A Black Veil For Lisa (1968)

Dir: Massimo Dallamano

Sir John Mills heads the cast in this early giallo that sees him as a police officer on the trail of a serial killer. This time, our black-gloved, leather-clad friend is bumping off people involved in drug trafficking but poor old Mills is rather too preoccupied to nail the perp. Instead, he's busy worrying if his glamorous, much younger wife (a former drug user herself but surely that couldn't be relevant?!) is cheating on him with half the men in town while he's out working... "A Black Veil For Lisa" straddles the line between the classic film noir model and the then-burgeoning giallo but falls slightly more on the noir side with its hat-n-raincoat-wearing dick, fur-lined femme fatale (Bond girl Luciana Paluzzi) and seedy side-cast of squint-eyed lowlives. It also reveals the killer's identity quite early, abandoning the "whodunnit?" aspect in favour of twisting the character-driven melodramatic sub-plot in a few nice, unexpected directions. Like many of Dallamano's films, this is a tragic morality tale at heart but a gloriously pulpy one, loaded with gritty violence, wonderful tough-talkin' and a masterful lead performance from Mills who brings a pitiable sense of pathos to his hard-boiled character. ***