The Human Bloodstain Part II: Duccio Tessari's Death Occurred Last Night (1970) - Horror lives at home
Italian gialli films often take us on strange, exotic journeys. Often we're tourists, lost at sea and overwhelmed in beautiful foreign, European cities, disoriented by the heady mix of modern art and ancient architecture. We are as assaulted by the shock of the new as we are by the savagery of the black gloved maniacs inhabiting these cities, with the weight of ancient history crushing us it does our out of their depth explorers.
In a previous post about the humane giallo, I've mentioned Duccio Tessari's The Bloodstained Butterfly, and how his gialli's main distinguishing feature is the avoidance of explicit violence and sex that characterize these movies, preferring to elide these altogether, keeping them offscreen. A recent viewing of his earlier giallo - politzitesci hybrid Death Occurred Last Night (based on Italian harboiled legend's novel The Milanese Kill on Saturday, a title which gains tragic resonance at the end of this story) confirms several other of Tessari's strengths. Like Michael Mann's Heat or John Sayles' Lone Star, this is a movie that doesn't believe in small characters - every one has their chance to shine and spout their viewpoint. Unlike other Italian horror films, where the characters are just blanks to focus on other important thing, like virtuoso filmmaking or nightmarish delirium, Tessari's characters feel like real human beings with values and lives beyond the frame, and when they interact, they interact in what feels like a community. Tessari's horror does not come from ancient curses or grand conspiracies, but rather, it hits us because it happens right at our doorstep.
Death Occurred Last Night deals with a father's (heartbreakingly played by Raf Vallone) efforts to find his missing, mentally impaired adult daughter. Frustrated by his local stations lack, he turns to a world weary Milanese police captain (Frank Wolff) and his callow partner (Gabriele Tinti) to find her. Their search leads them to the underbelly of Milan's human trafficking scene, as both father and cop become obsessed with recovering their own "lost women" (in the same way Butterfly seemed to accidentally prefigure Blue Velvet and Manhunter, Death plays like an ancestor of the Orphic noir we know from Taxi Driver, Hardcore and Man on Fire).
In contrast to the luxury and colour of Bergamo in The Bloodstained Butterfly, Death Occurred Last Night takes place in gray and anonymous car dealerships and apartments (some of this movie's style reminds me of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, especially in a sting set up outside of the San Siro stadium). Like the other film however, class or status is no guarantee of sexual morality, and you can't trust your neighbours. The small steps which lead to the final film's horrific reveal of what actually happened are based on opportunism and everyday desires built into perversion - horror does not intrude on everyday life, but is now an integral part of it. There's no cartoon supervillains, just people with off desires who then act on them when they can. The films seething disgust at the industry of sexual exploitation is palpable, although somewhat compromised by how harsh the film is on the prostitutes themselves too (though the johns, pimps and parents are bitterly criticized too), and almost wrecked by a grossly inappropriate funk jazz score which actively acts against the meaning Tessari works so hard to create with his dialogue and what he chooses NOT to show.
Like Butterfly, legal institutions are shown to be good in conception and staffed with good people, but ineffectual at dealing with the complexity of the world. Vigilante action in both is shown to have a deletrious effect on the soul of the vigilante. Although Death lacks Butterfly's roving, dexterous CinemaScope camera, it retains another of its powerful tools: the montage. Whereas montage was a tool to demonstrate the slippery nature of truth and memory in Butterfly, here it adds to Tessari's interiority and obsession with character (when in the form of a memory) and the scope of the problem (in the montages of interrogation and investigation).
The above evidence all goes into demonstrating just how heartfelt Tessari's gialli can be, and why they are special in the genre. Rarely does death hit its characters, and therefore us, as hard. Like many others, Tessari was a real craftsman and artist in a field where none was expected, and we're the richer for it. Death may have occurred last night - but it feels like it only happened a minute ago