You know who’s a good friend to dolls? It’s Mr. Leandro. Here he taking care of one that met with some sort of accident. He has a friendly smile, don’t you think?
So for today’s Daily Create, the prompt is “@IamTalkyTina wants to be everyone’s friend. Make a photo that represents that kind of friendship”
What would it look like to be friends with everyone? I suppose it would rock. I found this poster of the time Talky Tina opened for the Supersuckers on their Facebook page. I wonder if Talky Tina is friends with the Supersuckers. That seems like it would be fun. See for yourself:
A few weeks ago I came across this poster for Le Criminel, the French release of Orson Welles’ The Stranger, and apparently featuring Welles as the Incredible Hulk. I wondered how that (the title, not the Hulk) made the French moviegoer’s experience different from the American’s. The idea that he’s a war criminal comes out pretty early, so it’s not a spoiler, but the American title emphasizes the mystery whereas the French one points out that he’s a bad guy, and I can’t help but think that the title leaves a subtle suggestion in the back of the viewer’s mind that colors the viewing experience.
And I wonder how differences like that impacted people who saw Bava’s films. Did people walk away from Planet of the Vampires disappointed that there were no vampires in the film? It seems to me that marketing ploys like that would backfire in the long run, but maybe the distributors didn’t expect Bava’s films to do anything more than short runs, so the word of mouth wouldn’t matter so much. The Italian title, Terror in Space, seems like it could have been just as effective, and it wouldn’t have raised any false expectations. Along the same lines, I wonder how titles like Red Nights of the Iron Hand, Six Women for the Murderer, and Blood and Black Lace might have put audiences in different frames of mind for the same picture.
His titles regularly played on other film titles, like Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, or Antonioni et al’s I tre volti. Kill Baby Kill plays upon both Die Monster Die and Faster Pussycat Kill Kill. The Italian title, Operazione paura, plays upon any number of James Bond ripoffs that were popular at the time, which frequently had title beginning with Operation. I’m not sure whether the people who appreciate James Bond or Russ Meyer would appreciate being tricked into going to a gothic ghost story. Other names this film went by were Curse of the Living Dead and Die toten Augen des Dr. Dracula (The Dead Eyes of Dr. Dracula), which manages to reference a German krimi, vampires, and possibly Frankenstein with the “Dr.” part.
What do you know? Not only is there an opera, but there was also a comic book Planet of the Vampires back in the 70s! As if Bava had a whole multimedia empire! Except the comic appears to be more of a Matheson/Boulle rip-off rather than an attempt at adaptation. Like Bava’s film, the comic seems devoid of real vampires (Dracula on the cover notwithstanding), although there is some blood harvesting going on. Some groovy person or persons have shared the first issue online. Look at that last panel… standing off to the side… Is that who I think it is?
I think I first heard the term space opera used in describing Star Wars, and I’m pretty sure it was used in an unflattering sense – as a play on soap opera. Some sci-fi geeks looked down on George Lucas’ film as an adventure story set in outer space, without any real science-y elements. It wasn’t even futuristic really – a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
I was looking to see what people had to say about Bava’s work when it was new. I couldn’t find much. I suppose reviewing B movies in the sixties would be like reviewing direct-to-video releases today. Or Youtube. I did locate a Dec. 1, 1965, Variety review of Planet of the Vampires which basically pans the film but gives props to Bava’s visual sensibility. I didn’t really expect to find anything more, but I did.
There was an article from Opera Quarterly, “Vampires in Carthage,” that referenced Planet of the Vampires. Opera troupe The Wooster Group did some sort of bizarre multimedia mashup of Francesco Cavalli’s 1641 opera La Didone and Bava’s 1965 film, titled Terrore nello spazio in Italian. Now, opera is not my thing. Classic B movies I can devour, but classical classics aren’t really my bag. But this concoction sounds fascinating.
Apparently the stories play out in parallel on the same stage. “Two ships, two sets of captains and crews, two alien lands in which it’s all too easy to get lost.” to quote the NY Times (Lost in Space With Dido and Aeneas). Scenes from the film are shown on monitors, others are re-enacted on one side of the stage, while La Didone is performed on the other. Players shift from one story to the other, sometimes in mid conversation. Both scripts are displayed above the stage. The baroque music is performed more or less faithfully, but some parts are played on modern instruments like accordion and electric guitar. There’s a bit about the opera in Encore magazine as well.
