Earth, some time in the future. A weather monitoring station notes an impossible spike in temperature and is then attacked by an unseen force. All the staff are killed bar one, whose fate is unknown. The authorities at the UDSCO (United Democracies Space Command) send an expedition into the Himalayas, where they believe the source of the trouble is located – a suspicion enhanced by the sabotaging of the mission’s aircraft. This forces the team to proceed on foot, accompanied by a native guide and bearers. The bearers soon flee, but the team continue on. They discover a secret base, filled with advanced technology. The base is inhabited by a number of large green hairy creatures, which they initially take to be Yeti. The creatures’ leader then reveals, however, that they are actually from another planet, Aytin. As Aytin was about to become uninhabitable, they decided to take over the Earth. It is similar to their homeworld, but for its higher temperature. Accordingly the aliens have decided to melt the Polar ice caps, flooding large areas of the Earth, then freeze the oceans. The alien leader also stupidly – if predictably – reveals that their main power source is located elsewhere...
Directed by Antonio Margheriti, who has a producer credit as Anthony Marghertiti and a directorial credit as Anthony Dawson, this is one of those entertaining 1960s science-fiction films whose contemporary watch-ability arguably derives as much from the vision of the future it presents as anything else: Silver jumpsuits; pistols that seem more like blow torches when fired; domed, finned concept cars; computers whose main method of output is a printout onto continuous paper, and so on.
An obvious point of comparison, besides the director's other science-fiction entries of the period, is Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires. Bava and Margheriti were, after all, both filmmakers working in the popular filone cinema, under comparatively low budgets and with a knack for achieving effects and results that belied these impecunious circumstances.
It is, however, possible to identify authorial differences between the films. Planet of the Vampires is more reliant upon non-naturalistic lighting to create its alien landscape out of a studio space. The Snow Devils makes more use of location shooting – presumably with the Alps or Dolomites standing in for the Himalayas – and of actual sets. Bava makes more use of mattes, Margheriti of miniatures, which generally work, and stock footage, which is generally less satisfactory.
Moreover, while both films see their protagonists or identification figures facing off against hostile aliens, Margheriti’s is the more straightforward due to giving these aliens a visible and inhuman form, such that the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is obvious. His film’s resolution is also predictable and lacks the delicious ironies of Bava’s.
The Snow Devils benefits from a good Eurotrash cast, headed by Jack Stuart/Giacomo Rossi-Stuart and also including the likes of John Bartha and Franco Ressel in minor roles, plus a jaunty Angelo Francesco Lavagnino score.
No, it’s not 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it does feature a thought-provoking take on the climactic Star Wars type battle. For those monitoring the UDSCO strike force sent against the aliens’ base near one of Jupiter’s moons are receiving information from the strike force at a five minute delay. They can do nothing to advise or assist their colleagues nor affect the outcome of something that has already happened. Equally, however, the filmmakers do not subvert things further, as by only showing what happens (or more precisely has happened) from the Earth team’s perspective on their monitors, instead cross-cutting between the two crucially different points in time-space.
Showing posts with label Mario Bava. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mario Bava. Show all posts
Monday, 15 October 2012
Wednesday, 27 October 2010
Bay of Blood cuts waived
The seeming outbreak of common sense at BBFC continues as another former "video nasty" is passed uncut:
http://www.bbfc.co.uk/EVF059583
The new DVD from Arrow looks a pretty good package as well:
http://www.arrowfilms.co.uk/index.php?c=y&s=bd39246dd448ff3a272da060ec280255&art_id=4&tle_id=471&v=
http://www.bbfc.co.uk/EVF059583
The new DVD from Arrow looks a pretty good package as well:
http://www.arrowfilms.co.uk/index.php?c=y&s=bd39246dd448ff3a272da060ec280255&art_id=4&tle_id=471&v=
Saturday, 4 September 2010
Bay of Blood passed uncut in UK
And after only a quarter-century of banning and being available only in cut versions:
http://www.bbfc.co.uk/website/Classified.nsf/ClassifiedWorks/3975D2E2A63B79E9802577900037055B
http://www.bbfc.co.uk/website/Classified.nsf/ClassifiedWorks/3975D2E2A63B79E9802577900037055B
Sunday, 9 May 2010
Tuesday, 20 April 2010
Maciste all'inferno / The Witch's Curse
Maciste is unusual amongst the peplum heroes in that his origins are not mythological but literary, making his first appearance in Emilio Salgari’s novel Cabiria. Though a relatively minor character in the novel and Giovanni Pastrone’s 1914 film adaptation, Masciste proved a hit with Italian audiences, with dockworker turned actor Bartolomeo Pagano going on to play him in a further 24 films in the silent era.
Maciste’s adventures in these films established the character as unbounded by time and space, setting a precedent for his reincarnations in the peplum boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In Maciste alpino, for instance, Maciste actually fights in the First World War for Italy, while in the original Maciste all’inferno he is presented as a 19th century petit bourgeois type.
The English language title screen
In this remake cum reinterpretation of Maciste all’inferno the action is relocated to 16th and 17th century Scotland.
If this setting is one against which Kirk Morris’s / Adriano Bellini’s pepla wearing, bare-chested Maciste looks somewhat out of place, it is at least consistent with the nature of the character’s previous adventures. For, as we see via flashback interpolations of footage from other Maciste films – none featuring Morris, it might be added – the character’s mission to fight injustice wherever it may be found had earlier saw him face the mythical Cyclops and the historical Mongols.
The choice of setting might also be attributed to either director Riccardo Freda and / or producers Panda film, given that their previous collaboration on The Ghost had also had seen the use of Scottish locations.
As with that film, Maciste all’inferno / The Witch's Curse’s representations of Scotland is unconvincing, particularly through what appears to be the Catholicism rather than Protestantism of the Christianity on display when the priest officiating at the ceremony recites “in nomine patris” and so on.
Some rather un-Presbyterian hand gesturing here
This is excusable given that the purpose of the film was to entertain its target audiences in Italy, not to educate them on religious distinctions that might have interfered with their enjoyment of the film.
It does, however, also provide a further clue to why the typical peplum was unlikely to be well received by anyone emphasising fidelity to myth and history.
The story comes across as something of a combination of two films by Freda’s former cinematographer turned director Mario Bava, Black Sunday and Hercules in the Haunted World.
The opening sequence seems inspired by Black Sunday as a woman is burnt at the stake for being a witch and dies leaving a curse upon the village and its people.
I Vardella, er Martha, will have my revenge!
100 years later another woman is feared to be the re-incarnation of the witch and to have brought her curse to fruition.
While having the same name as the witch, Martha Gunt, she is not a double / reincarnation in the way Barbara Steele’s Asa and Katya are in Bava’s film, with the witch Martha and the innocent Martha being played by different actresses.
