We have not discussed any giallo films on Senseless Cinema since The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972), so we shall rectify that oversight now, because, as everyone knows, there is always room for giallo.
Some of your universe's critics are unfair to The Police Are Bludering in the Dark. For example, reviewer Andreas_W333 calls the film "a cheap and poorly executed province giallo." Reviewer horrorlover1026 writes, "It's better to skip this one, because the only suspense is when it will fade to black." And reviewer dopefishie writes, "Some Gialli are forgotten for a reason. In this film's case, it was forgotten because of it's [sic] poor qualities."
Read on for the truth about The Police Are Blundering in the Dark...
In the exciting cold open of the film, a woman wearing a brightly colored blouse drives through a rural area until she discovers her tire is flat. A mysterious person we never see approaches her and attacks her with a pair of scissors. Not unexpectedly, the assailant grabs her blouse, which tears, exposing her breasts. Instead of remaining in the car, she runs into the forest, where she falls to the ground not once but twice, and then is suddenly and repeatedly stabbed with the scissors. Her body falls down between the killer’s legs.
After this explosive opening, the film cuts to a nearby town, where con man Alberto is reading a newspaper article about a model being missing. The subheading says that, indeed, “The police are blundering in the dark.” Alberto sets the paper on a ledge so he can meet his friend disembarking a bus; director Helia Colombo zooms in on another part of the paper explaining that a “housebound artist seeks young couple for help with housekeeping, excellent conditions.”
Alberto and his friend Lucia climb into his beat-up Volkswagen beetle. They install themselves as housekeepers in the household of a wheelchair-bound man named Edmund, who frequently plays cards with his friends Eleonora and Dr. Dalla. Edmund photographs nude models in his studio, using a mysterious special camera, a pastime of which the doctor does not approve, blaming the models: “These girls do a job I would never do if I were a woman. At the thought to be naked in front of someone, to be photographed by that thing that looks like it might explode any minute, would make my blood freeze.”
Elsewhere, Edmund’s latest model Erica (real name: Enrichetta Blonde) drives home in the rain, but her car breaks down. (It should be noted that the car she is driving makes Alberto's beetle look like a massive battleship.) She stops at a pub to call Giorgio, whose car she borrowed—and who happens to be at his home lying in bed with a nude woman. Giorgio refuses to help Erica, so she is forced to stay overnight at the inn attached to the pub. In perhaps the film’s most celebrated sequence of existential dread, Erica strips nude except for a pair of panties, allows the innkeeper’s large, mute son to fondle her while he mumbles, puts on makeup, then eats an entire ham sandwich by the fireplace after the mentally defective man leaves the room.
Then Erica is murdered in the bathroom, with the black-gloved killer stabbing her left breast and leaving her dead on the floor.
The next morning, Erica’s disloyal friend Giorgio arrives at the inn and asks where Erica is. This scene is shot artfully from nearly a dozen angles, including one from behind a wicker container of wine.
The innkeepers believe Erica must have left during the night, as her bed was not slept in. They show Giorgio her room, where he sees the crumbs left from her ham sandwich but nothing suspicious. When he leaves, however, he sees the car he lent her, and inside it a diary that indicates she was at Edmund’s villa. He also finds a bottle of her moisturizer—the musical sting accompanying which is one of the film’s biggest jump-scares—though he throws the bottle in the trash after picking it up.
As is customary in giallo films, Giorgio takes it upon himself to investigate Erica’s disappearance. This involves watching a folk dance in the town square for several minutes, climbing onto and off of a bus for no apparent reason, and then driving to Edmund’s villa. He is met at the door by Alberto, where he introduces himself as Giorgio D’Amato, Journalist, and asks to be introduced to Edmund. “What is your name, again?” Alberto asks when they walk through the house.
“Giorgio D’Amato, Journalist,” Giorgio repeats.
When Giorgio meets Edmund in the living room, he says, “I haven’t come here as a journalist. Last night I received a strange call from Enrichetta Blonde.”
“I wasn’t convinced by her,” Edmund says. “No personality.”
“She’s disappeared,” Giorgio says.
“Another one!”
They are interrupted by Edmund’s wife Eleonora and their niece Sarah. Edmund introduces them: “This is Giorgio D’Amato, a journalist.”
They invite Giorgio to dinner along with Dr. Dalla. Edmund espouses his philosophy of life: “One should solicit fortune and exploit good opportunities.”
“Right,” agrees Eleonora. “What do you want in life?”
Giorgio replies quickly, “Everything! Everything it can give me.”
Dr. Dalla says, “Our friend has very clear ideas.” He is clearly impressed by Giorgio, though one might quibble with the clarity of the young journalist’s ideas. “This is what a young man needs to get ahead.”