There’s other parallels in the stories besides crashing ships. Bava’s characters are reanimated and possessed by alien life forces, which the English title identifies as vampires. Some of Cavalli’s characters, derived from Virgil’s Aeneid, are possessed by the gods. That coming back from the dead thing, spiritual possession, and general things not being what they appear, are all themes that Bava revisits throughout his films.
Another thing that’s not what it seems is the time frame of the movie. We watch it and assume that these are earth people sometime in the future, but the closing scene indicates otherwise. That temporal confusion is reflected in the Wooster Group’s production, pairing a seemingly futurist film from nearly fifty years ago with an opera that’s three and a half centuries old, performed on modern instruments.
The Times article links to a slide show of stage shots. You can see the Bava influence in the color schemes and the use of light and shadow, and in the styling space suits. There’s also a video online that shows a snippet of the performance.
So I guess space opera has a whole new meaning, or at least a new nuance.
Lucas writes that Bava wanted to follow up Black Sabbath with an H.P. Lovecraft adaptation, ideally The Dunwich Horror. AIP had started a Lovecraft series with Roger Corman’s The Haunted Palace. AIP presented this as one of Corman’s Poe films, since the title comes from a Poe poem, but the story is Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
I was intrigued by this. I’ve always been interested in Lovecraft, although I don’t think his work translates well to the screen. Corman, like Bava, is under-appreciated as a director, as they both worked in the low budget b-movie realm. So I had to look into it. I found the film on youtube. It has some similarities to Black Sunday. It opens with a scene from more than a century earlier, where the warlock places a curse on the town and its descendants as he is being burned. (Sorry about the ads. I wonder if there’s a way to change to thumbnails so they aren’t all the same.)
Then the great-grandson shows up, identical to his ancestor, and ends up possessed by the spirit of the warlock.
There’s a “waking the dead” scene
and a collection of people with facial deformities
although Bava seemed more interested in facial ruination than deformity.
I think Corman did a good job with what he had – it’s atmospheric and well-paced. But there’s a level of visual artistry that Bava brings to his work that Corman doesn’t reach, as he seems more focused on storytelling functionality than using visuals to achieve emotional impact. Compare the scene where Ward and his spouse are walking through the castle with the scene where the Count and Sdenka are walking through the ruins.
There’s a powerful subtlety in the way Bava uses light and color and contrast and composition. Corman isn’t bad, but the darkness is a little too dark, the contrast a bit lower, the color a little less imaginative, the composition a little more matter of fact. And all the little bits add up.
I wonder what Bava could have done with a Lovecraft story. The psychological dimensions to his stories and the way he hints at things would have played into Bava’s hands.
I heard through Twitter yesterday that Netflix streaming was losing 1800 films as of today. The linked article links to a list of what’s going, and a quick glance found both Black Sabbath and Blood and Black Lace, which had me worried. Were all of Bava’s films getting the axe? I checked this morning, and was relieved to find that was not the case. Hercules in the Haunted World dropped from streaming, and Four Times that Night and Planet of the Vampires are gone altogether, but the others on our schedule are still there, except for Danger: Diabolik, which wasn’t streaming in the first place. Fortunately, the missing movies can be found elsewhere online.
Black Sabbath, more properly titled I tre volti della paura (The three faces of fear), is out of chronological order in our BavaFest, but perhaps that is fitting. The AIP version, which was streaming on Netflix last week, has the segments out of sequence, and severely edited. It is also fitting because it’s now in the middle of the schedule, and in many ways the film is central to understanding what Bava was about. Bava had three obsessions, illustrated through the three stories:
“The Telephone” – sex and death
“The Wurdalak” – destruction of the family from within
“A Drop of Water” – psychological terror
We have seen these strands in other Bava films – psychological terror was the main component of The Girl Who Knew Too Much; sex, death and the family collapse were all part of both Black Sunday and Blood and Black Lace. The coworkers in the fashion house could be seen as a type of family unit, as could the ship’s crew in Planet of the Vampires. There is also an element of voyeurism and a feeling of claustrophobia that Black Sabbath shares with other Bava films. “The Telephone” shows this in particular. The action is all confined to the apartment, and the camera is often positioned in a way that makes us feel like we’re spying.