With the innocent Martha placed in gaol, tried, found guilty and sentenced to also burn at the stake, Maciste makes a timely entrance.
At this point the film becomes more like Hercules in the Haunted World as Maciste determines that the witch Martha’s curse can be lifted if he enters into Hell itself and bests her there.
The entry to Hell is beneath a tree
The complication is that the witch then ensorcels Maciste so that he loses his memory and cannot remember why he entered Hell in the first place
Although its story has affinities with the two Bava films, Maciste all’inferno is somewhat distinctive in its visual style. In part this is unsurprising when we consider the differences between the black and white expressionism of Black Sunday and the expressive use of colour in Hercules in the Haunted World. But another aspect of the difference appears more budgetary than aesthetic. Freda appears to have had the kind of material resources at his disposal to do crowd scenes denied Bava and to be able to deploy the sort of spectacular Bava had to fake through skilful mise-en-scene.
A relatively populous hell
In this regard it is also worth noting that, despite the film’s historical setting, Maciste all Inferno’s version of hell is a largely mythological one, as Maciste encounters the likes of Sisyphus and Prometheus rather than Satan, leading one to suspect that the lord of this hell is in fact Hades rather than Satan.
Maciste and Sisyphus...
and with Prometheus
One of the ways in which Maciste all’inferno remains distinctive even in its The Witch's Curse is that Maciste goes by this name, rather than being renamed as Hercules or Goliath for the sake of Anglophone audiences unfamiliar with the character and his history.
Maciste crosses a ravine...
to fight a giant; there is some good use of trick perspectives here to make the giant seem bigger than he really is
As a Freda film of this period it is also odd in that it sees him credited under his own name rather than his Robert Hampton pseudonym. This is perhaps because, unlike the cases of the western and the horror film, there was no-one to fool as regards the national origins of the peplum.
In terms of its own influence, meanwhile, Maciste all’inferno’s Scottish scenes are reminiscent of Michael Reeves’s The She Beast and Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General. If this seems co-incidental, it is worth noting the visual similarities between the witch Martha and her She Beast counterpart Vardella. Moreover, Reeves was clearly familiar with Italian horror given his second-unit work on Castle of the Living Dead; the Italian co-production nature of that film and The She Beast, and the casting there of Steele in a distinctively Italian-style dual role.
Maciste’s adventures in these films established the character as unbounded by time and space, setting a precedent for his reincarnations in the peplum boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In Maciste alpino, for instance, Maciste actually fights in the First World War for Italy, while in the original Maciste all’inferno he is presented as a 19th century petit bourgeois type.
The English language title screen
In this remake cum reinterpretation of Maciste all’inferno the action is relocated to 16th and 17th century Scotland.
If this setting is one against which Kirk Morris’s / Adriano Bellini’s pepla wearing, bare-chested Maciste looks somewhat out of place, it is at least consistent with the nature of the character’s previous adventures. For, as we see via flashback interpolations of footage from other Maciste films – none featuring Morris, it might be added – the character’s mission to fight injustice wherever it may be found had earlier saw him face the mythical Cyclops and the historical Mongols.
The choice of setting might also be attributed to either director Riccardo Freda and / or producers Panda film, given that their previous collaboration on The Ghost had also had seen the use of Scottish locations.
As with that film, Maciste all’inferno / The Witch's Curse’s representations of Scotland is unconvincing, particularly through what appears to be the Catholicism rather than Protestantism of the Christianity on display when the priest officiating at the ceremony recites “in nomine patris” and so on.
Some rather un-Presbyterian hand gesturing here
This is excusable given that the purpose of the film was to entertain its target audiences in Italy, not to educate them on religious distinctions that might have interfered with their enjoyment of the film.
It does, however, also provide a further clue to why the typical peplum was unlikely to be well received by anyone emphasising fidelity to myth and history.
The story comes across as something of a combination of two films by Freda’s former cinematographer turned director Mario Bava, Black Sunday and Hercules in the Haunted World.
The opening sequence seems inspired by Black Sunday as a woman is burnt at the stake for being a witch and dies leaving a curse upon the village and its people.
I Vardella, er Martha, will have my revenge!
100 years later another woman is feared to be the re-incarnation of the witch and to have brought her curse to fruition.
While having the same name as the witch, Martha Gunt, she is not a double / reincarnation in the way Barbara Steele’s Asa and Katya are in Bava’s film, with the witch Martha and the innocent Martha being played by different actresses.
With the innocent Martha placed in gaol, tried, found guilty and sentenced to also burn at the stake, Maciste makes a timely entrance.
At this point the film becomes more like Hercules in the Haunted World as Maciste determines that the witch Martha’s curse can be lifted if he enters into Hell itself and bests her there.
The entry to Hell is beneath a tree
The complication is that the witch then ensorcels Maciste so that he loses his memory and cannot remember why he entered Hell in the first place
Although its story has affinities with the two Bava films, Maciste all’inferno is somewhat distinctive in its visual style. In part this is unsurprising when we consider the differences between the black and white expressionism of Black Sunday and the expressive use of colour in Hercules in the Haunted World. But another aspect of the difference appears more budgetary than aesthetic. Freda appears to have had the kind of material resources at his disposal to do crowd scenes denied Bava and to be able to deploy the sort of spectacular Bava had to fake through skilful mise-en-scene.
A relatively populous hell
In this regard it is also worth noting that, despite the film’s historical setting, Maciste all Inferno’s version of hell is a largely mythological one, as Maciste encounters the likes of Sisyphus and Prometheus rather than Satan, leading one to suspect that the lord of this hell is in fact Hades rather than Satan.
Maciste and Sisyphus...
and with Prometheus
One of the ways in which Maciste all’inferno remains distinctive even in its The Witch's Curse is that Maciste goes by this name, rather than being renamed as Hercules or Goliath for the sake of Anglophone audiences unfamiliar with the character and his history.
Maciste crosses a ravine...
to fight a giant; there is some good use of trick perspectives here to make the giant seem bigger than he really is
As a Freda film of this period it is also odd in that it sees him credited under his own name rather than his Robert Hampton pseudonym. This is perhaps because, unlike the cases of the western and the horror film, there was no-one to fool as regards the national origins of the peplum.
In terms of its own influence, meanwhile, Maciste all’inferno’s Scottish scenes are reminiscent of Michael Reeves’s The She Beast and Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General. If this seems co-incidental, it is worth noting the visual similarities between the witch Martha and her She Beast counterpart Vardella. Moreover, Reeves was clearly familiar with Italian horror given his second-unit work on Castle of the Living Dead; the Italian co-production nature of that film and The She Beast, and the casting there of Steele in a distinctively Italian-style dual role.
Saturday, 17 January 2009
Barbablù / Bluebeard / Barbe-bleue / Blaubart
Why discuss Edward Dmytryk's Richard Burton vehicle Bluebeard in a blog dedicated to European popular cinema?
Well, for starters it's a French-Italian-West German co-production, with Italian co-writers, including Maria Pia Fusco, a frequent contributor to the Black Emanuelle series.
Then it's got an extensive list of Euro-performers, playing the titular characters' victims alongside the higher-billed US imports Raquel Welch and Joey Heatherton: Virna Lisi, Nathalie Delon, Marilu Tolo, Karin Schubert, Agostina Belli and Sybil Danning.
Then there's the quirky soundtrack by Ennio Morricone, which I can only describe as the giallo version of what Giu La Testa was to its spaghetti western predecessors, and the cinematography by Gabor Pogany.
Every frame is beautifully composed and lit
And, finally, there are certain intertextual references which suggest that Dmytryk had either seen some of Bava and Freda's films, namely The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock, Blood and Black Lace and A Hatchet for the Honeymoon, or if not that they were working from some of the same reference points.
It's the last aspect which is, of course, the most complex: when you're dealing with a mythic / fairy-tale / Gothic text, which Bluebeard is despite regardless of whatever period trappings the film-maker happens to give it - in this case a somewhat vaguely defined inter-war setting, with Bluebeard as a Red Baron style war hero and enthusiastic anti-Bolshevik cum fascist.
To wit, we've got the new wife who is too inquisitive for her own good, breaks the prohibition not to enter into the forbidden room, and thereby discovers the truth about her husband, that he has murdered his previous wives; there's also a hint of Poe's The Black Cat.
Bluebeard watches
What we've then got, however, is a distinctively modern take on the subject, through the foregrounding of Bluebeard's impotence and the way in which this wife then attempts to affect a kind of quasi-psychoanalytic talking cure on him so that she may avoid the fate that has befallen her predecessors. (Those who have seen Femina Ridens may also see something of a precursor here, whilst there's also the obligatory allusion to Psycho.)
The obligatory dark-room scene
The setting also allows for a mass-psychology of fascism type interpretation, in which the ostensibly normal, outwardly respectable man can be the real monster. Besides suggesting a connection with Dmytryk's own Crossfire, in which a returning GI murders a Jewish man in an ironic comment on the existence of fascist attitudes in the US itself - in the original source novel the victim was homosexual, a theme too hot for Hollywood at the time - it also recalls a comment made by Freda:
"I believe in a subtle, psychological kind of horror [...] My theory is that authentic terror can be attained with simple, common means. The most terrifying monster is the neighbour who cuts his wife's throat."
Accordingly one wife (Schubert) is murdered because she threatens to reveal the secret of Bluebeard's impotence; another (Belli) because she proves more whore than virgin; a third (Tolo) because of her proto-feminist and left-wing politics; and a fourth (Lisi) simply because, much like Laura Betti's character in A Hatchet for the Honeymoon, she's simply extremely annoying...
More than Five Dolls for an August Moon
Schubert's 'accidental' shooting during a hunting trip highlights another intertext, Renoir's The Rules of the Game, down to the blasting of assorted rabbits and other game animals, whilst the way in which Bluebeard accumulates hunting trophies to signify the passage of time recalls a montage in Powell and Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. (Both these are also, of course, films which also need to be read in relation to fascism.)
An abstract title image
Recontextualised
Also amongst Bluebeard's trophies are abstract prints representing each of his wives. Taken from portrait photographs and manipulated, these also form the Saul Bass-style credits sequence to the film, pointing to the possible influence of Vertigo - as another film about obsession, amour fou and necrophilia - and the further mess of influences and intertexts.
The domineering picture of the dead mother
In giallo terms, meanwhile, the distinction between Heatherton's wife and her less fortunate predecessors is that she sees what they did not here: looking at the prints she starts to imagine faces within them, with adding eyes further confirming her suspicions. In other words, it's all about the problem of vision, of seeing things correctly.
Besides some of the murder set pieces, the other area where the giallo influence is most apparent is visually. Though Dmytryk's style is more restrained that that of Bava or Freda, the rich production design, with the the various rooms of Bluebeard's castle colour-coded, and expressive/neo-expressionist use of colour seem to come straight out of the Italian directors' playbook.
Well, for starters it's a French-Italian-West German co-production, with Italian co-writers, including Maria Pia Fusco, a frequent contributor to the Black Emanuelle series.
Then it's got an extensive list of Euro-performers, playing the titular characters' victims alongside the higher-billed US imports Raquel Welch and Joey Heatherton: Virna Lisi, Nathalie Delon, Marilu Tolo, Karin Schubert, Agostina Belli and Sybil Danning.
Then there's the quirky soundtrack by Ennio Morricone, which I can only describe as the giallo version of what Giu La Testa was to its spaghetti western predecessors, and the cinematography by Gabor Pogany.
Every frame is beautifully composed and lit
And, finally, there are certain intertextual references which suggest that Dmytryk had either seen some of Bava and Freda's films, namely The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock, Blood and Black Lace and A Hatchet for the Honeymoon, or if not that they were working from some of the same reference points.
It's the last aspect which is, of course, the most complex: when you're dealing with a mythic / fairy-tale / Gothic text, which Bluebeard is despite regardless of whatever period trappings the film-maker happens to give it - in this case a somewhat vaguely defined inter-war setting, with Bluebeard as a Red Baron style war hero and enthusiastic anti-Bolshevik cum fascist.
To wit, we've got the new wife who is too inquisitive for her own good, breaks the prohibition not to enter into the forbidden room, and thereby discovers the truth about her husband, that he has murdered his previous wives; there's also a hint of Poe's The Black Cat.
Bluebeard watches
What we've then got, however, is a distinctively modern take on the subject, through the foregrounding of Bluebeard's impotence and the way in which this wife then attempts to affect a kind of quasi-psychoanalytic talking cure on him so that she may avoid the fate that has befallen her predecessors. (Those who have seen Femina Ridens may also see something of a precursor here, whilst there's also the obligatory allusion to Psycho.)
The obligatory dark-room scene
The setting also allows for a mass-psychology of fascism type interpretation, in which the ostensibly normal, outwardly respectable man can be the real monster. Besides suggesting a connection with Dmytryk's own Crossfire, in which a returning GI murders a Jewish man in an ironic comment on the existence of fascist attitudes in the US itself - in the original source novel the victim was homosexual, a theme too hot for Hollywood at the time - it also recalls a comment made by Freda:
"I believe in a subtle, psychological kind of horror [...] My theory is that authentic terror can be attained with simple, common means. The most terrifying monster is the neighbour who cuts his wife's throat."
Accordingly one wife (Schubert) is murdered because she threatens to reveal the secret of Bluebeard's impotence; another (Belli) because she proves more whore than virgin; a third (Tolo) because of her proto-feminist and left-wing politics; and a fourth (Lisi) simply because, much like Laura Betti's character in A Hatchet for the Honeymoon, she's simply extremely annoying...
More than Five Dolls for an August Moon
Schubert's 'accidental' shooting during a hunting trip highlights another intertext, Renoir's The Rules of the Game, down to the blasting of assorted rabbits and other game animals, whilst the way in which Bluebeard accumulates hunting trophies to signify the passage of time recalls a montage in Powell and Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. (Both these are also, of course, films which also need to be read in relation to fascism.)
An abstract title image
Recontextualised
Also amongst Bluebeard's trophies are abstract prints representing each of his wives. Taken from portrait photographs and manipulated, these also form the Saul Bass-style credits sequence to the film, pointing to the possible influence of Vertigo - as another film about obsession, amour fou and necrophilia - and the further mess of influences and intertexts.
The domineering picture of the dead mother
In giallo terms, meanwhile, the distinction between Heatherton's wife and her less fortunate predecessors is that she sees what they did not here: looking at the prints she starts to imagine faces within them, with adding eyes further confirming her suspicions. In other words, it's all about the problem of vision, of seeing things correctly.
Besides some of the murder set pieces, the other area where the giallo influence is most apparent is visually. Though Dmytryk's style is more restrained that that of Bava or Freda, the rich production design, with the the various rooms of Bluebeard's castle colour-coded, and expressive/neo-expressionist use of colour seem to come straight out of the Italian directors' playbook.
Sunday, 14 September 2008
Sunday, 11 May 2008
Reazione a catena / A Bay of Blood
Discounting the more fantastical Shock, A Bay of Blood was to be Bava's final contribution to the giallo. Having established the filone in the early 1960s with The Girl Who Knew too Much (1963), Blood and Black Lace (1964) and 'The Telephone' segment of the Black Sabbath (1963), he had spent the remainder of that decade working in other popular filone.
Though he had scripted Schoolgirl Killer (1968) as a return to the it, the project left his hands and was eventually directed by Antonio Margheriti, this loss of control perhaps especially galling given the professional rivalry between the two men. (This information comes from Tim Lucas's indespensible study of the director, All the Colors of the Dark, to which all subsequent commentary can only be a mere footnote.)
In the late 1960s and early 1970s Bava made three gialli. A Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1969) represents a natural Hitchcockian companion piece to The Girl Who Knew too Much, neatly inverting Psycho by having its schizophrenic killer introduce himself as such while also demonstrating that he would “hurt a fly” and featuring dreamlike waltzes that seem inspired by Shadow of a Doubt.
The opening double murder
Five Dolls for an August Moon and this film meanwhile conclude the so-called “greed trillogy” inaugurated by Blood and Black Lace.
These are high bodycount murder-mysteries in which the crimes are motivated not by psychopathology but by greed, the raw desire to possess. To be sure, a more sophisticated theory could not doubt connect the two, pointing to the psychotic logic of capital accumulation or suchlike – especially given that in Blood and Black Lace the police investigation is fatally led astray by their presumption of psychosexual motivation and aetiology for the crimes.
The second and third films of the trilogy, however, see Bava in increasingly ironic, deconstructive mood.
The keys to both film, I would argue, lie in their opening sequences.
In Five Dolls, we slowly move in on the modernist villa on an isolated island before the mise-en-scene breaks down into a series of shock zooms and fragmented close ups all but guaranteed to offend the aesthetic sensibilites of just about anyone as the idle rich protagonists are introduced. One of their number, mockingly identified as the “virgin of the tribe” is then sacrified to the god Kraal, the playful scene momentarily turning serious as the lights go out and it seems someone has taken the game of murder in the dark too far. Then, however, the fake blood is washed off with a few sprays from the soda siphon and everyone laughs.
Like Marcus Daly's remarks to his student in the opening of Deep Red, as he tells them that their playing is “too formal, too precise; it needs to be more trashy,” Bava is telling his audience to watch out, but unlike Argento he is also telling them that his film is essentially one big joke, not to be taken terribly seriously. (Here we might note the slapstick connotations of the soda siphon.)
The biggest part of this joke is the absence of the traditional murder set-pieces. In this regard the film is like an inverted Blood and Black Lace: we never see the murders, only the discoveries of the victims' bodies, most of which end up being stored in the meat locker to the strains of the same carrilon.
Here, we begin with the flight of a fly over the titular bay and its fatal plunge into the water. Though the bay is later identified by one of those opposing its development as a haven for insects, the ironic message seems to be that this place this is a place which is fundamentally inimical to all life.
The gaze and its objects
Following this, we enter the villa of the wheelchair-bound Countess Federica as, to the romantic-bordering-on-kitsch strains of Stelvio Cipriani's swelling piano and string based theme, she looks longingly over the bay towards her illegimate son Simone's hut.
Suddenly, the moment accompanied by a musical sting slighly reminiscent of Friday the 13th's ka-ka-cha the obligatory black gloved killer strikes, throwing a noose around the Countess's neck and kicking her wheelchair away. Something is immediately wrong, however, as once the Countess has breathed her last the camera pans up her killer as he removes his black gloves, revealing his identity, soon to be confirmed as that of Count Donati, Federica's husband.
A giallo, a murder-mystery, is not supposed to do this.
What is going on, what are the rules Bava is playing by?
The Count deposits a faked suicide note, and, a few moments later is them himself unceremoniously stabbed to death by an unseen assailant. This time, at least, we don't see the murderer. Yet, as the narrative itself starts it soon becomes apparent that no-one is particularly interested in finding out whodunnit compared to taking advantage of the Countess's death.
A week passes. The Countess's death has been adjudged a suicide, while the Count has disappeared.
Architect Franco Ventura (Chris Avram) heads out to the bay expecting to seal the deal that will allow him and his partners to further develop it into a holiday resort. On the way he is passed by four youngsters, two couples, looking for some fun at the bay.
Meanwhile, Renata (Claudine Auger) and her husband Alberto (Luigi Pistilli) and have already arrived. They observe Simone (Claudio Camaso / Volonte) and Signor Fossati (Leopoldo Trieste) from the undergrowth as the two men discuss the Countess's demise, Fossati also making veiled references to murder.
Though their attitudes to life differ, it is also clear that the semi-feral Simone and the harmlessly eccentric insect-obsessed Fossati are alike in one respect: both regard the bay as their home and would be hostile to any more changes.
Renata is more concerned with finding her father, her 'masculine' control over her weak-willed husband evident from the way she takes the binoculars (i.e. the gaze, the phallus) off him.
The four youngsters arrive, break into the night club and apartment, drink, dance, make love and generally behave like their Friday the 13th descendants.
