IL GIALLO A FUMETTI

Any attempt to nominate this or that film as the ‘first’ giallo has to negotiate the question of which version of this notoriously slippery term is being used – the giallo in its more inclusive Italian sense, ‘a metonym for the entire mystery genre’ (Koven, 2006: 2), or as a more particular B-movie filone that surfaced intermittently in the 1960s, blossomed more fully in the early to mid-1970s and has continued to appear sporadically, particularly in the films of Dario Argento. Either way, Mario Bava's La ragazza che sapeva troppo / The Girl Who Knew Too Much (Italy, 1962; refashioned as The Evil Eye, 1964) and particularly Sei donne per l'assassino/Blood and Black Lace (a coproduction involving Italy/West Germany/France, 1964) are often accorded seminal status in teleological accounts of the giallo as a cinematic cycle. Both have at various times had the distinction of being identified as the first ‘proper’ giallo ; the former with its tourist-eyewitness heroine and the latter with its bodycount narrative, eroticised violence and overheated visual stylisation. However, neither film clearly belonged to a contemporaneous cinematic cycle, or at least not an Italian one, at the time of their original release. As a West German co-production, Sei donne per l'assassino could equally be seen as a krimi, the prolific cycle of German mystery films often seen to anticipate and overlap with the giallo. According to Tim Lucas, the film (a commercial disappointment that failed to recover its investment costs) performed best in West Germany and Austria (2007: 560).