Crimes of the Black Cat

Sette Scialli Di Seta Gialla

Sales Title: Crimes of the Black Cat

Italy 1972

D: Sergio Pastore

P: Edmondo Amati for Capitolina Produzioni Cinematografiche//St & Sc: Alessandro Continenza, Sergio Pastore, & Giovanni Simonelli//DP: Guglielmo Mancori//E: Vincenzo Tomassi//M: Manuel De Sica//Art D: Alberto Boccianti//Costume: Luciana Marinucci//Makeup: Eugenio Ascani//Color.

Cast: Anthony Steffen (Antonio De Teffe), Sylva Koscina, Giacomo Rossi Stuart, Jeanette Len, Renato di Carmine, Umberto raho, Romano Malaspina, Annabella Incontrera, Liliana Pavlo, Isabelle Marchal, Shirley Corrigan.

Francoise runs a model agency that is experiencing a rather serious problem. Her models are being killed off, one by one. Their death is the result of being scratched by a cat whose claws are spiked with curare, a deadly poison. The victims are given a yellow silk shaw that causes the cat to attack. A blind composer named Peter is drawn into the crime when his girlfriend Paula is killed. He discovers the owner of the cat is a drug addicted ex-circus performer and when Peter offers to supply her with heroin, she agrees to reveal who is in charge of deciding which model will be the next to die. More murders occur before the killer is revealed and takes a fatal plunge from Peter's apartment window.

Sergio Pastore's only contribution to the Giallo, his career began in 1967 with the crime film, Omicidio a Sangue Freddo and ended with his death in 1987 while working on Delitti (the film was finished by his wife, Giovanni Lenzi, aka Jeanette Len). It's a shame as he definitely had a talent for setting up unusual set pieces (the shower of glass that crashes down on Steffen in an abandoned factory) and displaying graphic gore when need be. In fact, it's the extremely violent murder sequence set in a shower—imagine Hitchcock's Psycho filmed in color and featuring the type of gore you find in a Lucio Fulci film from the late seventies—that has gained this film a sort of legendary status. That's a real shame as it's only one small part of this film's overall excellence. For once, Pastore and his fellow screenplay writers came up with a way to excuse the general poor performance usually given by Steffen, make his character blind. Now there's a reason why his character appears stiff as a board! And though Koscina was beginning to show signs of age, the denouement revealing her character's deformity is a shocking highlight in a career that usually only required to look beautiful. One of the better efforts of the genre.