Sergio Martino: The Giallo Craftsman

Sergio Martino has spent fifty years telling interviewers, without a trace of false modesty, that he made whatever the market asked for. Gialli when gialli sold. Poliziotteschi when the audience wanted police. Cannibals after Deep Throat and Jaws had rearranged the appetite. Sex comedies, post-apocalypse, killer alligators, fish-men, and then three decades of Italian television. He has never claimed a vision. He is also, on the evidence, the finest pure director of thrillers Italy produced in the seventies, and the gap between those two sentences is the most interesting thing about him.

He was born in Rome in 1938 into the trade — his grandfather was Gennaro Righelli, a silent-era director who made La canzone dell’amore, the first Italian sound film, in 1930 — and his older brother Luciano became a producer and writer who would package most of Sergio’s career. The Martino operation was a family firm with a house star: Edwige Fenech, who was Luciano’s partner for years and the face of the brothers’ most bankable decade.

The Gastaldi machine

The five gialli that matter run from 1971 to 1973, and four of them were written by Ernesto Gastaldi, who is as responsible for the genre’s shape as any director alive.

Gastaldi’s contribution was a plot engine. He worked out that the giallo could carry two mysteries at once — a maniac in a raincoat killing people, and, underneath it, a completely rational conspiracy of relatives and lovers after money — and that the audience would follow the raincoat while the will was being rewritten in the next room. The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh (1971) is that machine’s first full run: Fenech as a diplomat’s wife with a razor in her past, George Hilton, Ivan Rassimov, an Austrian setting, and a solution that is entirely mercenary once you see it. The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail the same year does it again in Athens with an insurance payout.

The reason the machine works is dramatic rather than mechanical. A rational conspiracy needs the killings to be a performance staged for the audience inside the film, which means the giallo’s habit of aestheticising murder acquires a story reason — somebody in the plot is art-directing the deaths on purpose. Gastaldi and Martino got there years before Scream made the same joke in English.

All the Colors of the Dark (1972) breaks the pattern in the best direction. Fenech is a woman in London recovering from a miscarriage and a car crash, recruited by a neighbour into a suburban black mass, and Martino keeps the film balanced on a wire between a genuine satanic conspiracy and a total psychiatric collapse for nearly ninety minutes. Martino’s satanic giallo has the boldest imagery of his career — the blue-eyed man with the knife, the ritual in the drawing room, the Rosemary-adjacent paranoia of a London that has agreed to something.

Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972) has the finest title in cinema, taken from a note the killer leaves, and is a loose adaptation of Poe’s “The Black Cat” set in a rotting Venetian villa with an alcoholic writer, a battered wife, a cat called Satan and Fenech arriving halfway through as a niece with a motorbike. The giallo title to end them all is Martino’s best-directed film, and its cruelty is domestic rather than decorative.

Torso, and the half hour that matters

Torso (1973) is the one that changed the genre’s export prospects, because it is the giallo that most resembles what America would build five years later. Perugia, a university, foreign students, a masked killer, a red-and-black scarf, and a body count that mounts without ceremony.

The last thirty minutes are the argument. Suzy Kendall’s Jane is trapped upstairs in a villa with a sprained ankle while the killer dismembers her friends on the floor below, and the sequence plays almost wordlessly in something close to real time. Martino builds it out of pure geometry: what Jane can hear, what she can see through a keyhole, where the stairs are, where the key is, how long a saw takes. He gives the audience more information than the character has and then makes her decisions look reasonable anyway, which is the hardest trick in suspense and the one that separates Martino’s giallo body count from the hundred imitations of it.

Hitchcock would have recognised the construction. So did the Americans: the trapped-in-the-house final act, the wounded survivor, the killer working methodically through the house below — the whole shape walks straight into the slasher, and the giallo’s fingerprints on the modern slasher are, in that final reel, Martino’s specifically.

The craft, plainly

Martino’s method rewards attention because there is no mystique in it at all.

