Death Occurred Last Night | Blu-ray Review

Raro Video continues remastering rare and obscure Italian titles with the long unavailable 1970 curio from Duccio Tessari, Death Occurred Last Night. A rare hybrid of police thriller and giallo, this fascinating title is a definite highlight in the little known Tessari’s varied filmography. Most noted for his work in spaghetti westerns, those unfamiliar with his work will surely be interested in seeking out other available titles. As seedy and ridiculous as it is intriguing and unfailingly amusing, its attention to character and narrative development sets it apart from similar titles of the time period, preceding comparable American fare such as Paul Schrader’s 1979 Hardcore.

A self-controlled yet increasingly desperate father (Raf Vallone) informs Detective Duca Lamberti (Frank Wolff) at the police station in Milan that his girl is missing. As he answers a round of questions, we discover his girl is actually a mentally handicapped twenty five year old that’s drop dead gorgeous and suffers from nymphomania. A single father, he’s kept her locked in his apartment, only to discover upon returning home from work that she’s disappeared. Due to her condition and her tendency to do whatever a man tells her to, his fear is that she’s been sold into sex slavery. As the detective enters the sordid underbelly of Milan, scouring prostitution houses with the aid of his cocksure partner (Gabriel Tinti) and jaded hooker Herrero (Beryl Cunningham), the young woman’s corpse is discovered, leaving Lamberti in a race against the clock to find the killer before the girl’s vengeful father does first.

Disc Review

Released only in Italy, France, and West Germany, this long unavailable title gets a ravishing HD transfer from the original 35mm negative despite some minor grain. Every now and again the audio seems slightly muffled over a passage or two of dialogue, but the film’s contentious score feels exceedingly acute. Chris Alexander of Fangoria magazine speaks about the film in the only extra feature, and it’s of minor note. More interesting is the essay by Alexander and illustrated booklet in the insert.

Final Thoughts

With its jarring soundtrack and unnerving montage flashbacks of the handicapped young woman haunting the narrative, Death Occurred Last Night plays like a thrilling oddity in a universe all its own. Too many disparate elements relegate the film outside of the popular genre labels, which is exactly where this film’s strengths lie. Performances and dialogue are soberingly rendered, with Raf Vallone’s (from The Godfather III and the original The Italian Job) haggard father recalling the visage of, say, Peter Finch, pitted against the gruff yet kindhearted detective suffering from nagging sinusitis played by Frank Wolff (Once Upon a Time in the West). As dedicated as they are to their performances (something that also elevates the title beyond the subgenres it defies), a meaty supporting role from Beryl Cunningham, a black actress most well-known for erotic tinged exploitation cinema (perhaps most notably in the voodoo kink feature The Snake God, though she appears in one of the many Pasolini ‘Trilogy of Life’ knockoffs, The Black Decameron) tends to steal all her scenes, allowed to develop her embittered hooker into more than mere eye candy.

When initially asked her name, she angrily spits, “Negro prostitute—that should be easy enough to remember!” She’s a notable presence in an already alarming concoction, made even more evident by the odd score from Gianni Ferrio (featuring the vocal talents of Italian singer Mina, known as the Queen of Screamers, a hugely successful artist whose work appears in many famed films, including Antonioni’s The Eclipse and Petri’s The 10th Victim), creating a weird juxtaposition with the dark and dreadful onscreen happenings. The screenplay, from Artur Brauner and Biagio Proietti, seems influenced by the snappy zingers of classic film noir – “Money doesn’t say where it’s from,” Cunningham’s Herrero proclaims. Likewise, a lineup of prostitutes are described poetically by their madam, each given a strange, flowery descriptor, “as pale and dark as the day she was conceived,” we’re told of one such lolly.

Beginning as a documentarian, Duccio Tessari’s most notable titles happen to be his contributions to the spaghetti western, with his Ringo films (A Pistol for Ringo; The Return of Ringo) of higher regard. A workmanlike prowess, he’s drawn comparison to John Ford and even Sergio Leone, with whom he helped write the screenplay for A Fistful of Dollars. Yet, Tessari has an excitingly varied string of other titles, including the more classically defined giallo film, The Bloodstained Butterfly (1971), an English language cult classic, The Cats (1968) starring Rita Hayworth and Klaus Kinski as mother and son jewel thieves, and a pair of Alain Deloin films, including a Zorro treatment (1975) and Tony Arzenta (1973—aka Big Guns/No Way Out). Raro Video’s remastered availability of his Death Occurred Last Night is an exciting presentation of Tessari’s intriguing abilities as well as a definite must-see.

Film: ★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆
Disc: ★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