Before I conclude my cursory examination of the great Mario Bava’s directorial career, here are some personal reminiscences from my Filmfax interview with John Saxon, who starred in Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much: “I ran to make this film. It was brought to me by the girl involved, Letícia Román, who was Letícia Novarese, the daughter of [costume designer Vittorio] Nino Novarese…I was told it was an art film. ‘Do you want to do an art film?’ I said, ‘Oh, of course, yes, in Italy, wow!’ When I got the script, I thought, ‘This is no art film,’ but nevertheless, I wanted to go to Italy….In general, to me it was a vacation. I couldn’t believe it. In the United States…we worked a half day on Saturday, and if you ever finished the day’s work before the anticipated time, you know, if you finished at four, they would find some other scene for you to do on another soundstage….It was unbelievably funny. There were times that—I remember Bava got pissed off at something one day and he said, ‘I’m going home.’ It was, like, lunchtime, and he went home, and everybody went home until they did what he said. This was something that I never would have imagined even thinking of experiencing in the United States.”
“Personally, he was peculiar with me, I thought. He would be alternately very, very friendly, like an uncle, and then every once in a while I could hear—I understood just enough Italian; I learned quite a bit that year, because I stayed on—he would say things that were kind of sarcastic about me, and I thought, ‘What’s the matter here? What’s going on?’ I only discovered much, much later that he might have had—I think he did have—a crush on Letícia Novarese, and he was under the assumption that I was ‘with’ her….So alternately he was friendly, and then he thought I was the person getting in between, or something like that….I [only] did one with Bava, but that particular one—I’ve seen other stuff of Bava’s subsequently—was an attempt to do a tongue-in-cheek giallo, a takeoff on the mystery story. It was a mystery story within a mystery story. You remember, the character of the girl is influenced by mystery novels, so he was doing one and commenting on the nature of it. It was a matter of a little bit of tongue-in-cheek humor about the subject matter.”
And now, on with the show…
Una Hacha para la Luna de Miel (Hatchet for the Honeymoon, aka Il Rosso Segno della Follia [The Red Sign of Madness], Blood Brides; 1970): Midlevel Bava film about a young man who inherited a bridal-themed fashion house from his mother and feels compelled to kill both brides and models, each time coming closer to remembering the face of Mom’s murderer; it’s slightly misnamed, as his weapon of choice is really more of a meat cleaver. He has a hellaciously evil wife with whom he’s impotent, and who refuses to give him a divorce, so it probably won’t come as too much of a shock to learn that she and Mr. Cleaver get pretty well acquainted before too long. Tongue ever in cheek, Bava has the hero (?) explain to the gendarmes who visit him that the screams reported by the neighbors came from the TV, where a horror film is playing—it’s Bava’s own I Tre Volti della Paura, transformed into black-and-white. Speaking of gendarmes, riddle me this: why is this Italian-Spanish co-production set nominally in Paris, despite looking nothing like it, while all of the dubbed Latin-looking characters have English-sounding names? Give up? Yeah, me too. Other than that, this movie isn’t as confusing as I remembered it from my youthful first viewing (you’ll never, ever, EVER guess who killed Mom), but it’s fun watching the guy cope with his compulsion and the ghost of his wife, who comes back to prove that, as promised, he’ll never be rid of her.
Roy Colt e Winchester Jack (Roy Colt and Winchester Jack; 1970): I encouraged my friend Tom, an expert on spaghetti Westerns, to buy this one solely so I could see it. (This was before I acquired my own copy in Anchor Bay’s outstanding 2-volume Mario Bava Collection.) But I am sorry to say that it is not only not a good Bava movie, but also not a good spaghetti Western—and Tom is in agreement with me here—with too much of an accent on comedy. That Brett Halsey from Curse of the Fly (1967) is the biggest name in the cast probably speaks for itself.
Ecologia del Delitto (The Ecology of a Crime, aka Antefatto [Before the Fact], Reazione a Catena [Chain Reaction], Twitch of the Death Nerve, Carnage, Bloodbath, A Bay of Blood; 1971): Argento had barely made his first giallo, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), before Bava made a film that was already commenting ironically on the subgenre he had pioneered (an interesting point in light of Saxon’s comment above). This early slasher epic also prefigures Friday the 13th and its “series of creative deaths” ilk, but with an unusual twist: the murders are committed not by a single serial killer, but by a series of perpetrators, each with his or her own agenda, and often dispatching one another.
