Meanwhile, three activities – Franco’s puzzle-solving (his blindness had him demoted from investigative journalist to crossword writer), the lock-picking and safe-breaking carried out by Carlo’s informant Gigi (Ugo Fangareggi), and Carlo’s disinterring of a body in the crypt – all instantiate the very spirit of giallo, a genre which turns criminal psychology into an enigma which must be puzzled out, cracked and brought to the surface. The film’s nine disparate leads will eventually be synthesised, but on the way there are a lot of blind alleys, false trails and red herrings, as much obscuring as revealing the solution in a manner that recalls the parable of the blind men and an elephant. Indeed, Franco needs Carlo and young Lori (Cinzia De Carolis) to be his eyes in a case which revolves around things unseen or overlooked – like that concealed note, or a figure masked by the shadows of a car’s interior, or a detail cropped from a photo, or histories hidden away in files or safes. “You won’t find it by smelling it,” replies Franco Arnò (Karl Malden), “Look for it.” Though himself blind, Franco Arnò (Karl Malden) proves more adept at overhearing crucial evidence, feeling for clues and confronting a killer than many of his fellow investigators, even if the Carlo does most of the legwork. “It doesn’t smell very good down here,” complains journalist Carlo Giordani (James Francicus) as he searches a family crypt for a locket that contains a hidden note.
On the contrary, the film’s plot is full of references to the senses. So The Cat o’ Nine Tails is a fairly ordinary murder mystery, and reportedly Argento’s personal least favourite of his films, but that is not to say that it lacks all sensual – and sensational – pleasures. Even the murders come with uncharacteristic restraint, although the final death (of the killer) points the way to Argento’s more baroque impulses.
Yet at the same time the director nervously avoids the genre’s outer edges: the irrational narrative exuberance, extreme stylisation, incursions of the pseudo-scientific and of the supernatural which would all characterise his subsequent work are here notable entirely for their absence. He races with confidence through the more conventional whodunnit tropes of the giallo genre, pitting police and reporters against a serial murderer whose identity is concealed behind POV shots and extreme close-ups of eyes. Argento, too, is still finding his feet in The Cat o’ Nine Tails.
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