Deadly Inheritance (1968)

Original title: Omicidio per vocazione

Somewhere in rural France. The patriarch of a rich family whose members are still somehow involved in the daily running of a train station including signal duty (shades of Charles Dickens for me there, if the filmmakers wanted it or not, and they probably didn’t) dies in what is probably an accident. There’s quite a nice inheritance to be had, but Father has put a rather interesting stipulation into his will: nobody is getting at anything but the interest on the money until mentally unstable Janot (Ernesto Colli) will come of age and turn twenty-one in three years time and can be shoved off into the best mental health care. The fact that the guy playing him is twenty-eight and looks like forty nor the availability of mental health care for people under twenty-one notwithstanding. This isn’t terribly good news for parts of the family: there are bills to be paid, lovers in need of money to pay off their future ex-wives, and so on.

So it comes not completely as a surprise when other family members - of course including Janot who has another unfortunate train accident leaving him quite in pieces – start dying in accidents and things supposedly like it. Because local boss cop Etienne (Virgilio Gazzolo) isn’t deemed enough, the big city sends Inspector Greville (Tom Drake) to take care of business. Eventually, Greville brilliantly deduces that there’s something suspicious about all of these murders and proceeds accordingly.

Vittorio Sindoni’s Deadly Inheritance is a strange example of late 60s giallo filmmaking. For at least the first half of the film, you see some of the standard tropes of the genre, but they are for the most part used like in a standard and pretty boring mystery. There are dirty secrets, but these are neither treated as a doorway to sleaze nor to get snarky about the ways of the decadent rich, but feel more like necessary plot points the film needs to work through. The cast features some well-liked Italian genre actresses – at least heroine Femi Benussi and Valeria Ciangottini should fall under this umbrella – but they aren’t used to much effect, and Tom Drake’s Greville is about as boring as any protagonist of a movie can be imagined to be. Stylistically, everything feels very dry and lacking in punch.

But the longer the film goes on, the more elements of interest begin to emerge: suddenly, there’s a tightly and aesthetically pleasing chase sequence with a bunch of people after the Inspector’s favourite suspect, running through a very geometrically framed countryside; the murders don’t become exactly more bloody, but certainly more elaborately staged and filmed. Sindoni also begins doing clever things. Take for example the film’s best murder scene: the victim is alone locked into her home, with the police outside to protect her. Things start with a – pretty great as composed by one Stefano Torossi – giallo typical female voice singing an appropriately haunting melody on the score. Our heroine hears something, opens a door, finds a record player playing said haunting melody, which she thankfully lets play on to properly accompany the following set piece of stalking and killing. This is staged in such a matter of fact manner by Sindoni, it doesn’t feel too clever by half but delightful, funny and just the right bit macabre.

Once Deadly Inheritance has reached its final half hour, there’s very little that makes this recognizable as the same film of the plodding and naff to look at first act. Every scenes now has something to draw the viewer in, so much so, the film gets away with a last act double twist that’s as improbable as it is awesome. It also suggests that some of the boringness of the first part of the film was actually there on purpose, meant to manipulate its audience into a couple of very specific expectations concerning the roles of detectives, suspects, and victims in any kind of mystery. It’s quite a thing to do in highly commercial genre cinema, expecting a degree of patience from its audience I’m certainly not always willing to spend on a movie. It’s till a pretty great trick that provides Deadly Inheritance with a fantastic ending.