The Girl Who Knew Too Much

As expected, The Girl Who Knew Too Much has been infused with a compelling and thoroughly memorable sense of style that’s ultimately revealed as the one bright spot within a film that’s otherwise fairly interminable. Leticia Roman stars as Nora Davis, an American tourist who finds herself caught up in a series of bloody killings mere hours after arriving in Rome. Along with a friendly doctor (John Saxon’s Marcello Bassi), Nora begins looking into the crimes and investigating the various suspects – though it’s not long before she herself becomes a target of the killer. Director and co-writer Mario Bava punctuates the proceedings with a number of individually fascinating sequences, including an early set-piece in which Nora inadvertently stumbles onto a murder in progress, and yet it’s impossible to deny the ineffectiveness of the mystery that lies at the heart of the movie (ie it’s simply not interesting in the slightest). Exacerbating matters is the presence of an underdeveloped and downright bland central character, as Roman, though a competent actress, proves utterly unable to transform Nora into a figure worthy of the viewer’s interest and sympathy. The escalating emphasis on superfluous elements, including a headache-inducing gallery of suspects, ensures that The Girl Who Knew Too Much never quite lives up to the promise of that aforementioned stand-alone sequence, though fans of Bava’s lush visual sensibilities will likely find it easier to overlook the film’s various faults.

** out of ****