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The corpse of a girl is found on a tram, murdered it seems onj the
tram's last ride for the night - which seems incomprehensible for
detective Giordani (Enzo Cerusico), because in his view someone must
have witnessed the m,urder. So he invites allt he passengers of the ride
to reconstruct the crime - & soon he comes up with a tailor-made
suspect, the conductor Magli (Pier Luigi Arpa), who - according to all
testimonies - at the end of the ride has been alone with the girl,
& who had beeen attracted to the girl & tried to pick her up. In
fact he was so persistent that the girl wrote a complaint to the
tram-company. Magli is brought to court & convicted to 30 years in
jail - claiming his innocent ot the very last minute ... That's when
Giordani's doubts start, & he decides to reconstruct the night of
the crime once again with his girlfriend Giulia (Paola Tedesco), but
this time under night-conditions - & he really comes up with a few
interesting facts, that the tram's light goes out for a few seconds
every time it crosses a switch, & when the tram goes into a curve,
the front compartment is out of sight of large parts of the back
compartment - all providing the killer with enough time to hide
the corpse. All Giordani & Giulia have to do now is hide her in the
tram & having her go into the tram-depot, where Giordani promisees
to pick her up. What they don't know of course, is that the killer
dknopws abouttheir little plan & is right behind them, knockin g
Giordani out at a convenient moment & then chasing Giulia through
the depot, only to be apprehended just before he can kill her, too. &
the killer turnas out to be - Marco (Emilio Marchesini), a colleague of
the dead girl, who once was her lover but she dumped him ... To
build up a murder mystery to a logical conclusion, but after half way
through the story throw that conclusion out of the window to come up
with a different conclusion is always a valiant effort, & it makes
this tv-featurette stand out from most other tv-crime-fare,
unfortunately though the finale suffers from lack of believability -
that the killer all of a sudden would be on the cop & his
girlfirend's trail to kill them off is - mildly put - far-fetched, &
somewhat - at least in retrospect - destroys the suspense it was
supposed to build up, making the whole solution of the crime rather
corny as the finale looks way too forced-upon. On a
technical/artistical level, this is a solid crime thriller, but a far
cry from the visual feasts director Argento would become known for
(especially since Profondo Rosso/Deep Red [1974], the
movie he made immediately after this tv-series) |
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