BY HANK REINEKE
The 1972 Giallo Who
Saw Her Die? (Chi l'ha vista morire?) was Aldo Lado’s second film as
director, his first being Short Night of
Glass Dolls (1971). That film was a
somewhat less-than-traditional Giallo, photographed inexpensively behind the
Iron Curtain in the cities of Zagreb and Prague. Short
Night of Glass Dolls was a complicated film that told its story in backward
fashion, much in the style of the celebrated playwright Harold Pinter. It was also an unusual Giallo in the sense
that its overtly exploitative sex scenes were unevenly mixed with the genre’s
level of on-screen violence than European movie-thriller fans had come to
expect. Lado had entered into the film
business only some five years earlier, serving as the assistant director on a
handful of Sergio Leone-inspired Spaghetti western knock-offs and a couple of action
films, before getting the opportunity to work with the famed director Bernardo
Bertolucci on the auteur’s
Oscar-nominated production of The
Conformist (1970).
In the featurette “I Saw Her Die,†Lado offers a
compartmentalized history of popular Italian cinema. The eighty-four year old asserts that the
first wave propagated three identifiable trends: first the Maciste era (or sword-and-sandal “Peplums†as they are referred Stateside). These films were followed by the era of the Spaghetti
western, with the Giallo serving as this first wave’s bookend. Both Lado and principal screenwriter
Francesco Barilli on Who Saw Her Die?
were children of cinema’s first generation, having been exposed to the same
diet of black and white motion pictures and having read many of the same novels. There was little differentiation between the
classics and the pulp paperback. Lado
was in love of mysteries but preferred the hard-edged novels of Mickey
Spillane’s Mike Hammer to the drawing room nicety whodunits of Agatha Christie. Barilli was a fan of the pulp mysteries and
adventure tales by the likes of Edgar Wallace. Of their filmmaking contemporaries, both men expressed admiration for
Roman Polanski’s stylized work and this is reflected on the film they would
collaborate on.
In Who Saw Her Die? George Lazenby is cast as Franco
Serpieri, an artist who keeps a small sculpting studio based in Venice. He has been experiencing a welcome measure of
recognition due to a recent and critically acclaimed exhibition of his work in
Beirut. His success is partly the result of the machinations of his agent, the
powerful and commanding Serafin (Adolfo Celi, Largo of Thunderball fame). Serpieri’s
young, red-headed and freckle-faced daughter Roberta (Nicolette Elmi) is
visiting with her father from her home in London.
We learn the sculptor is apparently estranged from his daughter’s
mother Elizabeth (the beautiful Swedish actress Anita Strindberg). In a decidedly grim scenario that bristles
even today, the doomed child’s visit is short lived. The girl’s sudden disappearance and subsequent
murder throws Serpieri into depression and a relentless desire to bring the
guilty party to justice. Despite the
film’s morbid subject matter, the storyline soon evolves into a conventional
whodunit of sorts. There are any numbers
of shady characters introduced within the film’s running time: several seemingly
plausible suspects and red-herrings bring attention to themselves with expressionless
eyes or incautious suspicious mannerisms. Most moments are initially perceived as innocent, but now appear unseemly
in light of the tragedy.
