Death Laid an Egg

I had no idea what the title “Death Laid an Egg” could have possibly meant until the watching the first scene, for the first time. Chickens. The movie is all about Chickens.

I'd heard about this title back when I was trying to consume as much giallo cinema as humanly possible, but it never seemed to be available or accessible on any home video format – or if it was, it was never readily available when I was keeping an eye out for it. And then late in 2017 Cult Epics released this late-sixties gem onto Blu-ray, where I was finally able to see it, and I was not disappointed. This sexy sixties giallo stars Eva Aulin, whose claim to fame was playing “Candy” in the British cult film of the same name – Aulin is incredibly alluring in both films, in “Death Laid an Egg” she plays a young co-owner of a chicken farm who, along with Gina Lollobrigida (the striking sophisticated beauty and subtle femme fatale of the film) and Gina's character's husband played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, have just laid off all of the hired farm workers while executing a plan to replace them with new machinery and experimental technology. Right off the bat, it appears someone is trying to put at least one of the owners in harm's way, and the workers make and easy and immediate red herring. But soon, other suspects pop up as we're introduced to a sort of mercenary biologist and an untrustworthy, and highly suspicious, marketing designer who appears to have a relationship with Aulin's character. Amid all of this, the owners of the farm are dead-set on hosting a lavish party at their home, leading up to the point in the film where our giallo killer appears to finally make his (or her) first move – but wait... Strangely, though, at this key point in the film, co-writer/director Giulio Questi (who also directed “Arcana” and “Django, Kill...”) decides to take the narrative in an experimental turn, and it starts to look like we may have a giallo with no giallo killer, and with a death told via a very cleverly-edited and extremely stylish flashback that was not really a very giallo murder at all, but is rather a past event that is not even directly related to anything happening in the present at all, save for our lead characters' state(s) of mind. Even the socio-political aspect of the farm workers' plight has been long dropped from the plot, and at this point I started to wonder if Questi was just fucking with us.

Well, mind-fuckery or not, it was impossible for me to stop watching at this point, because the film is almost hypnotically engaging, it's astoundingly and imaginatively well-edited and it's got style and sixties fashion to burn; and Questi's film oozes eroticism with deceptive ease without actually being exploitive whatsoever. But when his plot suddenly switched gears halfway through from a chicken-industry conspiracy to a noir-style adultery/revenge scenario, I suddenly knew damned well he was fucking with us. It's at this point in the film where Gina Lollobrigida brilliantly takes the lead away from Jean-Louis Trintignant, with Ewa Aulin and her suspicious-marketing-guy boyfriend being the string holding everything in a line. 

There is some slightly lurid sexual exposition in this second half of Questi's arthouse giallo that eventually does lead to a murder, as well as the much-anticipated giallo twist-ending, meanwhile Lollobrigida doesn't so much steal the show, as much as she quietly, and most welcomingly, overtakes it with her dangerous beauty and magnetic screen presence. 

--V.