Julie Harrison (Carroll Baker) leaves a dinner party alone and notices someone is following her. She runs to unlock her car's door, panics, and goes to the nearest house. The person chasing her catches up . . . It's merely a photographer, who snaps a few pictures. Julie faints. The next false scare involves a man dressed in a gorilla suit, who scares Julie at her office.
THE DEVIL WITH SEVEN FACES doesn't quite live up to the promise of these scenes, which are unrelated to the rest of the movie. The story proper, set in Amsterdam, has Julie visit a friend, attorney Dave Barton (Stephen Boyd), to ask him to protect her from people she thinks are spying on her. Then Barton's race-car driver buddy Tony (George Hilton) saves Julie from being kidnapped. Julie's twin sister, Mary lives in London and is apparently a target of gangsters looking for a stolen $1 million diamond.
The remainder of the movie is a cat-and-mouse game between Julie and the gangsters, with Barton and Tony rescuing her from time to time. The title apparently refers to the diamond. It's one of those movies in which most of the characters double-cross one another.
Thankfully, the acting is a little better than most time-wasters of this type. Baker is good at playing the kind of character she perfected in similar melodramas, such as PARANOIA (1969). In THE DEVIL WITH SEVEN FACES, she is (for once) photographed well and looks great in a short blonde wig. Lucretia Love, a mainstay in 1970s Italian genre movies, plays Barton's secretary. She also looks great in a wig (red). A subplot focuses on her attempts to romance Barton, but all the men in the story are smitten by Julie.
It's all slow going and kind of unexciting, except for a hilarious car chase, in which the camera under-cranks so badly the scene looks like stop-motion animation. The final revelation of who's who is also mildly amusing. The rest is forgettable.
THE DEVIL WITH SEVEN FACES doesn't quite live up to the promise of these scenes, which are unrelated to the rest of the movie. The story proper, set in Amsterdam, has Julie visit a friend, attorney Dave Barton (Stephen Boyd), to ask him to protect her from people she thinks are spying on her. Then Barton's race-car driver buddy Tony (George Hilton) saves Julie from being kidnapped. Julie's twin sister, Mary lives in London and is apparently a target of gangsters looking for a stolen $1 million diamond.
The remainder of the movie is a cat-and-mouse game between Julie and the gangsters, with Barton and Tony rescuing her from time to time. The title apparently refers to the diamond. It's one of those movies in which most of the characters double-cross one another.
Thankfully, the acting is a little better than most time-wasters of this type. Baker is good at playing the kind of character she perfected in similar melodramas, such as PARANOIA (1969). In THE DEVIL WITH SEVEN FACES, she is (for once) photographed well and looks great in a short blonde wig. Lucretia Love, a mainstay in 1970s Italian genre movies, plays Barton's secretary. She also looks great in a wig (red). A subplot focuses on her attempts to romance Barton, but all the men in the story are smitten by Julie.
It's all slow going and kind of unexciting, except for a hilarious car chase, in which the camera under-cranks so badly the scene looks like stop-motion animation. The final revelation of who's who is also mildly amusing. The rest is forgettable.