La mort marche à talons hauts

Luciano Ercoli's Death Walks on High Heels begins with the murder of a famed jewel thief on board a train by a balaclava-clad killer with piercing blue eyes. The police suspect the slaying may be linked to a recent heist during which millions of francs worth of goods were taken, and believe that the missing loot is in the possession of the departed's daughter, Nicole Rochard (Nieves Navarro, here billed as Susan Scott), whose life may be in imminent danger. They may just be right, as the beautiful exotic dancer starts to receive phone calls by someone speaking through a voice-changer. After discovering a pair of blue contact lenses at the home of her boyfriend Michel (Simon Andreu), she flees to England with rich admirer Dr. Robert Matthews (Frank Wolff), only to discover that her would-be assassin may still be lurking.

Regularly paired with Ercoli's fellow giallo Death Walks at Midnight, made the following year, Death Walks on High Heels may not contain the same skill for ingeniously-structured set-pieces of Dario Argento or the gore level of Lucio Fulci, but it has in spades that other key ingredient of the giallo - fun. Many of the Italian thrillers to emerge in the 1970's contain a suitably bonkers and convoluted plot, but High Heels can boast one of the best. It's a film in which anyone and everyone could be the one behind the mask, with inexplicable red herrings at every turn and more than a few moments of extensive, but required, exposition. It plays on the camp appeal of the genre, and very much succeeds in doing so.

There's also Nieves Navarro/Susan Scott, who is not only unbelievably gorgeous, but also manages to transcend the usual roles her type of character gets to play in these types of films (eye candy) and stands out as a playful presence. She also delivers a marvellously bizarre performance in the first of her exotic dance shows we get to see it, which she performs in blackface while wearing a trimmed afro wig as Wolff looks on utterly enamoured. It's weirdly endearing, and highlights the void between now and then in terms of our attitudes towards political correctness. If you try and piece the puzzle together yourself, you'll probably leave yourself in a spin. Like many of the best gialli the Italians have to offer, view it with a blind acceptance of anything the film throws at you and it'll zip by in a flash.

A good plot, coupled with good editing, makes for a good noirish giallo. Direction drags at times, hence a lower rating. Woman-in-peril film with all of the standard giallo tropes. Becomes a little surreal once she arrives in the UK. An entertaining Ercoli effort, albeit slow pacing at times.

A jewel thief is brutally murdered on a train by a masked assailant. But when the murderer is unable to locate any diamonds, the murderer immediately suspects that the thief's daughter, a Parisian stripper named Nicole (Nieves Navarro aka Susan Scott), may have the diamonds. Nicole, however, claims to know nothing of the diamonds. After a series of threats, both verbal and physical, Nicole decides to flee France with a man she hardly knows. The pair begin a seemingly ideal relationship in a secluded seaside village. But Nicole is unaware that the killer has followed her to England and will stop at nothing to get his hands on the diamonds.

What a fun Giallo! Death Walks on High Heels has one of the most convoluted plots I've run into - even by Giallo standards. While the movie may lack the quantity of murder scenes found in other Gialli (although at least one murder scene is as violent as they come), Death Walks on High Heels makes up for this shortcoming with more plot twists than a mountain road and boatload of red herrings. It had me guessing (incorrectly, I might add) up to the very end. It's all about the mystery and director Luciano Ercoli skillfully casts the shadow of suspicion on just about everyone in the cast. Much of the movie is told quite nicely in flashbacks with bits and pieces of the story being revealed as each person confesses to what they may or may not have seen. There's even a pair of bumbling Scotland Yard detectives who are (surprise, surprise) actually funny. Overall, Death Walks on High Heels is very well done.

The acting is a notch or two above what I've come to expect in a Giallo. The highlight, at least for me, is Nieves Navarro. She is amazing as Nicole. I didn't think I would ever say this, but I think she might have been capable of challenging Edwige Fenech in my mind as the Queen of the Giallo had she made a few more of these movies. I'm looking forward to checking out more of her work.

As much as I enjoyed Death Walks on High Heels, it's not without its flaws. Chief among them, at least to me, is a "cheat" with respect to one of the murders. I don't want to give anything away, but there is one particularly nasty murder that the killer could not have committed given the circumstances immediately following the murder. Hopefully, with repeat viewings, I can reconcile this point in my mind and just enjoy the movie for what it is.

