The Italians riff on a Hitchcock that isn't PSYCHO with the giallo THE DESIGNATED VICTIM, on Blu-ray from Mondo Macabro.

Stefano Augenti (Tomas Milian, ALMOST HUMAN) is a successful advertising photographer who has made a star of Parisian model Fabienne Berenger (Katia Christie, THE LOVES OF THE MONSTER) in a chocolate commercial. At the height of his career, however, he wants to sell up his shares in the company and run off to Caracas with Fabienne. The only obstacle is his wife Luisa (stage actress Marisa Bartoli) since the shares are in her name and she has no intention of letting him go. During a trip to Venice with Fabienne, Stefano runs into the mysterious Count Matteo Tiepolo (Pierre Clémenti, BELLE DE JOUR). Matteo already believes their meeting was fated, and through conversation posits that they both have someone who is preventing them from living their lives freely – Stefano his wife, and Matteo his older brother who he claims is trying to destroy him "sadistically" – and proposes that they murder each other's obstacle, motiveless crimes since neither one knows their respective victims.

Stefano does not take the proposal seriously and feels betrayed when Matteo sends Luisa a letter telling her about her husband's affair and that he has forged her signature to sell the company without her approval. After a fight with Luisa, Stefano storms out and spends the night at their lake house with German hitchhiker Cristina (Alessandra Cardini, THE TOUGH ONES). The next day, he is informed that his wife has been strangled to death. Inspector Finzi (Luigi Casellato, THE BLOOSTAINED SHADOW) already considers Stefano the prime suspect before his affair and his disagreement with his wife about selling the company come to light. When Stefano finds himself unable to substantiate his alibi, Matteo reveals that he will only produce the evidence to clear him if he goes through with his side of their agreement.

Although on the surface THE DESIGNATED VICTIM comes across as a jet-set giallo restaging of Patricia Highsmith's novel and Alfred Hitchcock's film of STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, the film is actually far more interested in philosophical questions of being and identity than the plot mechanics ("Don't you know that murders are ritual," Matteo asks Stefano when he threatens his life in the heat of anger). Both Luisa and Matteo denigrate Stefano and his tawdry situation as the result of compromise, Stefano not having the nerve to rob his wife blind or murder her and stage it to look like an accident. Although there was an element of pronounced homoeroticism in the Hitchcock film, and Clemente gives a rather affected and effete performance, the filmmakers appear to attribute to Matteo's statement "I believe in friendship between men. Love, instead, is corrupting" a more existential meaning. Due to this approach, the film's most compelling sequences are between the two men while Christie (director Maurizio Lucidi's partner at the time) is window dressing and Casellato seems to be alternately observant and thickheaded for the contrivances of the plot. The ending may seem anticlimactic on first view, but it is hinted at throughout Matteo's dialogue in the film.

For a giallo set in Venice, the cinematography of Aldo Tonti (VIOLENT CITY) is only superficially attractive. The score of Luis Bacalov (DJANGO) in collaboration with the band New Trolls – including a thematically-relevant song performed by Milian that casts both his and Clémenti's characters in the role of Hamlet – is not as adventurous as their later work on Fernando Di Leo's CALBIBER 9, but the work is elegant and suited to the mournful undertone of the film's Venetian sequences. Lucidi was a jobbing director who had an early success with the western MY NAME IS PECOS and its sequel, and whose drama STATELINE MOTEL was one of his few other widely-distributed pictures. In later life, he moved onto directing hardcore films under the name Mark Lander. One of the film's co-scenarists was producer Augusto Caminito who gave Lucidi a chance to return to mainstream film directing NOSFERATU IN VENICE before walking out on the film after conflicts with Klaus Kinski. Co-scenarist and Lucidi's regular assistant director Aldo Lado returned to Venice for his second directorial effort WHO SAW HER DIE?

Released theatrically in the United States in 1975, THE DESIGNATED VICTIM was difficult to see in English-friendly form – the film was reissued on tape multiple times in Italy and Germany – outside of a cropped Dutch VHS until NEW in Germany put out a DVD in 2007 featuring an anamorphic transfer with English, Italian, and German audio (using the same master put out on DVD in Italy the same year) along with some short deleted scenes that only appeared on an Italian VHS release. The following year, Shameless in the UK issued the film on DVD adding English subtitles for the Italian track and a subtitle fact track. Mondo Macabro's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen Blu-ray comes from a new 4K restoration by rights owner Surf Film from the original 35mm internegative. Blacks are deep and some reds pop – no blood, just wardrobe accents – while whites are little diluted and skin tones of just about everyone apart from pale Clémenti lean towards Milian's complexion. Grain is present and abundant but it and the misty Venice canal scenes present no challenges for the encode of a film that never really was the visual equivalent of its Argento contemporaries. English and Italian DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono tracks are only selectable from the play options of "English Version" and "Italian Version (with English subtitles)" for the same encode with different audio (the subtitles can be toggled on or off via remote during playback).

