The Cat O’ Nine Tails (1971)
A solid Euro-thriller-giallo that lacks the flair of Argento’s debut, but still has enough ingenuity to keep things interesting. A blind ex-journalist overhears a conversation about blackmail outside his apartment. A newspaper reporter investigates a burglary in a nearby laboratory. As people at the lab start to die, the two men join forces to uncover the story, but industrial espionage is a dangerous game and the killer knows who’s on their tail.
Argento knows how to pick faces for his films — James Franciscus as reporter Carlo looks beautiful in every shot, stealing thunder even from the more seasoned Karl Malden as the blind puzzle-loving older man who the young girl in his care calls Cookie. And I love that Argento continued to include idiosyncratic secondary characters, like the burglar who always gets caught.
There’s roving first-person camera work, a handful of clever shots and a decent car chase, but it does feel like a consolidation of Argento’s skills as a director rather than a step up from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. It’s slow in places, and the ending on the rooftops with the killer’s reveal felt clumsy.
Basing the story in a genetics lab, and making the industrial espionage secret to be about a genetic marker for violence and murder, makes this a distant cousin of David Cronenberg’s more perverse surgical labs across the Atlantic a few years later. In ‘Bird’, the killer has an untreated trauma that causes psychosis; in ‘Cat’, the killer is protecting themselves from their own family’s business. What will be the killer’s motivation in the final part of Argento’s trilogy of animals?