Finally, and I'm really starting to sound like a shill, NoShame's new DVD is fantastic. I would have never dreamed that a movie like Death Walks on High Heels would look this good. Bravo NoShame!

Director Luciano Ercoli, screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi, and actors Susan Scott and Simon Andreu had greatly impressed me with their 1970 giallo offering, "Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion." Curious to see whether lightning could possibly strike twice for this same team, I took a look at 1971's "Death Walks on High Heels," and it turns out that this latter film is, remarkably, even better than the first. In this one, sexy redheaded stripper Nicole (appealingly played by Scott) gets into major-league trouble when a masked killer with a mechanical voice box starts to target her, whilst looking for some stolen diamonds. You may think that you know where this stylish thriller is headed (and Ercoli DOES direct with style to spare), but trust me, you're dead wrong. A shocking twist of plot around halfway through really does pull the rug out from the viewer's expectations here, sending us into very strange and uncharted waters indeed. Gastaldi has here provided us with yet another ingeniously plotted story that hangs together marvelously (unlike--for me, anyway--Ercoli and Scott's follow-up film, 1972's "Death Walks at Midnight"); composer Stelvio Cipriani has contributed a chic and catchy score; and some great-looking lensing of Paris, London and the English countryside provides some elegant backdrops for the film's very sinister doings. Add some touches of welcome humor (in the film's latter half), one genuinely nasty slice-and-dice sequence for the gorehounds, and some fairly brutal fisticuffs at the film's conclusion and you have one extremely satisfying giallo indeed. Good luck trying to figure out the killer's identity in this one! As icing on the cake, the DVD that I just watched comes to us courtesy of the fine folks at No Shame, who continue to impress with pristine prints of lost Italian wonders, and with excellent subtitling, to boot. Grazie, No Shame!

A famed jewel thief named Rochard is slashed to death on a train. His daughter Nicole, a famous nightclub performer in Paris, is questioned by the police about some missing diamonds but she claims to know nothing about this. Nicole is then terrorized by a masked man with piercing blue eyes who demands to know where her father has hidden the stolen diamonds.

The film is written by no less a figure than Ernesto Gastaldi, who is considered by some to be the father of giallo. The director, Luciano Ercoli, is interestingly perhaps better known as a producer or production designer. He more or less fell into directing as a cost-cutting measure -- one less person to hire. (Tim Lucas compares Ercoli to Brian DePalma... and there is some truth to that.)

Who doesn't love composer Stelvio Cipriani, probably among the top composers in Italy (behind perhaps Ennio Morricone and Goblin for genre film). What we get here is rather sparse (many scenes have no music at all) but the man does what he does well. Not surprisingly, his work has been used by Quentin Tarantino, the champion of such films as this.

A note on the lead actor, an American. Frank Wolff had bit roles in his first two films, Roger Corman's "I Mobster" and "The Wasp Woman". On Corman's advice, Frank Wolff remained in Europe and became a well-known character actor in over fifty, mostly Italian-made, films of the 1960s, including crime/suspense "gialli" and spaghetti westerns.

Director Ercoli obviously does not have the name recognition of Mario Bava or Dario Argento, but he still knows how to make a great giallo (with a dollop of influence from Argento's "Bird With the Crystal Plumage"). A masked and gloved killer, a bit of mirrors, and an unhealthy fascination with eyes -- close-ups of eyes, false eyes, windows that look like eyes. Nobody knows eyes like the Italians!

The Arrow Video blu-ray allows the viewer to watch either the Italian or English versions (because sometimes you need a dub, and sometimes you don't). The disc also comes with: Audio commentary by film critic Tim Lucas, by far the most knowledgeable non-Italian scholar of the Italian genre film. Introduction to the film by screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi. A featurette comprising newly-edited archive footage of director Luciano Ercoli and actress Nieves Navarro. A career-spanning interview with composer Stelvio Cipriani. Italian genre fans (which includes pretty much all horror fans) will love this disc, part of Arrow's "Death Walks Twice" set.