The Fifth Cord (1971) ★★★★½
Released the year after Dario Argento's groundbreaking The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, this checks all the boxes for the giallo template: a mysterious killer on the loose; black leather gloves; J&B whisky; an informal detective; mistaken identity.
With a brilliant lead performance from Franco Nero, who superbly plays the barely-functioning alcoholic journalist who is on the case (and then on the trail) of the mass murderer taunting the authorities and threatening people around Rome with a murder every Tuesday, this is a very special film.
Based on a novel by David McDonald Devine, this is a brilliantly written and engrossing giallo, a film with a very good story and characters (although he's a journalist rather than a PI, Andrea Bild isn't too dissimilar to detectives like The Long Goodbye's Philip Marlowe), and stunning cinematography by Vittorio Storaro – this is probably the most intelligently designed and filmed giallo I've ever seen, and that includes those by Dario Argento. As well as the superb visuals, this has a brilliantly moody and suspenseful soundtrack by Ennio Morricone. It's a film where Luigi Bazzoni, the director who would go on to make the brilliant Footprints on the Moon, is a master of mise-en-scène – this is a film which could be part of a film studies syllabus at university and is one I don't think I fully appreciated what I saw it a decade ago.
It's another film which I'll put to one side and rewatch with the other language track; I watched it this time with the Italian track and want to see what it's like with the English audio.
I recognise these two gialli are not horror films, but I've been putting off watching them through September because I thought they would fit with the October horror/thrillers.
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