The Secret of the Red Dress

When I was looking for The Assassination Bureau on Tubi, one of the movies that showed up in the search terms and that I had never heard of before was Assassination in Rome. I was mildly surprised not to have heard of it considering Cyd Charisse leads the cast, but having seen the movie, I understand why.

The opening credits on the print that Tubi ran were both letterboxed and pillarboxed, which wasn't a good sign, since I had a premontion that the rest of the movie would be panned and scanned, which was in fact the case. Two seemingly unrelated things open the movie. One is Shelley North (that's Cyd Charisse), in a well-appointed apartment in Rome, calling the police to tell them that her husband has gone missing. At the same time, we see two petty thieves robbing and unfortunately killing a man at one of the fountains of Rome that may or may not be the Trevi.

In robbing the man, they take his shoes and discover that the shoes have a heel that opens up. In the fashion of Pickup on South Street they determine that this is some sort of microfilm which must mean something big, but something that they don't know about although they're going to try to figure out who the microfilm was intended for and blackmail that person. But they're the sub-plot to the main story, which is Shelley's attempt to find out what happened to her husband.

The police don't seem to be much help, so she approaches the international newspapers in Rome, which brings her in contact with Dick Sherman (Hugh O'Brian), with whom she apparently shared a past. He does some research, and discovers that Shelly's husband Bill had gotten deeply in debt, to the point that he had to engage in some sort of criminal activity to try to pay off that debt. Of course, we know that the guy killed in the beginning isn't Shelley's husband, since she'd be able to identify him if it had been and the murder victim hadn't had any ID on him. Further investigation takes Shelley to Rome, which seems convenient in that it gives the filmmakers a chance to film a second exotic location for the benefit of the American audience.

Some of the synopses of Assassination in Rome call it a giallo film, and I have to admit that giallo is one of the genres with which I'm not terribly well acquainted. Apparently, the earliest giallo novels which gave birth to the film genre were closer to pulp murder mysteries, but as the film genre became more prominent in the late 1960s and early 1970s the murders became grislier. What killing there is here isn't particularly grisly, and the resolution of the mystery seems perfunctory. It's hard to tell at times how much this was intended for domestic consumption, and how much it was intended for the US audience having secured the participation of Cyd Charisse.

I suppose I'd be able to praise the movie's cinematography if I hadn't seen a panned and scanned print, but as things stand, everything here seems pedestrian and decidedly sub par. Perhaps it's worth watching if you're a Cyd Charisse completist or into giallo, but otherwise, there's a lot of other stuff I'd recommend first.