All the Colours of the Dark

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: gialli / In category: 1 of 10 / Overall: 4 of 100


Check out the image above. Off-kilter composition, bottle of J&B, Edwige Fenech. Yup, we’re in giallo territory.

‘All the Colours of the Dark’ is one of five terrific gialli Sergio Martino directed between 1971 and 1973, following on from (and reuniting the stars of) ‘The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh’ and the magnificently titled ‘Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key’.

Fenech stars as Jane Harrison, the increasingly harassed and distressed partner of London-based pharmaceutical rep Richard Steele (George Hilton). Still plagued with nightmares about the murder of her mother many years previously, Jane is also recovering from the trauma of a car accident (an incident for which it seems Richard is blameworthy) which caused the miscarriage of her baby. Richard favours prescription drugs to treat her nervous condition, while her sister Barbara (Nieves Navarro, appearing under her Susan Scott pseudonym) is keen for Jane to enter therapy with the psychiatrist for whom Barbara works.



To make matters worse, the piercingly blue-eyed killer from her dreams – a man with rather phallic tendencies to knife-wielding – seems to have stepped living and breathing into the real world. Jane’s already fragile condition deteriorates as he begins stalking her, following her on the Underground, keeping sinister vigil outside her apartment building.

Martino establishes a ‘Rosemary’s Baby’-style atmosphere of mounting dread from the outset, probing his heroine’s borderline hysterical mental/emotional state as effectively and unremittingly as Polanski did in his classic of the macabre. The influence of ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ is writ large, but it’s to Martino’s credit that ‘All the Colours of the Dark’ comes across as more than just a knock-off or a cash-in.

Martino gets the ball rolling with a zonked-out dream sequence structured around quasi-Freudian imagery that mirrors Jane’s state of mind. Many more dream/fantasy/paranoia sequences will follow, Martino segueing between Jane’s inner world and the (supposedly) real one with such sneaky aplomb that, for much of the film’s hour and a half running time, he maintains ambiguity as to whether everything we see is simply a product of Jane’s troubled mind. (Lucio Fulci achieved a similar effect, albeit using a different cinematic bag of tricks, in ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’ made the year before.)

If proof of Jane’s mental turmoil were required, it’s provided by the scene on which the film entire hinges. Panicked after a perhaps-real-perhaps-imagined appearance of the stalker, Jane seeks solace from her alluring but mysterious neighbour Mary Weil (Marina Malfatti).



Jane: I'm sure someone is chasing me, someone coming very deep from my childhood. Do you believe in that sort of thing?
Mary: I believe in a lot more .. I had my problems, too. Not as serious as yours, but I got rid of them.
Jane: How?
Mary: Do you know what a black mass is?
Jane: You're scaring me.
Mary: It makes sense to be afraid sometimes. You have to find it and it'll disappear.

At this point, ‘All the Colours of the Dark’ could easily have lurched into the realms of the risible, the carefully established atmosphere and giallo tropes swamped by this explicitly horror/supernatural-themed narrative development. And, it has to be admitted, Martino’s staging of the black mass/orgy does come close to parody. Bruno Nicolai’s wordless vocal score is unintentionally hilarious while actor Julian Ugarte’s portrayal of the cult leader is less high priest than high camp.

Yet somehow Martino manages to fuse the disparate elements into a decently-paced and never less than entertaining hybrid. He makes good, non-touristy use of the London locations and conjures as many striking compositions and memorable set-pieces as you’d expect from a giallo, culminating in a vertiginous rooftop chase.

Fenech turns in a full-throttle performance as a woman in meltdown. Navarro and Malfatti add to the glamour quotient, even if their performances prove somewhat by-the-numbers. Hilton is dependable, but badly dubbed in the English language version. (Subject of which: the Shriek Show DVD release, while presenting a beautiful anamorphic transfer, suffers from murky sound that renders entire chunks of dialogue nearly indecipherable; fortunately, an Italian language/English subtitles option is available.)

