Do most people actually have a
favorite color? I know mine seems to
change each time the question comes up (which is not often, I grant you). I mean, I can completely understand having a
least favorite color (olive green aka puke, I’m looking at you), but do folks
really have a color they absolutely can’t live without? I suppose they must, since some people feel
compelled to festoon their entire living space in one pigment (or slight
variations in tone thereof) to the point of obnoxiousness. I know, because I have worked in houses like
that. I have worked in a house where it
was literally floor to ceiling white (we won’t get into additive and subtractive
color theories here) with slight gold highlights. My question would be why? Why would you spend money decorating your
house in a color which will get dirty the instant you breathe on it? Never mind that it looks like a Kubrickian or
Fuestian movie set, it’s completely impractical to me. Between you, me, and the wall, I think this
type of behavior reeks of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Granted, it’s not as harmful as skinning
people, because everyone is only beautiful on the inside or running around in a
red cape killing people, but it’s still damned odd, to my point of view. You don’t have to agree. But you know you do, right?
Kitty Wildenbrück is a young,
pleasant girl who likes to play with her red-dress-wearing dolly.
Her precocious sister Evelyn enjoys
tormenting her sibling, and steals said toy.
Intruding on Grandfather Tobias’s (
Rudolf Schündler) study, the
sisters scream at each other until Evelyn is mesmerized by a rather gruesome
painting on the wall.
Suddenly, the
diminutive brunette is seized with an uncontrollable rage, and she proceeds to
stab the doll to pieces.
Naturally, this
is a good time for Tobias to tell the daughters about the family curse, wherein
the Black Queen kills the Red Queen, because she didn’t want to share her
man.
The Red Queen later returns from
the grave and proceeds to kill six people (wait for it…), with the Black Queen
being the final one (…and there’s the seven).
This curse rears its head every hundred years and is due to occur again
in about fourteen more.
Leap forward
fourteen years, and the adult Kitty (
Barbara Bouchet) is now a
photographer with a successful German fashion company and boinking the openly
adulterous Martin (
Ugo Pagliai).
But soon Grandfather Tobias is found dead,
and a woman matching Evelyn’s description is seen fleeing the castle (of
course, he lives in a castle) wearing a red cape and laughing maniacally.
The Red Queen has claimed her first victim.
Emilio Miraglia’s The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (aka
La Dama Rossa Uccide
Sette Volte aka
The Lady In Red
Kills Seven Times aka
Cry Of A
Prostitute: Love Kills) bears a few non-significant but definitely
noticeable similarities to his
The Night
Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave released the prior year.
Both focus on characters obsessed with
someone they believe to be dead.
The
deceased are both named Evelyn.
The two
films include characters who have been (and probably still should be) locked in
an asylum.
They both involve a mystery
which is both more and less unbelievable than one would suspect at first
glance.
Taken by themselves, there’s
nothing all that outstanding about these similarities.
They are all common facets in the Giallo
subgenre (excepting the name Evelyn, obviously), and Miraglia certainly knows
his way around them.
However, what
struck me the most in this film is how the subgenre’s devices are used in a
dual capacity.
When we think of duality in film,
we expect to be presented with double images as a visual metaphor. Things like mirrors, reflections, and so
forth are typical for this type of motif.
Miraglia doesn’t go that route, though, and I think that’s wise, because
it is a practice which can just as easily tip its hand and give away all of the
story’s surprises (Gialli being films difficult to second guess to begin with). Doubles are things which can work better as a
theme than as a story element. It’s all
in the user.
The main binary idea behind the
film, to my mind, is in a juxtaposition of reality (or cinematic reality, at
least) and artifice. It starts in the
very first sequence. Evelyn steals her
sister’s doll, and because of the influence of the painting of the Black Queen
stabbing the Red Queen (kind of odd in the grand scheme of the plot, but
still…), she starts stabbing the doll with the negligently placed (family?)
dagger. Already the folkloric world has
infiltrated the real world. Tobias
believes in a family curse to an absurd degree, and he even allows this belief
to govern his life and decisions. The
Red Queen is a story come to life, literally enacting a fantasy which is
difficult to put any credence in if we accept that this film is set in the
“real” world. Using montage rather than
any clever compositions, the filmmaker creates a dichotomy between verity and
fiction.
Miraglia contrasts the fictive
tale of the Red Queen and her exploits against the concrete world of Inspector
Toller (
Marino Masé) and his
quest to find the killer in his jurisdiction.
The scenes involving Toller and the police serve two purposes (duality
again).
First, they are exposition to
give the audience background information on characters, primarily, but they
also serve to give a procedural perspective on the case.
Never mind that the police are as ineffective
here as they are in almost every Giallo ever filmed.
Second, they provide a sense of
verisimilitude to the goings-on which are ludicrous on their face.
In my opinion, they also serve to kill the
film’s pacing (a third, most assuredly unintended, purpose).
In the police scenes, we are in a world of
dreary brick walls and hard, flat lighting, just like the world we actually
live in.
Contrast this with the scenes
involving the Red Queen, which are stylishly lit and choreographed and normally
take place away from any semblance of civilization (if you’ll notice, a large
portion of these scenes occur in castles, villas, parks, and empty
streets).
In some ways, it is
problematic to determine which side the filmmaker favors (that’s not to say
that he has to favor one over the other).
After all, the plot revolves around murders caused by a character who
shouldn’t exist, and we know that there is no way the final explanation can be
anything other than mundane.
Yet, like
great Gialli, not only is the explanation banausic but it also contains several
preposterous aspects, so that even when the last shot disappears from the
screen, we’re still left with the struggle between real and imaginary, film and
life, presentation and representation.
We decide.
MVT: The most valuable thing
for me is the mystery aspect of the story.
One of the most enjoyable things about Gialli is in trying to play along
and unravel the mystery before the other characters do. It is usually a hopeless pursuit, as there
will be so many twists and turns and revelations so far out of left field, you
tend to accept them more because of their lunacy rather than in spite of it.
Make Or Break: The Make is
the dream sequence that appears about halfway through the film. It marries real and unreal in the same shots,
summing up the film neatly. It is also
the most stylishly directed portion of the film in my opinion, and puts
Miraglia’s skills behind the camera front and center.
Score: 6.75/10
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