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.â€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.â€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€
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 soldierto 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.
So this film’s back story is almost as interesting as the
film itself.Co-screenwriter Francesco
Barilli’s featurette segment on the Arrow Blu-ray (“Once Upon a Time, in
Veniceâ€) is as informative and as entertaining in its commentary as Lado’s but
in an entirely different manner.If Lado’s
octogenarian recollections are spiced with warm nostalgia and occasional
laughter, Barilli’s are more intense.Barilli’s personality seems almost the opposite of Lado’s, not warm but brusque
and opinionated.He’s an irascible sort who
delightfully shares his strong opinions regarding the film industry, cinema as
art, misogyny, and how marriage and social relationships poison friendships and
opportunities. The original story for Who
Saw Her Die? was conceived by Barilli alone, on spec, although he would
bring on a frequent collaborator, Massimo D’Avak, to assist in composing the
screenplay.
Nearly a half-century following the release of the film,
Barilli – while acknowledging that Lado did a commendable job of adapting his original
thriller as written to the screen – expresses some resentment he was not chosen
to direct as he had been promised.According to Lado, producer Doria did suggest the directorial job might
go to Barilli, but that offer was rescinded when the producer began the task of
fund-raising the project.Doria went to
the German investor and un-credited producer Dieter Geissler who, intrigued by
his original story and screenplay, said he’d finance the film with the caveat
that Lado be chosen to direct.He told
Barilli flatly that his decision wasn’t personal, only that he already had
engaged Lado in a three-film contract, so the task of bringing the story to the
screen would be his.Distributors were
already showing interest in obtaining the rights to Who Saw Her Die? due to the surprising success of Dario Argento’s
1970 giallo The Bird with the Crystal
Plumage.
Barilli, a painter and interior designer by profession
both prior to and following his career in the movie-business, remains aggrieved
by the missed opportunity.He admitted
to having left behind a “messy film career.â€He was of the opinion that his strong talent and interest in visual
design and painting - along with his uncompromising desire to stage and dress a
scene appropriately - was likely to blame.Such attention to detail, he contends, was the antithesis to the
interests of a film’s producers and investors.It was Barilli’s belief the people who financed films cared little for cinema
as an art form.Most producers were only
interested in getting footage into the can as economically as possible. The writer mused, with a mixture of
resignation and bitterness, that the film business is, ultimately, “a job for
the rich…I understood this too
late.â€He was an artist, not a
businessman, and that was his Achilles’ heel.“When I make movies, I paint,†he tells Pulici, unapologetically. “When I paint I make movies.â€He did fault Lado’s direction in one regard,
suggesting that his visual sensibilities would have been more effective in
bringing a sense of mysteriousness to the film’s Venetian locales.
Perhaps.But it’s
hard to imagine to what degree Barilli could have improved on Lado’s visual cloak
of fog-bound, gloomy mysteriousness.Principal photography on Who Saw
Her Die? was scheduled for November and December of 1971, the winter months
when Venice is near-deserted, gray and gloomy.It was Lado’s opinion that the winter signaled a “most magical†time since
Venice was calm and quiet with few tourists about.Most filmmakers, not surprisingly, tend to
photograph the captivating cityscape of Venice from off shore, usually with the
sun glistening over the Campanile di San Marco – the view
you’d see on any pretty picture postcard of the city’s skyline.But Lado’s intimate familiarity with the less-photographed
backstreets of Venice is one of the film’s strongest assets.
The film has a claustrophobic feel, the city’s famous
canals present on screen but treated as no different or special a passageway
than the labyrinth of narrow red brick alleyways and weathered corridors, gray
stone courtyards, crumbling masonry and railed terraces.The atmosphere throughout is grim and
oppressive, the sun mostly appearing as a low lying orange-brown circle
diffused by heavy clouds.It rains on
and off throughout the film.Even the
usually busy tourist tables on the esplanade of the Piazza San Marco are
rain-soaked and eerily vacant.Lado
expertly captures the morbidity of the film’s storyline via the brilliant
cinematography of Franco Di Giacomo, who effectively translates the drab
dampness of the Venetian winter via his lens.
The production memories of Lado and Barilli are better
recalled than those of actress Nicoletta Elmi.This is hardly surprising as the actress had not yet turned eight years
old when cast as Roberta Serpieri.She
was, for a twenty-year period, a steadily working actress in the Italian film and
television industry, having almost effortlessly made the transition as a child
model for fashion magazines to film work.Lado would affectionately describe Elmi as the “baby Liz Taylor of
Italian gialli.†Interviewed by Davide Pulici at her home in June 2019, the now
fifty-five-year-old actress admitted her memories of being on set of Who Saw Her Die? were minimal, that any remembrance
of her association with the project were recollected only in “fragments.â€â€œI don’t have a clear memory of [Who Saw Her Die?],†she recalls, no real memories.†She mostly recalled the
scene where – always under the watchful eye of her doting mother or an appointed
chaperone - she played with a gaggle of other children (the offspring of the
director’s relatives) in a gloomy Venice courtyard.
Elmi would liken her work on this and other films as akin
to being on a “short holiday,†fortunate to visit interesting locales between
school sessions. The only times the child
actress would regard acting as a dreary “job†was the few times she was offered
roles requiring her to speak English.In
these instances it was compulsory to work with a tutor who could guide her
through necessary pronunciation lessons.The actress did recall George Lazenby as a “nice, caring person,†one of
the few adults on set who would interact and play games with her when she was
bored and the cameras were not rolling.
Elmi also recounts that, as a child actress who would
famously appear in a number of R-rated, sexually explicit and often violent
horror and Giallo films, she never
had the opportunity to see most of the films she had made until she came of
age.Though she was rarely involved in
scenes where on-screen violence was committed, she is still best known to
international film audiences through her memorable turns in such horror films
as Dario Argento’s Deep Red (1975) and
Mario Bava’s Baron Blood (1972). She
admitted she generally doesn’t care for the horror genre as intense films make
her uncomfortable.
Arrow Video’s Blu-ray release of Who Saw Her Die?, as previously mentioned, suffers no shortage of
bells and whistles.The film is
presented here in its original aspect ratio of 2.35:1, 1080p resolution and
with 24bit mono soundtracks.The
supplements included here are generous, extensive and illuminating; combined
they provide a comprehensive background history on the making of the film and
on other tangential subjects.The Blu-ray
includes both the original Italian language track as well as the
English-language dub.The supplements
includea quartet of substantial
interview featurettes: “I Saw Her Die†(Aldo Lado), “Nicoletta, Child of
Darkness†(Nicoletta Elmi), “Once Upon a Time, in Venice†(Francesco Barilli),
and “Giallo in Venice,†(an interview with author and critic Michael Mackenzie).There’s also an optional commentary track by
Troy Howarth.The set also includes the film’s
original theatrical trailer and a stills gallery. My only regret is that the review copy sent to
Cinema Retro was a pre-production
disc sans accompanying booklet.If the
booklet is of as high-standard as the rest of this package, I’m certain it’s nothing
short of a corker.