In the Folds of the Flesh

Where it fits in with giallo decorum, along with its easy on the eyes pop art design and color scheme, is the way the back-story continually thickens with a carousel of revolving (and evolving) characters, plot twists, and subjective flashbacks of the same primal murder scene. After a series of dizzying twists which will be unraveled below we learn that the real Falesse was traumatized by the primal scene and placed in an insane asylum —justly or not— while the character played by Pierangeli in a blond wig is actually Ester (or Esther), Lucille’s daughter by her first (unnamed) marriage. [...]In the Folds of the Flesh is an unusual merging of the two most commonly used reasons for murders in the giallo: profit or psycho-sexual. The worse case is the scene where Pascal forces them to dig for André’s corpse; we hear crickets but see a clear blue sky above. 2 I realize that because of the international nature of Italian films of this era (this is an Italian-Spanish co-production, featuring Italian and Spanish actors) all films at this time were shot silent with language dubbed in for the appropriate markets. Since some of the principal actors are Italian (Anna Maria Pierangeli as Falesse/Ester, Eleonora Rossi Drago as Lucille), I would have preferred having an Italian audio option to supplement the English only audio selection.