Giallo napoletano

Marcello Mastroianni plays a Chaplinesque mandolin player complete with curly hair, funny moustache and silly walk. In order to pay off his fathers gambling debts, he agrees to play a serenade under somebody's window in the middle of the night. Soon he is surrounded by dead bodies and has to figure out who is behind this plot before he is either jailed or thrown out of a window himself. Other suspects include Ornella Muti as a nurse from a mental hospital, Michel Piccoli as a famous conductor and Zeudi Araya as his flirtatious wife.

If this is supposed to be a comedy it literally falls flat. The sight of people repeatedly falling out of windows is not very funny and neither is the completely over the top gangster character in a fur coat. Only Renato Pozzetto as a police inspector who seems to have graduated from the Inspector Clouseau Academy of clumsiness (with a degree in Chief Inspector Dreyfus self-mutilation) manages to conjure up some laughs, but his part does not amount to much.

Director Sergio Corbucci does make the most of the beautiful Napoli scenery but the story takes too many different twists and turns. Particularly unnerving is a scene in which Marcello (in drag) starts to make out with Ornella Muti (who is more than 30 years his junior). A more suitable love interest for him would have been Capucine, who is waisted in the small part of a nun. Eventually the plot becomes so confusing that it takes about twenty minutes of talky exposition scenes to clear everything up.

4 out of 10

This is a wonderful comedy/mystery! Those expecting a serious giallo will be disappointed. However, if you're expecting a comedy with a number of mysterious murders, you will be pleased!

Marcello Mastroianni and Ornella Muti are wonderful as the leads! Ornella Muti is beautiful and mysterious, but this is Marcello Mastroianni's movie through and through. He is incredibly likeable here, and I couldn't help but root for him.

The mystery component was done well. There are a number of murders with people falling out of windows. There is a secret MacGuffin. There is a chase scene. And there is the classic reveal at the end.

I thought both the comic and mysterious aspects were handled/blended well. This film seems to be underappreciated. It's a fun ride!

It's hard to know what kind of audience the people who made this film had in mind. Riz Ortolani's music, Marcello Mastroianni's naive but good-hearted character and the occasional gags seem to suggest a comedy, but the picture isn't funny enough to be a comedy. The plot (which you will need a scorecard to keep straight, and even then you'll probably fail) and the original Italian title seem to indicate a thriller, but it's not thrilling enough to be a thriller. It has a good cast (including Ornella Muti, who is literally "dreamily beautiful" here - you can barely believe that a woman so beautiful is real and not just a dream), but it wastes it in insignificant roles. Out of respect for these actors, and for one funny scene with Marcello and a beefy hood who's forcing him to walk up some stairs, I give this film ** out of 4.

A mixture of comedy and detective story. It's decent but doesn't shine for quality. He jumps between a joke and a moment of tension lightly with a fluid rhythm but I would have preferred a more captivating protagonist.

Corpses fall from roofs and windows raining like cats and dogs ever time a mysterious music floats in the air. Very far upper the small people of a picturesque Naples, illustrious and powerful persons play their deadly game made of cold revenges and foreign millions. For the ones (Victor, Michel Piccoli), it's the polo, for the others (Raffaele, Marcello Mastroianni), it's the polio, as the meeting between the two sacred monsters at the very middle of the film resumes this class issue; but both thus inherit the same incurable infirmity towards life. All the events are very predictable during the whole story, the points that we could have lazily missed being hastily explained at the far end, default shared sometimes by other gialli scenarists. But here we are in full parody, giallo at its twilight seeming to turn around a last time in order to laugh frankly at itself, Corbucci taking the role of the ironic ringmaster as the curtains fall.