Strangers on a gondola

The Designated Victim (1971)

This is an Italian version of Strangers on a Train (1951). The basic storyline is the same, but this time it's set in Venice and the plot is introduced in a boat. There are however quite a few things added to the original story to keep it from being a direct copy. It's quite obvious that they wanted to steer away from the typical exploitation and keep this one a clean thriller. At parts that even works, but the thing is that this movie forgets the most important aspect of the original, the suspense. The movie wasn't thrilling in pretty much any part, just a very straight forward story telling that focused on the characters and their motives. That's a very bad problem as you are forced to compare this to the original and of course it can't cope with the master of suspense without any suspense at all. I did like some of the twists of the story which I won't get into to avoid spoiling and I liked the new setting also. The movie wasn't as stylish as I had hoped, but there are a few scenes that are quite brilliant. The cast was also great with Tomas Milian and Pierre Clementi being the driving force of the movie when things got dull. Luis Bacalov's score wasn't bad either, though he has done better also. So there were many things right and it had the potential to be a brilliant movie, but they forgot the main thing, suspense. Now it's just an interesting variation of the story that doesn't do what it's supposed to do as a movie. The DVD from Shameless had been made from multiple sources so the aspect ratio changes between scenes and sometimes during it, which I found quite annoying.
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