“Sometimes life is unfair,” says Eleonora.
Dr. Dalla disagrees. “No, life isn’t unfair. There is good and there is bad.”
As they eat dinner, director Helia Colombo cuts between two bravura styles, first showing the meal and the conversation in a static shot for several minutes, then, as the conversation continues, circling the camera around the diners. Cleverly and with an eye toward existentialism, this mix of techniques has nothing to do with the conversation’s ebbs and flows, as the conversation means little. By the end of the dinner, however, several important things have happened: Giorgio D’Amato, Journalist, and Sarah have flirted by bumping their shoes against each other, and Eleonora has used a small remote control to take mysterious photos from a camera mounted in a Buddha statue’s eye.
After dinner, in the lounge, the conversation turns to Sarah’s backstory. (It must be noted that, in another existential touch worthy of Buñuel, everyone speaks about Sarah as if she were not seated in the center of the room, to the point that the viewer might begin to suspect Sarah is deaf or mute, which she is not.) Eleonora explains to Giorgio, “Apart from being my niece, Sarah is also my best friend.”
Edmund adds, “Her father was my brother. He and his wife died in an airplane crash. Since then, Sarah has been with us.” He adds, perhaps oddly, “Although we love her, she has always missed them.”
Giorgi jumps into the conversation. “She’s a beautiful woman. So simple.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Edmund agrees. “We are very close, she likes to help me, but this is not enough. I’ve been trying to convince her to meet people her own age.”
The conversation turns to Edmund’s (mostly nude) photographic work, and he expounds on his artistic philosophy. “If flesh weren’t imbued in desire and tinged with pleasure, it would be a virtue. Vice, unfortunately, enters from all angles, as if carried by the wind. It’s in the air. Believe me, to preserve one’s virtue one needs a constant line of defense.”
“So true,” Giorgio agrees, as if such a philosophy is something other than clearly insane.
At the end of the evening, Dr. Dalla says he will cycle home, even though there is a raging thunderstorm. Edmund insists that Giorgio stay overnight because of the storm. When everyone goes to bed, the film shifts into a complex bedroom farce, as the maid Lucia tells Giorgio to come to her room upstairs (“It’ll be great,” she says. “You’ll see.”). After smoking a cigarette and quickly and futilely investigating the sound of glass breaking, Giorgio climbs the stairs for his tryst with Lucia, but he is discovered by manservant Alberto, so he escapes down a staircase, where he spies Eleonora visiting someone else’s room. Returning to his own room, Giorgio finds a frightened Sarah, who tells him, “Take me away!” She tells him Eleonora forces her to do things and even Edmund is at her mercy. Giorgio promises to take her away and they begin to kiss.
Downstairs, Eleonora (whose dress subtly matches the pattern of the sofa) argues with her husband Edmund. She wants to move to the city, and she is dissatisfied with being Edmund’s nurse instead of his lover.
Upstairs, Sarah gives more hints about Edmund’s mysterious camera. “He’s managed to perfect a method of photographing the human thought!”
“He’s a genius?”
“He’s a madman! He’s impotent.” Sarah explains that Edmund has never assaulted her, but Eleonora forces her affections on her.
Sarah strips and they make love—her first time. Tastefully, Giorgio makes love to her with a part of the flowered sheet covering his right buttock.
Downstairs, the argument continues, and the married couple helpfully fill in much of the backstory for the audience. “You’re impotent,” Eleonora explains. “To get rid of you I could sleep with another man in front of you.”
“You can do it,” Edmund says without enthusiasm.
“Is that what you want? I’ll never give you the satisfaction to call me a whore! I’ve found a sick, depraved way of satisfying myself…using your niece’s body!”
“Damn you! No!” Edmund appears to have a heart attack. He is so angry he grabs a pair of scissors and forces himself to a standing position from his wheelchair, but he soon collapses. Eleonora cries over his prone body and complains, “Two unhappy people!”
The next morning, Alberto gets rid of Giorgio, who drives away from the villa. Then Lucia, who wants to leave the estate just like Eleonora, confronts Alberto.
Giorgio finds Dr. Dalla’s house and asks him about the missing Monica. The doctor says many women have disappeared so they should go to the police. Giorgio tells him what Sarah told him: that Edmund has discovered a way to photograph people’s thoughts, and he was photographing their thoughts last night. Then, in a complex turn of events, the doctor receives a phone call from Eleonora, who is in Rome because she was told Sarah went to Rome in the morning to visit relatives, but she never showed up. Sarah is missing as well! Dr. Dalla, perhaps suspiciously, sends Giorgio to drive to Rome to speak with Eleonora.
