The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972)

Hey! This review is part of the Journey to Italy Blogathon!

I’ve returned to The Case of the Bloody Iris a lot more often than most giallos, even though it was pretty difficult to get here in the US. I first saw it on a streaming service, but when I went looking for a physical copy there just wasn’t an American version to be had. Celluloid Dreams released a 4k edition sometime last year, though, so this was a good opportunity to revisit .

There are the great giallos, of course — Deep Red, Blood and Black Lace, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage — but The Case of the Bloody Iris stands out as being perfectly representative of the genre. It’s all there: a gloved serial killer, sex, violence, a fish-market full of red herrings, and characters who often can’t stand to be in the same room with each other. The only mark against it is the killer’s gloves are yellow, not black.

The murders start with a pretty young woman being chloroformed and stabbed in an apartment building’s elevator. The body is discovered by Mizar, a model with a sideline wrestling nightclub patrons, and her elderly neighbors. Mizar scurries off to work, letting the other witnesses know where she lives, but later that night Mizar ends up dead herself — bound, then drowned in her own bathtub.

Two murders in the same building is a problem for architect and landlord Andrea (George Hilton). He wants to lease Mizar’s apartment out again quickly. Fortunately for him, Mizar’s colleagues Jennifer (Edwige Fenech) and Marylin (Paola Quattrini) don’t seem too concerned about the still unsolved murder and they move right in.

To be fair, Jennifer has a lot on her mind. She’s being stalked by her ex, Adam (Ben Carra), who insists she must return to the polyamorous sex-cult she’s recently fled, ominously dropping irises everywhere and only occasionally brandishing hypodermics full of heroin.

Fenech and Hilton are always a good watch, but here they are served particularly well by Ernesto Gastaldi’s screenplay. Gastaldi tried very hard to make sure his stories held together logically, maintaining a kind of Agatha Christie puzzle-box quality. Once the killer is revealed you can see that the clues were there the whole time amidst the misleading clues, extraneous subplots, and distracting sex scenes. This narrative honesty is not always the case with giallos.

Much like “official” masterpiece giallos like Deep Red, The Case of the Bloody Iris has something to say. Gastaldi’s screenplay is also exploring a theme. Early on, Jennifer just comes right out with it. When Adam confronts her the first time, he pleads: “The others haven’t been enough for me since you left.”

“What do you want from me?” she responds. “Love? Possession?”

⚠️ CW: mild nudity. Hover or tap to reveal.

There’s no argument that the movie is objectifying, but Gastaldi is also exploring the mechanisms and motivations of objectification. For example, we get this exchange between Andrea and his photographer friend Arthur (Oreste Lionello), as he tries to sell Andrea on using Mizar (not yet murdered) to advertise his apartment building:

“What do you need to sell beer? … The embrace of a naked woman. Can, bottle, mug… all of it right here, between the boobs.”

“I sell apartments,” says Andrea.

“So what? On top of a jet, sitting on a refrigerator, lounging on the hood of a car, holding a pineapple, a cup of coffee… it doesn’t matter. It takes naked women to sell products.”

⚠️ CW: mild nudity. Hover or tap to reveal.

Arthur is coded as gay (and incidentally also coded as Woody Allen), so his interest in naked women is purely mercantile.

Moments later, when Jennifer and Andrea lock eyes while she’s in the middle of a photo shoot and Arthur is disgusted. “Where the heck are you looking?” Arthur shouts. “Eyes here! Here!” Jennifer’s attraction to someone else has ruined the rhythm of the shoot.

And so, the motivating force for characters both major and incidental is a deep interest in controlling in other people’s sexuality — from parents trying to reign their adult children to businessmen using sex or the promise of sex to separate people from their money.

There’s only one relationship in the whole film that’s healthy, and it’s nearly destroyed by everyone else’s obsession with how, where, and with whom other people are doin’ it.

This, I think, is the hallmark of a Gastaldi script: a movie that ends up being a lot better than it has any right to be. Good enough in fact to get an English-language novel adaptation over forty years later. Since giallos got their start as film adaptations of Italian translations of English-language crime novels, you could say this movie has closed the circle.

Despite the blood and rather grim view of sex, The Case of the Bloody Iris feels pretty light. Part of this is the burbling, jazzy score of Bruno Nicoli. Nicoli worked on the music for a lot of movies in my collection, including The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave and The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, both of which I’ve reviewed here. The lighthearted score occasionally seems out of place, but it’s not as weird, as, say, Nicoli’s work with the MST3K-favorite director Jess Franco.

But a lot of credit for the tone is thanks to the grouchy police commissioner (Giampiero Albertini) and his assistant Redi (Franco Agostini), who are both delightfully incompetent. Jennifer calls them on it: “There’s been a parade of bodies, and the only thing you know how to do is pick the first suspect and say ‘Look, here’s your killer.’ ‘Why did he do it?’ ‘Because he’s a maniac.’”

Besides an indictment of the police here in the movie, it’s not difficult to here Gastaldi critiquing other giallo, which often cop out exactly the same way on motive.

I certainly don’t want to give the impression that The Case of the Bloody Iris isn’t without flaws. The way Andrea and Arthur discuss Mizar (“the black one” Arthur keeps calling her) is a pretty uncomfortable reflection of the times. The stereotypical characterization of gay characters is pretty tired. And things start to fall apart a little at the end while the movie seems to be fumbling for an exciting conclusion. It is nevertheless, a very entertaining and perfectly representative genre film — and one of my favorites.

Published Thu Jan 30 2025 11:00:13 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)