The Giallo Files: The Crimes of the Black Cat

The Crimes of Petiot

In this climate of intrigue, everyone seems suspicious.

A shadowy, black-coated killer is on the loose in Berlin's West Park neighborhood and he has a very specific pattern. Each time, he targets couples with a dark-haired woman and a blond haired man, shoots the man in the head with a Luger, leaves behind a Nazi emblem, and takes the woman to the abandoned tunnels beneath the city. There, he makes her listen to a bizarre tape recorded rant about vengeance against a woman named Madeline before shooting her. Reporter Vera (Patricia Loran) and her colleagues decide to catch the killer on their own, against the objections of Vera's boyfriend Boris (Paul Naschy) and Police Commissioner Rotwang (Anastasio Campoy). But when the reporters' trap goes horribly wrong, the killer sends a message that they will be his next targets. Could the killer actually be one of the reporters? And why does the killer strike in such a specific way? The police seem to be no help, so Vera and Boris must find the killer before he strikes again!

The Crimes of Petiot (not to be confused with The Crimes of the Black Cat) has a brilliant and engaging premise and would be a top-tier giallo if the tight storytelling springs didn't wind down in the second half. Once again, star and co-screenwriter Paul Naschy has crafted a high-body count vehicle for himself which, like Antonio Bido's Watch Me When I Kill, touches on the horrors of the Second World War for some somber gravity. If only more thought was put into the story logic and the killer's ultimate motive, this would have been a far better movie.

The Crimes of Petiot is director José Luis Madrid's follow-up to Seven Murders for Scotland Yard and he took the opportunity to re-assemble many of the same cast and crew.
Calculating the final body count of this movie is a little tricky. We're shown nine murders, most of which are by gunshot. But we soon discover that before the movie starts, there were at least six other victims. The film that the killer leaves behind appears to show the same killing as the opening of the movie, so that wouldn't count as a new murder. Also, two additional women are knocked unconscious and dragged away never to be seen again and, given the killer's modus operandi, we can presume that they were eventually killed. Adding all these up, I came to the final number of 17 - the highest body count of any giallo I've seen yet.
Special effects artist Antonio Molina would go on to work with famed director Pedro Almadovar on several films, often credited only as "Molina."

What the Hell Am I Watching?

There are plenty of opportunities for nudity here - gratuitous shower scenes, intimate moments - but the movie seems to actively avoid showing any actual nudity.

As a means of second-act exposition, the police show the reporters and Boris film of one of the victims getting shot - essentially a snuff film. Did civilians (and civilians who just received a serious death threat) really need to see that? It seems unnecessary at best and horribly irresponsible at worst.

Things get a little confusing at the end of the movie when Paul Naschy plays a completely different character during a flashback.

Fashion Moment

Dude loves his leather jackets. Here, Boris sports a chic brown leather overcoat:

And this black leather blazer is just for lounging around the house.

The Crimes of the Black Cat

"But I can't just go to the police and accuse a shadow... a voice... a scent."

The models at a Copenhagen fashion house owned by Françiose Balla (Sylvia Koscina) are turning up dead one by one... apparently of natural causes. At each crime scene, Inspector Jansen (Renato De Carmine) finds a picnic basket, a yellow shawl, and strange scratches on the corpse's neck. But how does it add up? Blind composer Peter Oliver (Anthony Steffen), the boyfriend of the first victim, aims to find out and his investigation leads him on the trail of a mysterious woman in a white hooded cape named Susan (Giovanna Lenzi). But what connection does Susan have to these models? Why would she want them dead? And how can she kill without even entering the room? The answers will lead Peter into a dangerous world of drugs, money, and blackmail!

The Crimes of the Black Cat (which often goes by its rhyming Italian title, Sette Scialli Di Seta Gialla, or Seven Shawls of Yellow Silk) is a fantastic giallo in the classic mode, even if it borrows heavily from other films. The killer's method comes from the 1940 Bela Lugosi film The Devil Bat, The fashion house setting and most of the plot comes from Blood and Black Lace, the blind detective can be traced to Cat O'Nine Tails, a slow-motion shot of a woman going head-first through a window comes from every Argento movie ever, and the brutal and highly graphic shower murder is an obvious homage to Psycho. But even though it appropriates all these elements, The Crimes of the Black Cat synthesizes them in a clever way and it turns out to be a very satisfying movie, highly indicative of the genre.

Check out the scene where Peter's assistant, Burton (Umberto Raho) is chasing Susan and she disappears when a rack of clothes passes in front of her. Yet another clever touch lifted from Blood and Black Lace.
There's not a lot of bad art in this movie. In fact, it looks like Peter owns a Mondrian.
There's a tense scene near the end where Peter is kidnapped and left alone in a closed glass factory. One false move and he'll fall into a pit of broken glass and the kidnapper uses the facility's machinery to try to knock him down. It's a great, suspenseful scene.

What the Hell Am I Watching?

Model Paula Whitney (Isabelle Marchall) is the first victim. Before she dies, her only line in the movie is a nasty homophobic slur against a co-worker.

That shower scene really is the thing that sticks with you, as it doesn't pull any punches. Unlike Marion's murder in Psycho, we see a razor blade tear deep into the victim's body in visceral detail in The Crimes of the Black Cat.

Fashion Moment

This movie has a giallo killer who wears the classic all-black coat and hat, but it also turns that tradition on its head with a villain in white. Check out Susan's trademark hooded cape.