Filmed in delicious slow-motion, these erotically charged moments really fuse the film with an intoxicating malaise, as does Nora Orlandi’s sensual and eerie score. ![]() Julie and her former lover Jean (Ivan Rassimov - Torso) are shown in darkness, locked in an unsettling tryst as he slaps her and showers her in broken glass. Martino and cinematographers Emilio Foriscot and Floriano Trenker have created an alluring looking film peppered with strikingly framed and seductive shots – most notably the dream sequences and flashbacks revealing the protagonist's titular vice - she is equally repelled and aroused by the sight of blood. ![]() Memories of Mario Bava’s groundbreaking The Girl Who Knew Too Much are also evoked from the get-go with the introduction of the exquisite Julie Wardh (Edwige Fenech) descending an escalator in an airport. Bucking the trend of setting and filming gialli in Italy, Martino imbues his already ravishing film with an exotic and heady atmosphere, particularly when events move to Spain. The various locations which provide the chic backdrop for the story – Vienna and Spain - lend the film a distinctly international flavour and jet-set feel. The title itself is a riff on the 1946 noir The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, a film thigh deep in its conveyance of the affinity of sex and death a common trait of most gialli. The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh was Martino’s first foray into the dizzily stylish genre and despite the fact that the director is criminally underrated - due in part to the fact that he dabbled in so many different genres, including westerns, sci-fi and comedies – the film stands as one of the finest and most exemplary gialli ever made. Their cinematic equivalents featured titillating scenes of sex and violence in an often blinding amalgamation of exploitation grit and art-house chic. ![]() Giallo (plural: gialli) is Italian for ‘yellow’ and the name originates from the trademark yellow covers of pulp crime-thriller books that were extremely popular in Italy. As the killer continues to wreck havoc, and Julie's affair with George becomes more torrid, it becomes apparent that the victims are all connected to her and she begins to suspect each of the men in her life of being the sadistic maniac… Can she work out who it is before it’s too late?ĭuring the early seventies, just after Dario Argento’s dazzling and justly influential The Bird with the Crystal Plumage sparked a trailblazing trend, director Sergio Martino made several giallo films back to back which would come to represent several of the genre’s most evocative and archetypal entries. In her husband’s increasing absence, Julie finds herself the (mainly) unwilling recipient of attention from her sadomasochistic ex, Jean and her latest suitor, George. The arrival in Vienna of international diplomat Neil Wardh and his wife Julie, coincides with a spate of vicious murders.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |