Crescendo

This lazy variation on script-writer Jimmy Sangster's Taste of Fear (1961) is further crippled by the lack of Seth Holt's assured direction. At a villa in southern France, American heroine Powers gets mixed up with a strange widow (Scott), her invalid, heroin-addicted son (Olson), and their attentive maid (Lapotaire). When the maid is murdered, Powers is drawn into a conspiracy by the scheming widow, while the son drives himself crazy with nightmares about being murdered himself. Some cursory soft-core sex scenes fail to enliven the mechanical plot, and the contrived ending never rises to the promised crescendo.