Carroll Baker topless in Orgasmo (1969)

Carroll Baker

The film also has nudity from Collette Descombes

Carroll Baker had been successful in the late fifties as a serious actress, even garnering an Oscar nomination in the Best Actress category. She was later successful in sex symbol roles in the sixties.

Her success was tinged with bitterness. Throughout her early career there had always been tension between her and the studios, or between her and specific producers. At one point she sued Hollywood big-shot Joseph Levine, and was basically blacklisted thereafter.

Baker then became one of those American actresses who migrated into European films when roles started to dry up for them in Hollywood. She was rediscovered by director Marco Ferreri and later became the go-to leading lady of another Italian director, Umberto Lenzi, who made slick exploitation films. For a full decade, 1967-76, she lived in Italy while she starred in, and sometimes removed her clothing in, a string of giallo films like this one.

This one is essentially a murder mystery.

SPOILERS FOLLOW after the jump:

—
—
—

Carroll Baker plays a wealthy American widow who moves to a tranquil Roman estate, hoping to recuperate from her husband’s sudden death in an automobile accident. She is lonely and drinks far too much, which makes her easy prey for a pair of grifters who seduce her, drug her, imprison her in her own mansion, and get her to name them as her sole heirs. Once they get her to change the will, they can’t take the risk of killing her, so they plot instead to drive her to madness and suicide.

It’s not a bad film at all. The production values are solid, and the dubbing is better than usual for the Italian films of that period. Unlike many other gialli, this one has a tight and comprehensible plot with some interesting twists at the end.

The Blu-Ray includes two versions: the 91 minute “X-Rated American cut,” and the 97-minute “director’s cut.” The extra six minutes in the director’s cut do make it worthwhile to watch that version, since it adds some explanations for details that are merely hinted at in the American version, and it also adds one additional delicious twist. It turns out that Carroll Baker, the murder victim, was herself a murderer who had bumped off her wealthy husband. When the American police discovered this, it meant that she had not been eligible to inherit his wealth, so his vast holdings went instead to his kindly old aunts. Therefore the con artists had killed her for nothing. They were her heirs, but her actual estate was zilch. That was a twist worthy of Hitchcock.

There were many other delicious twists in the closing minutes of both versions, particularly involving the identities, collaborators, and ultimate fates of the con artists. I’ll let you discover those for yourselves, if you are so inclined, since they are identical in both versions.

The film is not without its weaknesses. Lenzi was perhaps trying too hard to be hip with the trendy filmmaking gimmicks of the 60s. There are sequences that would then have been called “psychedelic” but are now just annoying. Those close-ups of eyes, kaleidoscope effects, and shifting color filters just seem more than a little weird to modern eyes. There are also times when the set-up of this film gets tedious.

The overall presentation is good enough that those things didn’t bother me much. The film is not lengthy, so it never gets too bogged down in repeating the obvious, and the individual scenes are short enough that the weirdness doesn’t overstay its welcome. The resolution of the plot is so much fun that it makes the film worth watching, especially in the director’s cut.

Some of the director’s cut was rescued from footage which was never totally finished (without dubbing, for example), but that’s not really a problem. It’s sort of odd to hear everyone switch to Italian when they had been speaking perfect English in every other scene, but there are sub-titles, so the viewer just gets over being startled and adjusts for a while.

The Blu-Ray package is very solid, including many special features, the aforementioned two versions of this film, and three other collaborations between Umberto Lenzi and Carroll Baker.