The Case of the Scorpion's Tail

Dario Argento’s wildly successful The Bird with the Crystal Plumage inspired a wave of quasi-imitations. Director Sergio Martino’s thriller follows this pattern, though it actually improves on Argento’s film in one crucial scene.

The story begins with Lisa. After her husband’s flight explodes midair, she discovers she’s the beneficiary for a one million dollar life insurance policy. She travels to Greece to collect, but the insurance company is suspicious and assigns their private investigator Peter, played by George Hilton, to investigate. But a rash of murders seems to implicate Peter, so he partners a reporter named Cléo, played by Anita Srindberg, to clear his name and identify the culprit.

Over the opening credits, Martino proffers a shot of Lisa strolling down a London city street. After she meets with the insurance executives, she meanders down a path along the Thames by the Hammersmith Bridge. When the film moves to Greece, Peter and Cléo lunch at an outdoor cafe overlooking the Acropolis. This kind of location photography gives the film a fresh look for an Italian-Spanish production.

Enhancing the photography, Bruno Nicolai’s score alternates between a catchy theme and tense, dissonant jazz. Consider the aforementioned scene where Lisa’s strolling by the Thames. The score begins as a slightly dissonant, jazz guitar number. As we realize she’s being followed, the tempo picks up. Then, as she realizes she’s being followed, Nicolai fades the guitar and introduces more dissonant drones and screeches, mirroring her state of mind.

Martino also leverages some nice camera tricks. In one scene, a man tumbles down a roof and catches himself on the edge. Martino frames the roll with the camera turning with the man before snapping back to vertical alignment, as though it were snapping back into place following the energy of the tumble. In another scene, he leverages the scope photography to frame two men across a table with a third behind by turning the camera sideways and panning between the men like a pendulum.

Besides the animal title and plot device of the lead trying to remember a clue he’d already seen, the film proffers a scene right out of Argento’s film: a woman is trapped in a room as a masked killer tries to break down the door with a knife. While Argento dawdled on the woman’s face as she cowered in terror, believing showing her afraid would make the audience afraid, Martino knows better, and cuts the scene shorter. The script knows better too and has the killer do something smarter than stick their arm blindly into a room.

That said, nothing in The Case of the Scorpion’s Tale approaches the brilliance of Argento’s chromatic flip shot in Plumage. Argento’s film also has a more satisfying ending, as its twist was there for the audience to deduce, while Martino’s film’s reveal feels disingenuous, as we realize the film’s been committing lies of omission.

It’s not a fatal flaw, more a disappointment. The mystery includes several surprising twists, and some gruesome deaths—including a memorable bottle to the eye sequence—while top-billed George Hilton provides a charming protagonist full of agency, and a decent amount of physicality as he dodges cars, axes, and knives. He even breaks down a door. A better ending and it might have stood alongside—if not surpassed—Argento’s film. That said, for giallo fans, it’s worth a look.