Though Hitch Hike only marginally quaifies as a giallo – there are no black gloved killers and no mystery involved – it is listed in the giallo bible Blood and Black Lace, so I’m going to classify it as such.

Hitch Hike begins as more of a crime thriller, though it quickly spirals into a misanthropic back and forth of psychosexual games and macho posturing.

Franco Nero plays an Italian reporter who has married his boss’ daughter and now spends much of his time drinking and cursing. I mean really drinking. He and his wife Eve have been camping in Nevada and are driving across the country towing a trailer. Against her husband’s judgement, Eve decides to pick up a hitchhiker, and it is revealed before long that he is one of a gang of thieves who just stole 2 million dollars from a bank.

Adam Konitz, the thief, is played by David Hess from Last House on the Left, and his performance here mirrors that of Last House and a lot of those especially psychotic male characters that proliferated exploitation cinema in the 70s. He finds great pleasure in subjecting the young couple to insults and humiliation, giggling and slugging whiskey from the bottle as he waves his revolver from the back seat. He says he needs them in order to pass any roadblocks on the way to Mexico, but it’s more likely that he enjoys keeping Nero around simply because of his stubborn refusal to kowtow to Hess.

The similarities between the drunk and the thief are not so subtle, and it’s the scumminess of the characters that grace the film with gravitas and 70s grit. Films today would never dream of making the good guy a complete prick, and a misogynist to boot, but it creates that uneasy feeling of living in a world where everything is not black and white, but shades of grey.

The film’s action scenes drag a bit and it’s really the cruel back and forth between Hess and Nero that deserves the spotlight. Having only seen Nero’s cowboy flicks, the gusto with which he attacks his role is hypnotic. A Morricone score of banjo plucking is nice, though the theme song, a hippie drum circle ballad, has the power to grate a little.

Director Pasquale Festa Campanile, who I’ve read made mostly throwaway comedies, infuses Hitch Hike with a deep cynicism and the downbeat ending reminded me of the shocking finale to Fernando Di Leo’s To Be Twenty. In that film, two young women are punished for reveling in their newfound female empowerment and perhaps Hitch Hike was also meant to be a rebellion against the hippie lifestyle. On more than one occasion it is Eve’s freewheeling samaritanism that proves the couple’s undoing. But you don’t have to think about any of that to enjoy watching two great actors attempt to one-up one another.

First some background. I’m a huge, huge fan of the Italian giallo genre. It was a genre that started in the late 60′s and was sort of the Italian equivalent of the American film noir, though, coming along a good 20 years after noir, giallo often turned to color for style and expression, rather than black and white. This is the most facile of explanations I could make, but its a starting place for those who would otherwise find themselves in the dark. And you can always bulk up your knowledge at good old Wikipedia.

If I’m making my inaugural giallo post, I wanted it to be something I really liked, so I’m opening with director Dario Argento’s best film and one of my all-time favorite giallos, Deep Red.

Dario Argento is widely regarded as one of the fathers of the giallo genre. He made 9 blockbuster entries between 1970 and 1987 and though his output now is decidedly less acclaimed, his name is almost synonymous. His debut feature The Bird With The Crystal Plumage was one of the first films to start the craze that ran for almost 20 years, but it was with his fifth film from 1975 that he perfected the formula.

Deep Red starts with the public performance of a psychic, who happens to read the thoughts of a killer in the audience and foresee a murder. An English pianist (David Hemmings) walking home after the performance just happens to see the same psychic being murdered in her apartment through a window as he passes. The little niggling amateur detective in him forces him to track down some clues on his own, and the closer he gets, the more murders that occur.

If that synopsis sounds pretty par for the course, that’s okay. Many giallos, and certainly many of Argento’s films owe a huge debt to Hitchcock and even Agatha Christie. In fact, the plot of Deep Red is nearly identical to Argento’s own Bird With The Crystal Plumage. Like I mentioned earlier, giallos are often more expressive in their camerawork and stylized images than in their plot devices, which might place them squarely in the thriller genre. Here, the camerawork is great: fluid and imaginitive, playing with the architechture and colors of the many locations. Even the music is amazing, with the Italian prog-rock band Goblin delivering a haunting score that ranks among my favorites.

Narratively, what Deep Red does so well is that there is nary a scene that is unnecessary; everything seems to be a premonition in a way, and there’s alot of playfulness regarding the dialogue and subsequent murders. It is with this strange set-up that Argento finally creates a believeable everyday world where evil lurks just beneath the surface. This is a theme that he would explore again and again in later films, specifically the next year’s Suspiria, and would also be popular avenues of thought among modern directors like David Lynch (with Blue Velvet) and David Cronenberg (with Videodrome).

Deep Red was a film that cemented the rules of the giallo film, and set the benchmark for those that followed. If you see only one giallo in your life, I would say this should be it.