BLOOD AND BLACK LACE

Focusing on style and plot more often than subtle nuances of characterization, the Giallo has long courted both controversy and admiration for its unapologetic worship of violence, sexual intensity, and celebrated perversion. Specializing in convoluted plots, psycho sexual imagery, offbeat characters whose shifting perceptions hold deadly secrets, and stylish excess, Giallo evokes the physical horror of corrupted/damaged flesh while celebrating it in loving color; at the same time, it evokes emotional terrors of betrayal, the modern world's sense of alienation, and the threat of loss.

The term Giallo initially referred to yellow paperbacks in post-fascist Italy which re-printed such mystery writers as Agatha Christie, Cornell Woolrich, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Applied to cinema, the genre is comprised of equal parts early German Crimi (pulp thrillers often based on Edgar Lee Wallace novels), the literary mystery, and the European influenced willingness to explore sex and violence more provocatively than ever before. The later, an Italian contribution to crime thrillers, are the first striking differences one notes between American crime films and the harsher, more delightfully perverse European counterparts. But it all isn't about sex and death. Amidst the creative-kill set pieces are thematic undercurrents of self identity, the illusion of appearances, and the inability of the human mind to decipher its perceptions.

Originating as an established art form with The Girl Who Knew To Much (1963), Mario Bava, the father of the Giallo, focused on a major POV character struggling with her memory/sense of perception to decode an act of violence upon which her life depended. This character, reused in countless variations by other filmmakers, through ignorance or chance, witnesses/experiences an act whose deciphering is crucial to the plot. Perception becomes a character unto itself, emphasized alongside fetishistic imagery. In Blood and Black Lace perception takes an even more important role in the development of plot and focus on theme, becoming for all intents and purposes a character every bit as important as the women who are butchered, skewered, burned, battered, and drowned.

A thoughtful poet of the perverse, Mario Bava was as dedicated to style as he was story, imbuing both with passion, startling clarity, and a sense of awe too seldom found in horror cinema. Wielding the camera like a knife, cutting conventions of expectation with as much passion as his masked, black-gloved killers exhibited separating flesh from bone, Bava's brush was shape, his canvas the world - a world not only of sights and sounds but of emotional extremes that fluctuated between innocence and deviance with the blink of an eye. Using light, shadow, various gels, and impressive special effects to breathe cinematic life into intellectual and emotional concepts which, like his intimate yet flashy approach to violence were way before their time, his major characters were not actors - they were, in fact, the primal, universal phenomena of death, violence and eroticism.

The father of modern sado-masochistic imagery and the psycho-sexual underpinnings of what would become the stock-and-call of the Giallo and, later, the 1970's and 1980's slasher films. A poet, a stylist, a storyteller, and a technological wizard, Mario Bava was also a dreamer with the industry know-how to lend flesh to emotional concepts, breathing suspense into deteriorating portraits of culture that both mirror and are mirrored by the select characters who Bava's disorganized but penetrating story focuses on. Thematic anchors upon which to hang his roving camera as well as flesh-and-blood personas who breathe and kill and die, Bava's characters are both symbolic and intimate, and his treatment of them subtle - when he isn't brutally killing them.

Easy in life, Bava lived dangerously in his cinematic dreams and techno-color nightmares. Telling stories with images instead of words, he dipped the screen in the blue of fantasy and the red of bloody eroticism. So intensely believable are his various worlds of fantasy, science fiction, ancient history, and horror that it's often difficult to tell where Bava's real world ended and his cinematic escapes began. A foundation of fantasy underlies many of his films, evoking in even the most realistic scenes the tension and phantasmagoria of an adult faerie tale, which, to an extent, was precisely what a number of his films were - modern myths and fables of terror, identity, transformation, and alienation. Instilling formulaic genres and plot devices with original ideas and a uniquely disquieting style, a lurking shadow of tension and palpable suspense flows beneath the visually thrilling surface action of his dark mysteries of self, soul, and the supernatural, evoking a sense of the outré even when the content is placed strictly in the realm of the realistic. For it isn't so much what Bava did as how he did it, teasing the soul of his subjects, scenes, and characters whose approach and effect captured an essence of occult power even when their themes were devoted to the realm of physical reality

In Blood and Black Lace, perhaps the most influential and certainly one of the most beautiful giallos, features death, deception, and flawed perception. 'Sei donne per l'assassino' (in Italian meaning "Six Women for the Murderer"), this first 'body count' film displays a savage intensity not found in his earlier effort, The Evil Eye. The use of color enhances the internal mood of conflict and better cements the visual relationship between pleasure and pain, the ugliness of death and its beauty.

