Review of The Devil with Seven Faces

"The Devil has Seven Faces" isn't a giallo, but admittedly it looks and sounds more like a giallo than most genuine gialli do. Now that was a weird sentence! Allow me to elaborate. The enticing title, the starring of George Hilton and Carroll Baker and the Stelvio Cipriani musical score have got written "GIALLO" all over it. Without even knowing what the plot is about, these elements are enough to convince all avid fans of Italian cult cinema that we're dealing with a bona fide giallo here. The plot, however, is that of a crime-thriller/mystery movie. There are no heavily breathing perverts with black gloves massacring scantily dressed fashion models here. Instead, "The Devil has Seven Faces" is an overly convoluted diamond heist thriller full of double-crossing and untrustworthy characters. Beautiful businesswoman Julie Harrison's life gets turned upside down when she suddenly receives threats, harassments and unwelcome visitors. It seems like her twin sister Mary stole a valuable diamond in London and vanished. Now the fellow jewel thieves that her sister double-crossed are mistaken Julie for Mary and terrorize her. She seeks help with a befriended lawyer Dave Barton and his hunky friend Tony Shane. Even though the men do everything to protect her, Julie's life is increasing danger. "The Devil has Seven Faces" is a fairly adequate Italian thriller, but like so often the case with these films, the screenplay tries to be overly clever and misleading, resulting in one too many convoluted plot twists. The film is also too talkative, especially during the first hour, and contains only a handful memorable moments of action, including a shoddy car chase and a tense confrontation inside a windmill. Speaking of windmills, for some reason the majority of the film (or at least all the exterior sequences) are shot in The Netherlands. I have no idea what the added value of that was, because it's weird to see all the road signs and newspaper clippings in Dutch. There are quite a number of shootouts and suggestive killings, but this definitely isn't a gory film. It's not even at all sleazy even though the cover image illustrates Carroll Baker in lingerie. Cipiriani's music is sensual and very lounge-like as usual.