Review: Riccardo Freda’s The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire on Arrow Blu-ray

With this noteworthy release, Arrow Video’s devotion to vigorously excavating lesser-known gialli continues unabated.

The Iguana with the Tongue of FireDario Argento is consistently deemed the preeminent giallo maestro by critics and fans alike because of how his films blend mystery and obsession into an irresistible concoction. In The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Deep Red, the gonzo plunge into the unknown doesn’t forsake the basic mechanics of plot and characterization. Yet the Argento-centric focus in giallo criticism and scholarship has effectively shortchanged the spectrum of diverse approaches to the genre, many of which seem to adopt incoherence as an almost philosophical aim. Whether The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire embraces narrative confusion by daftness or design, Ricardo Freda’s film nevertheless possesses a propulsive energy that gradually makes coherence an insignificant, even undesirable feature.

The film begins on a strange note, with wide shots of a motorcyclist making his way through Dublin. The Irish setting is random and nearly irrelevant to the subsequent story of a Swiss ambassador, Sobiesky (Anton Diffring), and his family being tormented by an unknown killer, but it does pave the way for some stunning footage shot near the Cliffs of Moher, where the ambassador’s daughter, Helen (Dagmar Lassander), flirts with John Norton (Luigi Pistilli), a detective in pursuit of the assailant. The film finds little meaningful activity for its characters to engage in amid this and other vistas, like the snow-covered ski slopes of Zurich in a later scene, besides moseying about. As sequences essential to developing the film’s themes or ideas, they’re practically useless, but as widescreen landscape footage, they’re magnificent.

The dissonance between story and image defines The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire, and sometimes in contrasting ways depending on the scene. The core of the film’s criminal investigation involves a plethora of suspects and possible motivations being discussed within the sparse confines of a police station. While Inspector Lawrence (Arthur O’Sullivan) is established in early scenes as the lead investigative figure in several interrogations of possible suspects, he’s gradually supplanted by Norton, whose own family becomes one of the killer’s targets. The switch plays less like a calculated shift of the audience’s expectations than an indication of Freda’s investment in the potential jolt of individual set pieces; in short, since Norton’s vulnerable mother and daughter make easy targets, the film uses their assault as the climax, pitting Norton face-to-face with the murderer.

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That the killer’s identity is almost impossible to surmise becomes part of the broader absurdist tone that feeds into Freda’s knack for composing striking images amid so much narrative chaos. There’s a sense that Brian De Palma was influenced by The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire, as Dressed to Kill similarly blends reality and dreams to memorable visual effect; there’s also the matter of the killer in both films wearing the same clothes and using the same murder weapon. But whereas Freda funneled his story into the cinematic equivalent of a lottery machine, De Palma makes guessing his killer’s identity a cinch, prompting us to truly wrestle with the implications of Dressed to Kill’s psychosexual and oneiric imagery.

The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire demonstrates how the different shades of the giallo genre, made in Italy and beyond, require variable critical orientations for identifying their aims. If one assumes that Argento’s genre model is the supreme and only approach to the giallo, then other, less logically inclined filmmakers like Freda or Massimo Dallamano, risk being marginalized or, worse, lopped from the canon entirely.

Image/Sound

Struck from the original 35mm camera negative, this transfer marks the film’s first appearance on North American home video and should be cause for celebration. Particularly striking are the incredible on-location scenes in Ireland: The saturated greens and browns of the Cliffs of Moher are fully discernible, while Zurich’s snow-covered ski slopes shimmer with vitality. There are only minimal signs of image damage, including slight scratches and debris, throughout the film. The monaural soundtrack sounds clean and comes in both Italian and English versions. It’s a release like this, of a film that seemed to have been relegated to eternal damnation on VHS or low-grade streams, that calls for terms like “renaissance” in reference to the spectrum of giallo titles being made available in HD by Arrow Video.

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Extras

Among the plethora of extras on this disc, most noteworthy is the audio commentary by film critics Adrian J. Smith and David Flint. Simultaneously playful and informative, Smith and Flint oscillate between providing historical information about The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire and their own personal takes on the film. A notable highlight of this commentary includes the revelation that, despite the credits citing a novel as the film’s source material, there was no such book; the claim was made in an effort to lend legitimacy to the production.

An interview with film scholar Richard Dyer provides a remarkably lucid explanation of the film’s themes and shortcomings. Dyer differentiates between the narrative details that provide the viewer with food for thought and those that are so thinly sketched or convoluted that even he can’t follow their logic. Elsewhere, DJ Lovely Jon gives an appreciation of composer Stelvio Cipriani, which is similar to but distinct enough from his words about the music of ’70s Italian cult cinema on Arrow’s release of The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion. Also included are interviews with actress Dagmar Lassander and assistant editor Bruno Micheli, the film’s original and international theatrical trailers, a virtual copy of the film’s original photo novel published in 1971, an image gallery, and a booklet containing an essay by film historian Andreas Ehrenreich on the film’s creation from pre-production to post.

Overall

With this noteworthy release of Riccardo Freda’s 1971 film, Arrow Video’s devotion to vigorously excavating lesser-known gialli continues unabated.

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Score: 
 Cast: Dagmar Lassander, Anton Diffring, Luigi Pistilli, Arthur O’Sullivan, Werner Pochath, Dominique Boschero, Renato Romano, Valentina Cortese, Ruth Durley  Director: Riccardo Freda  Screenwriter: Riccardo Freda, Sandro Continenza, Günter Ebert, André Tranché  Distributor: Arrow Video  Running Time: 96 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1971  Release Date: April 9, 2019  Buy: Video

Clayton Dillard

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

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