it was Lang’s “fuck you” to the production code, intentionally terrible and obviously tacked on just to demonstrate how their Puritan oppressiveness was stifling great art. Other than that, though, you’ve got a real good one here. Lang, Robinson, and most of the cast would reunite a year later for the probably slightly better SCARLET STREET, but WOMAN IN THE WINDOW stands out as a unique and formative film noir which lacks the rigid genre structures of later entries and thus is full of sublime surprises.