The Sweet Body Of Deborah

Resurrection Shuffle

The Sweet Body Of Deborah
aka Il dolce corpo di Deborah
Italy/France 1968
Directed by Romolo Guerrieri
DemCan Films

Warning: Strong spoilers right from the outset.

I suspect a lot of people would dismiss The Sweet Body Of Deborah as something which isn’t really a giallo these days. After all, many of the visual tropes that are associated with the genre... the black gloved, black hatted killer lurking in the shadows, the string of violent killings etc, are not on display in this movie. Heck, of the four deaths in the movie... well, there’s actually only one, when justice is served (although it seems like there are four... I’ll come back to that in a little while). There isn’t even a good old J&B sighting either. However, I can certainly see why this is considered a giallo because the ‘gaslighting’ style conspiracy between various ‘people you least expect’ in the film is almost a cookie cutter template for some of the more famous gialli from a few years later. The ones I’m thinking about could almost all be re-workings of the same ideas inherent in the plot of this film and directors like Sergio Martino certainly seemed to dip their toes into this kind of convoluted but domestic plot line in his films. Which is no surprise when you look at the credits of The Sweet Body Of Deborah and see that young Sergio was one of the producers and his brother, Luciano Martino (who also wrote a few gialli in his time) was one of the co-writers of this film. So, yeah, I’d certainly go with the consensus on this one that it’s a giallo... even if the German DVD cover of this one proclaims it a Krimi (which it also could be, in a way, I suppose).

Okay, the story such as it is, is all set in the honeymoon of newlyweds Deborah (played by Caroll Baker, probably the most prominent of the imported ‘American giallo queens’) and Marcel (played by Jean Sorel, who has been in a fair few of these himself). They spend their time between Switzerland and France as they holiday but, their first night in Geneva is marred by the discovery that Marcel’s ex-lover committed suicide the year before and many of his friends... including one played by, um, ‘giallo king’ Luigi Pistilli... blame him for her death. And then some gaslighting starts going on as traces of his ex-lover involving piano music, lipstick smeared cigarettes and other ‘out of place’ elements alongside threatening phone calls, follow Deborah and Marcel on their honeymoon... leading to the uncovering of a conspiracy and also the presence of yet another ‘suspect’, something the standard giallo always has in abundance. In this one it’s the swarthy ‘neighbour’ next to a rented villa, played by another giallo king, George Hilton.

The film is nicely shot with the director using various parts of the screen to highlight different characters in different split sections of the frame and the editing is pretty good in this one too... although the initial scenes of the two lovers driving into Geneva is a little bit scrappy in both framing and cutting, it has to be said. There’s some nice editing and coverage in a nightclub in this too, where large black and white comic book panels of characters like Barbarella, Batman and Galactus adorn the walls and bursts of comic strip onomatopoeia are flash cut in between shots, it's kinda interesting... and I think shows a culture willing to embrace that form of entertainment way before the English speaking countries started to recently lionise its own rich, comic book inheritance. 

 It’s all glued together nicely by Nora Orlandi’s somewhat syrupy score and it’s that element that got me watching the picture in the first place. She also scored my favourite giallo, The Strange Vice Of Mrs. Wardh (reviewed by me here)... which, of course, could also be a close relation to this film in terms of certain plot elements... that one IS directed by Sergio Martino.

The convoluted twisting of this thing is not something I can totally experience with the same kind of rawness that the first audiences to this film experienced. After all, I’ve seen the legacy of this movie offering similar or even more convoluted alliances of double crossing villains so, yeah, I was always going to be suspicious of various main characters here. So when the ‘assumed deceased’ character of Suzanne (played by another genre favourite, Evelyn Stewart) turns up alive and well... and plotting bad things for her successor, Deborah... well, yeah, I can’t say it was an unexpected plot twist. Indeed, I suspected each and every death in this film... except for the very last one, where one of the three main antagonists (not counting two possible counter-antagonists) is shot dead in the presence of the police... to be a possible fake and, yeah, that’s pretty much how it played out... 

Suzanne’s suicide, never seen and only lied about by others, is a facade to facilitate the preliminary gaslighting. Luigi Pistilli’s death is deliberately staged for the deception of another character and, when one murder is actually set in motion, as the title character is tranquilised and has her wrists slashed to bleed out under the guise of a suicide... well, George Hilton’s ‘knight in shining armour’ character comes through and rescues/hospitalises her before any damage is done. So yeah, like I said, not a typical giallo in some ways but, people who know many of the gialli which started dribbling out two years after this film, when Dario Argento popularised the genre beyond expectations, should see a marked similarity for sure.

And that’s really all I’ve got to say about The Sweet Body Of Deborah other than, I can see that it’s much more in keeping with the literary conventions of the Italian giallo than perhaps predecessors such as Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much (reviewed here) and Blood And Black Lace (reviewed here). I think films such as this, A Black Veil For Lisa from the same year (review coming this week to this very blog) and a fair few others are kind of a partial ingredient... a missing link if you like... between what Bava and Argento were peddling to an unsuspecting public and what that product evolved into after that, during the 1970s. So, at the very least in terms of lineage, if you’re a giallo watcher then you should probably check this one out.