PIU TARDI CLAIRE, PIU TARDI… (1968)
aka Run, Psycho, Run
Article 3802 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-1-2012
Posting Date: 1-11-2012
Directed by Brunello Rondi
Featuring Gary Merrill, Elga Andersen, Rossella Falk
Country: Italy
What it is: Not quite sure

A man seeks a look-alike substitute for his wife, who was murdered on a trip to Cornwall.

Knowing ahead of time that I was going to be seeing this one in Italian without English subtitles, I tried to do a little reading up on it. The John Stanley guide (from which I got the title) gave more or less the same plot description as IMDB, though where IMDB’s rating of 6.9 does seem to imply that it is fondly remembered in certain quarters, the Stanley guide dismissed the movie is a non-scary, boring talkfest. The Stanley guide was right on that one point; this is one of the talkiest movies I’ve encountered, and were it not for the plot descriptions, I wouldn’t have a clue to what is going on here. Heck, even with the plot descriptions, I’m still not sure. Only three visual moments stand out; the first is the murder scene itself (and that’s a little ambiguous), the second is a scene where a peasant girl plays with a young child while wielding a big butcher knife (which was rather suspenseful even if I didn’t know the context for the scene), and a scene near the end where a woman explores a hidden room, and it’s here I see the lone reference to PSYCHO (and which provides the clearest horror content I could find in the movie). Other than that, the English title should have been TALK, PSYCHO, TALK!. I hope the talk was interesting enough to sustain interest to those who understand Italian; for me, it was a bit of a chore to get through. And, of course, I withhold from any evaluation beyond that point.