A Black Veil for Lisa is an elegant and sexy combination of Noir and Giallo (actually Noir means black in French, Giallo means yellow in Italian). It's set in Hamburg (rather than one of the bigger Italian cities) and halfway the typical whodunit elements of the Giallo make room for a sultry cat-and-mouse game in the Noir vein. As more often, we only find out in the very last moments who was the cat, and who was the mouse.
John Mills plays a police inspector in charge of a drugs investigation, but he's not with his mind at his work. He can't stop worrying about his young wife Lisa (played by the gorgeous Luciana Paluzzi) who might be cheating on him. When he discovers who is behind a series of mysterious killings - a hitman eliminating witnesses for a crime ring - he makes an unexpected move: instead of arresting the man, he asks him to murder his wife! Of course things go not as planned: the two fall for each other, and the inspector, his wife and her lover become entangled in a dangerous game of trickery and deceit.
A Black Veil for Lisa was directed by Massimo Dallamano, best known for a series of voyeuristic thrillers known as the 'Schoolgirls in Peril trilogy' (What have they done to Solange? being the most famous of the three). Like most of his movies, Lisa is slightly trashy, but it's also slick and entertaining and above all beautifully shot (Dallamano was Sergio Leone's cinematographer for A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More). The script may feel a little contrived, but Paluzzi (Fione Volpe from Thunderball) is at her sexy best and Mills is perfectly believable as her aging and worrying husband, adding a touch of spleen to what otherwise would have been a rather mechanical character.
