Death Laid an Egg

Italian gialli are famous for farfetched plots, but few have been quite as outlandish as the script that director Giulio Questi and his co-writer/editor Franco Arcalli penned for this 1968 film, which mixes a critique of capitalist profit-mongering with the usual tropes of the genre. Jean-Louis Trintignant and Gina Lollobrigida star as Marco and Anna, a wealthy couple who run a highly mechanized chicken farm. Among their projects is an attempt to create a boneless chicken—at which they are ultimately successful, but horrified at the freakish result (which also lacks a head and wings). Their enormous warehouse also contains a gigantic machine that grinds grain into chickenfeed, but will inevitably be put to more gruesome use. Living with the pair is Anna's beautiful young cousin Gabri (Ewa Aulin), who becomes Marco's mistress although she is actually conspiring with her own husband Mondaini (Jean Sobieski)—an advertising man designing a weird new campaign to increase chicken sales—to frame Marco for murder, a scheme that is based on their belief that Marco is also a serial killer of prostitutes. In telling this convoluted story Questi indulges in peculiar camera angles, whiplash edits, and brutal montages (many involving car crashes), not to mention dialogue that is often surrealistically odd, all backed by a jangly, dissonant score by avant-garde composer Bruno Maderna. Death Laid an Egg is not a great film in any conventional sense, but it is a perversely fascinating oddity that will definitely appeal to connoisseurs of the bizarre. Extras include a gallery of lobby cards and a separate audio track of Maderna's score. Recommended. (F. Swietek)