Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (Italian: Il tuo vizio è una stanza chiusa e solo io ne ho la chiave) is a 1972 giallo film directed by Sergio Martino. The picture stars Edwige Fenech, Luigi Pistilli, and Anita Strindberg. The film uses many elements from Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Black Cat, and acknowledges this influence in the film's opening credits.

Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key was Martino's fourth giallo film. The title of the film is a reference to his first one, Lo strano vizio della Signora Wardh (The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, 1971), in which the killer leaves the phrase as a note to his victim. The victim in the film was played by Fenech.

Plot

Oliviero Rouvigny (Pistilli), a failed writer and an alcoholic, lives in a crumbling mansion with his wife Irina (Strindberg), who is scared of Oliviero's cat, Satan, that used to belong to his late mother. To fight boredom, Oliviero organizes decadent parties for local hippies and humiliates and abuses Irina in front of the guests. After his mistress, a young student, is found murdered, Oliviero becomes the primary suspect. When he finds their maid dead on the premises, he decides to conceal it to avoid further suspicions.

With no-one knowing the identity of the murderer, Oliviero's paranoia builds and leads to more abuse of Irina. Then Oliviero's niece Floriana (Fenech) suddenly arrives for a visit. Irina finds comfort in Floriana's arms and bed, and the two decide to find a way to deal with Oliviero.

After Irina kills Oliviero with scissors, Floriana reveals that she has been after the jewelry that Oliviero had stashed in the mansion. Irina humbly gives her the jewelry and the two part ways. However, Irina also had a plan of her own and she turns to Walter (Ivan Rassimov), the original murderer. Walter kills Floriana and her boyfriend making it look like an accident. Later, Irina pushes Walter off a cliff to have the jewelry all for herself. When Irina returns to the mansion, she finds the police there. An old woman had filed a complaint for animal cruelty, as she had seen Irina stabbing Satan. Inside the mansion, the police officers notice that the cat seems to be mewing in agony inside a wall. As they tear down the wall, they discover the cat and the dead body of Oliviero inside.

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools