So Sweet... So Perverse (1969)

the audience applauded

i must have seen a different film!!

Absolutely Fantastic

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

It seems that prior to Dario Argento's The Bird With The Crystal Plumage that normal template for gialli was the 'mystery amongst devious people' rather than the 'loads of babes being sliced up'. This is yet another one of those films, with a rather low body count (two!).Jean (he's a fanny rat, but hard to like, because he's French), is a rich playboy who is not getting any of his wife (Erika Blanc - she looks like David Bowie), so looks for other avenues to explore. When the film opens, he's banging his mate's wife, but soon he discovers a new blonde has moved into the apartment above his.There's something strange going with this new blonde too, because Jean is hearing the scraping of furniture and what sounds like someone being slapped around, but when he goes to the front door of his new neighbour, no one answers. When he does finally get to meet her she claims that her boyfriend Klaus loves beating her up and stuff.Soon the two fall in love (queue montage!) much to the dismay of Blanc and the delight of Klaus, and it's roughly about the halfway mark that the twists start happening so I'll stop there. Needless to say that one character goes from being vulnerable to evil, allegiances changes again and again and the hippy vibe of the late sixties shines through loud and clear.However, Lenzi seems to have had a vision of the state of Italian film ten years later and injected the film with scenes that make no sense whatsoever, for instance the credits sequence. Jean drives about with a rifle in his car and we get flashes of one of his lovers but this has nothing to do with the rest of the film. Plus, Carrol Baker has a velvet lined cabinet in her apartment full of instruments of torture. This has nothing to do with anything either.On the other side, Lenzi also injects an amazingly high amount of style into the film too, what with an early example of the use of primary colours (soon to be a trend in the gialli) - there's one scene that's stands out when Jean is forced to snog Carrol Baker while someone keeps changing the lighting to various colours, Nicely done.

If you don't get Klaus Kinski, why not simply name the bad guy ... Klaus! After such a cunning production move – Klaus being played by German 60s scoundrel regular Horst Frank, flown in directly from the set of one of Jürgen Roland's stuffy St. Pauli whores-&-pimps flicks –, there's few directions to go but down, and neither pallid Frenchman J-L Trintignant nor "Baby Doll" Carroll Baker can provide the slightest bit of uplift. And in fact, it's not Klaus who's coming between them, but a) Riz Ortolani's annoying soundtrack, especially the ear-cancer inducing theme canzone, and b) the convoluted mess of the script by hackmeister Ernesto Gastaldi, a pseudo-clever double-crossing murder scheme stolen shamelessly from Les Diaboliques (for his version of Strangers on a Train, see the stunning densefest Lo strano vizio della Signora Wardh). As for Horst Frank, he's almost as smug as Tarantino favorite Christoph Waltz. Almost, and if legend is true, he also suggested a much more fitting title for this Euro stinker: Klaustrophobia.

Great title and if not particularly appropriate for the film, no matter, for this is a fine film. Carroll Baker, excellent as ever, although she does keep herself fairly well covered here and not always in the most stunning of outfits, Jean-Louis Trintignant does pretty much what he always does, well and Erika Blanc puts in a very strong performance. Solid directing by Lenzi, might have been stylish but pan and scan print ensures it does not appear so, and for the first half we have a rather fun, colourful and bright story of an extramarital affair. Things change, however, just as we begin to wonder if all is as it seems things change very much indeed. Hardly any blood or bare skin for that matter but a most involving tale, exceedingly well told, that certainly starts to flip about towards the end. Indeed until the very end!

So Sweet...So Perverse is one of the late 60's gialli that Umberto Lenzi directed. It's an Italian variant on H.G. Clouzot's Les Diaboliques. It focuses on a couple with martial difficulties. The husband is lured into the arms of an upstairs neighbour who is being terrorised by a brutal boyfriend. But all is not what it seems.This one has a pretty good cast. The husband is the brooding Jean-Louis Tritignant (Death Laid an Egg), the wife is Erika Blanc (Kill, Baby…Kill!), the mistress is played by Caroll Baker (Baba Yaga)) and the boyfriend is the sinister Horst Frank (The Cat o' Nine Tails). Unfortunately, the film itself isn't a great vehicle for these actors. The story itself is not too engaging and there was a distinct lack of thrills and suspense in this one. In fairness, though, a lot of my frustration came from the awful copy that seems to be available of it. It was a terrible pan and scan job, that not only cuts off the sides of the picture but the top and bottom too! It means that the framing is constantly out and most of the shots are close-ups of the actors. This really effected my enjoyment of this one. I would like to revisit it when/if it is given a half-decent transfer.