He shoots for the cut. His coverage is decided before the day, which is why his films move at a speed the Italian competition rarely matched, and why his set pieces are legible — you always know where everyone is standing, which sounds like a low bar until you watch fifty gialli and discover how few of them clear it. He uses the zoom the way the period demanded and, unusually, uses it for information: a Martino zoom lands on the thing the plot needs you to file away, whereas Fulci’s tends to land on an eye for the sensation.

He is also disciplined about the murders. Where Argento treats a killing as a self-contained aria that stops the film to be admired, Martino keeps his inside the scene’s momentum; the violence is often uglier and always shorter, and the picture carries on. That choice costs him the ecstatic set pieces the genre is famous for and buys him something the genre almost never has, which is pace. A Martino giallo at ninety-five minutes has no dead ground in it.

Bruno Nicolai and Nora Orlandi supplied the scores, Fenech and Hilton and Anita Strindberg and Rassimov the faces, and Giancarlo Ferrando the photography for most of the run. It was a repertory company. It functioned like one.

The Fenech question

Edwige Fenech was born in Bône, in French Algeria, to a Maltese father and a Sicilian mother, won a beauty contest, and became for roughly a decade the single most reliable commercial asset in Italian genre cinema. The Martino brothers built four films around her and then, when the giallo faded, built a second career around her in the sex comedies that dominated Italian box office through the late seventies.

She is usually written about as a face, which undersells the work considerably. Fenech’s specific gift in the gialli is legibility under pressure: she can play a woman who is being gaslit while remaining plausibly intelligent, so the audience never gets ahead of her and starts shouting at the screen. All the Colors of the Dark depends entirely on this. The film has to keep the supernatural reading and the psychiatric reading alive simultaneously for eighty minutes, and the only instrument holding both is her performance — she is frightened in a way that could be either, and she never tips it. Argento’s heroines are frequently ciphers being moved through beautiful rooms. Martino’s, played by Fenech, have interiors, and that is a large part of why his films still work as thrillers rather than as objects.

After the boom

When the giallo cooled he moved without visible regret. The poliziotteschi are strong — The Violent Professionals (1973), Silent Action (1975), and The Suspicious Death of a Minor (1975), which is the strange one, splicing giallo, police thriller and outright comedy in a way that ought to collapse and does not. He belongs in any survey of Italy’s answer to Dirty Harry.

Then Mountain of the Cannibal God (1978) with Ursula Andress and Stacy Keach, which is the entry in his filmography that is hardest to defend and which I will not attempt to, since the animal footage in it is real and the ethics of that cycle do not have a favourable reading. The Great Alligator and Island of the Fishmen in 1979. 2019: After the Fall of New York in 1983, a post-nuclear picture assembled out of Escape from New York and Mad Max with total shamelessness and genuine energy. Hands of Steel in 1986. Then television, for thirty years, competently, without complaint.

The honest case against

The case against Martino is that he is exactly what he says he is. There is no development across the career, no argument being pursued from film to film, no subject he returns to because it will not leave him alone. He got better at the job and then applied the job to whatever arrived. The gialli are impersonal in a way Argento’s and Fulci’s never are — you can identify a Fulci from thirty seconds of any reel, and you cannot do that with Martino, because his signature is competence and competence is invisible.

The sexual politics of the run have also aged into something a modern viewer has to negotiate consciously. Fenech is photographed as an object with a thoroughness that the films’ plots occasionally interrogate and mostly just enjoy, and the Gastaldi conspiracies are usually driven by a woman’s duplicity. Your Vice is genuinely interested in the marriage it depicts. Several of the others are interested in the marriage the way a magazine is.

Against all of that: watch the last half hour of Torso, then watch the last half hour of any American slasher from the following decade, and ask which director understood the problem. Martino has never once suggested he was doing anything more than his job. He was simply better at that job than the men who thought they were doing art.

Where to start

Torso first, in a boutique restoration with the fuller Italian cut. Then Your Vice Is a Locked Room for the best filmmaking. Then All the Colors of the Dark for the nerve. He sits in the giallo canon on merit and holds the middle of it steady, which is unglamorous work and the reason the genre has a middle at all.