Establishing a thematic and stylistic blueprint for the Italian thriller and mystery that would be extended and innovated further by such talents as Argento and Fulci, the plot is as complex as you would expect. Murder and the discovery of a book instigate a series of horrible murders in a Haute Couture fashion salon, run by Contessa Cristina Como (Eva Bartok) and Max Marian (Cameron Mitchell), her lover and partner. In true voyeuristic fashion, sexy young women are methodically, inventively killed - snuffed out sadistically by a masked assassin obsessed with retrieving the red diary which, we find, is filled with evidence of sordid love affairs, drug abuse, and the key to an earlier crime.

Employing sensual camera shots and gliding pans, grisly murders are showered with colorful flair, shocking without the graphic excess of Bay of Blood. Graceful, operatic in a way that the excesses of slasher films can't mimic, the misogynist accusations against this story are overemphasized by those with their own political axes to grind. A catalogue of atrocities unfold as people are suffocated, drowned, and scalded. Innovative in structure as well as in the depiction of sadism, Bava reveals the culprit (s) halfway through the film, reaffirming its focus on sensation, not the 'who did it' conventions of the traditional mystery. Expected now by audiences, during its time Blood and Black Lace was both shocking and upsetting.

Bava pays homage to the established stalk-and-slash style of early Giallo he primarily formulated while revitalizing its cum-and-blood conventions. Interweaving the art of detection and the cold thrills of suspense with sexual frenzy, uncontrollable human impulses, and enthusiastic bouts of violence, Bava emphasizes the uncharacteristically complex motivations of his characters while making the problem of perception - so crucial to the success of the Giallo - uncomfortably intimate. He accomplishes this by making his character's motives understandable (abuse, neglect, etc) if not commendable, and making violence disturbingly beautiful while portraying the desirable act of sex as a prelude to treachery.

There is no saving grace in this film, no faith or redemption. There is simply excess, greed, pain, and torture. People are murdered for profit, extortion, and business; there is rarely ever anything personal in it. Yet when the killer strikes it is with vigor, bordering on the sexual frenzy of a lover taking possession of one's lover. Meat and blade, life and death, opposites are met and overlapped in disturbingly gorgeous detail. Passion energizes this movie, the actors infusing believability into character. A disturbing opera of betrayal, sexual indulgence, and death, the script's explosive moments of lust and violence are accompanied by undeniable emotional resonance. Generous amounts of skin and blood are mirrored by surprisingly believable dialogue, careful camera compositions, and a self assured directing style.

The brooding, sexually charged borderlands between hate and love, life and death, redemption and sin are further emphasized by characters whose plots and perversions are brought disturbingly close to home, daring us to sympathize with them. Many Giallos from Argento to Fulci operate in an emotionally cold wasteland where the identities and motivations of the killers closely guarded secret until the final, shocking revelation. While this helps create suspense, it also stressing a gap between story and audience involvement. Bava, even in this early effort, manages to establish this crucial sense of separation between the objective and subjective, killer and victim and audience, without sacrificing intimacy of character or emotional involvement. He accomplishes this by keeping us on close familiar terms with the true character of the movie, violent death, the tools of murder, and the very camera which reveals such final, deadly truths to us.

Initially released by on DVD around five years ago in a non-anamorphic transfer that was found faulty, this new release of a historically significant film is a slight improvement over the first transfer at a more affordable price. Uncut and presented in 1.85:1 hard-matted ratio, the colors, while satisfying and rich, are too often murky, distracting the eye in darker scenes. An 5.1 English soundtrack is strong but marred by an odd crackling that distracts from enjoyment, while both an original Italian and French track are included alongside as optional English and Spanish subtitles.

A dark treasure of extras recommends this DVD to the Bava enthusiast. A commentary by Tim Lucas (as well as his profile), whose obsessive research covers various facets of Bava's life, work, aesthetic, and technical proficiency alone makes the disc worth the purchase. The intriguing American trailer and a generous handful of other VCI trailers rounds out the first disc. The second disk includes an interview from 2000 with Mary Dawne Arden, one of the murdered models, alive and well in New York, who discusses her work on the movie with grace and honesty. This is followed by a Cameron Mitchell interview, before his 1994 death, the French title sequence, an original American theatrical title sequence, and three European trailers. Continuing with a still/photo gallery and a soundtrack of the swinging score by Carlo Rustichelli's, this last extra is particularly revealing, comparing scenes between the American and European versions, the later heavily edited.

In Bava's movies we see the world through his eyes and heart and soul, not our own, and his world was charged with a poetic symphony of decay, death, violence, and sexuality lovingly depicted with excessive style and incredible wit. This is Giallo as it should be: moist, wet, and dripping with not only blood and style but intelligence. Get it, savor it, and feel that Italian thriller goodness!

Review by William P Simmons