It has everything fans of gialli love–great visuals and setting, pulse-pounding suspense, sordid and perverse characters, truly surprising plot twists, and a great musical score and soundtrack. Farley Granger is wonderful, going convincingly from evil to sympathetic and back again. Bouchet and Neri are also both very good, particularly the latter. Neri is justifiably famous for her beauty (and her frequent nude scenes). She had plenty of competition in that respect when it came to gialli–Bouchet,Edwige Fenech, Nieves Navarro, Ewe Aulin to name a few–but she had no close rival when it came to sheer acting talent. This is definitely her best role, better even than “Lady Frankenstein”. To get an idea of how impressive this film is try watching it back to back with one of those terrible “erotic thrillers” they make these days. How did we get from wonderfully sexy gialli like this to that dreck?

The Eurovision DVD has recent interviews with both actresses (who look about the same even though they must be close to sixty by now). They both speak English (Bouchet quite fluently)and reveal some interesting tidbits. The director of this film Silvio Amado, according to Bouchet, dropped out of sight after an unrequited love affair with actress Gloria Guida (the Italian Lolita of the era). I have actually seen a second-rate melodrama Amado made with Guida a few years later, which is why I was genuinely surprised with the talent he shows here. It’s truly a misfortune that he didn’t stick around to do more films like this. A true classic of the genre