Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [18]
Bava sets up a traditional detective plot but makes little attempt to respect it, paying cursory mind to whodunit mechanics as he builds his movie around a half dozen elaborately composed murder scenes, designed with startling splashes of color and swirling, theatrical camerawork. Early on, the killer, wearing black gloves, which would become a staple of the giallo, strangles a woman on the street with a wire, leaving her undressed, with a face lined with streaks of blood. Other beautiful women meet equally nasty ends, eyes gouged out by a claw, faces burned, and another suffocated by a pillow, her curved legs kicking in the background. But the quintessential Bava death might be the last one, when the two killers hug, pull each other into an erotic embrace before a gun goes off, one shooting the other in the stomach. No director tied sex and violence together as tightly as Bava. The dual skewering of a couple in the middle of sex in A Bay of Blood was the apotheosis of his brand of violence, imitated numerous times, most famously perhaps in Friday the 13th, Part 2.
With the possible exception of Hitchcock, no director working in the sixties had more influence over the horror genre than Bava. Since he dabbled in many genres, including westerns and science fiction, his impact on subsequent genre artists has been far-ranging. Yet he was underappreciated in his own country. Blood and Black Lace, for instance, earned back only half of its $150,000 production cost. By the sixties, independent companies such as American International Pictures, home of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe movies, had started moving aggressively into buying films abroad, making deals from sales agents at festivals, which turned into enormous markets. It singled out Italy as the first stop to find cheap foreign product, in part because Bava placed American actors in lead roles.
“Most of the Italian pictures used a washed-up American name,” says William Immerman, the former lawyer for American International Pictures, in his office in Los Angeles. “The guy who got arrested as a drunk and couldn’t work would go to Italy to resuscitate his career. Jack Palance, and Aldo Ray and Dana Andrews, virtually everyone with an alcoholic problem who couldn’t work in the studio would go to Italy. It didn’t matter that they didn’t know their lines because they were dubbed.”
Bava had trouble in the States, too. Incredibly, American International Pictures turned down Blood and Black Lace for distribution, and when it was released in the United States (many of his movies were mangled in dubbed American versions) the critical response was not generous. The New York Times dismissed it in under 120 words that began with this insult:
Murdering mannequins is sheer, wanton waste. And so is “Blood and Black Lace,” the super-gory whodunit, which came out of Italy to land at neighborhood houses yesterday sporting stilted dubbed English dialogue, stark color and grammar-school histrionics.
More generous reviews of the film saw Bava’s interests as similar to those of Lewis. “Bava is simply trying to titillate a very specialized segment of his audience,” Carlos Clarens writes. In some regards, that may be true, though not the way that most people read it. Bava was more of an artist than a sadist, but he also didn’t feel that you had to choose. Bava’s vision was more visually ambitious, but in the sixties, it didn’t matter. Gore films were simply not taken seriously.
THAT CHANGED when a black-and-white movie made in Pittsburgh opened