‘All the Colours of the Dark’ arguably stops short of being one of the all-time great gialli, though. It flags a little towards the end. The fantasy vs. reality riff is recycled perhaps once too often. The eleventh hour inclusion of an exposition-spouting police inspector is arbitrary even by giallo standards. A just-as-eleventh-hour subplot involving an unexpected inheritance threatens to steer the mystery from the esoteric to the mundane. More annoyingly, a flashback to a crucial but initially overlooked clue requires a cheat on Martino’s part.

Still, these are relatively minor gripes and gialli often rely on endings that are abrupt, arbitrary or outright baffling (even such richly atmospheric, slow-burn entries as ‘Who Saw Her Die?’ and ‘The House with the Laughing Windows’ register high scores on the WTF-o-meter. ‘All the Colours of the Dark’ sees its prolific and versatile director on good form and gives the achingly gorgeous Fenech one of her best-remembered roles.

I am murderously yellow: a guide to recognising the giallo

You can’t really talk about Dario Argento without using the word ‘giallo’, so for the benefit of the non-aficionado, a few words of explanation:

Giallo is Italian for ‘yellow’. Historically, this refers to the distinctive yellow covers of pulp novels published by the Mondadori company in the 1920s and 1930s. These were the equivalent of American hard-boiled fiction (indeed, many were translations of works by the likes of Edgar Wallace), and proved so popular that other publishing houses rushed into print similar titles, retaining the lurid covers. In the 1960s and 1970s directors like Mario Bava, Sergio Martino and our current man of the match Mr Argento crafted cinematic equivalents – some of them adaptations of the original novels.

For an in-depth but always accessible examination of the giallo phenomenon, with plentiful examples under review, check out Giallo Fever.

For my part, perhaps the quickest introduction to the giallo is a simple list of some of its defining characteristics:

1. Black gloves. Along with identity-concealing trenchcoat and fedora, this is the de rigueur fashion accessory for the killer-about-town.

2. An amateur sleuth, in the wrong place at the wrong time, who decides to launch their own investigation after witnessing a murder or attempted murder. There’s usually something about what they saw that bugs them, something they can’t quite put their finger on. And there’s generally a threat to their own safety as a result of launching said investigation. Which they only do because …

3. The police are totally ineffectual. Take ‘The Bird with the Crystal Plumage’ (of which more later): Inspector Morosini (Enrico Maria Salerno), getting nowhere with the official investigation, happily sanctions star witness Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante) to undertake his own enquiries. Saves on police manpower, I guess.

4. Extended, operatic death scenes. Essentially, the giallo is a hybrid of the traditional whodunit and the visceral stalk ‘n’ slash flick. Death scenes are all important – the more tension that can be generated, the more bizarre the mechanics of the murder, and the more bloody the pay-off, the better.

5. Staircases. I don’t know why, but there’s a penchant in these movies for vertiginous shots of (often spiral) staircases. Likewise, killers and victims alike tend to plunge from high places or down elevator shafts.

6. J&B. It’s a bloody awful blend, but the manufacturers must have bunged a fair bit of money towards gialli budgets because it features as product placement in the same way – and just as blatantly – as Aston Martins in Bond movies.

7. Famous mainstream actors at the start or later on in their careers. Jennifer Connelly in ‘Phenomena’, for example, or Karl Malden in ‘The Cat O’Nine Tails’.

8. Gratuitous nudity. Well, black gloves and bottles of J&B can only generate so many ticket sales.

9. Edwige Fenech. See above.

10. Distinctive titles, often featuring an animal (‘Don’t Torture a Duckling’), a colour (‘Deep Red’), a number (‘Five Dolls for an August Moon’), or sometimes a combination of all three (‘Four Flies on Grey Velvet’). Elsewhere, you might find a reference to the murder weapon (‘Hatchet for the Honeymoon’), or the promise of something of something steamy, seamy and downright disreputable (‘Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key’ – see above).

Right, then: ‘The Bird with the Crystal Plumage’. And to quote Inspector Morosini, “Bring in the perverts …”