Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972) Review
Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key! What a mouthful! It reads like a bad song lyric. It’s actually a reference to director Sergio Martino’s earlier film The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh (1971), where it’s seen as a note to the killer’s next victim. Such a title does little to sell the film in my view. This is a shame as Martino’s movie is gripping, looks great, plays great and has a wonderful Bruno Nicolai score too. And despite being inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s well known short story The Black Cat, the film still manages to surprise eliciting gasps with every twist and turn that writers Adriano Bolzoni, Ernesto Gastaldi and Sauro Scavolini have concocted.
Luigi Pistilli stars as burned-out writer and alcoholic Oliviero Rouvigny. When we first meet Oliviero he’s a little worse for wear at his crumbling mansion near Venice. His dead mother plays upon his imagination and he has no morale conscience openly fondling his maid in front of local hippies partying at his abode and humiliating his wife Irina (Anita Strindberg). When one of Oliviero’s sexual conquests is murdered, whilst waiting to meet him, the finger of suspicion points towards him.
When his maid is found dead on his premises Oliviero decides to hide her corpse behind the wall in his basement and avoid further suspicions. Matters take a complicated turn when his young niece Floriana (the exquisite Edwige Fenech) decides out of the blue to come and stay with him for awhile. Where does the black cat come into this? Well that’s a cat called Satan who is observing all and is not alone in doing so. There is a silver-haired stranger doing the same who could just be the murderer.
Right from the start Martino’s flick is in your face with its abundant sexual shenanigans proving a wickedly welcome delight. So often sex is movies is about making love here it is about ownership and control and is more arousing for it. It’s also integral to the story rather than tacked on for purely titillating reasons. Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I have the Key is a superior giallo that is not as widely known as some other entries in the genre but far better than most. The story telling is measured to perfection with not one scene out of place or slowing it down. This is a lean mean killing machine of a movie worthy of a place in any genre fan’s collection.
