Why an Italian film spoken in Italian gets the English title of THRILLING beats me. That said, the title is not dishonest: all three episodes carry a share of thrills.
The first, IL VITTIMISTA (THE VICTIM), stars Nino Manfredi as an Italian man who suspects that his German wife (spectacularly sexy Alexandra Stewart) is trying to poison him. In a surreal episode in which the stripes of a zebra crossing actually rise from the road as he keeps getting in the line of oncoming traffic, Manfredi starts off by getting the kiss of life from a male lifesaver at a beach. Meanwhile, curvaceous Stewart walks about, apparently unconcerned as she hears cries that someone is drowning. All this happens to the strains of the song DOWNTOWN, made famous by English crooner Petula Clark but sung in Italian as CIAO CIAO (apparently composed by the great Ennio Morricone, though it does not sound at all like his type of music).
Manfredi delivers terrifically as the husband who suspects everything Stewart does, hates the dolls her father sends her, and pulls every trick to avoid eating the food she makes - only to binge at restaurants on his own.
This episode's beginning announces the ending, which makes sense only in terms of the surreality surrounding the plot. 7/10.
The second and shortest episode, entitled SADIK, refers to a comic book hero that totally enthralls the wife of businessman Walter Chiari, who sees his business going down the tubes and is hoping for a phone call from Switzerland to get some much needed financial relief that will hold his firm afloat... while his wife reads comic book after comic book, always with Sadik as the hero.
Chiari is convincing as the hubby unable to communicate with his comic-addicted wife, who simply ignores phone calls from the Swiss bank. Director Gian Luigi Polidoro cleverly keeps the fanciful narrative under tight time rein and with a comic-like ending. 8/10.
L'AUTOSTRADA DEL SOLE (SUNNY MOTORWAY) , directed by Carlo Lizzani, is the third and, in my opinion, best episode in this anthology.
Alberto Sordi plays a speedster on the motorway who thinks nothing of overtaking others on the blind side, and signalling that they are cuckolds. However, when a driver with a Milan number plate does the same to him, he gets peeved and hunts him down to a family-run hotel where two stupendously beautiful murder-plotting sisters, Sylva Koscina and Nicoletta Machiavelli - fittingly named, hey? - systematically ice visitors in a manner that would do Norman Bates proud.
Considering that PSYCHO came out in late 1959 and this is a 1965 film, it may well be a spoof on the famous Hitchcock horror flick.
To Lizzani's directorial credit, Sordi's over the top emotional performance takes none of the sting away from the thrill of a man who finds out that he is the new guest targeted for assassination. The scenes where he removes the rotor of the Milan driver's vehicle, and then has to return it during a family card game are memorable, as are the highly aggressive quarrels in that same family that seemingly only unites to commit murder.
Very good B&W cinematography. 9/10.
