The Bloodstained Butterfly/Una farfalla con le ali insanguinate (1971)

‘If this is a psychotic episode, the killer won’t have a police record.’

Children playing in a park find a young woman’s body moments after she has been murdered. A man in a raincoat flees the scene, and one witness identifies him as a popular TV personality. The star is tried and convicted of the crime, but then another victim is discovered in the park, and she seems to have been killed in the same way…

Sober and downbeat Giallo thriller from writer-director Duccio Tessari, here writing with Gianfranco Clerici. The Italian-West German financing package results in a few familiar faces from both nations, and the suburban setting brings a welcome level of realism to the mystery.

Sportscaster Alessandro Marchi (Giancarlo Sbragia) seems to have it all; a slot on prime time television, a beautiful wife (Evelyn Stewart) and a brilliant daughter in college (Wendy D’Olive). Unfortunately, it’s all a facade. He wears a toupee on-screen, Stewart is having an affair with family lawyer Giulio (Günther Stoll), and he’s also carrying out extracurricular activities with the free-spirited Marta Clerici (Lorella De Luca). Sbragia’s life starts to unravel when pretty young redhead Françoise Pigaut (Carole André) meets death by switchblade in the local public park. Not only is she a close friend of his daughter, but a witness identifies him as the man seen running in the aftermath of the attack.

At the trial, the evidence against him is largely circumstantial, but there is an awful lot of it. Despite the best efforts of defence counsel Stoll, who is understandably conflicted due to his long-running secret affair with Stewart, Sbragia is convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Meanwhile, daughter D’Olive has started a relationship with one of the friendly witnesses, a handsome music student named Giorgio (Helmut Berger), who may have been the victim’s secret lover. And just when Inspector Berardi (Silvano Tranquilli) thinks everything’s done and dusted, another body turns up in the park. He tries to deny the connection between the two slayings, but a third murder grants Sbragia a retrial.

Rather than employ the more extravagant flourishes of some of his contemporaries, director Tessari opts for a remorselessly realistic tone with this picture. So the action is firmly rooted in more conventional crime drama and is likely to disappoint the more hardcore fans of the Giallo sub-genre. There is a little nudity, but few scares, and the slayings occur almost entirely offscreen. Instead, the film verges on a police procedural with a surprising emphasis on forensics in the early part. One of the most effective sequences being Tranquili’s detectives desperately trying to salvage physical evidence from the first crime scene as an inconvenient rainstorm threatens to wash everything away.

To some extent, the film resembles Tessari’s previous Giallo feature, ‘Death Occurred Last Night’ (1970). However, the ‘whodunnit’ elements and red herrings don’t allow for the high level of character development and touches of bleak humour that his previous project displayed. There are still occasional moments, though, such as Tranquilli’s frequent complaints about the quality of the coffee available at the police station. Instead, the time is spent lining up all our suspects, and Tessari keeps them all in play with a sure hand, each appearing progressively more guilty than the last. If the denouement is a little disappointing, it is at least solid and logical, although a few minor details are left hanging.

The abundance of plot doesn’t allow the cast much breathing room, but performances are professional and accomplished. The only weak link in the chain is top-billed Berger, presumably included to secure the German financing. It’s not that his acting is poor; it’s simply that some shots can’t hide the fact that he was in his late 20s at the time, simply too old to be the classmate and romantic interest of the teenage D’Olive. Other German cast members, such as Stoll, fare somewhat better, and it’s always a pleasure to see the 1960s Dr Mabuse, Wolfgang Preiss, here playing the prosecutor at Sbragia’s trial.

Italian filmmakers of the late 1960s were often highly critical of the country’s idle rich, and many young and beautiful dilettantes were sacrificed on the cinematic altar of the Giallo. Although Tessari’s protagonists are far from members of the international jet set, they are still firmly bourgeois and display the same selfishness and lack of basic human values as their more privileged counterparts. Berger’s Giorgio might contemptuously refuse his wealthy father’s money and express his disgust for the Capitalist ideal, but he’s still swanning around Europe and living off his uncle’s trust fund. The action may be taking place in a more urban setting than the Mediterranean islands or the Costa del Sol, but the moral decay is still ever-present, and the animals are still hungry.

Berger found fame as the protégé, and partner, of the famous Italian director, Luchino Visconti and had a prominent role in his Oscar-nominated feature ‘The Damned’ (1969). The title role in Massimo Dallamano’s freewheeling update of ‘Dorian Gray’ (1970) followed as well as other projects for Visconti. The 1980s saw him as comic book supervillain ‘Fantomas’ on French television, and he even had a short run as a guest star on US mega-soap ‘Dynasty.’

Stewart, real name Ida Galli, took her opening bow in the Giallo with ‘The Sweet Body of Deborah’ (1968) after a long list of film credits that included work with director Mario Bava and a good number of Spaghetti Westerns. She followed up with ‘The Weekend Murders/Concerto per pistola solista’ (1970) and ‘The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail/La coda dello scorpione’ (1971) and later on with ‘The Murder Mansion/La mansión de la niebla’ (1972), ‘Knife of Ice/Il coltello di ghiaccio’ (1972) and the title role in ‘A White Dress for Marialé/Un Bianco vestito per Marialé’ (1972). After the popularity of the Giallo faded, she worked on throughout the 1970s, appearing in Lucio Fulci’s ‘The Psychic’ (1977), among other films.

Tessari was primarily a writer whose career followed the typical Italian film industry template. Beginning in Peplum with features such as ‘La vendetta di Ercole/Goliath and the Dragon’ (1960) and ‘Hercules Conquers Atlantis/Ercole Alla Conquista di Atlantide’ (1961), he crossed paths around that time with both directors Mario Bava and Sergio Leone. This led to writing assignments on Bava’s ‘Hercules in the Haunted World/Ercole al Centro della Terra’ (1962) and Leone’s ‘A Fistful of Dollars (1964). He picked up the megaphone around the same time, delivering several Spaghetti Westerns, including a couple in the popular ‘Ringo’ series, and branching out briefly into the Eurospy genre. He rounded out his trio of Giallo films with ‘Puzzle/L’uomo senza memoria’ (1974) and went on to work in a range of genres over the rest of his career. Other projects included tough mob drama ‘No Way Out’ (1973) with Alain Delon and noir icon Richard Conte and a version of the popular swashbuckler ‘Zorro’ (1975), again with Delon. He carried on working almost up to his death in the early 1990s.

Although not one of the highlights of 1970s Giallo, this is still a very well-made, accomplished thriller with much to recommend it.