Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972)

Dir: SERGIO MARTINO
Country: ITALY

AKA:
Excite Me
Eyes of the Black Cat
Gently Before She Dies

Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (it’s a bit of mouthful, but still an awesome title) was Italian filmmaker Sergio Martino’s fourth attempt to concoct excitement and entertainment within the highly stylised environs of the giallo. His previous three The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (1971), The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail (1971), and All the Colours of the Dark (1972) showed a filmmaker willing to develop and expand upon the conventions he was working in. The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh wore its influences a little too noticeably, but was still a confident first effort. The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail offered refinement, and was a solid progression on the previous film, if still somewhat overshadowed by its mimicry of others. The culmination of Martino’s vision came in All the Colours of the Dark; his first giallo to stand firmly on its own two legs, show some innovation, and offer the possibility of a unique brand of gialli with the indelible stamp of Martino’s personality. With this in mind Your Vice…has to be considered something of a retrograde step, and while some may cite the films cross pollination of gothic modes of address within the form of the giallo as evidence of innovation, one only need look to the marvellously baroque The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave (1971), which appeared a year before Martino’s film, and is far superior on almost every level.

The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (1971)

Dir: SERGIO MARTINO
Country: ITALY

AKA:
Lo strano vizio della Signora Wardh
Next!
Blade of the Ripper
The Next Victim!

Like his contemporaries Umberto Lenzi, Enzo G. Castellari, and Lucio Fulci, Sergio Martino was a director who possessed a highly developed degree of generic utility. This ensured that Martino and the others were constantly in demand in the 1970’s and 1980’s, but the price they all had to pay for this was critical marginalisation. However were it not for the commercial success of popular cycles such as the giallo, the spaghetti western, and the poliziotesschi films, the preening ‘art’ cinema of dullards such as Fellini, Antonioni, and Bertolucci, would undoubtedly have struggled to gain the domestic support they required. Sergio Martino’s renaissance has taken a little longer to come about, but like many of his ilk, the era of DVD has been critical in constructing an appreciation of a diverse and intriguing filmography. No longer do scribes have the excuse of films being unavailable. Whilst it is remiss not to place Dario Argento’s early films within the expectations of the cycle they operated within (a major weakness of Maitland McDonagh’s Broken Mirrors/Broken Mind’s was a failure to do this), it would also be equally remiss not to assess the important contribution to the cycle made by Martino and his producer brother Luciano. Although Martino was inspired by the success (and the style) of Argento’s debut picture The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), his own gialli offerings have a peculiarity and an attitude which help them to stand apart in a very overcrowded generic landscape.