Perversion Story

Pervertigo!

Perversion Story
aka One On Top Of The Other
aka Una sull'altra
Italy/France/Spain 1969
Directed by Lucio Fulci
Mondo Macabro Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Warning: Spoilers right from the outset...

Una sull'altra was Lucio Fulci’s first crack at a giallo and it was released in various versions internationally under that title and, also, its English translation, One On Top Of The Other. The name doesn’t do much for me but it’s a ‘typically giallo’ title and I like it much more than his intended title, which is what it has now become better known as and which Mondo Macabro have released it as, in its longest cut... Perversion Story. This one makes even less sense as a title, especially if you are taking the first word to talk about some kind of sexual aberration because that’s really not depicted here at all either. But whatever it’s known as, in whatever territory, it’s still the first of Fulci’s gialli and also, as it happens, a first time watch for me.

My personal response to the films of Lucio Fulci is pretty hit and miss. Zombi (aka Zombi 2 aka Zombie Flesh Eaters, reviewed here) grew on me since my initial viewing but, generally, I am less appreciative of his horror movies than some of the other genres he’s worked in... although I do quite like City Of The Living Dead (reviewed here) and The Beyond (reviewed here). I much prefer his gialli with Lizard In A Woman’s Skin, made a couple of years after this movie, being one of the greats of the genre as far as I’m concerned and... probably my favourite movie from this director (there is a very old review on this site but it's from when I was first starting out and I think I need to write a new one at some point).

This film is very much the kind of giallo which eschews the black leather gloves and multiple murders of some of the post-Bava and soon to be post-Argento explosion of gialli onto the screen... it’s much more in keeping with the style of the mystery meaning of the genre, so comparable to such films as the ones made by the likes of Carrol Baker, Jean-Louis Trintignant and, of course, Jean Sorel who stars in this one opposite two iconic Italian actresses.

The film starts off well with various shots showing off its San Francisco setting and a burst of Riz Ortolani’s jazzy and enthusiastic score. We then find that the sensationalist Dr. George Dumurrier, played by Sorel, is trapped in a loveless marriage. Blimey, how many gialli is this guy going to find himself in where his home life is just falling apart like this? His wife, played by the late, great Marisa Mell, looks completely different to the kind of look I would normally equate her with. And I was supposed to think that... Fulci is very much playing games with the audience as much as Sorel’s main protagonist. Mell is his wife Susan, suffering from very bad asthma and not happy with hubby’s various, secret exploits away from home. One such exploit is the film’s other leading lady, whom Sorel is having an affair with, erotic photographer Jane, played by the great Elsa Martinelli.

Sorel has to leave his most recent business/pleasure trip when he finds his wife has been killed. Not only that, she’s taken out a two million dollar insurance policy and he now gets the pay off. So it all looks pretty good for him and Jane... until, that is, an anonymous tip off leads them to a sensational performer/escort working at a strip club. She’s the dead spit of his recently deceased wife... or is she. At this point, I found I was right in believing the movie to be a sideways remake of Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo... not just in the main plot device but also, of course, right down to the San Francisco setting. I say sideways because it turns out the ‘recently deceased’ wife really is the sex worker, planning the demise of George and working in cahoots with his hateful brother and her housekeeper (played by Faith Domergue, of such wonderful fifties science fiction films such as This Island Earth and It Came From Outer Space, reviews of both coming to this blog at some point soonish), to inherit the clinic and be free to go off with the brother. Things get convoluted, George ends up on death row and the movie has a couple of trick endings in terms of the right people being brought to justice... which I suspect wasn’t always the case but, yeah, I’ll talk about parts of the ending in a minute.

There’s a lot of good stuff going on here and although the cinematography is maybe not as creative as a lot of the gialli being made around this period (including Fulci’s later ones), it’s more than competent and it has a nice bright colour palette, enhanced by Ortolani’s wonderful score. There are some nice little flourishes which make for some good eye candy though... well, apart from the natural eye candy of Marisa Mell in her birthday suit, that is. When George and Jane have sex, Fulci cuts in a lot of shots of the couple from underneath where the mattress should be... shot through a red filter or red creased cloth (or both) to simulate the top sheet... presumably the two performers were filmed from under a glass sheet too. Later, when Jane tries to seduce Marisa Mell’s stripper personae to gain information, the floor becomes the thing Fulci is shooting up from... or rather, under it. Which is a nice stylistic choice for certain scenes here.

There are also some nice looking sets and costumes in this. Not least of which is the milieu of The Roaring Twenties strip joint, in which some of the girls wear revealing bras of two black leather gloves holding each breast, the nipples peeking out from the centre. Actually, thinking about it, those bras are pretty much a metaphor, almost, for what the giallo genre was about to become in its most popular form so, yeah, interesting costume choices to say the least.

Just a word now about the ending. The last 20 minutes are a protracted build up to Jean Sorel’s wrongful demise on death row and Fulci milks the suspense in a prolonged series of scenes, as George’s lawyer is still trying to prove his innocence, for all his worth. Then, two things happen which make me think the film has a different ending to the one originally intended. Firstly, the brother and George’s wife are both shot dead in a bar by an ex-client of Marissa Mel’s escort persona. Secondly, the ID of the victims leads to a stay of execution and George is released... but we don’t see that part. The last five minutes is perhaps reminiscent of Psycho, where Simon Oakland famously filled the audience in on what was really happening. A news reporter tells the story of the last moments up to and including the stay of execution and subsequent release of the main character over the space of a few minutes. Then the film ends... we never see Sorel’s character after the point where he is expecting to die. I can only conclude, from this strangely impersonal ending, that the innocent George was originally destined to die in the gas chamber and, perhaps, somewhere closer to release, the producers changed their mind about letting an innocent character go to his death. I don’t know whether the death of the brother and wife were always in there or just inserted to strengthen the ‘crime doesn’t pay’ message at this point but I strongly expect the stay of execution was an addition... and maybe Sorel wasn’t around to do any pick up shots by this point. I guess I’m not going to know the answer to that (or maybe I will when I finally get around to reading Fulci expert Stephen Thrower’s book on the subject but, for now, that’s my theory and I’m sticking to it).

All in all, I’d say I had a good time with Perversion Story (aka One On Top Of The Other) and it’s been given a nice transfer from Mondo Macabro here. It’s not near the top in my ranking of Fulci gialli but it’s certainly better than some of the horror films I’ve seen him make and, yeah, I’ll definitely be watching this Vertigo wannabe again at some point. Nice little movie, great score.... glad I picked up the CD which has been spun many times.

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.