SO SWEET, SO DEAD (1972)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I saw this film under the title THE SLASHER IS THE SEX MANIAC. For once an exploitative and inaccurate English title is derived from an Italian title that's equally inaccurate though a little less exploitative (see above). I prefer the alternate English title for this film, the only giallo by director/co-writer Roberto Bianchi Montero.

SO SWEET SO DEAD comes damn close to rating "good mythicity" by the way the script utilizes tropes of misogyny. I'm not talking about the penchant of giallos to depict more female killings in disproportion to male ones. Due to the strength discrepancy between men and women, there's a degree of physical logic when a male serial killer-- or even a female one-- preys more on females than on males. Even the depiction of female deaths in spectacular visual terms is arguable in terms of its misogynistic content.

But in SWEET, we have a killer who incarnates a social form of misogyny, rather than killing because he's a "sex maniac." Perhaps because the murderer dresses in the standard black giallo attire with a stocking mask and uses a mundane knife all the time, the press doesn't give him a snazzy nickname. Thus I'll anticipate the film's Big Reveal by calling him "the Professor" (yes, that's why the spoilers are there), and he earns that name by showing a professorial level of research ability. All of his targets are all glamorous, upper-class married women who have cheated on their husbands, and the Professor first kills the women and then leaves behind photographic evidence on their indiscretions. He also very considerately scratches out the faces of the men with whom the unfaithful women dallied, as if he were avenging the husbands who were sinned against and yet excusing the men who made the indiscretions possible. In hands more capable than those of Montero, this could have been a searing indictment of Italian double standards toward male profligacy. But one of the big flaws of SWEET is that the Professor's psychosis is never really justified. Yes, there's some last-minute BS about how he lost his beloved wife because she died in an accident while in the company of her lover. Yet the weak script makes no attempt to grapple with his reasons for protecting the male transgressors. Ironically, when the Professor in his civilian ID is trying to lead the cops down the garden path, he suggests that the killer effaces the photos because he's homosexual-- which is also BS.

The Professor's main adversary, Inspector Capuana (Farley Granger) is a little better drawn. He and his beautiful wife Barbara (Sylva Koscina) moved from a small Italian city to a bigger one for the sake of social advancement. But because the Professor targets only rich people, Capuana constantly finds himself between a rock and a hard place: rich people constantly demand that he arrest the malefactor preying on their class (even if the killer IS knocking off unfaithful wives), but at the same time the cops have to treat all the rich people with kid gloves. After three or four women die, Capuana gets a break, of sorts. Gastone is a somewhat dotty mortician (played by Luciano Rossi as if he were channeling Klaus Kinski). Gastone, though not a suspect, seems to have a fetish for making dead bodies look flawlessly preserved. Out of nowhere the mortician confesses to the killings. Capuana and his fellow cops don't believe Gastone for a moment, but they tell the press they've caught the killer, in the far-fetched belief that this will offend the killer's pride.

This stratagem shouldn't work, but it does. The Professor calls Capuana and announces that he'll make the inspector pay for insulting the killer's holy mission, for the Professor then tells Capuana that he intends to slay Barbara. Apparently the killer's annoyance allows him to deviate from focusing on the upper classes, but he stays true to his main obsession, for he also tells Capuana that Barbara's been cheating on him.

Even though Capuana never actually sees any evidence against Barbara, he implicitly believes everything the murderer tells him. (And how convincing are a bunch of photos with the male faces scratched off, anyway?) But though Capuana still has no way to track the Professor, he has a sudden realization of just who Barbara's lover could be. He rushes to Barbara's rendezvous point.

I'll omit the movie's final twist, which could have been a Hitchcockian masterpiece if Montero hadn't saddled SWEET with such cardboard characters and unbelievable motivations. Frankly, the Professor is such a weak-sauce monster that I really wish Gastone had been the culprit. His obsession with making women look beautiful in death-- and thus incapable of refusing any attentions-- could have been a nice comment on the way the better giallos use the female body to portray a union of eros and thanatos, of "the sweet" and "the dead."