The main interest of the movie is that it mixes reality and fiction, around the real and eponymous Number One nightclub scandal, which involved giallo stars like Philippe Leroy or Elsa Martinelli, whom name even appears on one of the old newspaper articles displayed at the beginning of the film (see the online archives of L'Unità for historical details). And after a set of black and white pictures of seventies jet-setters, a slide adverts that the "chronic of reality" gives now place to "imagination and fantasy". But the plot, lacking of a strong scenario, stays clumsily cramped around the false suicide of the young socialite Deborah (Josiane Tanzilli posing as the real Talitha Pol) with Nembutal (the medicine also involved in the death of Marilyn Monroe), with a stolen paintings traffic background.
Facts are related through short flashback records but parts of the jigsaw painfully tend to fit one another, and we are lost among a pyramidal scoundrels organization, self-said "civilised people, not gangsters", and a blend of fuzzy smuggles of all kinds. The traditional genre movie scenes succeed in a rather scattered way, the cemetery, the racetrack, the photo studio, the burglary, the gang rape, the shoot-out, but "knowing the truth" leads nowhere and as Massimo, a fashion photographer turned into hoodlum (Guido Mannari), says, we stay "mixed-up in this worthless story", while witnesses are eliminated through a "suicide pop up". The police (Renzo Montagnani, L'arma l'ora il movente, and Luigi Pistilli, Gli assassini sono nostri ospiti) as usual "blunders in the dark", like we do, and instead of "breaking the wall of silence" collapses against a "wall of rubber". Failing to solve the case, they are reduced to philosophically quote that "democracy is salved for it is better to have ten guilty men go free than one innocent in jail".
Logic shall be respected: the pretty girls remain victims (the French actresses Claude Jade, La ragazza di via Condotti, and Isabelle de Valvert, Prigione di donne), the henchmen get punished (Howard Ross, Ragazza tutta nuda assassinata nel parco, and Bruno Di Luia, Profondo rosso), and the powerful bosses (Renato Turi, Cadaveri eccellenti, and Chris Avram, Rivelazioni di un maniaco sessuale al capo della squadra mobile), can rest unworried, only threatened by complacent reporters flashes, allowing the feast to go on.
