Giallo #1: "The Girl Who Knew Too Much" (1963)

Mario Bava is commonly referred to as the founding father of the Italian giallo film ("giallo" meaning yellow, referring to the gaudy yellow covers of pulp crime stories and potboiler mysteries) and his one-two punch of "The Girl Who Knew Too Much" and "Blood and Black Lace" both usher in the common tropes that we now associate with these trashy, virtuoso films.
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With "Blood and Black Lace," (which I'll be discussing later as part of this feature) he introduced one of two common narratives, the body-count slasher, and with "The Girl Who Knew Too Much," he expounded on the genre's greatest influence (Alfred Hitchcock) while producing one of its most common tropes, the paranoid woman-in-peril. 
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It is uncommonly shot in black-and-white, yet its high-contrast outdoor photography (particularly those numerous shots on the Piazza di Spagna) retroactively give the film a uniqueness that its garish successors do not. 
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The film charts the "Roman holiday" of American Nora Davis (naturally played by an Italian, actress Leticia Roman) who is traveling to visit her elderly aunt. Quite rudely, Nora is mugged, her aforementioned auntie passes away, and she's also a witness to a brutal murder - all in the first night!
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Ah, but did she really witness a murder or simply dream up the whole thing? After all, Nora is an avid reader of the very same cheap murder mysteries that the genre is founded on and the police can find no evidence (except a murder taking place there over ten years ago) of anybody getting a knife in the back. 
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She learns of the "Alphabet Killer," who kills victims in tidy, alphabetic order (I wonder what he's planning on doing for 'X'?) and would you know it, 'D' for Nora Davis is next in line! Thus the rest of the film concerns Nora's quest for either her survival or her sanity, as no one seems to be buying her hysterical paranoia. 
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Eventually we're given our clues and resolution, and like most giallo films, the answers take too long to crop up and once given, too long to explain. "The Girl Who Knew Too Much" may not retrospectively hold up to later, more virtuoso technical achievements in the genre (namely from Argento), nor is it going to satiate those who crave high body counts and candy-red blood, but it remains a modest, trendsetting work in the giallo timeline. [C+]