One very giallo difference, however, is that none is marked out as a “final girl” type. Instead, all four are quickly killed off. Though again we could no doubt read something sexual into the death spasms of skinny dipper Brunhilda (Brigitte Skay) and the couple who are impaled by a spear mid-coitus were we so inclined, their deaths are really more the result of territorial transgression than anything moral or sexual: Brunhilda discovers the hitherto submerged body of the Count and thus threatens someone's scheme, so she must die; Brunhilda's friends will soon notice her absence, so they too must die.
Sex and violence, and double penetration splatter style
By this point, the structure of the film has also become clear: an alternation of scenes focusing on violent set-pieces and on narrative and character development. (For the record the murders occur at 5, 7, 32, 34, 36, 56, 58, 68, 73, 77 and 80 minutes, somewhat belying Mikel Koven's 20 / 40 / 20 breakdown of murders / development / murders.)
Despite the duration and number of the former – there are no fewer than seven more murders still to come, the body count totalling more than those of the two previous films in the trilogy combined and surely setting some kind of record for the giallo – each of the main characters is reasonably well defined and personified, albeit with some not quite escaping from the realm of the 'type'; in addition to those already mentioned, we also have the likes of Ventura's opportunistic secretary and lover Laura (Anna Maria Rosati) and Fossati's boozy, tarot-card reading wife Anna (Laura Betti).
We cut from an extreme close up of a victim to the mirror image in the hub cap
The dialogue is also better than might be expected, with some amusing references thrown into the mix. One of the red-blooded Italian males tells the Nordic Brunhilda “hold the culture” as she makes a passing reference to Sibelius, for example, while it the Countess's own reluctance to 'convert' to “modernism” in consenting to her husband and his erstwhile associates' plan to concrete over and develop the bay that precipitates the whole chain of murders.
Bava cuts from the bloody stump of a severed head to a dropped pottery head
Similarly though Bava's direction again foregrounds many of the 'wrong' kind of techniques, most prominently the zoom, its also clear that this is part and parcel of his own modernist formal experimentation, insofar as he also often transitions from one scene to another with a matched cut on a zoom in or a zoom out or pulls focus to create dissolve type effects.
In sum, a film that there is a lot more to than meets the eye.
Though he had scripted Schoolgirl Killer (1968) as a return to the it, the project left his hands and was eventually directed by Antonio Margheriti, this loss of control perhaps especially galling given the professional rivalry between the two men. (This information comes from Tim Lucas's indespensible study of the director, All the Colors of the Dark, to which all subsequent commentary can only be a mere footnote.)
In the late 1960s and early 1970s Bava made three gialli. A Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1969) represents a natural Hitchcockian companion piece to The Girl Who Knew too Much, neatly inverting Psycho by having its schizophrenic killer introduce himself as such while also demonstrating that he would “hurt a fly” and featuring dreamlike waltzes that seem inspired by Shadow of a Doubt.
The opening double murder
Five Dolls for an August Moon and this film meanwhile conclude the so-called “greed trillogy” inaugurated by Blood and Black Lace.
These are high bodycount murder-mysteries in which the crimes are motivated not by psychopathology but by greed, the raw desire to possess. To be sure, a more sophisticated theory could not doubt connect the two, pointing to the psychotic logic of capital accumulation or suchlike – especially given that in Blood and Black Lace the police investigation is fatally led astray by their presumption of psychosexual motivation and aetiology for the crimes.
The second and third films of the trilogy, however, see Bava in increasingly ironic, deconstructive mood.
The keys to both film, I would argue, lie in their opening sequences.
In Five Dolls, we slowly move in on the modernist villa on an isolated island before the mise-en-scene breaks down into a series of shock zooms and fragmented close ups all but guaranteed to offend the aesthetic sensibilites of just about anyone as the idle rich protagonists are introduced. One of their number, mockingly identified as the “virgin of the tribe” is then sacrified to the god Kraal, the playful scene momentarily turning serious as the lights go out and it seems someone has taken the game of murder in the dark too far. Then, however, the fake blood is washed off with a few sprays from the soda siphon and everyone laughs.
Like Marcus Daly's remarks to his student in the opening of Deep Red, as he tells them that their playing is “too formal, too precise; it needs to be more trashy,” Bava is telling his audience to watch out, but unlike Argento he is also telling them that his film is essentially one big joke, not to be taken terribly seriously. (Here we might note the slapstick connotations of the soda siphon.)
The biggest part of this joke is the absence of the traditional murder set-pieces. In this regard the film is like an inverted Blood and Black Lace: we never see the murders, only the discoveries of the victims' bodies, most of which end up being stored in the meat locker to the strains of the same carrilon.
Here, we begin with the flight of a fly over the titular bay and its fatal plunge into the water. Though the bay is later identified by one of those opposing its development as a haven for insects, the ironic message seems to be that this place this is a place which is fundamentally inimical to all life.
The gaze and its objects
Following this, we enter the villa of the wheelchair-bound Countess Federica as, to the romantic-bordering-on-kitsch strains of Stelvio Cipriani's swelling piano and string based theme, she looks longingly over the bay towards her illegimate son Simone's hut.
Suddenly, the moment accompanied by a musical sting slighly reminiscent of Friday the 13th's ka-ka-cha the obligatory black gloved killer strikes, throwing a noose around the Countess's neck and kicking her wheelchair away. Something is immediately wrong, however, as once the Countess has breathed her last the camera pans up her killer as he removes his black gloves, revealing his identity, soon to be confirmed as that of Count Donati, Federica's husband.
A giallo, a murder-mystery, is not supposed to do this.
What is going on, what are the rules Bava is playing by?
The Count deposits a faked suicide note, and, a few moments later is them himself unceremoniously stabbed to death by an unseen assailant. This time, at least, we don't see the murderer. Yet, as the narrative itself starts it soon becomes apparent that no-one is particularly interested in finding out whodunnit compared to taking advantage of the Countess's death.
A week passes. The Countess's death has been adjudged a suicide, while the Count has disappeared.
Architect Franco Ventura (Chris Avram) heads out to the bay expecting to seal the deal that will allow him and his partners to further develop it into a holiday resort. On the way he is passed by four youngsters, two couples, looking for some fun at the bay.
Meanwhile, Renata (Claudine Auger) and her husband Alberto (Luigi Pistilli) and have already arrived. They observe Simone (Claudio Camaso / Volonte) and Signor Fossati (Leopoldo Trieste) from the undergrowth as the two men discuss the Countess's demise, Fossati also making veiled references to murder.
Though their attitudes to life differ, it is also clear that the semi-feral Simone and the harmlessly eccentric insect-obsessed Fossati are alike in one respect: both regard the bay as their home and would be hostile to any more changes.
Renata is more concerned with finding her father, her 'masculine' control over her weak-willed husband evident from the way she takes the binoculars (i.e. the gaze, the phallus) off him.
The four youngsters arrive, break into the night club and apartment, drink, dance, make love and generally behave like their Friday the 13th descendants.
