Puzzle
It has been eight months since Peter Smith awoke following a serious car accident, his identity known from his passport but his past a blank, a psychiatrist working with him but unable to shift the block until a very different intervention offers a lead, a man who confronts him and tells him that his name is actually Ted Walden and that he is a double crosser in deep debt.
The stranger shot before he can explain further, a telegram summons Ted to Portofino to meet with the wife he has no memory of, Sara Grimaldi, similarly prompted to meet the husband she has not seen him in over a year at the station but neither of them having sent the messages, the man who has brought them together Ted’s former accomplice, George, who says unless he can recall the details of where he hid a million dollars worth of drugs he will kill them both.
Released in Italy as L’uomo senza memoria (The Man Without a Memory) and opening under the grey skies of London, as washed out as the man who believes himself to be Peter Smith, the shift to Italy brings Mediterranean vibrancy to the film known internationally as Puzzle, directed by A Fistful of Dollars co-writer Duccio Tessari and starring Luc Merenda and Senta Berger as Ted and Sara with Bruno Corazzari as George.
Ted’s memory returning in flashes – the spinning mechanism of a clock, a man murdered – the amnesia is more a gimmick than a driving force of the film which feels artificial, an empty fantasy which is enlivened by the distraction of the shift to the coastal town and its looping high-walled alleys, allowing many chase sequences both day and night, while the action switches between Sara’s expansive villa and the swimming pool where she coaches.
With Duilio Cruciani as Luca, Sara’s neighbour and one of her charges, and Umberto Orsini as Doctor Reinhardt Lang, Sara’s companion during the long absence of her husband who aspires to be more, even by the standards of the giallo the mechanics of the plot are as clumsy as Ted’s amnesia, the identity of the mystery man manipulating events obvious to anyone but the lead characters who are a part of the puzzle.
A fragmented film of sometimes incomprehensible behaviour, Ted and Sara planning to escape to the anonymity of the big city but first taking a friend to lunch to say goodbye less than a clandestine exit, her immediately subsequent accident where a driver (L’anticristo’s Anita Strindberg) reverses into her breaking her leg fails to trigger alarms, though happenstance can also work in her favour, the gardener once again having left her mini-chainsaw on the kitchen table despite being asked to tidy it away, a convenient tool when uninvited callers arrive.
Puzzle will be streaming on the Arrow platform from Friday 9th January
