THE EYE IN THE LABYRINTH (1972)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*



SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Nothing in the repertoire of director/screenwriter Mario Caiano—full of peplum flicks, Eurospies, and westerns—suggests artistry. In the U.S. Caiano’s probably best known for the 1964 horror-film NIGHTMARE CASTLE. It’s possible that when Caiano directed and co-wrote THE EYE IN THE LABYRINTH, he may have been making his bid to enter the domain of “toney thrillers,” along the lines of the celebrated giallo-filmmaker Dario Argento. Presumably EYE didn’t bring in big box office, since Caiano didn’t become as prolific a producer of giallos as numerous other toilers in that field, like Umberto Lenzi.

An opening quote from Jorge Luis Borges certainly seems to signify Caiano trying to stake out territory for EYE among the more sophisticated horror-films. The title is similarly referential, and much less random that many giallo-titles, many of which comhine sensationalism with nonsensical elements (cf. DON’T TORTURE THE DUCKLING). Eyes aren’t automatically paired with labyrinths, where the dominant association is either the thread that leads the hero out of the maze, or the minotaur-monster waiting to assault said hero. Yet the image of an eye at the center of the labyrinth suggests a trope common to mystery-thrillers, where the person seeking to solve the mystery is “a private eye,” investigating a labyrinthine mystery. Further, given that EYE makes liberal reference to psychoanalystic ideas—albeit seen through the prism of a horror-thriller—the main character turns out to be seeking the nature of her own self, lost in the maze of her own conflicting nature.

EYE first shows a man being knifed to death by a vaguely seen assailant, though this scene proves to part of a dream on the part of central character Julie (Rosemary Dexter), and the man being murdered is her boyfriend Luca (Horst Frank). Disturbed by the dream, Julie seeks out Luca at the mental asylum where he works as a prominent psychiatrist. But Luca has left without leaving a forwarding address. Julie’s only clue is that a fanatical patient screams that Luca can be found in the small (and fictional) seaside resort-town Maricuda.

Guided by this token from a demented soothsayer-type, Julie goes to Maricuda. There she meets an older man, Frank (Adolfo Celi). He guides Julie to a resort built on a rocky Mediterranean coast, run by its apparent owner Gerda (Alida Valli).  However, none of the resort’s residents appear to be tourists. Rather, they all seem to be bohemian psuedo-artists living on the property at the sufferance of Gerda. All of the residents are famlliar with Luca, who stayed at the resort, but they claim that the psychiatrist left some time ago. However, Julie observes various inconsistencies in their stories, and gets a mysterious phone call that sounds like Luca. A previous relationship between Frank and Gerda is mentioned—one which involved in Gerda taking over the house from Frank in some arrangement—and all of the artists have peculiar tics, to the extent that they seem like the demented Dionysian rabble from Tennessee Williams’ SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER. Sex, particularly age-transgressive, makes frequent appearances, and not only with Frank macking on Julie. Middle-aged Gerda keeps Louie, a younger man, as her lover, and a teenage guy, Saro, peeps on Julie in her bedclothes. Saro is also the source of another clue about Luca’s disappearance, when Julie sees that Saro has painted a picture of one cartoony figure stabbing another to death at the resort. Real death doesn’t take long to raise its grisly head, as a mysterious killer makes attempts on Julie’s life. The director doesn’t craft his murder-attempts with as much visual panache as Argento. Still, Caiano brings a piquant quality to a scene on the rocky coast, where the driver of a distant speedboat tries to kill Julie with a speargun.

The truth about the artists’ colony—more or less the “labyrinth” of the title—is that the god they worship is the demon of lllegal narcotics, and both Frank and Gerda are pushers. Further, the monster at the heart of the labyrinth initially seems to be Luca, who used his psychological mind-games to unearth the artists’ secrets for blackmail purposes. This revelation devastates Julie, who reacts by falling into bed with Louie, much to the displeasure of Gerda. Caiano also gives his audience the impression that Julie’s inquiries are spreading a plague of death without help from some other killer. She drags the lascivious Saro into a car, intending to make him admit his secret knowledge of Luca’s fate to the cops. Instead, she crashes the car, and manages to accidentally set it on fire with Saro inside.

But Caiano has an additional mystery to disclose, right out of the Cornell Woolrich “the killer is really the detective” handbook. Although Gerda, Frank and their bohemian puppets are dangerous people— that speargun shows up again, when Gerda executes the traitorous Louie with it—none of them embody the monster at the labyrinth’s center. Frank has known the monster’s true nature all along. It turns out that Julie wasn’t just Luca’s girlfriend, but his former patient. The audience never knows much about Julie’s psychological problems—this is no attempt to do a rigorous portrait of a disturbed mind a la “Equus”—only that at some point in the past Jule’s father cast aside Julie’s mother, which somehow resulted in Julie being treated for anger issues. Yet, precisely because Luca was a scumbag, he took advantage of his patient’s father-transference, sleeping with her and then casting her aside, just as her mother was cast out. So Frank finally reveals that Julie’s visit to Maricuda was her second one: that she came to the resort days ago and murdered Luca. None of the residents witnessed the murder, but they all covered it up to avoid having their own crimes exposed. Frank evidently worked all this out because he was monitoring the situation in the hope of reclaiming his former property. However, Frank outsmarts himself. He gets the idea that he can become the new “daddy” in Julie’s life—not realizing that for Julie, sex and death are inextricably entwined.

Some IMDB reviews complained that EYE was too “Freudian.” It’s true that Freud’s intermingling of “eros” and “thanatos” casts a long shadow over the history of popular entertainment. However, though Freud was notable for a few images of monstrous femininity—in particular when he imagined the Medusa as horrible because her snaky hair represented the pudenda—his principal concern in most of his psychological writings concerned the Oedipal conflict of father and son. The father of psychology even rejecred Jung’s perhaps-humorous concept of an “Electra complex,” in that Freud argued that the female subject simply manifested a feminine version of the Oedipus paradigm.

There might be a father-son conflict buried in the original story of Theseus and the Minotaur, but there’s none in this labyrinth. The “eye” of the movie’s title is clearly Julie herself, the would-be detective, but she;s also the minotaur waiting at the maze’s center. Her monstrousness is malignant femininity, in that it’s directed toward not just fathers, but all males. There’s a loose opposition between her and Gerda, the evil mother-figure, since they contend over the same man, whom Gerda ends up killing out of jealousy. (A previous scene, in which Gerda upbraids Louie for his infidelity, shows a rate moment of humor in this grim film, for the proprietess of the resort asks “Aren’t you ashamed,” as if she were a real mother castigating her son for going out with a bad girl.) Yet even though Julie’s specialty is killing false fathers, she’s something of a fatal mother to teenaged Saro as well, reacting to his clumsy passes by imprisoning him in a flaming coffin.

Most giallos allow the protagonist to remain relatively innocent, and thus qualify for the Fryean mythos of the drama. But there are no redeemable characters in Caiano’s acidulous riff on bohemian evil, and so it better aligns with the more downbeat mythos of the irony. I've already mentioned one of the "bizarre crimes" in the narrative, that of the speedboat-speargun attack, but at the climax Julie also decapitates her dead lover for no reason in the plot, which tempts me to believe that Caiano was referencing the Freudian take on castration.