One very giallo difference, however, is that none is marked out as a “final girl” type. Instead, all four are quickly killed off. Though again we could no doubt read something sexual into the death spasms of skinny dipper Brunhilda (Brigitte Skay) and the couple who are impaled by a spear mid-coitus were we so inclined, their deaths are really more the result of territorial transgression than anything moral or sexual: Brunhilda discovers the hitherto submerged body of the Count and thus threatens someone's scheme, so she must die; Brunhilda's friends will soon notice her absence, so they too must die.
Sex and violence, and double penetration splatter style
By this point, the structure of the film has also become clear: an alternation of scenes focusing on violent set-pieces and on narrative and character development. (For the record the murders occur at 5, 7, 32, 34, 36, 56, 58, 68, 73, 77 and 80 minutes, somewhat belying Mikel Koven's 20 / 40 / 20 breakdown of murders / development / murders.)
Despite the duration and number of the former – there are no fewer than seven more murders still to come, the body count totalling more than those of the two previous films in the trilogy combined and surely setting some kind of record for the giallo – each of the main characters is reasonably well defined and personified, albeit with some not quite escaping from the realm of the 'type'; in addition to those already mentioned, we also have the likes of Ventura's opportunistic secretary and lover Laura (Anna Maria Rosati) and Fossati's boozy, tarot-card reading wife Anna (Laura Betti).
We cut from an extreme close up of a victim to the mirror image in the hub cap
The dialogue is also better than might be expected, with some amusing references thrown into the mix. One of the red-blooded Italian males tells the Nordic Brunhilda “hold the culture” as she makes a passing reference to Sibelius, for example, while it the Countess's own reluctance to 'convert' to “modernism” in consenting to her husband and his erstwhile associates' plan to concrete over and develop the bay that precipitates the whole chain of murders.
Bava cuts from the bloody stump of a severed head to a dropped pottery head
Similarly though Bava's direction again foregrounds many of the 'wrong' kind of techniques, most prominently the zoom, its also clear that this is part and parcel of his own modernist formal experimentation, insofar as he also often transitions from one scene to another with a matched cut on a zoom in or a zoom out or pulls focus to create dissolve type effects.
In sum, a film that there is a lot more to than meets the eye.
Thursday, 17 April 2008
Dr Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs / Spie vengono dal semifreddo
This was one of those films that I’d been wanting to see for a long time, but approached with a measure of trepidation. On the one hand, it was one of the few films directed by Mario Bava that I hadn’t seen. On the other it had a reputation as something of a 'bomb' itself.
The plot is simplicity itself.
The evil Dr Goldfoot (Vincent Price) has managed to evade capture once again and is soon back to his old tricks with his attractive but explosive girl bombs – i.e. convincing looking fembots equipped with explosive charges.
Working with the Chinese, represented by Hard Job (Moa Tahi), Fong and a bunch of nameless goons, his plan is to precipitate a nuclear war between the USA and the USSR by dropping an H-bomb on Moscow.
Price in the Pit and the Pendulum?
The only ones standing in his way are Bill Dexter, an ex-agent of SIC (i.e. Security Intelligence Command) whose boss Colonel Benson (Francesco Mulé) refuses to believe him when he tells the that Goldfoot is alive and scheming until it is too late; Benson’s secretary and obvious love interest/damsel in distress Rosanna (Laura Antonelli), and two hapless individuals by the names of Franco and Ciccio (er, Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia) accidentally recruited by SIC as the only men with the special talents needed to stop Goldfoot in his tracks…
Franco makes a gesture that means something different to an Italian than a US audience?
Goldfoot and the lookalike General Willis
The results aren’t quite as bad as I had feared, but would hardly qualify as prime Bava by any stretch of the imagination.
The chief culprits are Franco and Ciccio, the extraordinarily prolific and popular Italian comedians who averaged half a dozen films a year at the time by the expedient of doing their usual characters and routines in spoofs of whatever was in favour at the box-office at any given moment (e.g. spaghetti westerns like The Handsome, the Ugly, and the Stupid and Two R-R-Ringos from Texas).
The girlbomb Antonelli
Whilst Franco and Ciccio were clearly very good at what they did, their humour doesn’t appeal to me. Not that it could or should be expected to. There is, after all, a big difference between watching this film as a member of the terza visione in Italy, 1966, caring nothing about its director, and as an Anglophone Bava fan 40 years later.
We are the robots...
Following from this, the larger problem seems to be that the film is simply too much of a mish-mash of elements to particularly appeal to anyone: One could well imagine the same terza visione audience who wanted to see Franco and Ciccio do their thing tuning out when Vincent Price or Fabian were on the screen, and the bulk of the US matinee audience wondering who these crazy Italians were. (Tellingly even the English and Italian titles emphasise different things: Goldfoot and his girl bombs versus the two spies who came in from the semi-cold.)
Franco makes his escape, disguises as a girlbomb
Bava’s direction seems pretty flat and uninspired, though his hand feels evident in the numerous trick shots and the cheap yet sometimes effective designs for Goldfoot’s laboratory, most notably the mirrored room in which the ever-multiplying army of girl bombs exercise.
While Ciccio gets captured and stuck in the duplication machine
At a pinch there is also some characteristic play on the idea of deceptive appearances in a gag where Price is on one side of the mirror frame and Ciccio, as his reflection, on the other, and in the girl bombs more generally, most notably in the sequence where Fabian has to make out the difference between the real and replicant Antonelli’s – part of the difference being that the real one won’t yet make out with him while the mechanical doll double is decidedly more forward – with the result a broken doll/dummy figure on the floor.
Another moment, intriguing in light of the Bava-scripted Schoolgirl Killer with its private girls school setting and cross-dressing killer, is a scene where Dr Goldfoot dresses up as a nun while his girl bombs pose as schoolgirls in order to intercept the bomb from Franco and Ciccio.
The plot is simplicity itself.
The evil Dr Goldfoot (Vincent Price) has managed to evade capture once again and is soon back to his old tricks with his attractive but explosive girl bombs – i.e. convincing looking fembots equipped with explosive charges.
Working with the Chinese, represented by Hard Job (Moa Tahi), Fong and a bunch of nameless goons, his plan is to precipitate a nuclear war between the USA and the USSR by dropping an H-bomb on Moscow.
Price in the Pit and the Pendulum?
The only ones standing in his way are Bill Dexter, an ex-agent of SIC (i.e. Security Intelligence Command) whose boss Colonel Benson (Francesco Mulé) refuses to believe him when he tells the that Goldfoot is alive and scheming until it is too late; Benson’s secretary and obvious love interest/damsel in distress Rosanna (Laura Antonelli), and two hapless individuals by the names of Franco and Ciccio (er, Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia) accidentally recruited by SIC as the only men with the special talents needed to stop Goldfoot in his tracks…
Franco makes a gesture that means something different to an Italian than a US audience?
