Past Misdeeds: Una Iena In Cassaforte (1968)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Eleven months after their deed, a group of intrepid robbers and their backers come together in the villa of one of their own, Boris, to divide up the diamonds they stole out of a Swiss vault. The diamonds are hidden away in a safe that in its turn is hidden in a pool of water, only to be lifted by some sort of hydraulic device, and not openable through explosives because it's somehow built with uranium inside™. Said safe  can only be opened with six keys, one of which should be in the possession of each robber.

Of the original robbers, only Steve (Dimitri Nabokov), Klaus (Otto Tinard?) and Albert (Alex Morrison) are left, though. Boris has died (and is entombed in his own backyard) and is represented by his wife Anna (Maria Luisa Geisberger) whose frightening fashion stylings will delight and/or horrify the audience for the rest of the movie, while another of the original robbers has lost his key gambling to a certain Juan (Ben Salvador). The final robber is hiding from the police and has sent his girlfriend Carina from Algiers (Karina Kar). Because two women aren't enough, Albert has brought his fiancée Jeanine (Cristina Gaioni, doing her best Brigitte Bardot impression) to the party.

Alas, things are not going as smoothly as everyone present had hoped. Just when the group is about to open the safe, Albert realizes he has lost his key. The others don't believe his story and begin first to try and find the key on Jeanine's body and then - after that doesn't lead to anything but a woman at once sticking out her décolleté and cupping her breasts - decide to torture Albert for a night by not giving him his favourite drug and puttering about on a piano.

Once that is over, leading nowhere, somebody shoves Albert down a balcony. Obviously, this won't be the last murder in the villa, because soon enough, everyone is at each other's throats, and everyone's trying to get the diamonds for his or herself.

Una Iena In Cassaforte belongs to that school of the giallo that doesn't see its own lack of a budget as an excuse for not being a mad and stylish concoction of luridly glowing pop particles. As giallos go, this one's most definitely far on the mindless pop and pulp side of the equation, and not at all interested in (even pop-)psychology, social commentary or depth. Instead Una Iena is a film working hard to keep its audience entertained by throwing as much exciting and crazy shit at it as the money allows, in a style closer to the weirder eurospy films than most other giallos.

The whole story is presented with all the sensibility and subtlety of a fumetti (I'd be very surprised if "make it look like a comic" wasn't scrawled on the first page of the script), with caricatures instead of characterization, but delights through weird flourishes like the "uranium in the safe" business, and is dominated by a mood of overexcited playfulness that seems to have infected every part of the movie.

The actors (most of them having only this and one or two other films in their filmographies) are inhabiting their one-note roles with great enthusiasm, as if they were born into them (and I'm not too sure they weren't), and - when the situation affords it - can go from comparatively normal acting to wild scenery chewing at the drop of a hat. Especially Geisberger and Gaioni are fantastic that way. As a special bonus, the former actress does all her freak-outs wearing clothes and make-up that many of the more exalted drag queens would reject as a bit too tacky and bizarre, as if the guy responsible for her wardrobe were a Martian visitor trying to get his three brains around the concept of a "vamp", at once failing and succeeding incredibly well.

There's something wildly inventive (always bordering on hysteria, but only succumbing to it from time to time) about Cesare Canevari's direction too. Canevari seems to have gone into the film with the determination to do something visually interesting or outright bizarre with every single shot (possibly to distract from the small number of locations). Sure, some of his ideas of the bizarre and the interesting are quite clearly part of the generic visual language of the pop cinema mainstream of his time, but Canevari manages to build a beautiful little freak out of these more generic parts and his own ideas. Plus, the generic of 1968's pop cinema is pretty damn colourful to today’s blue and yellow haunted eyes.


Una Iena In Cassaforte (yes, as far as I understand, the film's title really translates as "An Hyena in the Safe") is not only an extremely fascinating and fun film to watch, it' also one which can make for an instructive hour and a half of "guess the influences". Elements like the water death trap garage seem to point either at the Bond movies, the eurospy film, or Rialto's Edgar Wallace krimis as sources and influences for the film at hand, but it's neither impossible, nor unlikely that these influences did run in more than one direction, and this small and unassuming film influenced later films of the respective series right back. We are talking about pop cinema after all, and one of pop cinema's most noble activities is to go through an endless cycle of films borrowing ideas other films took from somewhere else, that will in turn be borrowed again by other films, and then by other films again, until it becomes difficult, possibly even absurd, to find an original source, or anything amounting to a state of authenticity.