The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh: Martino and Fenech

There is a moment about twenty minutes into Lo strano vizio della Signora Wardh when you realise the razor killer prowling Vienna is the least interesting thing in the film. Sergio Martino’s 1971 thriller arrives dressed as a maniac-on-the-loose picture — the newspapers, the frightened women, the black gloves — and spends its running time quietly picking that costume apart. What it actually is underneath is a gaslighting melodrama about money, wearing the giallo’s clothes because in 1971 the giallo’s clothes were what sold tickets.

This was Martino’s first giallo and his first film with Edwige Fenech, and the pairing mattered enough that they made two more together, All the Colors of the Dark and Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, both in 1972. It is worth saying at the outset that Fenech’s reputation has been badly served by the way her filmography is catalogued. She spent much of the decade in Italian sex comedies, which is how the reference books tend to file her, and the effect is that her genuinely controlled work in the thrillers gets read as decoration. Watch what she does here and the condescension collapses.

Gastaldi’s machine

The screenplay is by Ernesto Gastaldi, and if you want to understand why the Italian thriller of the early seventies feels so structurally consistent across so many different directors, Gastaldi is a large part of the answer. He was the form’s most reliable architect. He had already written The Whip and the Body for Mario Bava in 1963, a gothic of desire and guilt that we have looked at in its own right, and the continuity between that film and this one is instructive: the same interest in a woman bound to a man who hurt her, the same suspicion that the supernatural or the psychotic is a story someone is telling for profit.

The Gastaldi machine works like this. Take a wealthy or well-married woman. Give her a past she cannot discuss and a present she cannot trust. Introduce a public menace — a maniac, a curse, a ghost — that provides cover and noise. Then reveal that the menace is either irrelevant or manufactured, and that the real threat is a domestic arrangement of people who want her money and have calculated that madness or death is the cheapest route to it. The lineage runs back to Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques in 1955, which is the ur-text for the entire Italian gaslight thriller, and Gastaldi never pretended otherwise.

What Gastaldi added was velocity and a taste for the double reverse. He does not settle for one revelation. He builds a solution, lets you hold it for a scene or two, and then pulls a second solution out from underneath the first, usually in the last four minutes. Some critics find this cheap. I find it honest about what the form is for. The Italian thriller of this period was never really a fair-play puzzle in the Agatha Christie sense; it was a delivery system for dread and reversal, and Gastaldi built the best delivery systems anyone built.

Vienna, and the vice in the title

The film is set in Vienna, which does a great deal of quiet work. Rome would have given Martino heat and crowds. Vienna gives him wet stone, embassies, formal rooms, an atmosphere of diplomatic propriety with something rotting inside it. Julie Wardh is a diplomat’s wife, which means her whole existence is performance and surface, and the city keeps handing the film images of surface: polished floors, glass, rain.

The vice of the title is the film’s most notorious element and its most misunderstood. Julie is haunted by fragments of a relationship with Jean, played by Ivan Rassimov with his usual pale-eyed menace, and the memory returns in flashes — rain, breaking glass, a violence she both fled and misses. Martino shoots these fragments in a different register from the rest of the film, slowed and saturated, so that they read as intrusions rather than exposition. The technique is doing something specific. It puts Julie’s interior life on screen as an involuntary event, something that happens to her mid-scene, and it makes her unreliability sympathetic. She is a woman being interrupted by her own head.

Rassimov’s casting is the film’s cleverest bit of misdirection, and it works because of everything else he was in. By 1971 he had a face the audience had learned to read as guilt. The film knows this. It puts him in the frame, lets you do the arithmetic, and profits from your confidence.

Nora Orlandi, and why the score outlived the film

The score is by Nora Orlandi, one of very few women writing film music in Italy at the time, and it is the element of this picture with the longest afterlife. Her main theme — a wordless female vocal over a slow, circling figure — was picked up by Quentin Tarantino for Kill Bill: Vol. 2, which is how most people alive today have heard it without knowing where it came from. That is a real irony worth sitting with: the most widely distributed thing Sergio Martino ever made is a piece of music he did not write, recontextualised by an American thirty years later.

