THE IGUANA WITH THE TONGUE OF FIRE (1971) / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: RICCARDO FREDA / SCREENPLAY: RICCARDO FREDA, SANDO CONTINENZA / STARRING: LUIGI PISTILLI, DAGMAR LASSANDER, ANTON DIFFRING / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
In the early ‘70s, Italian giallo films were all the rage. Dario Argento made his name solidifying the genre with his ‘Animal’ trilogy, and a slew of like-minded filmmakers saturated the market with lewd, violent, and morally ambiguous thrillers. There are literally hundreds of these films in existence and over the past few years distributors like Arrow has made a lucrative affair of rereleasing many of the long-lost or ignored. The latest is Riccardo Freda’s The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire, a traditional giallo set, surprisingly, in Ireland.
Since most gialli are set in continental Europe, usually Rome, sometimes places like Paris, Iguana has an uncharacteristic British feel because of its setting. Director Freda apparently wanted Roger Moore for the lead, which would have been superb, and further pushed Iguana as a very different flavour, but we are blessed with the effortlessly suave Anton Diffring, here playing an incredibly guilty-seeming Swiss diplomat. The mystery that unfurls is a typical giallo one: a murder mystery strewn with red herrings and the private fiascos of the rich and powerful. But it doesn’t pack the punch most of its siblings do.
Compared to Lucio Fulci’s The Lizard in a Woman’s Skin or Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Freda’s offering feels disappointingly stale. Gialli often feel like intoxicating variations on a police procedural, with heightened style, sensuality, psychological elements, and visceral violence. Sure, Freda opens with a wonderfully grotesque kill, but he sets the bar high for himself and never reaches that kind of perfect giallo nastiness. The Irish setting is exploited a few times, most notably in a gorgeous foggy street chase that highlights the noir origins of the genre and provides one of the film’s few decent cinematic sequences. For the most part, though, the location feels like a natural dampener on the film’s style and rather than playing with the genre’s tropes in a foreign setting, the film just looks pretty dull. It’s missing the strange architecture and vibrant high-life exoticism often found in these films.
Stars like Diffring add instant panache to anything they touch, and watching the French star swan about as an effortlessly suave, and totally guilty, toff is an enjoyable treat. Dagmar Lassander (The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion) and Luigi Pistilli (Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key) are similarly watchable but rarely given anything really decent to do. So as far as checking this one out goes, you’d be better impressed if you watched any of the other giallo mentioned, The Iguana With a Tongue of Fire feels like a curiosity for giallo die-hards, rather than a must-see.
