Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key: The Giallo Title to End Them All

The Italian thriller of the early 1970s produced some of the strangest titles in the history of commercial cinema, and they were strange for a reason. Argento had scored with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, and the industry concluded — correctly, in box-office terms — that the formula was an animal, an adjective and a note of unexplained menace. Within three years Italian distributors had released The Cat o’ Nine Tails, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail, Death Walks on High Heels, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, and a film whose full domestic title asks why there are strange drops of blood on Jennifer’s body. The titles were the marketing. They promised the audience that something perverse and inexplicable was going to happen, and they were under no obligation to describe it.

Sergio Martino’s 1972 entry wins the whole competition and closes the category. Il tuo vizio è una stanza chiusa e solo io ne ho la chiave — Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key — is a title that sounds like a threat, reads like a line of bad poetry, and is, in the film, precisely that: a phrase from a poison-pen note received by a man who richly deserves one. It is the most extravagant title the genre produced. The remarkable thing is that the film underneath it is Martino’s best.

A drunk, a villa, a cat

Oliviero Rouvigny is a failed writer. He lives in a crumbling villa in the Veneto that his family has owned for generations and that he can no longer maintain, he drinks with commitment, he holds squalid parties for hangers-on who despise him, and he torments his wife Irina with a systematic cruelty that the film refuses to soften. Luigi Pistilli plays him, and the performance is the reason the film works — a portrait of a specific and instantly recognisable type, the man of letters with no letters, whose viciousness is entirely a function of his own mediocrity. Oliviero is not a monster of the gothic. He is a bad novelist with an inheritance and a drinking problem, and Pistilli makes his every humiliation of Irina feel like the deferred cost of a book he never wrote.

Anita Strindberg plays Irina, and the film’s opening movement is an unblinking catalogue of what is being done to her — the public mockery, the affairs conducted in her house, the ritual with his dead mother’s red shawl, which Oliviero produces to remind his wife that the only woman he ever revered is in the ground. There is a black cat called Satan, which Oliviero adores and Irina cannot bear. There are murders in the district. And then Floriana arrives.

Floriana is Oliviero’s niece, played by Edwige Fenech in the sharpest role of her giallo run, and she is the film’s disruption in the purest sense: a person of complete self-possession dropped into a house of mutual dependency. She sizes up the arrangement within an afternoon and begins working both halves of it, seducing Oliviero and Irina in turn with an efficiency that is the closest the film comes to comedy. Fenech, so often asked to be looked at, is here the one doing the looking, and the difference in her performance is remarkable.

The wall, and the trowel

The film is adapted, loosely and knowingly, from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” — the story of a drunkard who murders in his own home, conceals the body behind a freshly mortared wall, and is undone when the animal he sealed in with it starts to cry.

Martino spends his first forty minutes assembling Poe’s narrator with unusual care. Everything the story requires is loaded into Oliviero: the drink, the escalating cruelty, the wife who has nowhere to go, the adored cat, the decaying house that magnifies every raised voice. By the time the film has finished introducing him you know exactly which story you are sitting in and exactly who is going to reach for the trowel, because you have read it, or because you have seen one of the dozen films that borrowed it.

Then Martino does something to that structure which I will keep below the line, since it is the single best idea in his filmography and the entire picture is engineered to land it. What can safely be said above the line is that it is a genuinely elegant piece of adaptation rather than a smart-arse subversion; that it follows from Poe’s material rather than contradicting it; and that it redistributes the story’s guilt in a way Poe never considered.

The cat is the mechanism either way, and Martino keeps Poe’s ending intact because Poe’s ending is unimprovable. An animal is the one witness that cannot be reasoned with, bribed, frightened or included in a plan. Everything else in a household can be managed. The cat simply knows where something is, and eventually says so.

The ancestor that ignored the story

The collector’s cross-reference here is a good one, because the most famous film called The Black Cat has almost nothing to do with Poe at all. Ulmer’s 1934 film put Karloff and Lugosi in a Bauhaus mansion built on a war grave and delivered Satanism, chess and flaying, retaining from Poe roughly one animal and the title, which Universal had bought for the name recognition. It is a magnificent film and a fraudulent adaptation. Roger Corman’s Poe cycle took similar liberties throughout the sixties.

