The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail (1971)

Original title: La coda dello scorpione

Warning: I’m going to spoil an early twist!

The plane the businessman husband of Lisa Baumer (Evelyn Stewart) is on is destroyed by a bomb while the good lady is having a bit of fun with her lover. Hubby had insured his life for a nice million dollars, and the insurance company seems perfectly willing to pay out at once, without any investigation into the matter. Lisa only has to come to Greece to get the money, for reasons. In truth, the company isn’t really as happy to oblige Lisa as it pretends to be, and has put sexy investigator Peter Lynch (George Hilton) on her trail.

He doesn’t seem to be the only one interested in Lisa, though, for a shadowy figure in classical giallo killer get-up is following her around. For some reason, Lisa wants to take the money due her in cash; and once she has it in her hands, the killer loses little time in dispatching her and absconding with the money.

After Lisa’s death, the female protagonist role shifts to journalist Cléo Dupont (Anita Strindberg), who is rather too nosy for staying healthy in a giallo environment. Of course, there are further murders and curious plot twists coming.

I am quite the admirer of the giallos of director Sergio Martino, and The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail is no exception here. This is certainly one of the more conventional of Martino’s giallos, seeing as it follows a properly constructed, if overconstructed (it is a giallo after all), thriller plot that even borrows its early protagonist death from Psycho as if this were a Jimmy Sangster script for one of Hammer’s thrillers of the 60s. This is not a complaint, mind you, for Martino, as was his wont at this stage of his career, puts out all the visual stops: hand camera, POV shots, dramatic close-ups, wonderfully artificial light, unconventional camera angles are all part of his toolkit, as are picture postcard beautiful shots of Greece, and a good bit of bloody business.

Because Martino at this point was one of the masters of this sort of thing, this intense stylishness isn’t just a way to distract the director and his audience from implausible plotting, and the tedium of straightforwardly shot dialogue, or to make his beautiful cast look even more glamorous, but also creates the flow and energy of the film, the tension and release quality so important for thrillers and horror films. As is often the case in the giallo, the director’s style takes on the function of the choreography in a martial arts film or a musical, turning what could be a dry presentation of twists into a sort of dance. Style becomes substance.