The aforementioned deleted scenes are not included as their own bonus but within an extended version composite (104:52 versus the theatrical's 100:41) utilizing the same video source as the DVDs. A prefatory text informs the viewer than the scenes can be found by advancing through the chapters via remote; however, the chapters do not fall directly on the deleted bits so a bit of fast-forwarding is required. Most of the bits are relatively short, including the tops and tails of a scene in which Stefano visits his banker (which includes his request to place fifty million lire in his wife's account which is only brought up later in the theatrical version), a couple scene extensions with Stefano and Matteo that may have been remove because they edged slightly towards the homoerotic, and the longest depicting Stefano and Cristina's drive to the lake which includes an incident with a toll taker that also figures into the plot later but was not really necessary to see onscreen. This presentation only includes an Italian DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track and optional English subtitles.

The theatrical cut is accompanied by a new audio commentary Fragments of Fear podcasters Rachael Nisbet and Peter Jilmstad who note that the film is more than a giallo take on the Highsmith novel and Hitchcock film, and that may not be as popular with the genre's fans because it has more in common with the pre-Argento gialli than those of its period. While they acknowledge that the script has a lot of well-tread elements, they are of the opinion that the script's philosophical bent elevates it. They cover Lucidi's career first as an editor and then a director – noting that his real directorial would be MY NAME IS PECOS rather than HECULES THE AVENGER which consisted of new dialogue scenes arranged around action sequences from HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD and HERCULES AND THE CAPTIVE WOMEN – and that of assistant director Lado who they note claimed not to have heard of the Highsmith novel or Hitchcock film. While they express doubt about this, they note that the film does draw from contemporary Italian crimes that had caused a stir in the media as well as co-writer Fabio Carpi's citing inspiration from Andre Gide's "The Vatican Cellars" which featured a young man who desired to commit a completely gratuitous crime.

Co-writer/assistant director Lado appears in a new interview (48:04) in which he discusses his beginnings as a writer and assistant director, initially hired by Valero Zurlini for an aborted adaptation of "The Garden of the Finzi Contini" (eventually filmed by Vittorio de Sica), and meeting Lucidi who he worked with on MY NAME IS PECOS through THE DESIGNATED VICTIM. He reveals that he originally wrote the story for the film and what would become SHORT NIGHT OF THE GLASS DOLLS for a magazine and that he angered Lucidi by refusing to let him have the rights to the latter story even though the director had been presumptive enough to start negotiating with Titanus' Goffredo Lombardo. When he was later contacted to work on a film with Lucidi, he discovered that it was an adaptation of the other story. He served as assistant director for part of the film but ended up working behind Lucidi's back in an unofficial capacity to convince cocaine-addled Clémenti to work on the film since Milian would only do the film if the French actor was involved, and then to convince Milian to continue working on the film at a later point. Here, he acknowledges Hitchcock and Highsmith as "points of reference."

In "Pierre Clémenti: Pope of Counterculture" (27:42) Clémenti's son Balthazar discusses his father's interest in theater and writing while working odd jobs as a teenager, becoming a muse to the avant-garde crowd, meeting Alain Delon who introduced him to Luchino Visconti who then cast him in THE LEOPARD, noting that it was not Clémenti's role in BELLE DE JOUR that brought him fame but his lead in the comedy BENJAMIN. He gives an overview of Clémenti's Italian period and collaborations with Bertolucci, Pasolini (the actor's first wife was in MEDEA while he as in PORCILE), and Miklós Jancsó while also making his own short 16mm films including coverage of the 1968 student revolution. He claims that the police planted drugs on his father leading to his eighteen month prison sentence to make an example of him, and that while the French embraced him upon release the Italians and Americans with their fear of communism rejected him. It was after his release that Clémenti started rejecting roles in more mainstream films and focusing on working with more experimental filmmakers and on his own films.