Nobody - and I do really mean nobody - could make suspenseful, ultimately strange, and politically relevant thrillers like the Italians during the 1970s! This "Flower in his Mouth", for instance, is a uniquely gripping, convoluted and truly original motion picture, brought to an even higher quality-level by great performances and another staggering soundtrack by the one and only Ennio Morricone.
I could easily fill three pages with just the plot description but will stick to a short summary. Elena Bardi arrives in a secluded town community in Sicily to become the new schoolteacher. The gap between the rich and the poor couldn't be bigger in this town, and even though she's embraced by the rich, Eleni immediately shows care and sympathy for the poor and struggling families that cannot even send their children to school. Also shortly after her arrival, Elena gets publicly harassed by a man who approached her on the bus already. One day later that same man is found murdered and placed on a chair in the middle of the town's square with a flower in his mouth. According to the old Sicilian code, this means he was killed for offending a beautiful flower and thus implies somebody in town guards over Elena. From then, she's feared by the eminent people, and she uses this power to help the poor.
"Flower in his Mouth" features great roles for Jennifer O'Neill and the always reliable Franco Nero, and a downright powerhouse performance by James Mason, as the seemingly kind town's patriarch. Many sequences are complex, and I even found the last 10-15 minutes almost incomprehensible, but the film is eerily compelling and hypnotizing to look at. The many moments during Elena Bardi is gazed at by hundreds of silently judging eyes of townsfolk are hauntingly tense; - especially because they are guided by the mesmerizing tunes of Morricone's score.
