Alex da Silva Ex-junkie author David Hemmings (Tim) is chilling out in Italy and agrees to meet his aunt Flora Robson (Lucy) for lunch in Pompeii. I'm afraid that's not going to happen – Robson doesn't make it. She's been strangled. Hemmings wants to find out more about her aunt's life and pursues his own investigation back in London. However, there is a network called 'The Stepping Stones' that seems hell-bent on preventing him from discovering anything. He's a marked man unless he drops his curiosity.It's a tense film if a little complicated at times as you're never quite sure who's who. Basically, suspect everyone who Hemmings comes into contact with. The cast are good and the story unravels well but the ending just didn't do it for me. I wanted something better as things don't get resolved in the manner I had wanted. And the music by Johnny Harris is laughably inappropriate. I see that some nutter has previously referred to it as a superb music score. He clearly has no knowledge of how to score a film. The film leaves unanswered questions and that was a let-down for me.

Cristi_Ciopron A movie with Hemmings, Gayle Hunnicutt, Adolfo Celi (a serviceable supporting player), W. H. White, about insanity, severe delusions, grief, very accomplished unpretentious craftsmanship, it's not artsy, but stylish, lavish, colorful; the style is a European synthesis, not only British, but continental as well ….Very suspenseful, one of the most accomplished genre movies, of an ineffable freshness; the sense of creepiness is as efficient as nuanced and sober. It has an undertone of distorted sexuality, the predilection for aged women, Bunface and the schoolgirls, the eerie but certain appeal of the aged ladies, those kisses; the focus is on eyes, mouths, thighs in their shameless bare luxuriance. Tim Brett's flat gives a very suggestive sense of the place.The young women appear as naked thighs, and so does the seductress in the train, the temptress who knows the writer's address. Also, the leading character's 1st shot shows his legs.Those thighs symbolize the access, not as much denied (by the women), as repellent. He feels threatened by the walk, by the bride's walk …. The male characters, beginning with the copper who visits him, are paternal symbols. They are burly. The women's thighs are viscous. The women are cold, tempting, indifferent, desired. The writer resents them. Force, desire, dream, deceit; he feels deceived, and resents health, the insanity proves a stronger temptation than the drugs he used to take.In its depiction of the insanity, the movie shows the feverish phony cleverness of the delusion, with its crippling mistrust; and it's not a moralizing stance, but a clinical one, the twilight of a mind, clinically depicted. The addiction is a _crippleness, and the leading character ends in a wheelchair, i. e. denying himself almost everything, deprived of walk and deprived of rest, unable to walk, unable to rest, dominated by his wife, defeated. The puzzling plot has been meant to be dreamlike. The eerie, spooky story-line from the standpoint of insanity had a worthy career in the cinema, and occasioned other movies as well.Both leads give apposite performances. It's impressive how both of them understood the requirements of their roles.Gayle Hunnicutt is decorative, and her role required a bland act, she had to be a decorative doll. Hemmings made me think of a plumper and more urbane Dean; what might seem like overacting actually suits his part, suggesting the behavior of a psychotic, the feverish, sometimes frenzied behavior.

christopher-underwood I felt this could have been so much better and began to temporarily tire of it somewhere around the halfway mark and then it lifted and ran pretty well to the end. David Hemmings seemed a bit limp and Gayle Hunnicutt almost asleep but then maybe it was the erratic script. I guess there is also the problem where a film is going to have different levels of reality that not all can be made too transparently clear. There is a wonderful cameo from Wilfred Hyde-White and things certainly pick up with the appearance of Daniel Massey and Arthur Lowe. Apart from the dialogue being rather lacklustre at times and some scenes going on a tad too long, the music is completely wrong. I have seen the score by Johnny Harris highly praised and possibly outside of the film the jazzy music is fine but here it is too loud, too obvious and basically, bloody annoying. Despite all this, the film remains likable enough and certainly worth a look.

jonathan-577 This British - very British - thriller trades on the good name of David Hemmings, who at this time still had substantial "Blow Up" cachet left to p*ss away. His jaded ex-junkie finds his aunt murdered one sunny vacation, and sets out to find out whodunit amid many threatening overtures from big nasties. The main selling point here is a wild and wholly inappropriate soundtrack from one Johnny Harris - Hemmings is just shlepping around the funeral doing nothing in particular, and in comes that damned 'screaming flute' with attendant bongos. It's not embarrassingly bad, but it is dull for long stretches of dialogue in between its set pieces, and for all its attempts to be tense and/or creepy the plot's passing resemblance to Argento's "Deep Red" (also with Hemmings) does this no favours at all.