The theme earns its second life. Orlandi writes it as a lullaby that will not resolve, and Martino drops it over Julie’s flashbacks so that the memory of being hurt arrives sounding like tenderness. That is the whole film in one cue. The character’s problem is that the worst thing that ever happened to her is also the most vivid, and the music refuses to separate the two on her behalf. Ennio Morricone was doing comparable work across the corridor for Lucio Fulci the same year, and the Italian thriller’s habit of scoring atrocity as romance starts around here.

Martino as a director of glass

Martino is not a stylist in the Argento sense, and the film is better for it. Where Argento builds sequences around colour and glass as an end in themselves, Martino uses those materials functionally. Glass in this film is almost always a barrier that fails: windows, bottles, a lift’s glazed panels, the champagne flute. Things that are supposed to separate Julie from the world keep shattering, and the motif is consistent enough that you can track her collapse by counting broken transparent objects.

There is also a genuine tension in how Martino films Fenech, and I would rather name it than tiptoe past it. The camera is frankly appreciative of her, in the way the commercial Italian cinema of 1971 required, and that appreciation sits uncomfortably close to the terror the film is putting her through. Bava had already opened this wound in Blood and Black Lace seven years earlier, staging beautiful deaths for beautiful women with an aestheticising eye. Martino inherits the problem without solving it. The difference here — and this is why I keep coming back to the film — is that Fenech plays against the camera’s leer. She gives Julie an exhausted watchfulness that the lighting never asked for.

The case against

Honesty requires the complaints. The middle third sags; there is a stretch of blackmail plotting that exists to keep the film at feature length. Alberto de Mendoza’s husband is a functional role rather than a person. The Vienna geography is vague enough that you never build a mental map, which costs the stalking sequences some of their tension. And the film’s psychology of masochism is 1971 psychology, delivered with a confidence no one has earned since.

It also carries a piece of trade folklore that has followed it for decades: the odd spelling of “Wardh,” which the legend attributes to a legal difficulty over the name Ward. The story is repeated everywhere and confirmed nowhere I would stake anything on, which makes it a good emblem for the film’s distribution history generally. It has circulated under Blade of the Ripper and Next!, in prints of varying length and wildly varying colour, and for years the version you saw determined the film you thought you had seen.

Where this sits

Start here if you are working into Martino: this is the cleanest statement of what he does. Then take All the Colors of the Dark, where the same team pushes the persecuted-woman structure into occult territory, and Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, which is Gastaldi at his most baroque. Torso shows the other Martino, the one who saw the body-count film coming. The broader map is in the giallo canon.

Where to watch: it has been restored, and the restoration matters, because Orlandi’s cue and Martino’s blues are the film. A muddy print turns the flashbacks into brown noise and the whole design goes with them.

Spoilers below

The maniac is a fraud. There is a razor killer in Vienna, and he is genuinely killing people, and he has nothing to do with what is being done to Julie — he is weather, an atmospheric condition the conspirators exploit because a city already frightened will accept another body without asking hard questions.

The conspiracy is mercenary and domestic. George, played by George Hilton with exactly the wrong amount of charm, is inside it. This is the film’s real cruelty: Julie’s instincts are not broken at all. She correctly identifies that she is in danger and correctly identifies that she cannot trust her own memory, and the one decision she makes to save herself — running to the attentive, patient man — is the decision that delivers her. Rassimov’s Jean, the figure the film has trained you to fear for ninety minutes, is a red herring who gets used up by the plot.

Then Gastaldi does the thing Gastaldi does. The conspiracy is not a stable structure; it is two people with a shared interest and no reason to keep trusting each other once the money is close. The final reversal turns the plotters on each other, and the film ends with the machine consuming its own operators. Nobody is redeemed. Julie survives with the knowledge that her judgement of character was sound and irrelevant, which is a bleaker ending than the genre usually permits, and the reason this film still holds when a hundred of its imitators do not.