Nostalgia Kinky

Standing just over 5’5, armed with a wide mischievous grin and trademark bushy black mustache, Tano Cimarosa looked like he was ready-made for work as a prolific character actor from the very beginning. Born in Messina, Italy on New Year’s Day, 1922 Cimarosa is probably best known to English language audiences for his performance as the blacksmith in Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988), but Italian film fans will know him more for his many appearances in the sixties and seventies across a variety of genres. Working in everything from Westerns to Poliziotteschi to Gialli, Cimarosa always managed to stand out like a crafty bulldog no matter the size of the role.

Despite looking like he was born to play every stubborn cop on a complicated case imaginable, Cimarosa began his film career relatively later in life as he was well into his forties when initial roles came his way in the early to mid-sixties. After working twice with Lucio Fulci in the earlier part of his career as an influential director, Cimarosa began to become more interested in the filmmaking process and began to harbor dreams about making his own films, that he hoped to also act in and write.

By the mid-seventies, Cimarosa had been a fixture in the Italian film industry for well over a decade making enough connections in the process to get financing for what became his first film as a director, Il vizio ha le calze nere (Vice Has Black Shoes). Released in 1975, Cimarosa’s first outing behind the camera is mostly known now as Reflections in Black, an undeservedly obscure Giallo from 1975 featuring one of the best, if a bit underused, casts of that year.

Scripted by Adriano Bolzoni and Luigi Latini de Marchi, Reflections in Black features everything you’d expect from a mid-seventies Giallo, frequent bloodshed, ample nudity, a great score, slightly clueless cops and a mysterious killer dressed in black. By 1975 the formula for Gialli was fairly well set and the dawn of the American Slasher film was coming into view. Reflections in Black shares traits with both genres as well as a heaping dose of Poliziotteschi thrown in for good measure.

While not a classic example of any of the genres it toys with throughout its slim running time, Reflections in Black is a solid entry in an already overcrowded field propelled by a truly great cast and surprisingly solid direction from Cimarosa. An admittedly slight and flawed work featuring too many characters and a convoluted storyline that ultimately doesn’t make a lot of sense, Reflections in Black is just stylish enough to elevate it from the rather crude and low-rent Gialli that was beginning to appear as the genre took more and more of a hold on Italian filmmaking. Cimarosa is clearly not looking to transform the genre in any way, instead just filling it with as many examples of it as he can from loading it with the color yellow as much as possible while showing a possible personal fetish for redheads in the process.

Competent cinematographer Marcello Masciocchi is on hand to photograph Reflections in Black following some similar work he had done in the sixties on films like Romolo Guerrieri’s The Sweet Body of Deborah (1969). While the print I watched was both beat-up and full-frame, the film’s photography still came through as one of the film’s chief pleasures. Cimarosa’s wise choice to keep the running time fairly brief went hand in hand with his choice of editor, talented cutter Romeo Ciatti, who had already lent his skilled hands to classics like Emilio Miraglia’s The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971) and The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972). Ciatti’s tight editing job and Cimarosa’s at times inventive if still no-nonsense direction helps Reflection in Black escape from that overly complicated screenplay that could have been lumbering in the hands of another team of filmmakers.

Chief amongst Cimarosa’s debut’s pleasures is the great score from the nearly always inspired, and extremely prolific, Carlo Savina. Already a veteran of a slew of classic Giallo scores, Savina was the perfect choice for Reflections in Black’s soundtrack and his work is both inventive and sublime. Making it even more impressive is the fact that it was just one of nearly a dozen scores Savina delivered within a year of Reflection in Black’s release. Even when the film falters, Savina’s score keeps things interesting and compulsively watchable.

Like many Italian thrillers of the period, the assembled cast became one of the most memorable things about Reflection in Black, although sadly many of the most recognizable faces are underused. Chief amongst these is legendary Prague-born actress, Dagmar Lassander who is one of the top billed figures in Reflection in Black although frustratingly she just appears sporadically throughout the film. The same goes for other great figures of the period including Daniela Giordano and Ursula Davis who appear so infrequently that at times it feels like a number of the most high profile cast were basically doing Cimarosa (whom they had worked with previously onscreen) a favor. Giordano is especially wasted, which is a real shame as she was one of the most charismatic and talented personalities of the period.

In a case of egoism and machismo, Cimarosa gives himself one of the largest roles found in the film, playing yet another police detective who always seems one step behind the killer (and audience in this case). In fact, most of Reflections in Black’s running time is taken up with more police procedural material than thriller elements but it works here for the most part although it’s regrettable that Cimarosa wasn’t able to balance this out better.

Several other familiar faces for Italian genre cinema fans appear including Giacomo Rossi Stuart, John Richardson, Magda Konapka, and Ninetto Davoli but all are slightly underutilized as well. Reflections in Black is a great example of having too many terrific actors in a film not expansive enough to hold them all. Bolzoni had penned another overly complicated screenplay a few years before Reflections in Black, the overcooked Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I have the Key for Sergio Martino, and de Marchi was all but new to the genre so neither one was an ideal choice for Cimarosa’s first directorial outing. Regardless, Reflections in Black still works, remaining very much an above-average outing for the entirety of its running time.

Cimarosa continued acting all the way up to his passing in 2008. He only directed two more films, both of which he cowrote, No alla violenza (1977) and Uomini di parola (1981). I’ve yet to see either one so I can’t comment on their qualities. I can say that I liked Reflections in Black enough that I’d very much like to seek both out though, especially the latter as it stars the terrific Leonora Fani in one of her final screen performances.

Save for some international VHS releases and television airings, to my knowledge, Reflections in Black hasn’t had an official release on disc, certainly not in an HD format. Pity, as while it’s certainly not a top-tier Giallo it’s more than deserving of a proper HD edition and I found it much more appealing than other fans of the genre who have labeled it below average and forgettable. The appearance of Lassander alone makes it more than worth seeking out, even though there are several other pleasures to be found in the film. Until an official re-release happens, downloads can be found in the usual spots and the VHS version can be viewed on YouTube, with custom subs, as well.

-Jeremy Richey, January, 2024-