Goldfoot and the lookalike General Willis
The results aren’t quite as bad as I had feared, but would hardly qualify as prime Bava by any stretch of the imagination.
The chief culprits are Franco and Ciccio, the extraordinarily prolific and popular Italian comedians who averaged half a dozen films a year at the time by the expedient of doing their usual characters and routines in spoofs of whatever was in favour at the box-office at any given moment (e.g. spaghetti westerns like The Handsome, the Ugly, and the Stupid and Two R-R-Ringos from Texas).
The girlbomb Antonelli
Whilst Franco and Ciccio were clearly very good at what they did, their humour doesn’t appeal to me. Not that it could or should be expected to. There is, after all, a big difference between watching this film as a member of the terza visione in Italy, 1966, caring nothing about its director, and as an Anglophone Bava fan 40 years later.
We are the robots...
Following from this, the larger problem seems to be that the film is simply too much of a mish-mash of elements to particularly appeal to anyone: One could well imagine the same terza visione audience who wanted to see Franco and Ciccio do their thing tuning out when Vincent Price or Fabian were on the screen, and the bulk of the US matinee audience wondering who these crazy Italians were. (Tellingly even the English and Italian titles emphasise different things: Goldfoot and his girl bombs versus the two spies who came in from the semi-cold.)
Franco makes his escape, disguises as a girlbomb
Bava’s direction seems pretty flat and uninspired, though his hand feels evident in the numerous trick shots and the cheap yet sometimes effective designs for Goldfoot’s laboratory, most notably the mirrored room in which the ever-multiplying army of girl bombs exercise.
While Ciccio gets captured and stuck in the duplication machine
At a pinch there is also some characteristic play on the idea of deceptive appearances in a gag where Price is on one side of the mirror frame and Ciccio, as his reflection, on the other, and in the girl bombs more generally, most notably in the sequence where Fabian has to make out the difference between the real and replicant Antonelli’s – part of the difference being that the real one won’t yet make out with him while the mechanical doll double is decidedly more forward – with the result a broken doll/dummy figure on the floor.
Another moment, intriguing in light of the Bava-scripted Schoolgirl Killer with its private girls school setting and cross-dressing killer, is a scene where Dr Goldfoot dresses up as a nun while his girl bombs pose as schoolgirls in order to intercept the bomb from Franco and Ciccio.
Saturday, 15 March 2008
Little Bava article by yours truly
On Cinefantastique online:
http://cinefantastiqueonline.com/2008/03/14/mario-bava-master-of-illusion
Thanks to Steve for inviting me to write it; it's for a Bava retrospective in Los Angeles and there are various other Bava pieces on the site, so even if this one doesn't tell you anything new you may find something of more interest elsewhere there.
Modestly; the appropriate tone for a director who once said that he only ever made bullshits...
http://cinefantastiqueonline.com/2008/03/14/mario-bava-master-of-illusion
Thanks to Steve for inviting me to write it; it's for a Bava retrospective in Los Angeles and there are various other Bava pieces on the site, so even if this one doesn't tell you anything new you may find something of more interest elsewhere there.
Modestly; the appropriate tone for a director who once said that he only ever made bullshits...
Thursday, 4 October 2007
Kidnapped / Rabid Dogs / Rabid Dogs question
I got the new-ish Anchor Bay DVD of Mario Bava's formerly lost film Kidnapped today and, having watched that version and the Rabid Dogs one included as extras have a question: is there also a third reconstruction of the film, in the form of the one on the Lucertola DVD released way back in 1997?
If I remember correctly the Lucertola version bookends the action with two silhouetted sequences of the mother on the phone; this subplot is absent from the Anchor Bay Rabid Dogs and in kidnapped the first insert of the mother on the phone is positioned later in the narrative, after the point at which the gang has commandeered Riccardo's car, and stylistically more consistent.
While I think the positioning of this sequence in Kidnapped works better, I have to say that I don't find any of the versions entirely satisfactory. I found I preferred the solarised type titles on the Anchor Bay Rabid Dogs version because they reminded me of one of the trailers for A Bay of Blood and thus seemed to strengthen the thematic connection with that film, along with the parallel introduction of both Riccardo and the gang, including a nice match cut between Riccardo and Doc's wristwatches, which I found reminiscent of the opening / closing images of the story sequence in the original Tre volte della paura as a way of establishing an almost subconscious link between the two men ahead of their meeting.
Insofar as it's difficult to say much more about the film without spoiling it, I'll leave it at that and ask for your thoughts...
If I remember correctly the Lucertola version bookends the action with two silhouetted sequences of the mother on the phone; this subplot is absent from the Anchor Bay Rabid Dogs and in kidnapped the first insert of the mother on the phone is positioned later in the narrative, after the point at which the gang has commandeered Riccardo's car, and stylistically more consistent.
While I think the positioning of this sequence in Kidnapped works better, I have to say that I don't find any of the versions entirely satisfactory. I found I preferred the solarised type titles on the Anchor Bay Rabid Dogs version because they reminded me of one of the trailers for A Bay of Blood and thus seemed to strengthen the thematic connection with that film, along with the parallel introduction of both Riccardo and the gang, including a nice match cut between Riccardo and Doc's wristwatches, which I found reminiscent of the opening / closing images of the story sequence in the original Tre volte della paura as a way of establishing an almost subconscious link between the two men ahead of their meeting.
Insofar as it's difficult to say much more about the film without spoiling it, I'll leave it at that and ask for your thoughts...
Wednesday, 18 July 2007
Il Rosso segno della follia / A Hatchet for the Honeymoon
John Harrington is quite, quite mad. Unusually, however, he is perfectly aware of and comfortable with this situation: “Paranoiac – an enchanting word and so full of possibilities!”
His compulsion to murder young brides is also therapeutic, each fresh victim bringing him closer to understanding a childhood trauma by revealing another crucial detail of this Freudian primal scene.
Tiring of his wife, own Mildred, John seeks a divorce. But having worked hard to make the bridal wear business John inherited from his beloved mother into a success, Mildred is unwilling to accede to his demands, expressing a firm belief that their marriage is of the “till death do us part” variety.
Thus John decides to do away with Mildred.
In an unexpected twist on the till death do us part theme, she then returns as a ghost to haunt him, this making his craziness more outwardly manifest insofar as no-one else can see her or thus who John is talking to...
If this wasn't bad enough, the police are becoming increasingly suspicious that he is the bride killer. All the victims can, after all, be traced back to the House of Harrington in one way or another.
While John points out that there are 200 weddings a day in Paris this only makes things worse, making the coincidence seem all the more striking, design rather than accident...
Bava's involvement in the project extended beyond the direction to cinematography and the title design, in which the Red Sign of madness over Harrington is a recurring motif
Mario Bava's 1969 return to the giallo may have also witnessed a return to the fashion setting of Blood and Black Lace and the theme of the discrepancy between the public face of the bourgeois and the monster lying beneath, but it does so with a very different tone to its predecessor.
