Two more gialli out of our boxed sets.

First up: The Possessed, which despite being in this boxed set is not, I maintain, actually a giallo. It’s B&W, and lacks the lurid colors of a giallo; nor does it have the lurid salaciousness of a giallo.

What it is, is an Italian take on a Hitchcock suspense movie. It’s about a guy who’s obsessed with a woman he met on vacation last year; he comes back to the vacation town now, only to find out that she’s dead. He keeps seeing her in dreams and flashbacks and hallucinations, and works to solve the mystery of her death. (It was ruled a suicide, but if movies are to be believed, Italian police will happily judge a death to be a suicide even if the person was stabbed repeatedly in the back.)

It’s extremely Hitchcockian. The movie is built around themes of obsession and the confusion between memory and reality; there are some really distinctive shots; the music sounds like it could be by Bernard Herrmann (it isn’t); and it’s got a building tension throughout.

I don’t want to overhype it, because the directors of this movie aren’t Hitchcock, and it doesn’t rise above being pretty good — some of the plotting is kinda loose, and it requires the protagonist to be incredibly stupid. But if you want a pretty good Italian movie that’s I guess kind of a proto-giallo in a Hitchcockian mode, well, here you go.

Smile Before Death is more straightforwardly a giallo — the colors are bright, the midcentury interiors unbelievably stylish, the kills bloody and knifey, and the women frequently unclothed — but that’s about the only thing straightforward about it.

The movie opens with us witnessing the violent death of a woman. One title sequence later, and we’re watching her daughter arrive home from college to handle the estate, meeting up with her stepfather (who she’s never met before), her mother’s live-in lady friend, and the maid (who is suspicious at the official ruling of suicide).

The rest of the movie is figuring out what happened, and what the relationships between these characters are going to shake out to be. It’s a twisty plot, with lots of betrayal and deceit. (Thankfully, this is one of the rare gialli where it was easy to keep all the characters straight for the whole movie, perhaps helped by the relatively small cast.) And the ending is just excellent, echoing a movie that it would be a spoiler to mention, but doing so more coherently.

Easily one of the best gialli out of these boxed sets, and an easy recommend to any fan of the genre.