Color, 1970, 96m. / Directed by Luciano Ercoli / Starring Dagmar Lassander, Pier Paolo Capponi, Susan Scott, Simón Andreu / Blue Underground (US R0 NTSC) / WS (2.35:1) (16:9)
This film's real trump card is a dynamic and sexy lead role for busy actress Dagmar Lassander at the height of her beauty, fresh off her memorable turns in The Frightened Woman and Hatchet for the Honeymoon. Here she's Minou, a married woman whose often-absent husband, Peter (The Cat o' Nine Tails' Capponi), leaves her alone to wallow in luried daydreams and booze binges. One night while strolling on the beach, she's approached by a menacing stranger (Andreu) who holds her on the sharp end of a knife-equipped cane and
Buoyed by one of Ennio Morricone's finest '70s scores (later memorably sampled by Super Furry Animals), Forbidden Photos doesn't really explore the same psychosexual cinematic terrain forged by maestros Bava and Argento; instead Ercoli goes for a deeply subjective interal approach (the amount of bloodshed is less than your average episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents), with the heroine's dubious sanity and everyone else's shady motives creating a disorienting puzzle that paves the way for future mind-warping giallo oddities like Spasmo. Though not overly explicit, the erotic passages are
For its DVD premiere, Blue Underground presents Forbidden Photos in a gorgeous, very colorful transfer that shows off every delicious bit of art direction in perfect clarity. Past European VHS editions tended to fudge a bit with the aspect ratio, but here the full scope ratio is perfectly preserved. The mono English track (which typically matches the actors' lips movements better in some scenes than others) sounds clear and well-balanced. Extras include the wonderfully lounge-friendly theatrical trailer and a 9-minute featrette, "Forbidden Screeplays," in which a jovial Gastaldi talks about his beginnings as a screenwriter, the shooting conditions in Italy at the time, and various ploys used to get the film's more sensational material around the censors-- namely doing the kinkiest bits as flashbacks so the viewer can fill in any gaps.
The first of a wonderfully stylish and quirky giallo trilogy by director Luciano Ercoli and prolific writer Ernesto Gastaldi, The Forbidden Photos of a Lady above Suspicion arrived in 1970, just
as the genre was breaking through to mainstream popularity thanks to the likes of Dario Argento, Umberto Lenzi and Sergio Martino. Though Ercoli's three shockers (including the later Death Walks at Midnight and Death Walks on High Heels) weren't distributing as widely as many of their peers, his marvelously twisty plots and keen eye for colorful scope compositions is already in evidence here.
growls threats about her husband, whom he could implicate in a murder. Afterwards Minou relaxes with her friend Dominique (regular Ercoli muse Susan Scott), who mentions that one of Peter's colleagues was recently found dead under mysterious circumstances; even stranger, she shows off a series of erotic photographs, which highlight the strange blackmailer -- who soon starts tormenting Minou with phone calls and clandestine meetings in which he names her body as the price he requires for silence. Of course, these events only prove to be the beginning of Minou's descent into degradation, with covert dirty pictures and numerous plot twists whipping the story back and forth until the obligatory surprise finale.
still heady stuff thanks to the vivid color schemes and wild decor, including the first memorable encounter with Lassander and Andreu in a red-lit room lined with plaster hands.
