Teresa Reviews Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970)

Teresa Reviews Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970)

(c)2024 by Teresa Peschel

(5 bambole per la luna d’agosto)

Fidelity to text: 1 knife

Assemble ten people on an island. Let the murders begin. There was one other parallel to the novel. One.

Quality of movie: 1½ knives

It would help immensely if you spoke Italian and watched an Italian-language version with Italian subtitles to ensure you hear the dialog. Otherwise, it’s incoherent.

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.

5 Bambole marks my eleventh film version of And Then There Were None (1939). Other than assembling a bunch of people in an isolated location and murdering them, virtually none of the novel — or the stage play with its radically rewritten ending — made it onscreen. Even more jarringly, the underlying concept in every other adaption I’ve seen, even the Bollywood version Gumnaam (1965) is missing. The need for justice, however twisted, drives the murderer to slaughter a pack of strangers. Not here.

What’s the rationale? It’s greed. Professor Gerry Farrell has developed a magic formula for an industrial resin that will revolutionize manufacturing. Sleazy industrialist George Stark invites Professor Gerry and his wife, Trudy, to his private island. George brings his abused wife, Jill, a painter. Two more couples are on the island. First is industrialist Nick Chaney and his slutty wife, Marie. She’s the one writhing like a Vegas pole dancer in the opening. Nick and Marie enjoy an open marriage. She cheats on him with their houseboy, Charles, (also on this excursion) and Nick’s response is to ask why she hasn’t seduced Professor Gerry to get the formula.

You also meet Jack Davidson and his wife, Peggy. If you watch a lot of ’60s Italian sword-and-sandal flicks, you might recognize actor Howard Ross who plays Jack. Or rather, you might after he strips down to a tiger print Speedo. Boy howdie. He doesn’t look like any industrial magnate I ever saw. They’re usually considerably older and doughier.

The 10th person on the island is Isabel, the daughter of George’s game warden. During the party weekend, her parents are off-island for medical reasons. That’s why that 17-year-old blonde is wandering around, snooping and spying on the grownups.

The opening debauched party ends in a failed virgin sacrifice. Everyone drinks heavily, smokes like chimneys, and wears eye-popping ’70s fashions. Outside, George’s villa looks like it was built for Fred Flintstone after he won the lottery. Inside, it’s Italian ’70s high-end design right down to the table loaded with glass marbles sitting on matching glass pedestals. Those marbles will appear later in a very nice bit of filmmaking that’s also completely unbelievable.

In the morning, Professor Gerry learns George, Nick, and Jack want to (separately) buy his magic formula. They each offer him a check for $1,000,000. Professor Gerry refuses because his research partner died tragically while they were developing the formula. This becomes important at the end but not for the reason you think.

Also that morning, Marie leaves the house to tryst on the boat with Charles, but discovers he’s been stabbed. Does she report this to anyone? No, she runs back to the villa and fights with Nick over why she hasn’t seduced Professor Gerry.

You’ll sit through a lot of arty cinematography and bizarrely intrusive music before the next body appears. Someone shoots Professor Gerry while he’s musing on the shore. Weirdly, Isabel reappears and drags his body into the surf.

The yacht disappears, along with any other boats. The phone lines are down, as is the radio. Despite the obvious presence of visible land from the beach, no one thinks to light a huge S.O.S. bonfire. Instead, they wander aimlessly, drink more, and behave like this is somewhat normal. Then Peggy, Jack’s wife, is found dead in the bathtub. Jack is upset and angry, in the first real emotion you’ll witness onscreen. Soon thereafter, while the survivors are chasing around the island, they discover Marie, stabbed and tied to a tree in a callback to her play-acted ritual sacrifice at the opening party.

As each victim dies and their body is found (other than Professor Gerry washed out to sea), the corpses are hauled back to the villa, wrapped in plastic using the kitchen’s industrial-sized rolls of Saran wrap, and suspended from ropes in the walk-in meat locker. Why anyone would hang the bodies when they could just be laid out on the floor in the corner is beyond me, but it looks creepy.

Nick vanishes, but nobody cares. George, Jack, and Trudy remain. Trudy plays with the reel-to-reel recorder and tapes a diary entry. They swill down their drinks amid the trashed living room until they pass out. The music changes, morning comes, and the once-trashed living room, with glass marbles scattered everywhere, is pristine. A yacht captain and his sailors investigate the house and find it empty. They don’t check the meat locker. They leave.

Then George, Jack, and Trudy wake up in the trashed living room! They discover the recorder had been left on and hear the voice of the yacht captain ordering his crew to search the place. They find Nick hanging in the meat locker, argue, and accuse Trudy of drugging their drinks before separating. George finds a hidden, broken boat. Jack admits to drugging George and Trudy, hiding their sleeping bodies, cleaning up the entire house of evidence so the yacht crew found a pristine house, followed by putting everything back exactly the way it was!

Referencing the novel, sole survivors Jack and Trudy stand off against each other over the formula microfilm. It doesn’t end well. Isabel reappears. She takes all three checks and tries to get the microfilm. Jack’s not quite dead because either Trudy’s a lousy shot or he learned mad survival skills on all those sword-and-sandal epics. Isabel fights him off and leaves his body in the meat locker.

By this point, you’re thinking, “Okay, this is weird. Does Isabel have vengeance in mind against these people that she’s going to reveal?” She does not. She wanted the money! She saw those million-dollar checks floating around, and in a criminally underwritten plot, decides to take advantage of Jack’s murders. She’d lurk in the background until the shooting stopped, then swoop in and get rich.

You learn this when she visits Professor Gerry in jail. He’s still alive? Isabel is the daughter of a game warden, remember? Despite him being 40 years older, she’s madly in love with Professor Gerry so she shot him with a tranquilizer gun to get him safely out of the way. Professor Gerry ended up in police hands (you won’t learn how) and while under the sodium pentothal, he confessed to murdering his research partner for the formula. He’s in jail, awaiting trial and execution. Why did Isabel visit him? Because she didn’t know the bank account number on the last check and she’d already spent the other two million dollars. Professor Gerry tells her and off she goes to spend more money.

This all makes about as much sense as the bizarre title. Maybe it was clear in Italian but got lost in translation.