The real train and the simulacrum
From the outset, as the director cuts from stock-type footage of a real train – a train on which the as-yet-unidentified Harrington as just killed once more – to a very obvious model (whilst the audio continues as before) before then revealing that Harrington is now at home playing with his toys, it is clear that Il Rosso segno della follia / Hatchet for the Honeymoon is more light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek than deadly serious.
The oh-so Freudian motif of the stairs in John's haunted memories
Rather than presenting the killer as an un-knowable, masked Other as in Blood and Black Lace, Bava instead draws us in to identifying with him through extensive use of voice-over and subjective camera and a more abstract, less explicit manner.
Like Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux – identified by Tim Lucas in his liner notes on the Image Entertainment DVD as a key intertext for the film – you come to understand why he kills, becoming unable to condemn even if you do not condone.
The superficially charming John Harrington wouldn't hurt a fly – until, having saved it from drowing, he feeds it to his parrot...
But there are also differences between the two characters and films: whereas Chaplin sought to comment on the ironies and inequities of a world that accepts at the societal scale what it denies at the individual – kill one man and you are a murderer, kill a million and you are a conqueror – Bava is less concerned with making such a grand(iose) statement. However, insofar as this was also the kind of subtext that many critics felt out of place in Leone's The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, the Good's remark that “I've never seen so many men wasted so badly” an admission that in the scheme of things he and the other rogues are, like Verdoux, “merely amateurs,” perhaps this is no bad thing as a wise acknowledgement by Bava of the kind of limitations he was working under.
John's ideal women – mannequins preserved in a state of perfection, unable to answer him back
Yet, other subtexts are undoubtedly there if one wants to search for them. Harrington's quest for self-knowledge that will ultimately prove self-destructive has clear echoes of the Oedipus myth – arguably the first detective narrative and protagonist – itself given a consciously idiosyncratic interpretation by Pasolini the previous year.
With an elegant score by Sante Romitelli, considerable camp / kitsch charm and three attractive female presences in the forms of Dagmar Lassander, Femi Benussi as models / victims who fall into the House of Harrington's ambit and Laura Betti – reinforcing the Pasolini connection, having approached Bava to express her interest in working with him on the back of her award-winning performance in Medea - as Mildred, perhaps Hatchet for the Honeymoon's only real weakness is that from a generic perspective the resolution of its central enigma is all too predictable.
But given the aforementioned opening sequences, perhaps this was entirely the point: if Pasolini's Oedipus Rex represents the most subversive take on a classical text in the Italian cinema of the 1960s (“I have never dreamt of making love with my mother, rather I have dreamt, if at all, of making love with my father...”) might not Hatchet for the Honeymoon be the equivalent ne plus ultra for the giallo, circa 1969?
His compulsion to murder young brides is also therapeutic, each fresh victim bringing him closer to understanding a childhood trauma by revealing another crucial detail of this Freudian primal scene.
Tiring of his wife, own Mildred, John seeks a divorce. But having worked hard to make the bridal wear business John inherited from his beloved mother into a success, Mildred is unwilling to accede to his demands, expressing a firm belief that their marriage is of the “till death do us part” variety.
Thus John decides to do away with Mildred.
In an unexpected twist on the till death do us part theme, she then returns as a ghost to haunt him, this making his craziness more outwardly manifest insofar as no-one else can see her or thus who John is talking to...
If this wasn't bad enough, the police are becoming increasingly suspicious that he is the bride killer. All the victims can, after all, be traced back to the House of Harrington in one way or another.
While John points out that there are 200 weddings a day in Paris this only makes things worse, making the coincidence seem all the more striking, design rather than accident...
Bava's involvement in the project extended beyond the direction to cinematography and the title design, in which the Red Sign of madness over Harrington is a recurring motif
Mario Bava's 1969 return to the giallo may have also witnessed a return to the fashion setting of Blood and Black Lace and the theme of the discrepancy between the public face of the bourgeois and the monster lying beneath, but it does so with a very different tone to its predecessor.
The real train and the simulacrum
From the outset, as the director cuts from stock-type footage of a real train – a train on which the as-yet-unidentified Harrington as just killed once more – to a very obvious model (whilst the audio continues as before) before then revealing that Harrington is now at home playing with his toys, it is clear that Il Rosso segno della follia / Hatchet for the Honeymoon is more light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek than deadly serious.
The oh-so Freudian motif of the stairs in John's haunted memories
Rather than presenting the killer as an un-knowable, masked Other as in Blood and Black Lace, Bava instead draws us in to identifying with him through extensive use of voice-over and subjective camera and a more abstract, less explicit manner.
Like Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux – identified by Tim Lucas in his liner notes on the Image Entertainment DVD as a key intertext for the film – you come to understand why he kills, becoming unable to condemn even if you do not condone.
The superficially charming John Harrington wouldn't hurt a fly – until, having saved it from drowing, he feeds it to his parrot...
But there are also differences between the two characters and films: whereas Chaplin sought to comment on the ironies and inequities of a world that accepts at the societal scale what it denies at the individual – kill one man and you are a murderer, kill a million and you are a conqueror – Bava is less concerned with making such a grand(iose) statement. However, insofar as this was also the kind of subtext that many critics felt out of place in Leone's The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, the Good's remark that “I've never seen so many men wasted so badly” an admission that in the scheme of things he and the other rogues are, like Verdoux, “merely amateurs,” perhaps this is no bad thing as a wise acknowledgement by Bava of the kind of limitations he was working under.
John's ideal women – mannequins preserved in a state of perfection, unable to answer him back
Yet, other subtexts are undoubtedly there if one wants to search for them. Harrington's quest for self-knowledge that will ultimately prove self-destructive has clear echoes of the Oedipus myth – arguably the first detective narrative and protagonist – itself given a consciously idiosyncratic interpretation by Pasolini the previous year.
With an elegant score by Sante Romitelli, considerable camp / kitsch charm and three attractive female presences in the forms of Dagmar Lassander, Femi Benussi as models / victims who fall into the House of Harrington's ambit and Laura Betti – reinforcing the Pasolini connection, having approached Bava to express her interest in working with him on the back of her award-winning performance in Medea - as Mildred, perhaps Hatchet for the Honeymoon's only real weakness is that from a generic perspective the resolution of its central enigma is all too predictable.
But given the aforementioned opening sequences, perhaps this was entirely the point: if Pasolini's Oedipus Rex represents the most subversive take on a classical text in the Italian cinema of the 1960s (“I have never dreamt of making love with my mother, rather I have dreamt, if at all, of making love with my father...”) might not Hatchet for the Honeymoon be the equivalent ne plus ultra for the giallo, circa 1969?
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