In short: Door into Darkness: Il tram (1973)

Original title: La porta dul buio: Il tram

The cleaner of a tram discovers the body of a murdered young woman half hidden below a seat. Commissario Giordani (Enzo Ceruscio), a young up-and-coming policeman with the habit of snapping his fingers rhythmically when he’s trying to think, is tasked with solving this puzzling crime. He quickly establishes who shared the last night tram with the victim, but his handful of witnesses seem to have seen or heard nothing whatsoever out of order, leaving the policeman with a murder taking place in front of multiple witnesses who didn’t actually witness it. It’s as if he had stumbled into a modern variation of a golden age impossible crime mystery.

Il tram is the second of four short movies in a 1973 Italian thriller (not quite giallo as we would use the term outside of Italy today) anthology TV show that was at least in part responsible for putting its writer, producer, as well as in this episode director, Dario Argento into the high profile, yellow-press alluring, rock star like popularity he had for a decade or two in his home country. From the here and now, I’m not completely sure why: the four movies are certainly good – particularly on a European TV budget of this time – and Argento is put front and centre via short introductions before each episode, but good filmmaking does not exactly turn a director into a star, and the intros don’t exactly present the mix of wit and shtick you’d get from Alfred Hitchcock. If you’re Italian and know what the special attraction was, please explain in the comments!

As an Argento movie, Il tram is actually an interesting little artefact, in many scenes – thanks to the budget – prefiguring his post Sleepless turn to forms of less visually dreamlike intensity. Here, after his early three giallos for the big screen, Argento is clearly a bit more enthusiastic about ways to still make naturalism sing to a stranger tune. While complex camera work is only in the cards for a couple of scenes, many of the sequences here are edited to a beat – the snapping of Girodano’s fingers and the rhythm of the tram are mirrored in the rhythms of the editing, not just helping to provide visual interest but also making a minimal plot with one single core idea and rather a lot of scenes of people talking lively and suspenseful. Until everything ends in a really tense stalking sequence that’s so Argento, you wouldn’t actually need to see his name in the credits.