Title: The Crimes Of The Black Cat

Year: 1972

Director: Sergio Pastore

Reviewed By: Xavier Mendik

Often ignored in the flurry of imitations that followed the release of Dario Argento�s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Pastore�s film makes superb use of its themes of the alienated male giallo hero and the monstrous female killer. The Crimes of the Black Cat, set in Copenhagen, involves an investigation into a series of murders committed at a fashion house owned by Madame Francoise Ballais. The film reveals an underside of sexual excess, lesbianism, drug abuse and blackmail as possible motifs behind the killings of a series of models associated with the boutique. This plot device, obviously indebted to Mario Bava�s Blood and Black Lace, is further indicated in the fact that male and female suspects are revealed as culpable for the film�s crimes.

However, whereas Bava�s film is played out as a straight sado-sexual examination of the logistics of crime, Pastore�s vision of transgression takes this theme to an absurd level. Each of the victims is given a shawl that is covered in a feline repellent, and then attacked by a cat whose claws are dipped in curare. The cat in reacting to the repellent savages the victims with its venom tipped claws thus ensuring a speedy and largely undetectable death. This extreme examination of the mechanics of murder is traceable to what Maitland McDonagh has termed as the �weird science� of crime that underpinned Dario Argento�s first three films. Purely at the level of titling, Pastore�s film coincides with Argento�s Cat o� Nine Tails which was released a year earlier.

As with Argento�s film, The Crimes of the Black Cat features a blind detective Peter Oliver (Anthony Steffan), and the key feature that allows this film to transcend its status as mere emulation is the way the director critiques the motivations for his hero�s actions. One of the elements that Argento�s early gialli perfected was the ability for the viewer to remain distanced from the male detectives they depicted. Often this was figured through an indication that the hero was somehow implicated in the crime under investigation. In The Cat o� Nine Tails for instance, Giordano is implicated in a series of murders at a scientific research centre through his relationship with a female suspect. Equally, his blind assistant, the amateur detective Franco Arno is even cast as the murderer at one point when the pair are forced to break into a crypt to further their investigation.

Peter Oliver is similarly implicated in the killings of The Crimes of the Black Cat losing not just one but two girlfriends to the killer. Oliver is initiated into the narrative as suspect after his lover Paoula becomes the cat�s first victim. Although his alibi proves him innocent, the rest of the narrative reveals him to be an ineffectual force in stopping the killer (revealed to Ballais). Although Oliver attempts to convince official police investigators that his blindness has equipped him with a type of intuitiveness needed to resolve the case, the narrative continually indicates how his misguided actions provoke the deaths of others. For instance, he first becomes aware of the case when overhearing the murderer bribing a drug addict in a restaurant booth behind him. Oliver�s lack of sight as handicap is referenced here by the camera�s obsessive zip-panning movements, which attempt, but fail to focus on the visual evidence of the killer�s identity. This sequence also indicates the ease with which Oliver�s hearing (arguably his key investigative tool) is overpowered, when the music from a nearby jukebox drowns out his access to the killer�s conversation. It is this inability to function as an autonomous detective that provides the finale of the film with its greatest shock. Here, Oliver has to be rescued by the police detailed to safeguard his new girlfriend Muriel, allowing Ballais to butcher her while she is defenceless in the shower.

Importantly, Peter Oliver�s career as a composer for giallo movies further implicates him in the transgressions under review. At one point he is seen scoring the music for images from Lucio Fulci�s 1971 film A Lizard in a Woman�s Skin. The fact that it is the scene revealing Carol Hammond (Florinda Balkan) as a killer that Oliver repeatedly seen scoring is important. Not only does it provide a point of intertextual reference in the film, but it also provides a way into reading the monstrous construction of the female killer in The Crimes of the Black Cat. Argento�s female killer�s are horrific because they hide their aggressive urges under a cloak of femininity, Fulci�s female killer from Lizard even manipulates masculine norms that equate the female with paranoia in order to hide the evidence of her sexual crimes. Francoise Ballais takes this theme of the �unknowable� woman one step further, after revealing her murderous quest to be premised on a vain attempt to prevent Victor (Rossi-Steward) from leaving her for other women. As she reveals to Oliver just before falling to her death, her breasts were disfigured in an earlier car crash. This violent alteration of her body resulted in a hatred of women whose physical identities were �complete�. Her monstrous depiction is thus premised on her inability to identify with the women that she then constructs as victims. The resultant lack of empathy while shocking enough is overshadowed by the fact that Oliver�s score provides a vital clue to guessing the killer�s identity; yet his failings as a detective prevent him from reading the truth until to late.

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