The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, April 5-11
Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972)
Directed by Sergio Martino
The evocative title of this giallo whack at Poe’s “The Black Cat” is a line written on a note in Martino’s previous film, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh. He noticed that it garnered a reaction during a screening, so he carried it over, no matter that it has little bearing on the goings-on here. Flat-faced, curly-haired Luigi Pistilli (Bay of Blood; a couple Man with No Name films) is the novelist suffering from inertia and alcoholism who enjoys humiliating his wife Irina (Anita Strindberg) at the swinging hippie parties he throws at their rural estate, but it’s Irina one should be wary of as bodies start piling up around both. The leggy, handsome and Swedish Strindberg (who resembles Fassbinder actress Margit Carstensen) radiates a regal poise, even as she’s mascara-streaked and hysterical, or gruesomely mutilating the ever-mewling family cat, Satan (a red flag, that), who torments her. As the sexy niece who further disrupts this unhappy household, Edwige Fenech adds an element of urban sass to the dour gothicity. Aided by Bruno Nicolai’s lush score, Martino is able to maintain an atmosphere of swank decadence that lives up to the title, with the threat of hook knife throat-slashings always looming. As if to prove he’s not over-serious, Martino also makes room for a long motorbike race that foreshadows a later tragedy. Justin Stewart (April 7, 8, midnight at the Nitehawk)