Rating: C-
Dir: Silvio Amadio
Star: Farley Granger, Barbara Bouchet, Rosalba Neri, Umberto Raho
a.k.a. Alla ricerca del piacere
I don’t know about you. I would be rather reluctant to take on a job, if the previous incumbent of the position had disappeared under mysterious circumstances. However, this is a giallo, and so logic will be a secondary consideration, if it is a consideration at all. Naturally, Greta Franklin (Bouchet), the new secretary to writer Richard Stuart (Granger), has an agenda. She was a close, personal friend – nudge, nudge – of the vanishing predecessor, Sally, and is working undercover, in the hopes of finding out what happened to her. Sally’s last letter to Greta contained ominous and florid passages, such as, “I’m prey once again, mesmerized by their evil, unable to escape it.”
Mind you, her employer is fond of ominous pronouncements himself, e.g. “A true artist never dies. He’s immortal.” There’s also a roaming imbecile, Rocco, with “the body of a giant and the brain of a child.” He likes to stare, wild-eyed, through the windows. Naturally, this causes Greta to go into shock and dream about Richard’s wife, Eleanora (Neri), making love to her. Or was it more than a dream?!?! She then wanders into a swingers’ party being held by the Stuarts. That is probably the point I’d be handing in my notice, missing BFF or not. Again: giallo logic applies, not least because it’s soon quite apparent that Greta’s subterfuge is not fooling anyone, least of all Richard.
The main problem is, there isn’t much of anything going on here, apart from atmosphere. The gratuitous nudity, while certainly far from unpleasant, is not enough to make for the fact that watching Greta creep along corridors and explore dusty rooms, simply isn’t very interesting. She’s not particularly good at sleuthing either; perhaps the lack of basic competence was intended to make her adorable. I do wonder if this was an inspiration for Basic Instinct, with Richard describing in his work, what had happened to Sally. Otherwise, you’ve got Eleanora randomly possessing ESP and being possessed by the spirit of Sally, a duck-shooting trip where Greta decides she’s the target and gets stuck in gratuitous quicksand (maybe that’s the “muck”?), plus sundry other bits of well-photographed but more or less meaningless nonsense.
The film seems generally to be equating sexual freedom with depravity, Richard and Eleonora using and manipulating those around them in ways both sexual and psychological. This might seem a bit hypocritical, considering how much time it spends depicting – indeed, I’d say wallowing in – said depravity. I mean, did we really need to see the characters watching a Super-8 porno version of Little Red Riding Hood? Naturally, as in all good morality plays, the evil ones get their just desserts, the “monster” they have created eventually turning against them, with a final twist literally seconds before ‘THE END” appears. But it’s fair to say I didn’t really care for anyone, or what happened to them. There’s little here of interest, beyond a platter of prime seventies Eurototty.