Gli Orrori del Castello di Norimberga (aka Baron Blood, The Torture Chamber of Baron Blood, Chamber of Tortures, The Thirst of Baron Blood; 1972): This is admittedly not as stylish as, say, Bava’s lyrical Lisa and the Devil or his masterpiece, Black Sunday. It is, however, one of his most coherent films (not an idle boast if you’ve seen Hatchet for the Honeymoon or the so-called Beyond the Door II) and one of his most straight-ahead shockers. Unwittingly resurrected by his present-day ancestors, the eponymous nobleman fires up the old torture chamber and the fun begins; I wouldn’t insult your intelligence by assuming you’d be fooled by the “surprise” twist of wheelchair-bound Joseph Cotten, who purchases the old homestead, turning out to be the Baron.
Quante Volte…Quella Notte (Four Times That Night; 1972): As yet unviewed, this Bava rarity with Brett Halsey (the star of his lamentable Roy Colt and Winchester Jack) is reportedly a sex-comedy variation on Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Gee, that sounds like a good idea, but hey, Bava is Bava, so I’ve gotta have it. I’ll probably let you know.
Lisa e il Diavolo (Lisa and the Devil, aka Il Diavolo e i Morti [The Devil and the Dead]; 1974): One of Bava’s best films, this was made after Baron Blood with the same star, Elke Sommer, and for the same producer, Alfredo (“No Relation”) Leone, who gave him a million bucks to make whatever movie he wanted. In that sense, this might be regarded as the purest expression of Bava’s peculiar vision, and peculiar it is indeed. Sommer plays a tourist who gets lost and ends up in a weird household headed by blind Alida Valli (The Third Man [1949], Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case [1947]); Telly Savalas is a hoot as the Satanic butler—a role which I can only think was written for him—who’s obsessed with lifelike mannequins. Slow and dreamlike at first, with stunning color photography (natch), the film leads up to a number of really nasty killings and an ending with multiple twists. Not surprisingly, Leone was at a loss as to how to sell this poetic yet twisted masterpiece, until in the wake of The Exorcist (1973) he came up with the brilliant idea of butchering it, which made an already confusing plot almost completely impenetrable; adding new scenes of Sommer as a possessed woman vomiting toads and Robert Alda, who’s not even in the original film, as her would-be exorcist, who’s killed by a bolt of lightning; and retitling it La Casa dell’Esorcismo (The House of Exorcism; 1975). The result is, to put it mildly, hilariously cheesy. The original version was long said to be elusive at best, yet I remember watching it on TV (albeit heavily censored) in the late 1970s. Favorite line: “I can’t with you here!”
Shock (Transfer Suspense Hypnos) (aka All 33 di Via Orologio Fa Sempre Freddo, Beyond the Door II, Suspense; 1977): Bava’s tour de force crime thriller Rabid Dogs (aka Kidnapped; 1974) was tragically unreleased in his lifetime due to financial problems, or it might well have changed the course of his career. As it was, it took him several years to get another project off the ground, and his last feature was co-directed, uncredited, by his son and longtime assistant, Lamberto. Since Lamberto later broke into a solo directorial career under Argento’s aegis, is it is appropriate that this looks more like an Argento than a Bava film. This resemblance is only strengthened by the presence of Argento’s longtime lover and sometime collaborator, Daria Nicolodi, in the lead. She and her son and second husband move back into her old house, which is apparently haunted by the first husband’s ghost.
Go to http://www.videowatchdog.com/bava/index.htm to order Tim Lucas’s magnificent Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark (which will probably reveal some errors on my part), and be sure to check out all the latest from Video Watchdog as well.
Great post on Bava! Have you read Alain Silver and James Ursini’s article from Images? You can click through from my blog post: http://wp.me/pRSeI-g
Very interesting. Thanks for the link–cool site!
This has been very interesting and informative. Thanks, Matthew!
Thanks so much for your ongoing interest in my work, Tom. Bava is, perhaps, an acquired taste, but for those of the proper mindset, his films provide riches indeed.