THE STRANGE VICE OF MRS. WARDH (1971)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

Director Sergio Martino completed two of his earliest giallos back to back in the same year and with two of the same writers contributing to his scripts. Neither this one nor CASE OF THE SCORPION'S TAIL represents the best work of either Martino or his scripters, but it's arguable that they provided Martino with training for some of his better efforts in the genre later on. 

Of the two 1971 efforts, I felt that the script for SCORPION'S, while nothing extraordinary, provided a better array of victims and suspects while Martino's direction was more fluid. By contrast, I found VICE clunky and obvious in terms of both plot and characters. Admittedly, I'd seen VICE before over ten years ago, so it's possible that I retained some memories of its plot-twists, at least on the subconscious level. But visually I found it boring as well. 

A "razor killer" is on the loose in Vienna at the same time when Julie Wardh (Edwige Fenech) and her husband Neil return to the city for Neil's diplomatic business. Viewers learn that Julie's "vice" is not all that strange as vices go, for prior to her marriage she was regularly seeing a lover named Jean (Ivan Rassimov). Through flashbacks we see that Jean is a sadist, but it's not quite certain that Julie is a masochist, though she does allow Jean to inflict cuts in her flesh to satisfy his fetish.

At a party Julie's friend Carol introduces Julie to her cousin George (George Hilton), and slightly later Julie starts sleeping with George to allay the boredom she feels with her "safe" husband. But a caller threatens to reveal Julie's affair to her husband, Carol is slain by a razor-wielding murderer, and Julie almost meets the same fate. Is it a coincidence, or is Jean the Razor Killer? Or is all part of an even more devious plot, one of those beloved giallo schemes in which sane men pretend to be mad?

The film's greatest shortcoming is that Julie is not particularly sympathetic, despite getting targeted by a killer. I've only seen a couple of films made by star Edwige Fenech prior to VICE, so I can't get a sense as to her level of acting-skill at the time, though she had made over a dozen films of various kinds before 1971. All I can say is that a lot of giallos have been able to put across some basic heroine-sympathy despite the sketchiness of the main characters, and this one did not.

The film got my hopes up by starting out with a portentous quote from Freud about violence, but this turned out to be nothing but window-dressing for a murky story.