Plot twists and sudden swerves, red herrings lead to a climax that is both unpredictable and unsurprising. Add some very nasty violence and you've pretty much got any Giallo movie. These bloody and intriguing adaptations of crime fiction speak for generation of Italian cinema ('60s-'80s) and number more than a few high points along the timeline from the likes of Mario Bava, Dario Argento and, here, Lucio Fulci.
Lucio Fulci's rap sheet lists a lot of movies from the '50s to the '90s and they're a big mix of genres; westerns, comedies, Gialli, etc. However, what he has become known as a horror director for the bunch of titles in no genre but that made between the late '70s and early '90s. A major reason for this is that when he turned his hand to horror he brought a signature surrealism to the tales. Very few, if any, play like straightforward genre pieces and fewer still offer much attention to plotting. Even Zombie/Zombie 2/Zombie Flesh Eaters/Woodoo, though it replaced the magic/religion that Romero had famously removed in his own influential Dead films, this one still plays like a nightmare rather than a survival tale. From there he put zombies of increasingly strange powers into other acid-gothic films like City of the Living Dead and The Beyond. But back when his next job was whatever genre was on offer he made Giallo films with precision and force.
Duckling begins, middles, and ends the way all Gialli do but Fulci, up against a formidable field, adds a compelling eye, way with deep focus, magnetic colour pallet and performances that survive the awful growling English dub on my old Anchor Bay copy. If these thrillers put violence forward, Fulci delivers ghastly chain whippings and their results on the human body, a shiveringly spectral light to the victims when they are discovered, the toughness of the knotty landscape that looks like it's resisted argiculture from the Etruscans on, canny hiring of a composer for a solid score and a strong sense of lens placement and motion. The scene where Maciara is hunted down by the local dog squad is told largely at canine level and comes across as a hunt rather than an arrest. A later scene sets some extreme violence to some bland soul hits on the radio in an ironic juxtaposition that Tarantino would have noted in letters of fire when he most certainly saw it.
Gialli don't have to do any more than show violent crime and its detection but many do take on social or political themes. Duckling aims squarely at credulity, here, not sparing local folklore nor the mighty Catholic Church itself whose power was felt strongly by his immediate Italian audiences. The best of this in this film has to do with the equivalence of both streams, the household level of ancient magic and the reach of the Church.
In stark, raving contrast to this is one of the film's most notorious scenes which, even just described, might put many off. Patrizia the debaucher is introduced lounging in her loft completely naked (though posed on a lounge to conceal her pubic region. The son of her housekeeper is sent up a jug of orange juice she's ordered. The boy (about twelve) is confronted by the sight of the woman who playfully flirts with him. She remains gleefully uncovered, enjoying the effect on the child and even leaves him with a vague promise for the future which he takes with him down the stairs, never to part with its images.
Before you say something like, well, it was 1972 and things were different, you should know that Fulci was arrested over the scene on charges of endangering a child. He was able to prove that the boy was never actually in the same place as the woman while shooting, that he had used an adult actor with dwarfism for the two shots that contained both figures. Even so, what are we to make of this scene? Could Patrizia have teased the boy fully clothed? Of course, and it might have made for a more complex scene. But the bit about it being 1972 and things being different is that the shock value of her nakedness and creul glee would have outranked a subtler approach. The scene still feels edgy, pushing well up against the ick barrier. For me, it forms a depth-giving contrast with the character's later humaneness. In a later scene it makes one character's smile a crushing misconception. Her playfulness is cruel but there is no suggestion that it was the prelude to physical abuse. It is another tarry patch in a film pushing against its generic constraints.
The movie was blacklisted but not for that scene. The pokes at the Church meant more. Would this be reversed today if made anew? You don't have to be a humourless puritain to find the woman and child scene uncomfortable but, without onscreen nudity the cause celebre that it was, might the attempt itself feel desperate, old fashioned or just twee? Whatever, in the time capsule of this fifty year old movie, it does work, it's intentionally disturbing rather than leery and provides another aspect to the story of a series of particularly dark murders that the community on screen, for their religion and superstitions, have permitted.
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