In both audio commentaries found on Severin Films' ORGASMO (aka PARANOIA, 1969; included in their COMPLETE LENZI/BAKER GIALLO COLLECTION box set), director Umberto Lenzi is mentioned as having a "hack" reputation, and while neither of them offers much of an explanation of why he's not, watching the images go by while listening is explanation in itself. It's not just the colors, which are noted, but the constant flow of images, which is like a dance distilled from glamorous women, glittering pools, elegant panning, shocks, surprises, tight close-ups of menacing eyes, sudden moves, the flutter of thrown magazine pages, zooms in, zooms out - and Lenzi and his cameraman Guglielmo Mancori put extra oomph into each shift of its gears, making the whole thing somehow more noticeable and appreciable as a mechanical construction - a kind of celluloid Ferrari.
The four gialli collected in this set, all directed by Lenzi and starring American actress Carroll Baker - ORGASMO (1969), SO SWEET SO PERVERSE (1969), A QUIET PLACE TO KILL (1970), and the lesser-known KNIFE OF ICE (1972) - were mostly made just prior to Dario Argento's reinvention of the Italian thriller with THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (1970, celebrating the 50th Anniversary of its US release this very week) so they do not always seem as relatable to the genus as one might hope, and I think this has a good deal to do with the disregard they've suffered. They aren't offspring of, say, Mario Bava's BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (1964), but are actually more relatable to a whole spate of "women on the verge of a nervous breakdown" melodramas made in Hollywood from the postwar years through the 1960s. Susan Hayward made a number of these, encompassing Stuart Heisler's SMASH-UP: THE STORY OF A WOMAN (1947), Daniel Mann's I'LL CRY TOMORROW (1955), Robert Wise's I WANT TO LIVE! (1958), and even Mark Robson's VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1967); as did Lana Turner with Douglas Sirk's IMITATION OF LIFE (1959), Michael Gordon's PORTRAIT IN BLACK (1960), and David Lowell Rich's MADAME X (1966); and if Doris Day's turn in Alfred Hitchcock's THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1956) seems a little too lofty to qualify, her casting in David Miller's MIDNIGHT LACE (1960) is spot on. While these "mellers"were ultimately about survival, they were also fairly guilty of taking sadistic pleasure in showing how any well-meaning woman can be mercilessly beaten down and dragged through the mud - mostly the mud of her own natural desires mixed with a bit of bad luck.
Though Hitchcock had little to do with this kind of movie, there are aspects in much of his work that dovetail into this fellow body of work quite nicely - the tendency toward international travel and intrigue, the flash of light on sudden knives, and of course those icy blondes (Vera Miles in THE WRONG MAN, Janet Leigh in PSYCHO, Tippi Hedren in MARNIE) that dark circumstance does its very worst to thaw. You can certainly add to this legacy the past work of Carroll Baker, who after a supporting role in George Stevens' GIANT (1956), almost single-handedly defined a certain wing of Hollywood trash cinema with her starring roles in Elia Kazan's film of Tennessee Williams' BABY DOLL (1956), Irving Rapper's pious yet sensationalist THE MIRACLE (1959), Jack Garfein's SOMETHING WILD (1961), Seth Holt's STATION SIX SAHARA (1963) and, of course, Edward Dmytryk's film of Harold Robbins' THE CARPETBAGGERS (1964). All of these films show us, to some extent, about how far a glamorous woman can be ground down by circumstances and still rise back up with her self, if not her heart, intact. This is the wellspring that led to something like Lenzi's film, one of the first X-rated thrillers to be released in the United States under the title PARANOIA.
The rather shockingly titled ORGASMO casts Carroll Baker as as Kathryn West, a rich widow who returns after a retreat to a resplendent villa that looks like Rome but is apparently located in London. A former painter, she considers going back to her work but - despite the friendly guidance of her lawyer Brian Sanders (Tino Carraro, the Herbert Lom of Italian cinema) - instead retreats again, this time into alcohol (cue shots of a brace of never-ending J&B bottles), to avoid the fact that she spent too many years looking after a much older husband. When young Peter Donovan (Lou Castel) appears at her villa gates, asking for tools to help him repair his car, he gets invited in and proceeds to slowly take over, soon introducing his alleged sister Eva (Colette Descombes) into the increasingly sexual equation. Of course, three into two won't go, and what results is an extended mind game addressed by the two incestuous, with-it "siblings" against a woman who could just about be their mother but wants very badly to be young again. In this respect, ORGASMO is also directly related to predecessors like Joseph Losey's THE SERVANT (1964) and Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's PERFORMANCE (1968/released 1970). Especially like the latter, ORGASMO has scenes of isolated living, mutual bathing, orgiastic love-making, rock music bombardment, people getting dosed with LSD, and attempts to push the frontiers of identity, with Baker at one point sporting a wig that makes her look more like Descombes. (Neither commentary draws these connections.)
This film, and its variant, have never been privy to a truly acceptable home video presentation before, so we can safely say that Severin Films have given us the first opportunity to enjoy and process the film with accuracy in half a century. The disc includes both ORGASMO (the extended Italian version, viewable in Italian or English) and the American version PARANOIA (which is some 7m shorter, mostly minus a protracted ending that punishes the victors, yet incorporates noticeably more nudity). In her audio commentary for the former, Australian author and academic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas quotes Lenzi at length about how Baker was his favorite actress and a thrill to work with, and that she inspired him to new heights of achievement in his work. Of those who have written seriously about the giallo in English, Heller-Nicholas is one of the sharper knives in the drawer and her track is generally a model of how to juggle much-needed information, valuable translations of Italian materials, academic and gender insights, humor, and a charming delivery. Unfortunately she falls quiet for too much of the final third of the picture, coming back every few minutes to tell us what we're seeing, to crack wise, or to remind us she's still there. The second commentary, found under the PARANOIA cut, features SO SWEET SO PERVERSE: 50 YEARS OF ITALIAN GIALLO FILMS author Troy Howarth and MONDO DIGITAL's Nathaniel Thompson, who are so energized by the film and each other that they quickly (and in Thompson's case, I mean "Slow down a bit, man; we're not going anywhere") make full amends for the other track's early collapse. I described their commentary style here recently as "podcasty," and that still goes, but this is an especially engaging and lively example. After two versions of the film and one commentary track, and an archival Lenzi interview besides, I was ready to shut down, but they held my interest for the long haul.
More LENZI/BAKER to come.
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