TITLE: Cold Eyes of Fear
TAGLINE: N/A
DESCRIPTION: A young London lawyer finds himself in a prickly situation after taking home an escort and discovering his butler dead, and a ruffian on hand with a gun. After maneuvering a delicate phone call from his uncle, a judge, requesting information at the young lawyer's disposal, the judge sends an officer to the house with a legal missive. But the officer is in on the hold-up, too! And it soon emerges that a quest for vengeance against the judge is the driving force behind the whole, muddled hostage situation.
DIRECTOR: Enzo G. Castellari
YEAR: 1971
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: Italy
RUNTIME: 95 min
SUBTITLED/DUBBED: Dubbed
IMDB PAGE
ROTTENTOMATOES
REVIEW:
After an agonizingly tedious pre-film introduction, care of the Redemption Films brand, Cold Eyes of Fear opens slowly but surely into the seedy underbelly of 1970s London life. Just as the tone of the opening encounter, between a lawyer and the escort he's just picked up, lulls you into the expectation of a rather underwhelming "mood piece," director Enzo G. Castellari does something interesting with his lighting: he has the young couple knock into a low chandelier, pointedly drawing the audience's attention to the light source that then frames, in pendulous passing, a very striking set of close-up images of the young lawyer falling over his escort on a table. Then the body of the lawyer's butler falls into view, interrupting the whole affair.
In that moment, I knew Castellari had the capacity to intrigue and surprise, and with this in mind I watched closely as a coarse criminal with a terrible English accent entered the fray; as tense close-ups of each character's eyes lit up the screen over and over in various, overdone sequences; as a phone call from the lawyer's uncle, a judge, in the middle of the enigmatic hold-up raised the stakes; as all hope for rescue from a subsequently dispatched officer fizzled as the man behind the uniform turned out to be the brains behind the hold-up after all.
Somewhere in the midst of all this, my interest thinned again. A strained attempt to cast the escort and coarse criminal as peas in a pod (and similar with the "higher intellects" of the lawyer and upper-class criminal) fell irredeemably flat when a bonk to the coarse criminal's head conveniently gave him a comic bout of amnesia. And the script was especially useless around the matter of the escort, who, having been trapped in a scenario that truly didn't involve her, frittered away this great potential tension on stiff and oddly-timed outbursts.
This failure to adequately divide or unite the conflicts between lawyer and past-defendant, and between low-brow criminal and "woman of loose morals," is a fairly good metaphor for the whole film's failure to divide the strengths of two distinct sub-genres resonating in Cold Eyes of Fear -- the home invasion piece, and the giallo, or criminal mystery. The former demands a great deal of exploitation and related action in their confined quarters, of which this film has precious little. Meanwhile, the latter demands a certain precision and logic to the developing story that fits in with the scope of the criminal's actions... and the viewer instead gets an overly complicated revenge plot existing solely so the criminal and lawyer-nephew have the opportunity to haggle about vague, meandering nuance surrounding a case never clearly laid out for the audience to consider on its own.
However, Castellari hadn't entirely nodded off in the course of this exhausting second act -- and when an explosion does occur in the third, the audience chances upon another striking snippet of excellent cinematography. Sadly, that's the last interesting twist (plot- or cinematography-related alike) in the whole, sordid affair, leaving this viewer with the following question: Did Castellari just assume the best surprises are doled out in exceptionally tiny increments, or did the man capable of creating those two bright moments of cinematic intrigue also think the rest of the piece equally up to snuff?
I'm left, therefore, with little to praise about this particular film except for a redeeming soundtrack, care of Ennio Morricone, but as giallos were far from Castellari's specialty (he directed, among other things, The Inglorious Bastards and a slew of spaghetti Westerns), and as he showed himself to have very clear moments of insight in his cinematography for Cold Eyes of Fear, I know I will be looking forward, with great curiosity, to the next Castellari flick that falls my way.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING AIDS: A sharp-shooter's eye for brief moments of very interesting cinematography, and a stiff drink for all the rest.
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