Death Carries a Cane 1973

Kitty, Nieves Navarro, is vacationing in Italy with her parents to reunite with her boyfriend Alberto, Robert Hoffmann. She passes the time with a coin-operated binocular, scanning the city’s façades for something human to notice, and that curiosity leads to a chilling glimpse: a woman in an apartment is stabbed by a killer wearing a black hat, glasses, and an overcoat. The view is brief—the scope malfunctions and she has to insert another coin—so she only catches a partial trace: a house number, a peanut vendor, and a cleaning woman on the street as the killer slips away. The moment sticks with her, a fragment of a crime that feels almost unreal in its distance and distance itself from the usual rhythm of life.

Unable to draw police attention through an off‑duty fireman she approaches, Kitty and Alberto decide to report the sighting. Alberto, who carries a limp from a prior injury, keeps details to himself, and the police team—led by the somewhat distracted inspector George Martin Merughi—are skeptical of a sighting with so few concrete markers. Yet the case does not vanish; the investigation intensifies when the authorities confirm that the dead woman has been found and that there is more to the crime than a single encounter. Kitty’s testimony becomes a thread the investigators tug at, hoping to pull a clearer image from the fog of uncertainty.

As the case unfolds, the killer’s calling card emerges: imprints from a cane at each crime scene. The inspector’s team pulls at this thread to test alibis, and Alberto himself becomes a brief suspect because of his leg injury, a detail that earns Kitty’s reproach and a sting of doubt that briefly unsettles their partnership. Meanwhile, a peanut vendor’s routine is interrupted by a sudden, brutal attack—slashed throats and a chilling reminder that the killer is both meticulous and merciless. The vendor had uncovered dark secrets the killer wished to keep buried, secrets that now leave the path of danger broader and more personal.

With Alberto cleared, the investigation expands to a second, older murder that predates the two recent killings. The cane prints link all three victims, and the detective work begins to converge toward a single, terrifying possibility: the prey and the predator are entangled in a web of people who know each other, especially within the intimate orbit of a dance academy. A cleaning lady tries to extort Alberto for information about the killer, but her attempt ends in her own death, underscoring how perilous it is to chase the truth too far.

The plot thickens when Alberto accompanies a colleague, Marco, to an audition at Magda Hopkins’s studio, run by Marco’s wife Lidia Arrighi and, complicating matters, her twin sister Silvia Arrighi. Cristina Tamborra brings Magda to life here, a dancer whose presence seems ordinary enough until danger closes in. Magda retreats to her hotel room, where the killer—hiding under the bed—smothers her with a pillow, sealing a brutal fate with clinical restraint. The sense that the killer is always watching becomes almost tangible, a creeping fear that borrows its tempo from the dance world’s glossy surface.

To trap the killer, Alberto pushes for a bold plan: Kitty pose as a prostitute in a police sting, drawing the predator out by offering herself to passing drivers who show up with money and a cane as a signal. The ruse draws a crowd, but when the cars assemble, the police commissioner reveals himself and halts the operation, turning the sting into a public misstep that heats up the investigation and risks exposing the force’s vulnerabilities. The sting’s embarrassment sharpens the pressure to find the truth.

A new lead arrives when a woman who witnessed a killer’s face at a crime scene comes forward. She visits the Arrighi home, and while waiting, she glimpses a photograph that unsettles her—recognition of something hidden in the image sparks panic. The killer slips into the backseat of her car, then crushes her throat with the cane and drives off, leaving another room for fear to grow in the minds of those who survived.

Kitty and Alberto press on, searching through records at the dance academy where Magda and the other victims studied. A break‑in at night yields a familiar face in the files, and as the two split up to pursue the lead, the killer closes in. In a tense moment, Alberto and a student find themselves separated when the killer locks them in a closet. Kitty races through a greenhouse, the danger intensifying as the killer closes in. Just as the threat seems to culminate, the inspector arrives and shoots the killer dead, a decisive act that finally halts the terror.

The momentum of the case then pivots to a dramatic reveal: the killer is Marco, the very dancer who had seemed peripheral to this circle. Marco, a man who craftily used the cane as a misdirection, lured victims who auditioned for his theatrical company and punished them for failures. The revelation clarifies the strange imprints left at the crime scenes and explains why the culprit targeted a family and a dance community that had once welcomed him. In the aftermath, Lidia explains to Alberto that Marco was driven by retaliation against those who could not see his talent or his reckoning, and that the cane was merely a prop—an old trick to throw the police off track.

Throughout the investigation, the elements of art, performance, and danger are braided together, treated with a calm, almost documentary tone that lets the plot unfold with cool precision. The film’s tension arises not from sensational dialogue but from the steady accumulation of small, concrete details: the cane’s prints, the dance academy’s records, the hotel rooms, and the greenhouse where fear becomes a live audience. The cast’s emotional rhythms—Kitty’s perseverance, Alberto’s pragmatism, the inspector’s method, and Marco’s chilling artistry—create a mosaic of motive and opportunity that feels both specific to its Italian setting and universally human in its darkest moments.

In the end, Marco’s crimes are laid bare, and the community that once celebrated dance and beauty is forced to confront the vulnerability that lies beneath polished surfaces. The truth arrives with the kill-or-be-caught clarity of a well‑timed finale, and as the case closes, the characters must live with the consequences of what was hidden in plain sight. Lidia, and her sister Silvia, become part of the tale’s final accounting, underscoring how fear can travel through families and close circles, and how art—whether a dance academy or a performance—can both reveal and mask the darkest impulses of those who inhabit it. Anuska Borova plays both Lidia Arrighi and Silvia Arrighi, a pairing that adds a haunting symmetry to the film’s central mystery. The case’s resolution brings a quiet, sobering ending to a story built on observation, misdirection, and the relentless pursuit of truth.