Puzzle (L’uomo senza memoria—"the man without a memory") is a 1974 Giallo film from Italy directed by Duccio Tessari.
Peter Smith is a man in London who has been there for eight months, after suffering a complete case of amnesia following an auto accident. One night a man comes into his room and, at gunpoint, demands that Peter hand over...something. That man is promptly shot by an unseen sniper. At this same time, Peter gets a telegram informing him that his name is actually Ted and that he has a wife, Sara, waiting for him in Portofino, Italy.
Ted still has no memory and doesn't even know who Sara is, but he heads for Portofino anyway. Sara, who unsurprisingly is ravishingly beautiful, bade goodbye to her new husband eight months ago and has been wondering ever since where the heck he went. She has been waiting in Portofino, where a guy named Reinhardt has been hanging out with her, obviously hoping she'll give up on Ted and give him a shot.
Ted meets Sara in Portofino, a reunion that is awkward since he doesn't recognize her. However, he can't just sit back and relax: a gun-toting thug named George has followed Ted to Portofino. It turns out the thing the man in London wanted was heroin, a million dollars' worth. Ted knows where it is, and George wants it—except that Ted has amnesia so he doesn't know where it is.
Tropes:
- Axe Before Entering: Reinhardt bashes right through the door to the kitchen, when he's chasing Sara during the climax.
- Binocular Shot: Seen from George's POV as he stalks Ted and watches Ted greet Sara.
- Concealment Equals Cover: The gun-wielding thug who confronts Peter/Ted in his hotel room is shot by a high-powered rifle from across the street. Ted, who was standing right in front of said thug, should have been hit by the bullet but was not.
- Diagonal Billing: Leads Luc Merenda (Ted) and Senta Berger (Sara) get diagonal billing in the opening credits.
- Dogged Nice Guy: Reinhardt, the Low Key Yearning sort, who hangs around with Sara in a low-key-yearning kind of way, making the occasional comment about how hey, he's interested. Subverted in the end when he turns out to be the Big Bad.
- Easy Amnesia: The typical sort of Hollywood amnesia in which one has 100% memory loss of one's past but is functionally unimpaired.
- Flashback: After he comes to Portofino Ted's memories start trickling back. The first one shows that he is in fact a murderous crook: he held a man by the arms while a second man with his back to the camera slit the other man's throat.
- Free-Range Children: Luca, a boy of maybe ten who apparently just hangs out with Sara, all the time. He goes to dinner with her and Reinhardt for some reason.
- Handshake Refusal: Ted scornfully refuses George's handshake. Of course, George is a gun-wielding crook who's demanding Ted give him a million bucks worth of heroin.
- Killed Mid-Sentence: The gangster who confronts Peter/Ted in the hotel room says "Now buddy boy, you tell me where the—" when he is shot and killed by a rifle.
- Love Redeems: Ted falling in love with Sara (again?) leads him to turn over a new leaf, even after he fully remembers his past as a criminal. Sara is willing to pin everything on Reinhardt, which would have worked since everyone who knows of Ted's connection to Reinhardt is dead, but as the film ends he decides to make a clean breast of things and confess to the police.
- Murphy's Bed: After the man in Peter/Ted's room is killed by a sniper, Ted stuffs him in the hotel room's Murphy bed. This gives him time enough to get out of England.
- Rule of Symbolism: The bullet hole in the back of the man in Ted's room, and the trickle of blood, form a question mark.
- Scenery Censor: Ted gets whacked on the back of the head only to wake up in an abandoned church. To draw out the suspense of who the Big Bad killer is, said killer addresses Ted from the other side of the door, vine over the glass obscuring his face.
- Toplessness from the Back: All the nudity there is in this movie, in a scene where Sara is changing into a nightie before going to bed.
- Wedding Ring Removal: Inverted. Sara has to hurriedly put her wedding ring back on when she sees Ted getting off the train.
