Review: The Possessed and The Fifth Cord Arrive on Arrow Video

In both films, death both threatens to throw a society into disarray and serves as a possible corrective for corruption.

The Fifth Cord
Photo: Arrow Video

Luigi Bazzoni’s 1971 giallo film The Fifth Cord opens with Andrea (Franco Nero), a drunken journalist, slumped over a bar on New Year’s Eve. Lights flash and neon colors abound throughout a credits sequence that recalls that of Mario Bava’s classic Blood and Black Lace. Bazzoni and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro display a winking self-awareness by alluding to Bava’s film, which is often cited as the inaugural giallo. Assigned to cover a vicious attack that happens later that New Year’s Eve, Andrea becomes, much like Tony Musante’s writer in Dario Argento’s less playful The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, equal parts investigator, witness, and suspect throughout the course of a string of murders.

Six years before The Fifth Cord, Bazzoni co-directed The Possessed with Franco Rossellini. That film explored a similar story, about a writer, Bernard (Peter Baldwin), caught between his pursuit of an old flame, Tilde (Virna Lisi), and the realization of her disappearance and possible murder. But unlike The Fifth Cord, where Storaro’s color photography feels wholly in keeping with the gialli of the ’70s, The Possessed uses black and white as an allusion to film noir, particularly Carol Reed’s The Third Man. Bernard speaks to himself in voiceover, fearing that he’s “running straight towards disaster” in hustling from place to place in the small lakeside town where he met Tilde. The Possessed also has an air of early-’60s art cinema that The Fifth Cord lacks, seeming, as it does, to channel the ennui of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert and the mysterious circumstances of Jacques Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us.

In both The Possessed and The Fifth Cord, death both threatens to throw a society into disarray and serves as a possible corrective for corruption. The killer in The Fifth Cord, who leaves a pair of black gloves (each with a finger cut off) at the site of each murder, says as much about his plans, claiming through a recording that he’s chosen victims for whom death “could only be a liberation.” The killer’s motives become muddled, however, when he targets Sofia (Rossella Falk), a paraplegic who in one scene finds herself helplessly crawling toward a telephone after falling out of her wheelchair. Storaro’s camera crawls on the floor beside her, neatly placing the the viewer in her point of view. For the way he strangles Sophia and hurls her down a spiral staircase, the killer proves to be only cruel and not at all ideologically motivated. The sequence echoes a moment in The Possessed where Bernard is told, in relation to Tilde’s disappearance, “perhaps it only appears that way.” Bazzoni directs both films to reveal the hypocrisy of most claims of vengeance as actually being self-aggrandizing acts, especially when the lives of women are so often forsaken in the process.

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The 2K restorations of both films from Arrow Video highlight Bazzoni’s knack for a variety of spatial compositions, especially his dreamlike presentation of a character’s point of view. In The Possessed, some of the anguished Bernard’s recollections are rendered in overexposed black and white, while in The Fifth Cord, a fish-eye lens replicates the unseen killer’s perspective as he whispers his plans on a recording. The most intriguing overlap across both films is the voiceover that appears on the soundtrack as men wander through a space, whether Bernard around the lakeside town or the unnamed killer tiptoeing around partygoers. In each case, Bazzoni uses speech to reveal how these men aren’t so much caught in their feelings as they are perpetually lost, and doomed, within their own tangled thoughts.

The Possessed and The Fifth Cord are now available on Blu-ray and DVD from Arrow Video.

Clayton Dillard

Clayton Dillard is a lecturer in cinema at San Francisco State University.

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