The film also bridges Bava from stories of the past to contemporary settings. Most of his previous work had been set in the past. Much of what he did following was set in the present.
As both Lucas and Howarth describe “The Telephone,” the story involves two prostitutes who are former lovers, and their pimp who recently escaped police custody and is after revenge on the girl who turned him in. Watching the film, the relationships between the characters and their professions was not so clear. We know Rosy and Mary had some sort of falling out, and that Mary is manipulating Rosy to re-establish their friendship. We know Rosy informed on Frank, but the details are unclear. Maybe I missed something, or maybe key details were edited out of the version I saw. In the US version, Frank was supposed to be dead, and his ghost calls on the phone after Rosy stabs him to his second death. The producers thought the story as Bava presented it was not spooky enough, as well as being a bit too adult for their target audience.
As an interesting side note on the topic of target audience, Lucas says it opened in NYC on the bottom half of a double bill with McHale’s Navy. It’s amazing the way his work was mishandled and mangled when it came over here. The editing on “The Telephone” diluted its impact, the re-ordering of the segments fractured the structure of the film, and changing the film score overwhelmed Bava’s subtle and brilliant use of sound throughout the movie. Speaking of the soundtrack, Remains of the Web supplied a link to Roberto Nicolosi’s original score:
Bava considered this his favorite of all his films. Lucas says Bava shows us this with the crazy ending (Youtube, en espanol) seen on the Italian version, where the camera pulls back from Karloff to show us how the shot is being filmed:
the coda is nothing less than Bava’s unmasking of himself: a man who became a cameraman in order to be unobtrusive as an artist, a man who disliked being photographed, a man whose chosen field of endeavor was the once-invisible field of trick photography. A man of Bava’s character could have conceived such a final for only one reason: he had finally achieved something of which he could be proud, something warranting his full disclosure.
Above is the fourth episode of bavatuesdays, in this discussion Paul Bond and I take a look at Mario Bava’s 1964 giallo Blood and Black Lace. It’s quite a masterpiece of murderous technicolor, and it’s considered by many the beginning of the body count/slasher film genre. The premise is that a fashion house becomes the epicenter of a series of gruesome murders of six female models, and hence the Italian title Sei donne per l’assassino (Six Women for the Murder). The assorted murders are stylized to seem as if they had been taken from the pages of a death-themed fashion magazine. There is a lot to love about this film, and while Paul and I try to cover as much as we can, we couldn’t help but spend much of the time lauding Tim Lucas’s (of Video Watchdog fame) amazing commentary on the DVD. The man has nothing short of an encyclopedic knoweldge surrounding just about every detail of Mario Bava’s career. It is absolutely compellign to hear him talk, and it makes me want his book Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark all the more.
As for the recording of our conversation, I’m still working on getting the delay between Paul in the Google Hangout and the Wirecast broadcast to mesh more cleanly. As of now we are still a couple of seconds out of sync which is annoying. And while this doesn’t break the deal for me because we are doing it for fun and to learn about Bava’s films, I have to say it makes it harder to watch and having it synched would make the world a little bit of a better place to be ;). Anyway, I’ll try and figure this out this week so the next six episodes are clean. Hope you enjoy the show despite all it’s imperfections!
Since Blood and Black Lace wasn’t available through Netflix streaming, I put it in my queue. I found it was on Youtube in the meantime, but neglected to change the queue. So I watched the DVD with commentary by Tim Lucas turned on. Lucas starts his commentary like he starts the chapter on the film, with a quote by director Ernst Lubitsch: “Technicolor is interesting. It’s perfect for [Heaven Can Wait], wonderful for musicals and comedies. But… never shoot a drama or mystery in Technicolor.” Bava proved this wrong on a regular basis in the sixties, but this movie really drives the nail home. Note the use of bright red through the film. It’s in almost every scene. Those red mannequins make for an interesting bit of foreshadowing.
Lucas calls this Bava’s first true giallo, and with its Italian title, Sei donne per l’assassino (Six Women for the Murderer), the first body count movie. Like most of Bava’s work, it had multiple titles in different languages: Blutige Seide (Bloody Silk) in German, and according to Lucas, a Danish title that translates as The Iron Hand in the Night of Horror, in reference to the death claw used in one scene. I especially like the over-the-topness of the pre-release title, The Fashion House of Death.
