Eye in the labyrinth (V.O. “L’occhio nel laberinto”)
Italy, 1972
Director: Mario Caiano
Script: Mario Caiano, Antonio Saguera, Horst Hächler
Cast: Rosemarie Dexter (Julie), Adolfo Celi (Frank), Horst Frank (Luca), Sybil Danning (Toni), Alida Valli (Gerda)
Music: Roberto Nicolosi
Story
Young Julie is worried about the disappearance of her boyfriend, psychiatrist Luca. She begins her search and arrives in a village where she asks about him. Nobody seems to know anything, but the inhabitants of the place behave in a suspicious way. And they react in a peculiar way when the girl shows them the photo of the missing person. They all claim never to have seen him, but it is obvious that they are lying. A villager suggests to Julie that she go to a house on the outskirts of the village. There, she suffers a strange “accident” (everything indicates that through sabotage someone is trying to kill her)…
Julie meets an individual in the village named Frank. He invites her to stay in an orphanage that he owns, since there is no hotel in the village. Then, the young woman receives advice from Frank to go to a country village, near a cliff, and which works as a kind of boarding house. Maybe Luca is there. Julie sets off and arrives at the villa owned by Gerda, who runs that pension. The guests are a group of eccentric young people. They all seem reluctant to tell you what they know about Luca, and Julie notices that they have quite a bit to hide.
Meanwhile, Frank (who has a murky gangster past behind him) tries to blackmail Gerda, showing her a painting by one of the children from her orphanage. The painting depicts a bloody murder next to a villa that looks very much like Gerda’s. And the victim is quite reminiscent of the missing Luca…
Commentary
This Italian-German co-production is a story of mystery and entanglement, in which many seem to be involved. The film lacks the structure and rhythm characteristic of the giallo, but it does have quite a few elements of the sub-genre; right from the first scene (the protagonist’s nightmare), in which we see someone being stabbed by a hand without seeing the killer.
The film has a hard time getting started, captivating the viewer and even maintaining its interest (at least during the first forty minutes). The director of the proposal, Mario Caiano, also made “Shadow of illusion”, a thriller with supernatural elements set in Egypt, which is much more interesting. Caiano also directed the comic western “My name is Shanghai Joe” about the adventures of a Chinese man in the Far West.
The main character Julie is played by Rosemary Dexter, who participates in “Justine” (1969), Jesús Franco’s adaptation to the big screen of the play of the same name by the Marquis de Sade. Frank is played by Adolfo Celi, a very popular face of Italian genre cinema whom we saw in the highly recommended “They have changed their face” (Corrado Farina, 1971) and in “The Italian Connection” (Fernando Di Leo, 1972). Alida Valli gives life to Gerda. This actress with a stale aristocratic background (she was a baroness, and her full name was Alida Maria Laura Altenburger von Marckenstein-Frauenberg) participated in masterpieces such as “Suspiria” (1977) and “Inferno” (1980), both by Dario Argento.
The soundtrack is markedly jazzy.
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