'La Morte Ha Fatto L'uovo' aka 'Death Laid An Egg' (Giulio Questi, 1968)
"How absurd"
Right then. First of all, this film is considered a 'Giallo' film, which is a specific genre of violent Italian murder mystery... a sort of pulp fiction whodunnit, usually with added gore! A Giallo film will always include one or more grisly murders, a red herring or three, and -most crucially of all- a pair of trademark black leather gloves, which will always belong to the murderer! Probably Dario Argento is the most well-known director of this genre, but Giulio Questi's 1968 oddity 'La Morte Ha Fatto L'uovo' pre-dates Argento's excellent debut 'L'uccello Dalle Piume Di Cristallo' ('The Bird with the Crystal Plumage') by two whole years, and can therefore be considered to be one of the very first films of the genre.
But wait! Does Death laid an egg actually belong to the Gialli sub-genre? Well... not really. It's too arty-farty and experimental to be any kind of outright horror film. The film is really about fragmented relationships and disloyalty. To be honest, it's all over the shop, and not in a good way. Director Questi appears to be confused about which kind of film he wants to make, therein making Death laid an egg a scrambled mess.
The story concerns Jean-Louis Trintignant as Marco, who is married to the lovely Gina Lollobrigida, but is having an affair with his wife's live-in assistant Gabrielle (the very beautiful Ewa Aulin). Along with his wife, Marco runs a chicken farm, and has a penchant for bondage with prostitutes, and possibly even muuuurrrrrderrrrrrr!
With this being a supposed Giallo, most of the cast act suspiciously, and the viewer never really knows who to trust until the very end. 'Egg' is a funky trip. There are lots of chickens, large dollops of irritating acoustic & piano jazz in the soundtrack, and a sprinkle of quick visual cuts just to make the viewer even more nauseous.
And on that note... I'm really not sure about Giulio Questi's talent as a film-maker. Some critics/fans think that he's avant-garde and surreal, but there's a fine line between avant-garde and ineptitude. Just look at the films of Donald Cammell and Pier-Paolo Pasolini... are these maverick genius' at work, or artless exploitation hacks with a gift of the gab? Well, I lean to the latter on that one, but that's another article. I'm unconvinced about Pasolini's 'genius' and Cammell's films are poorly realised. Questi's talents are questionable.
Giulio Questi only directed a handful of films, and besides 'Egg', I've seen his bizarre 1967 western 'Se sei vivo spara' aka 'Django, Kill! (If You Live Shoot!)'. Hmm. The Worldwidegimp jury is still out on the tiles on both of those films, and Questi's ability as a decent film-maker.
However infuriating the film may be, 'Egg' does have a great cast, and its wacky form of self-conscious craziness does work well considering the year it was made. Also, with the battery farm as a key location, you get the feeling that Questi isn't taking this very seriously at all. Just check out the ending! And the scene with freaky headless and wingless chickens! Blimey.
So now this happened, and hurrah for crowd-funding! Nucleus films got some cash via an online public campaign (which yours truly helped fund), and now this long-lost film gets a special release on Blu-ray. There are two versions, the Director's cut which runs at 1H44m, and the edited early 1970s re-release which marketed the film as a Giallo (see the Japanese film poster the the right to see what I mean) and runs for around 91 minutes. Too be honest, the director's cut has a lot of insignificant scenes about marketing chicken, and includes several scenes with Marco's friend Luigi (played by actor Renato Romano) which goes absolutely nowhere. I think the 91m minute version is good enough. There are lots of nice extras on the disc, and a lot of time & effort went into this release. Full marks to Nucleus films for doing this!
Oh, nice birds, like.