So the joke of the Italian giallo tradition, which nobody has ever accused of literary fidelity, is that Martino’s film — the one with the ludicrous title, the nudity, the Fenech seduction scenes and the commercial brief — is the most faithful screen version of “The Black Cat” that anyone made. It keeps the drink. It keeps the domestic cruelty as the engine. It keeps the wall. It keeps the cat’s testimony. It understands, as Ulmer did not care to, that Poe’s story is about the specific psychology of a man who cannot leave his own guilt alone.

The other reference point is Anita Strindberg, who had made A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin for Lucio Fulci the previous year and brought from it exactly the quality this film needs — a stillness that reads as fragility until it abruptly does not. And the film sits alongside The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave as the best of the gothic-giallo hybrids, films that took the black-gloved modern thriller and moved it into a mouldering ancestral pile to see what the two forms would do to each other.

The case against

The film is squalid, and its squalor is calculated for a market. Martino was working to a commercial specification that required a certain volume of nudity at certain intervals, and the seduction material is paced by the distributor’s stopwatch rather than the story’s need. Fenech is very good here; the film’s interest in her is nonetheless divided between her intelligence and her body in a ratio she had no say in.

The middle act sags. Once the arrangement in the villa has been established, Martino has to fill time before the mechanism can start, and he fills it with police procedure, a subplot about the district killings, and a couple of red herrings that go nowhere anyone cares about. The English dub is poor even by the standards of the period, and Pistilli’s performance — which is doing fine, granular work in Italian — takes real damage from it.

And the last reel piles on reversals past the point of diminishing returns. Martino cannot resist one more turn, and then one more after that, and the film’s final movements start to feel like a man refusing to leave the stage. Poe knew to stop when the cat cried out. Martino keeps going.

Against all of that: this is the one Martino giallo with a genuine idea in it, executed with conviction, carried by a performance of real specificity, and built on the smartest piece of adaptation in the whole cycle. Set it beside The Case of the Bloody Iris or All the Colors of the Dark from the same twelve months and the difference is that this film would still work if you removed the mystery entirely.

Spoilers below

Irina kills him. After forty minutes of degradation delivered with Oliviero’s particular brand of literary condescension, the film turns and Irina puts an end to it, and Martino stages the murder with none of the operatic flourish the genre had trained audiences to expect. It is ugly, close, and over quickly. Then the wall goes up, with the cat sealed behind it, and Poe’s clock starts ticking.

The reversal lands because of everything Martino front-loaded. Pistilli’s Oliviero is so comprehensively established as the Poe narrator — the drink, the cat, the wife, the house, the self-pity — that the audience has spent forty minutes waiting for him to reach for the trowel. Handing it to Irina retrospectively reframes the entire first act: what looked like a portrait of a man’s descent was a portrait of a woman’s arithmetic.

Floriana works it out, and the film’s second half becomes a blackmail. Fenech’s performance is best here, because Floriana’s leverage is total and she enjoys it — she has walked into a house, identified the corpse in the masonry, and calmly assumed ownership of everyone in the building. Irina’s response is the film’s grimmest logic: the first killing was a release, the second is maintenance. Having become a murderer to stop being a victim, she discovers that the position requires upkeep, and Martino follows that descent without offering her any of the sympathy the opening act had banked for her. The abused wife’s liberation curdles into a job.

The cat closes it. Sealed in the wall, alive, it does what Poe’s cat does, and the sound from behind the plaster brings the whole edifice down at the exact moment Irina has begun to believe she has managed everything. The animal has no motive, no stake and no plan. It simply cries in the wrong room at the wrong time, and that is the story’s oldest and best point: a conscience does not need to be internal to be inescapable.

Martino then adds his final turns, and this is where the film overreaches. There is a last reversal involving the survivors and the estate that is clever, unnecessary, and slightly diminishing — a giallo tax paid to a genre that expected its ending to sting twice. The film had already found its perfect final beat in the crying wall. It plays another two hands anyway.

Still, the joke that the whole thing rests on is worth the title. A genre built on baroque promises of perversion produced, almost by accident, the most faithful Poe adaptation in the movies — and its one substantive change to the source was to notice that the person behind the wall might have opinions about being there.

Where to watch: Shameless released a strong restoration under the full title, and the Italian track with subtitles is essential to get Pistilli’s work intact. Follow it with A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin for Strindberg in Fulci’s hands, or with The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh for the Martino–Fenech partnership one year earlier and considerably less sure of itself.