Blood Stained Shadow

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: gialli / In category: 2 of 10 / Overall: 13 of 100

‘Blood Stained Shadow’ was the second of two gialli directed by Antonio Bido, following ‘The Cat’s Victims’ (a.k.a. ‘Watch Me When I Kill’) and represents a quantum leap from its predecessor’s staid pacing and uninvolving mystery. Set – like Aldo Lado’s ‘Who Saw Her Die?’ – in an almost permanently fog-enshrouded Venice, ‘Blood Stained Shadow’ exploits its setting to good effect and values atmosphere and tension above gore and grand guignol set pieces.

Academic Stephano d’Archangelo (Lino Capolicchio) returns to his native Venice for some R&R – and, having struck up a rapport on the train with attractive fellow passenger Sandra Sellani (Stefania Casini), maybe something more – but his arrival home is met with truculence from the locals, suspicious looks, and a reunion with his brother that is overshadowed by strange events which soon lead to murder.

Stephano’s brother, Don Paolo (Craig Hill), is a priest whose actions on behalf of his parishioners have brought him into conflict with Count Pedrazzi (Massimo Serrato), a suspected paedophile. Pedrazzi attends séances conducted by a medium (Alina de Simone) who is using information gleaned at these events for personal gain.

Don Paolo witnesses the medium’s murder one stormy night, but by the time he raises the alarm the killer has fled. In trying to raise the alarm, Don Paolo finds himself alone in the house, both his brother and the sacristan Gasparre (Attilio Duse) having inexplicably chosen this most inclement of evenings to take themselves out on errands. The following morning, Don Paolo receives an anonymous note warning him to keep quiet. Other notes follow, their contents increasingly threatening.

‘Blood Stained Shadow’ is a veritable blood stained fishpond, a shoal of red herrings darting across the screen at any given moment. Is it coincidence that Don Paolo’s misfortunes begin the moment Stephano arrives back on the scene? What’s the story behind Stephano’s never-fully-explained medical condition? Why are his “attacks” accompanied by flashbacks, and what are these flashbacks to? What’s the secret that connects the local doctor and a midwife who behaves suspiciously? Why is someone willing to kill for a painting by Sandra’s bed-ridden mother-in-law and what does the canvas symbolize?

Bido plays with genre tropes and expectations just as deftly as he plants/obfuscates the clues. There are roving POV shots, not always from the killer’s perspective. There’s a pounding Goblin-like score clearly inspired by ‘Deep Red’ (‘Blood Stained Shadow’ was made a year after Argento’s masterpiece) that doesn’t always mean a fatality when it kicks in. Stephano’s love of art recalls Capolicchio’s character in Pupi Avati’s ‘The House with the Laughing Windows’, while the importance of a painting is a giallo standard perhaps most famously exemplified by Argento’s ‘The Bird with the Crystal Plumage’.

There are a couple of week spots: Capolicchio’s performance is as plank-like an unemotive as it was in ‘The House with the Laughing Windows’, while Casini – an intriguing actress who’s worked with Argento, Marco Ferreri, Bernardo Bertolucci and Peter Greenaway – is wasted in a nothing role. On the plus side, Craig Hill is excellent, investing Don Paolo with gravitas.

The murder scenes, while secondary to Bido’s penchant for suspense and misdirection, are (pardon the pun) well executed, particularly an extended set piece featuring two boats and a hapless individual who finds himself plunged into the dank waters of a canal.

For a city that subsists almost entirely on tourism, a city so frequently cited as a romantic destination, cinema has done Venice few favours: it’s a place of decaying grandeur against which von Aschenbach dies in ‘Death in Venice’, an appropriately sorrowful backdrop to a psycho-sexual study of loss and impending violence in ‘Don’t Look Now’, a place in which one becomes both physically and emotionally lost in ‘The Comfort of Strangers’, and the stalking ground of black gloved killers in at least two gialli. See Venice and die.

The House with Laughing Windows

Painter Stefano (Lino Capolicchio) is invited to a church in a run-down village in Italy's Po Valley to restore a fresco by the late Legnani, a local artist notorious for his degenerate lifestyle and descent into madness. The fresco depicts, in gruesome detail, the suffering of St Sebastian, and a graphic sepia-toned opening credits sequence suggests that it might have been painted more from life than from historical record.

Solmi (Bob Tonelli), the nattily dressed dwarf who serves as the mayor, views it as a significant work of art destined to put his town on the map; it is at the recommendation of Antonio (Guilio Pizzirani), a former colleague of Stefano's sojourning in the country during his recuperation from a nervous breakdown, that he engages Stefano to undertake the work.

Stefano arrives, however, to find Antonio spooked and jittery, dropping allusions to a horrific story behind Legnani's painting and rambling about a "house with laughing windows". Seemingly mistrustful of the townsfolk, he promptly clams up, promising to discuss things privately with Stefano later. Before this conversation can occur, Antonio is killed. The local police write it off as a suicide. Meanwhile, Stefano has begun receiving phone calls warning him away from the fresco; encouraging him to leave town.

Dedication to the work and a developing romance with fellow outsider Francesa (Francesca Marciano) - a schoolteacher transferred there from another town - persuade him to stay. When he is asked to leave his hotel room to make room for a large tour group - a reason he quickly discovers is a lie - he is offered a room by Lidio (Pietro Brambilla), an edgy young man who helps out at the church, at his mother's house: a rambling old building in the middle of nowhere.

Lidio isn't the only strange character Stefano meets: all of the villagers seem to be in on something dark and unspoken, from the police chief to the mayor's alcoholic driver Coppola (Gianni Cavina). Imagine the pastoral milieu of the Sicily-based scenes in 'The Godfather' repopulated with the residents of 'Twin Peaks', with perhaps a dash - in its final stretch - of 'The Wicker Man'; such is the atmosphere of Pupi Avati's slow-burn giallo 'The House with Laughing Windows'.

Disturbed by noises from the upper storeys when the only other resident is Lidio's bed-ridden mother, Stefano comes to the painfully slow conclusion that something is amiss.

Painfully slow is a criticism frequently levelled at the film as a whole, along with bland hero and weak ending. And I have to agree, to a greater or lesser degree, with all three brickbats. However ... the slow pacing is offset by the creepy atmosphere Avati conjures from the first frame and sustains effortlessly. Cinematography and canny choice of locations give the film a striking visual quality. There are any number of shots that could be clipped from the film as a single frame, enlarged, framed and hung on your wall as a piece of art, utterly compelling images even if divested of a narrative context.

The other criticisms aren't so easy to get round. Stefano ranks as one of the least pro-active characters in cinema history, wandering through the film like a narcoleptic. Capolicchio's performance doesn't help - you'd have to spend a week at a lumber yard to encounter something more wooden. The much-maligned ending, whilst conceptually appropriate, is arrived at by two plot devices that are clumsy at best and embarrassing at worst. They bely the 'artistic' quality Avati seems to be striving for.

'The House with Laughing Windows' (or 'La Casa dalla finestre che ridondo', to quote its indigenous title) thus occupies an uneasy middle ground between art film and genre film. The script leaves much unanswered, and while some of the resulting ambiguity is effective, the overall feeling is one of being sold ever slightly short. Still, it remains genuinely unsettling, and made yours truly jump more than once; Avati's direction is often stylish without being intrusive; it's not your typical giallo and is worth seeking out as one of the more cerebral examples of the genre; and the title's a belter.