And Bernard may be trying to solve a crime, but plagued as he is by daydreams, flashbacks and hallucinations, he’s not the most reliable of narrators, and the absence of transitions to these scenes sometimes means that we have work as hard as Bernard in figuring things out. The idea of the uncertainty of memory had already been used in The Girl Who Knew Too Much and made a return in a few later films courtesy largely of Dario Argento, but becomes the dominating element here. Two killings, one in 1933 and one in 1946, occurred the first was of Emma De Ventura, a maid who worked in the hotel Il Centrale and was actually considered to be suicide for many years, the second was of a lady named Caterina Finazzer, but I can’t really tell you any more details because the film does use some of the facts even if it’s not at all a conventional murder tale. It’s based on the 1962 novel La donna del lago by Giovanni Comisso, which was itself based on a real murder case that took place in the village of Alleghe. Before properly finding its foot, the genre would be taken down some different paths, but I don’t think that I’ve seen any as unusual as The Possessed. Yes, Mario Bava had already made The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood And Black Lace which together form the basic giallo template, but their effect wouldn’t truly be felt until the giallo boom of 1971. Their rather experimental creation is not at all a typical giallo, but then it was made before the genre would really kick into gear. Loenida Barboni’s work on this film is simply stunning and is perhaps the most important of the ingredients directors Luigi Buzzoni and Franco Rossellini use to create the dreamlike state which their main protagonist inhabits. Bernard becomes curiouser and curiouser, but how much of what this haunted man sees takes place in the present or even in the real world….Įvery now and again one comes across a film shot in black and white that would lose much of its effect in colour, and the most recent of these for me is The Possessed, whose generic, off-used export moniker is rather misleading and shouldn’t have replaced its far more evocative original title The Lady Of The Lake. Soon after that, a photograph reveals that she was pregnant, and when Enrico’s son Mario and his wife Adriana return from their honeymoon, Adriana silently walks around the lake at night. However, his friend Francesco tells him that she committed suicide by ingesting poison and slitting her own throat. Enrico and his daughter Irma, but Bernard is most interested in their maid Tilde who he become infatuated with a year before.
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Does this set deserves its title, or are there much better examples Arrow could have included?īernard, a well-known writer, arrives in a small Italian town near a lake to spend his winter holiday and hopefully get going on his new book which will be inspired by all the times he stayed at a certain hotel, going all the way back to his childhood. I was eager to check out two gialli I’d never come across before and rewatch the one I’d already seen. GIALLO ESSENTIALS : On Blu-ray 25th October, from ARROW VIDEOĪrrow have bundled together three earlier releases for this new box set. Starring: Dalila Di Lazzaro, Franco Nero, Peter Baldwin, Ray Milland, Salvo Randone, Silvia Monti Devine, Ernesto Gastaldi, Flavio Mogherini, Franco Rossellini, Giovanni Comisso, Giulio Questi, Luigi Bazzoni, Mario di Nardo, Mario Fanelli, Rafael Sánchez Campoy The Fifth Cord, The Possessed, The Pyjama Girl Case ( 1965, 1971, 1977)ĭirected by: Flavio Mogherini, Franco Rossellini, Luigi Bazzoni