Meanwhile, the mentally defective son of the innkeepers sexually assaults Luca at Edmund’s villa. He rips open her shirt and fondles her breast, which she enjoys. She makes love to him behind a tall, narrow tree—which the filmmakers cleverly shoot from bottom to top, as if the tree itself is becoming erect.
The film cuts to Edmund in his studio, where he manipulates the computer/mixing board controlling his mysterious camera.
Then the film cuts to Alberto, who visits a doctor describing the condition of a woman (cleverly, the film does not yet tell the audience whether the woman is Eleonora or Sarah or Lucia). The doctor diagnoses, “Erotomania in a hypomanic state.” Depending on this woman’s sexual arousal, she could be affected by paranoia and/or schizophrenia. She was hospitalized for the disorder ten years ago, but the doctors released her because “the signs of imbalance didn’t respond to a latent state.”
Back at the villa, Lucia, wearing full makeup, takes a shower, then toplessly packs all her things, including a wig, to run away. Unfortunately for her, she is attacked in her room by the scissor-wielding murderer. She crawls bloodily into the bathtub.
In his studio, Edmund successfully prints a photo of someone’s thought, as the audience is treated to at least ten minutes of footage of Edmund turning dials and knobs. The print shows a nude Sarah. “My God! It’s him!” Edmund realizes. He wheels himself out of the studio and calls for Alberto, who is not in the villa. Edmund wheels into the study, where he finds Dr. Dalla holding scissors and standing over Lucia’s body.
However, the doctor believes Edmund is the murderer. “Why carve up the bodies of these beautiful women? Only to bury them beneath the lettuce? You’ve discovered a method of photographing other people’s thoughts…and yours? You could have saved yourself the pain of discovering that you are the killer! Confess your crimes!”
Edmund simply replies, “You know very well that you killed her.”
“No! It’s not true. You’d be happy to see me fail, but I’m an important man. You’re going to be in so much trouble.”
In the climax, Alberto returns to the villa, where Dr. Dalla tells him that Giorgio killed Lucia and the other women. Alberto grabs a gun and runs after Edmund, who apparently is not really confined to a wheelchair. Alberto shoots the running Edmund just as Edmund passes over a bridge, beneath which a thresher slowly rolls along a driveway. In true giallo fashion, Edmund is dragged under the thresher, his body threshed.
In the finale, which takes place in the breakfast nook around a table with the local police commissioner, Edmund shows everyone the nude photo of Sarah, which was taken directly from Dr. Dalla’s thoughts. Further, Dr. Dalla is actually Professor Stefanelli, who killed his wife when she was giving birth (the sufferer of erotomania discovered by Alberto might have been the professor's wife). This information is conveyed by Alberto, who reveals himself to be not the manservant but a private investigator. Alberto explains, “I’ve been following the case of the missing photo models for some time, and seeing how the police were blundering in the dark—forgive me, Commissioner—I decided to start my own investigation.” He also reveals that the murdered Lucia was not a maid but actually his sister.
The commissioner asks Edmund what he will do with his miraculous camera. Edmund replies, “I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet, but I think I’ll give it to science. A discovery like this must…yet! it must be used to serve society, but in a society run by men with a superior intelligence.”
Ironically after such a statement, the film cuts to the innkeeper’s mute son, who walks in the doctor’s greenhouse to the rows of lettuce, under which presumably the murder victims were buried. He looks at the camera and chuckles evilly. Onscreen is superimposed a quotation: “Mankind differs from beasts for an incurable evil: intelligence.” (The quotation is not attributed to anyone, so it might in fact be a translation of the mute man’s thoughts.)
Then the film cuts to an aerial shot from the front of a propellor plane for no reason whatsoever.
The End
Reportedly written and directed by songwriter/record producer Elio Palumbo under the pseudonym Helia Colombo, The Police Are Blundering in the Dark is an innovative giallo in that it introduces two amateur sleuths investigating a string of disappearances (one a secret sleuth, Alberto, whom we follow first, and the second a more open sleuth, Giorgio, whom we follow afterward)--and neither sleuth is present for the solving of the crime. Additionally, its title, though accurate, is only questionably related to the narrative, as no policemen or policewomen are present until the final wrap-up scene at the end, after Edmund, perhaps the most suspicious of the suspects, has identified the murderer.
As is often the case with unheralded gems like The Police Are Blundering in the Dark, it is a shame that the director, whatever his or her name, never wrote or directed another film. One can only imagine the huge leaps forward the giallo genre would have enjoyed if Palumbo/Colombo had continued taking such bold risks. But cinemagoers everywhere may be thankful that he or she created one of the most indelible, distinctive giallo scenes in any film: Enrichetta Blonde eating a ham sandwich by the fireplace for several minutes. For that, Palumbo/Colombo deserves a place in some kind of hall of fame somewhere.