Past Misdeeds: Death Falls Lightly (1972)

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 presented with only  basic re-writes and 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.


Warning: it's impossible not to talk about the film's ending when talking about its strengths and weaknesses, so the following will enter spoiler territory.

After returning home from a business trip Giorgio Darica (Stelio Candelli) finds his wife dead in her bedroom with a slit throat. Giorgio does not report the murder to the police, for his business trip was of a type one just can't use as an alibi, unless one is a big fan of spending time in prison. Instead, Giorgio goes to a judge (or lawyer, the fansubs aren't quite sure about that one, though I'd go with judge) he is working with. Giorgio's business, you see, is to smuggle drugs for a conspiracy of corrupt judges, cops and politicians who buy position and influence with the money they make from the drug trade (and clearly, any form of corruption that's profitable). Even though that's not something you want to say aloud in a murder trial, it is very much something a man like Giorgio would be willing to say in a murder trial if his rather well-positioned "friends" don't help him out of his problematic situation.

Because nobody wants to risk to have Giorgio arrested or questioned, and even just killing him is deemed too risky, his partners hide Giorgio and his girlfriend Liz (Patrizia Viotti) in a big, empty hotel building, while they put their influence in action and make further plans that may or may not be meant to exonerate Giorgio.

The couple's stay at the hotel isn't too pleasant. Giorgio's new position in life as a murder suspect does not make Liz happy, especially since she isn't quite sure her lover didn't actually kill his wife, so there's a lot of squabbling and hysterics going on between the two. That, however, is before the hotel turns strange. Music plays in rooms where there shouldn't be any music playing, and noises hint at other people staying where there shouldn't be any. It's as if the hotel were haunted by ghosts peculiarly in tune with Giorgio's troubles. Things turn even stranger when a group of people appear who claim to be the hotel's owners. It doesn't take long until Giorgio isn't sure what's dream, what's reality and what's delusion.

Leopoldo Savona's Death Falls Lightly is a more interesting example of the giallo than it at first seems to be. The film's first half is more than a bit slow going, and even though its rather sardonic comments on the state of Italian judicial and political culture are not completely without relevance for anyone curious about the political climate surrounding early 70s Italian genre cinema, it's also not exactly riveting. Especially the whole "lovers flip out on each other after spending about one day alone together" angle is just not very convincing, and while the secrets and lies which these scenes disclose as the basis of Giorgio's and Liz's relationship will be important later on, I could think of less artificial ways to expose them.

However, once that (expository) hurdle is taken, Death takes a turn for the weird I can only describe as delightful; at least if your definition of "delightful" fits a series of scenes that turn a character's inner workings into simply yet effectively realized metaphors and nearly drive him insane in the process. I find especially lovely how organic the film's turn from the semi-realistic tone of its beginning to the weird and possibly supernatural is, Savona using the empty hotel as a place that - even when we are nominally still in the "realist" part of the movie - does more belong to the realm of dreams than to that of reality as we usually understand it. Savona emphasises this by lighting and blocking everything that takes place in the hotel quite differently from the rest of the film, suggesting the claustrophobia and spacial and temporal disjointedness of a dream.

Of course, and somewhat disappointingly, all the supernatural occurrences will later turn out to be no such things at all in a last act twist that is not exactly to my taste - as I prefer the supernatural in my narratives to stay supernatural, or at least ambiguous -, but that works too well to ruin what came before. Mostly, this part of the movie works well enough for me because Death - quite surprisingly for a giallo - does play fair with its audience by featuring a killer whose motivations you can discern from the clues the film delivers, as well as by using a device for its plot twist whose cause you have actually witnessed and (hopefully) just forgotten as one of these random flourishes giallos tend to include. Of course, even though the twist's set-up makes sense seen from that perspective, it's still quite difficult to buy it as anything any police force, even one as corrupt as the one shown in the movie, would actually be involved in; on the other hand, it's thematically and atmospherically so fitting to the film at hand, I can't find it in me to see that fact as a problem for anyone who doesn't insist on absolute realism - and therefore boredom - in her movies.


I, for one, am happy to have found another giallo that succeeds at wedding rather sardonic politics with moments of dream-like beauty.