Lightweight, afternoon tea-like Giallo with subtle humour and a nice performance by Marcello Mastrioanni. A kind of Marks and Spencer

giallo.

In Turin, dirty old man/architect Garrone goes about his daily business of looking up woman's skirts, making optimistic passes at young waitresses, and ruining high class are exhibitions. Meanwhile, bored housewife Anna is tuning out her older husband ramblings and thinking about a pointless argument she's having with her possible lover Massimo (Jean-Luis Trintigant). They are arguing about how to pronounce the word Boston, by the way, and this architect Garrone has stuck his nib in about it. Clearly venting, Anna writes a letter where she thinks Massimo and herself should kill Garrone.

Garrone ends up being beaten to death by a giant stone phallus and Anna regrets writing that letter as her two newly-fired house staff take the letter to the police. The man in charge of the case is Marcello Mastrioanni and he's a bit uncomfortable with this whole upper class thing. The bored Anna and the even more bored Massimo start treating the whole thing like a game and start doing their own investigations.

Complicating things further is the revelation that Massimo isn't Anna's lover, as he's in a turbulent gay relationship Lello. While it's refreshing to see an actual gay relationship in an Italian movie from this era, rather than a man in drag battering policeman with a handbag and screaming that he's all woman, these two bicker like fiends and you wonder what Lello is thinking when he also starts his own investigation into the murder to save his relationship with Massimo.

The more Marcello digs, the more dirt he finds as it seems that no one has an alibi and everyone seems to be up to something. He now also has to contend with two eccentric sisters who have trouble with hooker using their garden for business, a mysterious car that's following people around and a stonemason business that specializes in stone phalluses

There's not a great deal of murder here but plenty of mystery, and Marcello Mastrioanni's laid back, bemused cop wanders through a world he doesn't understand, with a few sidekicks, many, many meals, and plenty of discussion about Sicilians, Sardinians, and Piedmontians. It's quite a long film for a giallo and even though it's trash free, my mind didn't wander at all while watching it.

Nice Ennio Morricone soundtrack too - but do i have to say that?

"The police have the victim, the weapon and the suspect. What they don't have is the Sunday Woman." You know that a movie is high class when Marcello Mastroianni plays the investigator and it's based on a book that's listed as one of the first examples of modern Italian crime novels.

Commissioner Santamaria (Mastroianni) is on the case of Garrone, an architect who was playing an intellectual game of murder within a series of letters to his friend Massimo Campi (Jean-Louis Trintignant). While investigating, Satanamaria falls for one of the suspects, Anna Carla Dosio. Can we blame him when she's played by Jacqueline Bisset?

It seems that Garrone has been killed for his blackmailing, but now that Campi's boyfriend Lello has also been killed - amongst others - the plot is thickening.

Luigi Comencini is usually the director of more high brow things than we cover here. But hey - there's a Morricone soundtrack to tether us to the tenuous connections to the giallo genre that we hold so dear. I guess I shouldn't say too high brow, as after all the main victim is murdered with a stone penis, so there's that.

A very poor Italian comedy, based around a cop investigating the murder of a sleazy old architect. THE SUNDAY WOMAN is a perfect example of style over substance: there's always plenty going on, lots of characters and dialogue, Jacqueline Bisset looking photogenic, and a fine Ennio Morricone score. But there the good elements end. The story is beleagured and drawn out endlessly, the mystery anything but intriguing, and the whole thing comes across as very silly - especially the murder weapon! A giallo this isn't, despite being advertised as such in some quarters. It's more of a satire on Italian social conventions, so might have been of interest to local viewers at the time, but certainly not these days.