There’s a nice tracking shot through the fashion house early on. Lucas says Bava couldn’t afford a camera dolly on his budgets, so he mounted his camera on a child’s wagon.
Bava knew that the real money was in the English language markets, so he had the actors memorize their lines in English even if they didn’t understand it. All his films were overdubbed anyway, due to noise on the set, but this way makes for a better illusion. Apparently his scriptwriter didn’t understand English all that well either, so American actress Mary Arden (victim number 3) rewrote a lot of the dialogue during the filming. Most of the male voices were performed by Paul Frees (Burgermeister Meisterburger, Boris Badenov).
Bava taught me that “the essence of cinema is framing. Framing is how you experience life. It’s that thing you see that attracts you to someone, a fault or a special quality, a look in someone’s eye, a certain decor that inspires you. It’s framing that creates emotion.”
Blood and Black Lace was released largely uncut in the US. Instead of working with AIP, who had hacked some of his earlier movies, Bava went with Allied Artists, who came up with the English title. The only significant change they made was the opening credits, which is kind of baffling because Bava’s are brilliant. But the distributors thought they weren’t scary enough, so they had an animated sequenced done as a replacement. One shot that did get cut in many countries was tail end of the bathtub murder. That bloom of blood was too much for some censors.
This was a particularly fun discussion for me, and it came at a time that I desperately needed a distraction. Paul Bond continues to be nothing short of gold when it comes to these discussions about Mario Bava’s films, and it’s pretty amazing how we’ve been able to work together in a pretty loose, distributed way to make this show happen fairly organically. He’s very mellow and doesn’t seem the least bit phased by my lack of organization and planning, what’s more he does his research and has a ton of interesting things to frame about each film as well as Bava’s career more generally. You can see Paul’s post about The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) here, and his screen shots for the discussion here.
The discussion starts out talking with a focus on the trailer for the American International release of this film in the U.S. titled The Evil Eye, which appears to be dramatically different from the Italian version—which was a complete flop in the theaters, being pulled after only a week. Neither of us have seen the film, but would love to know if there are any existing versions of the U.S. version out there, because we really want to see it.
It’s fun to talk about the trailer because it includes so many scenes that just aren’t in the Italian version of the film. That said, I must recognize that I misspoke about the proximity of Rome to the sea. Rather than being two or three hours away from the Mediterranean (as I stated during the show), it just so happens the center of Rome is just 30 miles away from Ostia (which Paul mentioned), a beach community that is frequented by Romans during the Summer. In other words, my knowledge of Italian geography is greatly exaggerated, and I suck. Research, Jim, RESEARCH!!!
From there we spend some time talking about Leticia Romàn‘s career, the unbelievable use of lighting in this film to create suspense and horror, a few prolonged scenes demonstrating Bava’s mastery of the medium, as well as the fact that many consider The Girl Who Knew Too Much the first film Giallo. We cover even more than this (the conversation lasts over an hour), and I feel the more Paul and I watch Bava’s film in succession the more attentive and comfortable we become with our discussions. There is something be said about working your way through a director’s ouevre to get a more precise sense of their art.
Finally, we also talked about the theme song for this film in the Italian version: Adriano Celantano’s song “Furore.” Celantano is a titan of Italian pop music and film culture, and “Furore” was an earlier hit from 1960. He was inspired by Elvis Presley, and has gone on to have a 50 year career selling millions and millions of records. What we have in this film is an early appearances of Italy’s “King of Pop.” Also, another correction is due here. I’m not sure if “Furore” was Celantano’s first major hit in Italy, that is something I said in the discussion but I can’t confirm it. But, to be frank, I don’t think it was given how many singles he had made before that song—but I recognize that is not proof. What’s more, I am not sure if Furore was Celantano’s first appearance on a movie soundtrack–another point I make that needs to be fact checked. Anyway, I guess it was good no one watches less they be dreadfully misinformed by me, Paul on the other hand is the genuine article
For a detailed schedule with trailers and more go here.
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You know who’s a good friend to dolls? It’s Mr. Leandro. Here he taking care of one that met with some sort of accident. He has a friendly smile, don’t you think?
Who wouldn’t want to be friends with him?
