DELIRIUM (1972)

 

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

Though the story of Renato Polselli's DELIRIUM is fairly obvious-- when it's not incoherent-- it earns myth-points for being fairly "in one's face" about the "war between men and women," even when some members of one sex join the wrong side.

Main character Herbert Lyutak (Mickey Hargitay) lives in some unspecified part of Europe. Though he and his wife abide in a ritzy-looking house, Herbert's only source of income is that of a criminologist who advises police on the behavior of psychos. (This doesn't count his service in the American military during Vietnam, though this detail appears only in the American version.) But first we see Herbert plying a deadly avocation. He meets a pretty girl in a bar and offers to give her a lift to her destination, but Herbert callously murders her-- and it's not his first killing. The local cops, aware of a pattern-following serial killer in town, learn that Herbert was seen with the murder victim, so that he's briefly a suspect. But then someone commits a new murder while Herbert's in custody, so the cops drop their suspicions and never give Herbert a second look until movie's end.

The identity of the second killer remains in play until the end, but no viewer will really doubt that all the non-Herbert murders are committed by his devoted wife Marzia (Rita Calderoni). Given that she's constantly bleating about how deeply she loves Herbert, and that no one else has a motive to help him, Marzia's shared guilt in the killing of female victims is no surprise. Herbert does knock off a male victim too, but just for self-protection, not for psycho-killer reasons. Herbert is driven to kill because he's filled with remorse about being impotent with his wife, and he seems to derive some relief from murdering women, though he doesn't sleep with them either. 

Just as Polselli has no intention of creating a story of detection, he also doesn't get into the psychology of Herbert or Marzia, and I could barely figure out the identities of most of the other characters thanks to Polselli's scattershot script. Though Herbert's wife has remained technically virginal since the couple's marriage, she apparently enjoys sapphic relationships with her maid Joaquina (Christa Barrymore) to blow off steam. 

It's not the cops who bring Herbert down, but Joaquina, who attacks Herbert with a whip because he's about to blame all the killings on Marzia. The different versions give Joaquina different reasons for attacking. In the Italian, she does so because she's in love with Marzia; in the English one, it's because one of Herbert's victims was her sister. I didn't fully watch the English version, but I don't think it offered much beyond extra murder scenes, and a loose implication that maybe PTSD is partly to blame for the psycho's impotence. This add-on motive proves irrelevant, since Herbert always seems driven by intertwined passion for, and hatred of, femininity. 

The glossily-photographed murders look great, but it's hard to say that they don't implicate the director in a certain amount of misogyny. I'm not sure that the maid's brutal attack on Herbert counts as any sort of "Revenge of the Female," but it helps that I liked Barrymore better than star Calderoni. The other victims are also stone glamour-pusses, though I recognized none of the performers. Hargitary and Calderoni certainly dial the emotion up to eleven, and for good measure Polselli throws in some wild sex-dreams in which Hargitay struggles in peplum-style chains while his wife and her maid cavort in bed. But at least no one can accuse Polselli of falsification. He promises the viewers "delirium," and that's just what he gives them.