Death Laid An Egg

Murder Most Fowl

Death Laid An Egg
aka La morte ha fatto l'uovo
Italy/France 1968 Directed by Giulio Questi
Nucleus Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: More or less full story spoilers... not that this film is really about story.

Okay, it’s been a couple of decades since I first saw Death Laid An Egg, so I’m revisiting it now on a nice Limited Slip Case Numbered Edition Blu Ray from Nucleus, in it’s full length cut and with a beautiful new transfer. Yay!

 The film starts off, in the version I watched this time around, with Bruno Maderna’s unusual, strident score over a credits sequence which shows various cells growing in a chicken embryo. We then get in to the main movie, which I’ll lay out very briefly here because, frankly, it’s a very simple story and it’s not the movie’s strength.

We have a married couple... Marco played by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anna played by Gina Lollobrigida. The two run a chicken factory where a scientist is doing experiments on some of the eggs to try and produce boneless chickens... at one point in the movie and much to Marco’s disgust, he succeeds in breeding headless, wingless chickens. Staying with Marco and Anna is Marco’s cousin Gabrielle, played by Ewa Aulin, who is having a secret affair with him. Marco, unknown to pretty much everyone, likes to hire prostitutes in a nearby hotel and stage fake, brutal murders with them... his personal kink. Meanwhile, Gabrielle is plotting with a new PR man at the company to bring down Marco and Anna so Gabrielle can inherit the family wealth. They murder Anna towards the end of the movie but Marco, finding the corpse and thinking he will be blamed (which is the plan all along), takes it to the factory to dispose of it in a pulveriser (something which his poor doggy fell into earlier in the picture). However, he forgets he sabotaged the machinery so Ann would fall in when he planned his own murder of her so, instead of disposing of the body, he accidentally falls into the machine and dies. But with the body of Anna found on the premises where Gabrielle and the PR man are... they are rightly blamed for the murder after all. The end... so yeah...

One murder. Hardly any dwelling on the plot and a strange sub-plot element of an old friend of Marco’s, suffering from mental trauma is also thrown into the mix... the first thing which strikes me about this film is that, for a ‘rediscovered giallo’, well, this really isn’t a giallo. This has only one actual murder and few, if any, of the tropes which the giallo was defined by. Bava had made a few proper gialli before this but the genre hadn’t exploded in popularity yet and wouldn’t for another year, until Argento’s The Bird With The Crystal Plumage was released into cinemas (reviewed here).

However, stylistically, it’s really quite special and does it’s own thing. I’m not exactly the biggest fan of Questi’s Django Kill! but this film is a different story. It’s almost an expressionist film in some ways and the plot and story has very little interest. It’s all about the collision between stylish visuals and sound... perhaps one of the things which actually could be said to be something in common with a giallo but, this is also really its own thing here.

The composition on a lot of the shots, especially the interior scenes, are all based on blocks. In some scenes they are big upright verticals split with horizontal rectangles and then diagonals coming in from the top or bottom of a shot to bring in a kind of exaggerated single point perspective... which looks as fantastic as it sounds. Then, all of a sudden, the director will cut to a scene where we are in, say, the big area where the chickens are being fed, which is a big silo utilising an abundance of diagonal struts delineating actors in their specific space on screen and moving around and through them as various diagonals overlap visually in the frame. It’s pretty much good eye candy (which, yeah, is basically what gialli are all about for me... although just this element alone doesn’t make a giallo, it’s just good direction and cinematography).

The camera movement is also quite special and, in a lot of sequences through the movie, he will have shots moving at similar speeds where the camera is dollying or panning left and then cut it to a shot panning in the other direction and repeat this a few times... so the montages of moving camera elements can be quite unsettling at times. This is taken to a nice ‘coda’ moment where that aesthetic is followed in just a single shot, where a man paces back and forth in front of the camera but the camera is panning back and forth at the same speed in the opposite directions to the ones the man is walking in. It certainly put a lot of speed in a shot and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody pacing, filmed in quite this way but, that initial shot almost informs the way the shots are cut together at odds throughout the picture.

Another amazing thing he does, in one sequence where Marco and a friend go for a walk... is just to have their voices on the soundtrack as we are presented with a montage of shots of various people walking in the streets... however, the shots are quite out of focus and it’s more an impression of people rather than anybody you could pick out. And then, suddenly, we are presented with a more traditional shot of the two men walking in close up, carrying on their conversation in sharp focus but, again, with all the people moving around them in the street seen in exactly the same level of blurriness as the prior shots... a wonderful effect which both brings you back to the characters while allowing you to suddenly accept the prevalence of the out of focus street. Wonderful.

And then we have what I can only think to call the ‘crash montages’. There are a few moments in the movie where the already aggressive editing style skyrockets into overload and the audience is bombarded with short, sharp edits all splashed together in a hard to follow and disorienting manner. The first time I really noticed this was when Marco is driving and we are suddenly smashed into loads of quick close ups of advertising signs... while Maderna’s crazy scoring strives to punctuate every little quick edit to heighten the sense of visual agitation. Another similar scene suddenly assails us when Marco and Gabrielle are having a conversation in their vehicle about a car accident in Marco’s past and we are suddenly hit with an unhinged motion montage of various shots of the car accident played out to punctuate the memory in a kind of extended, hyper-real visual echo of the incident. It’s astonishing stuff and is the kind of sequence which leads me to the idea that this film is pure expressionism, along with the film’s focus on Marco’s growing paranoia that... “something’ is going on” and the almost bláse attitude to the machinations of the plot, such as it is.

And that’s what I got out of my revisit to the hugely entertaining Death Laid An Egg. It’s very poppy, trippy and a joy to watch as the director has fun playing with the visual language of cinema at the expense, perhaps, of the weight of the story but, honestly, who cares about the story aspect of a movie (I’ve never really understood this propensity of modern Hollywood directors to pander and honour the story... often to the expense, in my mind, of the real art of the moving image). Questi doesn’t seem to have a problem with it here and, fortunately, with great actors like Trintignant and Lollobrigida, he really doesn’t need to either. This film is always going to be a definite recommendation from me and I hope the various boutique labels keep releasing and rescuing beautiful Italian movies like this. Grab it while you can.