A Game of Crime (1964) Poster

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6/10
Twists! Rats! Smoking!
Bezenby26 May 2017
Eat your heart out, Wes Craven! Here's some postmodernism right here, when the character involved in this giallo discuss what books they like, and one of them says any kind, except gialli! Ha! It's almost like...something or other.

We get right into the action here as the film starts out with Paolo (Drew Barrymore's Dad) getting chased around and beaten for owing gambling debts. Paolo approaches his lover, but she ain't got no cash, so he ends up at his other lover's house - a rich lady who has a husband with a bum ticker. Uh oh!

Double Uh oh in fact, as the husband lives in a huge Italian villa with not only a deformed crippled brother with his own nurse, but also with a horrible creepy tunnel underneath full of rats. Man, do we have the right ingredients for a giallo/Gothic horror crossover or what?

This one also has some suspicious, almost competent policeman trying to figure out with the guy with the bad heart died or got whacked, and as the film seemingly begins to get really boring, we get a few good twists thrown in to keep our interest. It isn't a body count film, but yet another proto-giallo where everyone smokes like troopers.
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5/10
Early giallo
BandSAboutMovies5 January 2024
Warning: Spoilers
A Game of Crime comes from the time before Argento and at the nascent time of giallo on film, following The Girl Who Knew Too Much by just a year. Directed by Romano Ferrara, who also wrote and directed Planets Around Us, Intrigo a Los Angeles and Gungala the Virgin of the Jungle, as well as writing Spy In Your Eye, Paolo e Francesca and Gungala the Black Panther. This was written Ferrara and Marcello Coscia, who also wrote forty films including Yeti Giant of the 20th Century and Red Rings of Fear, and Sandro Continenza (School of Death).

Paolo Morandi (John Drew Barrymore, Death On the Fourposter, War of the Zombies) is a gambler in the middle of a run of the worst luck, which means he owes big money to an organized crime boss at the same time that his girlfriend Christine (Ombretta Colli, Snow Devils) has gotten pregnant. He's also sleeping with Anna (Luisa Rivelli), the wife of his boss Davide (Jean Claudio), who he plans to rip off to pay for an abortion and get ahead of his debts.

Just when Davide suspects that his lover is cheating him and Paolo has taken his cash, he has a heart attack, which places him in the care of Elisabeth Buckner (Lisa Gastoni, War of the Planets). It's simple for Paolo to kill the man now and all the money goes to Anna, who now has to take care of her husband's brother Cario, who has been left an invalid after an accident. None of this adds up to Commissario Perrotti (Umberto D'Orsi), who is on the case.

At one point, the characters discuss books and one says that they like anything but giallo, as they are too far fetched. How meta!
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8/10
An Italian proto-giallo that's worth a look, at least
melvelvit-125 August 2014
Within the first ten minutes, John Drew Barrymore gets beaten up by gangsters, talks his girlfriend into an abortion, and convinces his mistress they'd be better off with her wealthy husband dead but nothing is what it seems in this post-noir/proto-giallo crime thriller. It actually references the Italian horror sub-genre by having a police inspector ask one of the suspects what kind of books she reads and she replies "anything except giallo -they're too violent and improbable" but, of course, she doesn't have to since life soon begins to imitate art. There's also a horribly disfigured family member hidden away upstairs with the lovely Lisa Gastoni as his mysterious nurse. The gritty black & white photography and jazzy score give the film a "noir" ambiance and what appears to be a happy ménage à trois ending turns into a satisfyingly sick denouement just in the nick of time. Throughout his dodgy "B-list" career, psychotronic film star John Barrymore, Jr. either tried too hard or not hard enough and this is a case of the latter, unfortunately, but I was interested even if he wasn't and the film definitely belongs in a "giallo continuum" that begins with 1934's GIALLO.
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Nothing special in this Italian thriller.
searchanddestroy-127 July 2010
Warning: Spoilers
Well, I expected a little more from this flick. We find here the usual husband, wife and lover triangle. The wife and the lover get rid off the husband and the inquiry begins, with the cops searching the proof for murder. I won't spoil the movie any further.

So, you see, we have seen this kind of topic many times before, in US, France, UK, Spain...

But it's worth watching it. The English dubbing is correct. A good time waster. And it's so rare.

Except John Drew Barrymore, I don't know any of the actors. Filmed in black and white. Never heard of the director either.
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