Though not for every taste, this is a well-constructed
film and it’s likely George Lazenby’s best film after On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969). Though an Italian production, the
English-speaking Lazenby was brought on at the suggestion of producer Enzo Doria,
primarily due to the actor’s recent attachment with the James Bond
franchise. He was, in Lado’s unapologetic
estimate, “A good name to attract easy money.†In an eleven-minute featurette featured on Anchor Bay’s DVD issue of Who Saw Her Die? (2002) (not ported over to this new Arrow
edition), Lado would recall, “George Lazenby had already played the role of
James Bond and acquired a certain international fame. This was useful for the producers… He had
deep issues with (Cubby) Broccoli and the entire James Bond organization… In
the end, he didn’t make a lira. He was
going to the casinos, staying in big hotels, and nothing was free. At the end he was shown the bills and
everything had been deducted from his pay… he had made nothing. His only dream was to return to his homeland
of Australia, buy a boat and sail off alone. He was happy that [his work on Who
Saw Her Die?] would earn him the money to buy the boat.â€
Lado’s memory is partly in error here, as Lazenby, an
admitted novice boatman, had already sailed with his wife Chrissie into Italy,
via the island of Malta. The
adventuresome couple eventually arrived, according to Lazenby’s recollection,
in “Fiumicino, at the mouth of the Tiber outside Rome.†The pair had arrived on
a catamaran purchased on the dwindling reserve of earnings from the Bond
film. As late as October 1973, Lazenby
told one journalist that the paycheck cashed from the “little art film†shot in
Italy - along with the remnants of his Bond money - allowed him and his wife to
survive on “five pounds a week.†He
confessed he had no yet had the opportunity to see the final cut of Who Saw Her Die? but was nonetheless
thankful for the gig as “it helped keep us for fifteen months on the catamaran,
and that kind of life brings sanity.â€
If the Bond producers had weathered the well-documented “deep
issues†with the actor, Lado in contrast could only recall one uncomfortable
exchange with Lazenby. Lado was proud of
the fact he had never experienced problems dealing with any of the actors he
had worked with previously… but admitted that dealing with Lazenby was somewhat
of an initial challenge. “He was used to
all that James Bond entourage, that luxury environment,†the director recalled,
and this was a low-budget production that allowed for few indulgences. Lazenby may have been James Bond, but he was
not yet an established international movie star of Sean Connery’s stature, and
even Connery’s post-Bond films had not been box office smashes. Indeed, other than OHMSS, George Lazenby had only one other film on his résumé, and that was an unsuccessful one at that.
Lazenby’s first post-Bond film Universal Soldier (Cy Endfield, 1971) had been partly financed by
Lazenby and then sold, for percentages, to Britain’s Hemdale Film Corporation. The entertainment company puzzled how to
market this shot-on-a-shoe-string, mercenary-turned-hippie- pacifist
production. Though Universal Soldier was eventually released to theatres in the UK in
February 1971, it was a commercial failure. Hedging its bets, Hemdale chose to absorb their losses by releasing the
film as an under-bill to a more commercial property, the political
suspense-thriller Embassy, based on
the best-selling novel by Stephen Coulter. Directed by the Gordon Hessler, Embassy
would feature an all-star cast that would include Richard Roundtree, Max von
Sydow, Ray Milland, Broderick Crawford, and Chuck Connors.
The film had some defenders. John Russell Taylor, the film critic of the
London Times, wrote that while Universal Soldier was undeniably
“muddled†and “not exactly a missed masterpiece,†the film was stronger than
the more formulaic Embassy as it
“tries to say something about war, arms sales, and the limits of cynicism.†Taylor’s view of the film was far more
generous than David McGillivray of the UK’s Monthly
Film Bulletin. That critic unkindly
wrote off Universal Soldier as little
more than a “shallow piece of social drama,†and mercilessly dissected the
screenplay’s “apparently improvised dialogue.†Especially galling to the MFB
critic was the plot device that allowed for Lazenby’s immoral, cynical
mercenary soldier to undergo a “sudden and dramatic ideological conversion
[…] largely attributed to the influence of one insipid yoga fanatic and a
couple of outbursts from Germaine Greer on the topic of arms to South
Africa.â€
It’s likely neither Lado nor Doria had even screened Universal Soldier, the film having disappeared
from sight almost upon release. On the
set of Who Saw Her Die?, the director
had more a more logistical issue to contend with. Lado, a native Italian whose second language
was French, spoke little English. So, to
communicate with Lazenby, the filmmaker – who maintained that a director’s
responsibility was to “stage†a film as one might a theatrical performance –
would pantomime what he desired the former James Bond to convey as the cameras
rolled. Following production, Lazenby bragged,
“For the Italian film I had needed to learn the language,†but if this was the
case the lessons didn’t go so well. The
actor dialogue’s is dubbed throughout the film in both the Italian and English-language versions of the
film.
The dubbing was becoming something as a trend. Though he had been famously dubbed as “Sir
Hilary Bray†for parts of OHMSS, he
was also - mostly - dubbed in the course of the three Kung Fu films he would
appear in for Raymond Chow’s Golden Harvest Productions following his move to
Hong Kong in 1973. In any event, Lazenby
appears in Who Saw Her Die? much as
he did as the mercenary Ryker in Universal
Soldier, almost unrecognizable as the previously dapper James Bond. For starters, the actor’s hair is shoulder-length
long, and he now sports a thick brown moustache. When Lazenby removes his shirt during one
early scene he appears well beyond thin – he’s alarmingly lanky and skinny. This was likely the result of his and his
wife Chrissie’s conversion to vegetarianism in 1971.