"It's midnight let's throw the corpse" is an old giallo led in a sarcastic way like Arsenic and Old Lace. The film opens with a snoring policeman sleeping instead of watching on his screen a jewelry robbery by three masked characters. The police is as usual inefficient and it won't appear anymore. But a first surprise occurs when the robbers undress after having escaped: they are three young women, in fact three sisters of the aristocratic but broken family Davilas.
Sibilla (Luisa Rivelli, Crimine a Due), Elena (Lucia Modugno, La Ragazza che sapeva troppo) and Micaela (Gia Sandri, I due Mafiosi) want with this 500 million booty to save the family mansion which is to be auctioned for taxation, because, Noblesse Oblige, they don't want "a financial shark or a cinema actress" to grasp it. But they don't seem to be the only ones who want to seize the loot, for a mysterious killer starts to prowl around their safe, which each one of them possesses one of the three compulsory keys, like in the later Una Iena in cassaforte.
From whom should come the threat? From Dennis (Bruno Piergentili aka Dan Harrison, I Diamanti che nessuno voleva rubare), Micaela's boyfriend, an abstract artist who considers Renaissance painter Andrea del Sarto to be too colorful, and who desperately needs money to set up his own exhibition? From Ernesto (Cesare Gelli, La Notte è fatta per rubare), Sibilla's husband, liking erotic books and seeming not very smart but who could hide his game? From Gianni (Valentino Macchi, Tre Notti Violente), a friend of Dennis who often seems drunk but claims to be "stronger than the daemon"? Or more plainly from one of the three sisters who would not be quite ready to share the hoard?
They convene to the villa their German receiver Van Himst (the American star Gordon Mitchell, Bersaglio Mobile) who, after the usual plane landing scene, is to bring them the cash. And everybody gather to this closed circuit place, including the stylish bohemian friends of Dennis and Micaela, lured by "an exceptional treasure hunt". In a mood of joyful disorder corpses start to pile up under the invisible hand of the killer, who uses the very all means of death including gaz, poisonous darts and ropes. Fortunately, as Sibilla is a ceramist, she happens to have in her "den of a modern witch" a useful oven to get rid of cumbersome bodies, under the tune of Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette, which Hitchcock has already used for his part.
And in this Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians atmosphere, we gaze with our "wild eye", as quoted by a conceptual cinematographer guest of the party and fond of André Breton's surrealism, at the smoke which flows out the fatal workshop to see if the elected one of this "grotesque macabre" game could be, after the canonical and waited shower scene, finally chosen. And the deadly party should go on until the complete "exhaustion of the characters" for the final lot of the coveted jewels. (Viewed in Italian 1.66 aspect ratio 1h29 version.)
