Dagger Eyes (1983)

Original title: Mystère

High class call girl Mystère (Carole Bouquet) keeps up the style and posture of a high fashion model at all times, projecting an aura of impossibly perfect beauty presented with total emotional detachment. Her mantra appears to be that nothing ever surprises her. Indeed, Mystère’s perfect surface hardly shows the tiniest cracks even when a mysterious figure starts stalking her with ambitions on murder.

The killer is not a random maniac, as you’d expect, however. Rather, a long-fingered colleague has more or less accidentally hidden a lighter in Mystère’s stylish handbag she has stolen from a client. In the lighter is a microfilm, and on that microfilm are photos that show the assassin (John Steiner) who shot a politician during a motorcade. The brutally disposed people behind the assassination are in the espionage business, and certainly not to be trifled with.

However, neither is in Mystère, even less so once she teams up with the deeply misogynistic, very subtly named, Inspector Colt (Phil Coccioletti).

The giallo genre hit a rather big snag during the 80s. In part, this was only natural in the somewhat fad and fashion based world of Italian genre movies where yesterday’s hit genre is today’s box-office death knell. Italian filmmaking as a whole started suffering from fewer opportunities and ever lower budgets, with rather a lot of talent making their way to the aesthetically less pleasing but more secure feeding troughs of TV production.

However, I believe the giallo had another problem in trying to update its style to that of the new decade. Visually, the genre had always been deeply informed by pop culture and fashion, but there aren’t that many directors involved in the genre who appeared interested in updating this element of their films as much as it was needed to keep giallos contemporary.

Carlo Vanzina, mostly specialized in directing comedies, demonstrates no problems in that regard here (nor in his later giallo Nothing Underneath) – if there is any film that breathes the idea of the giallo as a version of the thriller and horror genres informed by violence and sex but also by fashion, it is Mystère. Its titular heroine – really embodied by Bouquet more than strictly acted – is presented as the impossible ideal of its time: an always perfectly made-up, cool kind of femininity. Bouquet always looks as if she’s just stepped out of a magazine cover, even when surrounded by people who look perfectly normal, always in control, Hitchock’s everyman protagonist inverted into something new and deeply contemporary - as it will turn out morally as well as stylishly, as befits the decade.

She strides through a plot that enlivens giallo standards by combining them with the conspiracy thriller – also reimagined into something more fashionable and more amoral – through often rather wonderful suspense sequences, shots of great, artificial beauty, and those sudden outbreaks of illogic and goofiness which were always part of this arm of the genre. Indeed, if you ask me, its the inherent strangeness and the disinterest in presenting the world of the film as working like the real world does that always bring the giallo into the folds of horror, or at the very least the cinema of the fantastic, as a sibling of the film noir that’s even more stylized and even less interested in real-world logic.

From this perspective, even the pretty damn silly epilogue of Mystère makes sense as part of the aesthetic package of the film; that it also doesn’t even seem to understand, and certainly not share, the moral outrage of the conspiracy thrillers it also borrows from makes sense: this is a complete product of the 80s.

Nothing Underneath (1985)

Original title: Sotto il vestito niente

Wyoming park ranger Bob Crane (Tom Schanley) has a sudden vision of the murder of his sister Jessica (Nicola Perring). Jessica’s working as a model in Milan, but still, Bob jumps into the next plane to Europe to perhaps save her, hoping for the whole deal having been a premonition. Bob and Jessica are twins, you understand, so twin telepathy is a thing between the two, so why not clairvoyance, too.

In Milan, there’s not a trace of his sister to be found. She simply seems to have disappeared, and nobody seems to think more about her disappearance than that she’s a model being a model. That’s not enough for Bob, of course, so he starts an investigation of his own. He also pretty quickly manages to convince police commissioner Danesi (Donald Pleasence) that there’s an actual criminal case to investigate here. And this even before more models of Jessica’s acquaintance get murdered and/or disappear.

A model-based mid-80s giallo shouldn’t really be my cup of tea, threatening the dreaded mix of pure sleaze and boring modelling scenes (nearly as boring as underwater scenes in most movies), but Carlo Vanzina’s Nothing Underneath turns out to be a pretty great giallo from the late phase of the genre I often feel empty of anything deserving even the word “good”.

The film of course isn’t sleaze free, but Vanzina does manage to hit the sweet spot where the titillation doesn’t harm the rest of the movie – some of it is even pretty important to the plot – but there’s enough on screen to sell the film through it. The handful of modelling sequences aren’t superfluous filler either, but indeed part of the plot and so get a pass from me, too.

Of course, not mishandling these aspects doesn’t make a film necessarily a good one, it just provides it with the opportunity to be one. The director does grip this opportunity pretty hard, though, presenting a giallo that is – if you can overlook or better yet enjoy the very silly set-up – actually pretty effective as a mystery, setting up Bob’s investigation so that he is always involved in something fun and interesting that also provides clues to the life and death of his sister.

The climax does of course descend back into classic giallo madness, but it does so with a lot of style, a reveal that probably was pretty surprising in 1985 (and might read as offensive to some today, but then what doesn’t), and the kind of macabre craziness at least I am bound to enjoy.

On the way to the climax, Nothing Underneath (a title meant ironically, by the way, even if it sounds pretty softcore) sets some stylishly staged murders, and quite a few side characters for Bob to interact with. Bob, as is tradition, isn’t a terribly interesting guy, so the film uses him as a foil for the rest of the cast, and in that role, he’s really rather effective. And then there’s the film’s secret weapon: beloved Donald Pleasence in his Italian phase, when he brought class and quite a number of different ironic looks to all kinds of continental European movies that probably should have been below his dignity. Pleasence appears to have a whale of a time with his Italian accent, his smartarse dialogue (yes, the dialogue is often pretty good here, too, quite against the rules of the giallo), even giving Danesi quite a different body language to many of his usual characters, including quite a bit of very un-British touching of shoulders. That the cop is neither unlikeable nor an idiot nor the killer is another interesting change for the genre, but then the script (by the director, his brother Enrico Vanzina and Franco Ferrini) really does seem quite a bit more interested in what’s underneath the surface of its characters than many films of the genre.

In the case of Nothing Underneath, this approach works very well, turning it into a film that’s really good at doing all the things you want and expect from a giallo, but also diverging from them in way that enrich instead of weaken it.