Just before Christmas, Lee Leander is caught shoplifting. It is her third offense. She is prosecuted by John Sargent. He postpones the trial because it is hard to get a conviction at Christmas time. But he feels sorry for her and arranges for her bail, and ends up taking her home to his mother for Christmas. Surrounded by a loving family (in stark contrast to Lee's own family background) they fall in love. This creates a new problem: how do they handle the upcoming trial?
This film is an extremely entertaining psychological thriller with Carrol Baker excellent as a rich American widow getting away from it all at a secluded Italian villa. Enter smart aleck down on his luck playboy, Lou Castel, who has some golddigging motives behind his slick hipster seduction techniques and has no qualms about how he gets what he wants. He encourages Baker's character's incipient alcoholism and dubious self-esteem, brings in his supposed 'sister' to help drag Baker even further into a maze of sick mind games, drug addiction and group sex, all culminating in a descent into near-madness and self-destructive depravity.
I won't give away anymore, suffice to say that the film delivers on its swinging sixties, Euro sleaze ambience and psychological suspense thriller credentials in spades. Director Umberto Lenzi's work has been, at best, uneven and he's churned out his share of crap. However, he made some quite good giallos and crime pictures in the sixties and seventies and this is one of them (other good films by Lenzi -- SPASMO, SEVEN BLOODSTAINED ORCHIDS, ASSAULT WITH A DEADLY WEAPON, to name only a few).
Unfortunately this film is ofen confused with another okay but not-quite-as-good Lenzi film that was also released briefly here in America under the same PARANOIA title (but is more commonly known, especially on video, as A QUIET PLACE TO KILL).
Appropriately, her own 14th arrondissement (specifically Rue Daguerre) is a source of pleasure for the protagonist (Jasmine Thiré) and viewer, having been photographed carefully, beautifully, and lovingly. The first word that this all brought to mind way “playful,” and I’m pleased that my simple descriptor is something Varda would consider appropriate. Says her, “It’s playing a game with reality. The game is called cinema.”
这是导演的成名之作,罗伯特自掏腰包拍了这部低成本的黑色电影,结果一炮而红。影片讲述的是一名心狠手辣的罪犯成功越狱后,来到小镇伺机找他的仇家报仇,仇家的手下只知道那个罪犯将武器藏在吉他盒子里随身携带,而从来都没有见过他本人。一名流浪的吉他手(卡洛斯•加拉尔多 Carlos Gallardo 饰)凑巧这时来到小镇谋生,于是,莫名其妙的他就被卷入了一场不知所谓的追杀中。追杀的场面被导演演绎的笑料百出,黑色幽默表现的淋漓尽致。
A ship carrying a band of black-marketeers, including a beautiful woman, eludes police after a battle at sea and lands on a remote island where a marine meteorological observatory is stationed. They take over the observatory but tragedy ensues as a violent typhoon approaches the island.