Yellow: le cugine

Marta Garbini (Lisa Seagram), a premature spinster, has spent her life caring for her late grandfather so imagine her shock when she finds out the old man bequeathed his entire estate to her cousin Valentina. The newlywed Valentina and her husband Pierre are as free- spirited as Marta is uptight but when Pierre makes a play for her, Marta responds with long pent-up passion. Valentina photographs them in a compromising clinch and laughs it off but later that night, after a fight, Pierre runs off and Valentina chases after him. When she's found dead the next morning the lovers suddenly find themselves free to cross and double-cross each other 'til the bitter end...

As its title makes clear, YELLOW is a "giallo", of course, but not the kind usually associated with the popular horror sub-genre. The Italian giallo burst upon the scene practically full-blown in 1964 with Mario Bava's BLOOD & BLACK LACE and disappeared just as quickly until bouncing back with a vengeance in 1970 with Dario Argento's THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE. But what happened between 1964 and 1970? A lot, if you consider the spate of films from directors like Umberto Lenzi and Lucio Fulci that have come to be known as psychological or "bloodless" gialli. Films like ORGASMO, SO SWEET SO PERVERSE, and ONE ON TOP OF THE OTHER were forerunners of today's "erotic thrillers" and depended on amoral themes, devious schemes, plot twists, and plenty of sex to carry the day. YELLOW, made in 1969, is one of the last of its kind before Argento changed the genre's face and the nudity (both male and female) is only briefly glimpsed but the same can't be said for product placements like Marlboro and J&B whiskey which is how a lot of these films got financed. There's also some pot and a bit of free love but the body count's low and spaghetti western director Baldanello isn't in the same league as Lenzi or Fulci who might have made something of this cold-blooded tale. The score's terrible, too.

One-time Hollywood sex bomb ("more bomb than sex" according to her critics) Carroll Baker turned "bloodless" gialli into a virtual cottage industry in the late '60s and YELLOW's lovely Lisa Seagram picks up the torch but, unfortunately, she didn't keep it long. Sexy Seagram was a raven-haired, green-eyed starlet who decorated any number of U.S. TV shows throughout the '60s (BURKE'S LAW, BATMAN, HONEY WEST) but, like Baker, she relocated to Italy at the end of the decade to star in feature films of dubious quality. Lisa soon retired but according to her IMDb trivia, she teaches acting in L.A. these days (!).

Marta is a very sexually frustrated spinster who has spent her life looking after her grandfather. The old fella has just popped his clogs and when the funeral procession is about to leave the villa for the cemetary, Marta's cousin Valentin shows up in an open top car, blaring music. If you've guessed that Valentina is one of those obnoxious, late-sixties, free living, smelly hippies, you'd have guessed right. Valentina is also married to the handsome Peter, who right away starts giving Marta the eyeball.

Valentina right away starts rubbing Marta's reserved lifestyle in her face (setting off a memory of what might be Marta's only sexual encounter) and things get even worse when at the will reading, Marta learns that Valentina gets the lot! Soon, the villa is filled with smelly, dope-smoking hippies and after Valentina and Peter have a blazing argument, everyone wakes up the next day to find Valentina dead...

Yes, it's one of those psychological gialli that's low on gore, not bad on nudity, plus has plenty of mind games on the go. Your enjoyment of this really depends on how much you enjoy the more famous Orgazmo or So Sweet, So Perverse. Although the plot is more or less the usual, director Baldanello does throw in some weird visuals, like Peter watching the will reading through the bottom of a glass, or when the camera suddenly takes on the persona of a fly, flitting between Marta and Peter. Peter also likes to talk to an old portrait in the villa too, and for added weirdness, we get a guy performing a never-ending sitar solo in the middle of the film.

We also get a Colombo style cop in there too, for good measure, and things, once again, come together nicely in the end, with an added twist that isn't so generic.

Two cousins opposite in all way are reunited for the funerals of their wealthy grandfather Bernardo. The one, Marta (the American actress Lisa Seagram, for the opening of her second-part career in Italy), an "icy princess", traditional, catholic and full of dignity, turned into a spinster after a love pain in her youth, has taken care of the grandfather and lives within the countryside in the luxurious family mansion full of precious things, "a perfect morgue". The other, Valentina (Caterina Barbero, Raptus), is a young bohemian fashionable and full of life socialite, who comes with her new and Parisian well-named husband Pierre Cheri (Maurizio Bonuglia, Top Sensation), an artistic sculptor who wants to restore a statue of a "drowned angel" found there in a fountain, and who gets drunk declaiming Saint Francis's Canticle of the Creatures.

The wise grandfather, in order to preserve "the family unity" and "the integrity of the estate", has given in his will the entire property of the valuable villa to Valentina, but its usufruct to Marta: they are thus trapped to live together. But their two universes seem definitely too incompatible. Marta for her part is jealous of her cousin's joy and love, and on her side the spoiled Valentina sees her freedom lost through this issue. But fortunately one of the both is to be killed at the old mill of the domain for the very middle of the film.

How should the surviving one be able to handle the new situation? How would react Pierre, a playboy in fact quite "cold and ruthless", in order to protect his own interests? Will the old gardener Romolo (Attilio Dottesio, A tutte le auto della polizia) tell something about what he could have seen? What shall be towards this family "above all suspicions" the position of the local authorities, whose motto seems to be "surtout pas de zèle"? The commissioner Saccara (Renato De Carmine, Sette Scialli di seta gialla) decides to come to lead an inquiry, in the harassing and tenacious style of the then very recent Columbo character.

"Yellow", with its inheritance plot and its familial hatred mood around a murder mystery, could have been thus an interesting "giallo", but it lacks of thrill and anguish, and turns more into a familial drama mixed with a police inquiry. In fact the director, passed the murder moment climax, had no more seen well what to exactly do further with the ideas of his plot, and the movie tends to loose the right rhythm and nerves to go on efficiently until the end. (Viewed in an Italian 1h30 version.)