Blood and Black Lace

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Blood and Black Lace
VCI DVD release
Directed by	Mario Bava
Produced by	Alfredo Mirabile Máximo Patrizi
Written by	Giusseppe Barilla Marcello Fondata Mario Bava
Starring	Cameron Mitchell Eva Bartok
Music by	Carlo Rustichelli
Cinematography	Ubaldo Terzano
Distributed by	Woolner Bros.
Release date(s)	1964
Running time	88 min
Language	Italian (U.S. release dubbed into English)
Budget	$150,000 (approximate)

Blood and Black Lace (Italian title: Sei donne per l'assassino) is a 1964 Italian horror thriller film directed by Mario Bava. Bava cowrote the screenplay with Giusseppe Barilla and Marcello Fondato. The film stars Cameron Mitchell and Eva Bartok. The story focuses on the stalking and brutal murders of various scantily-clad fashion models, committed by a masked killer in a desperate attempt to obtain a scandal-revealing diary.

The film is generally considered one of the earliest and most influential of all giallos, and served as a stylistic template for the “body count” slasher films of the 1980’s. Tim Lucas has noted that the film has "gone on to inspire legions of contemporary filmmakers, from Dario Argento to Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino."^[1] In 2004, one of its sequences was voted #85 among the "100 Scariest Movie Moments" by the Bravo Channel.^{[2] [3]}

Contents 1 Plot 2 Production 3 Response 4 References 5 External links

[edit] Plot

Isabella (Francesca Ungaro), one of many beautiful models employed at a fashion house, is walking through the grounds that lead to the establishment one night when she is attacked and violently killed by an assailant wearing a white featureless mask. Police Inspector Sylvester (Thomas Reiner) is assigned to investigate the murder and he interviews Max Morlan (Mitchell), the manager who co-runs the salon with his lover, the recently widowed Countess Cristina Como (Bartok). Max attests that he can provide no information whatsoever that can assist the inspector, but as the investigation continues all of the fashion house’s various sins, including corruption, blackmail and drug addiction, begin to come to light. It is revealed that Isabella had kept a diary detailing these vices, and suddenly almost every employee becomes nervous.

Nicole (Ariana Gorini) finds the diary, and she promises to provide it to the police, but Peggy (Mary Arden) manages to steal it from her purse during work. That night, Nicole drives to an antique store owned by her lover, Frank (Dante DiPaolo). He is not there, and while inside she suddenly finds herself stalked by a black clad figure, who had apparently been waiting for her there. She makes it to the front entrance door but is grabbed from behind by the masked individual, who raises and slams a spiked glove into her face, killing her instantly. The murderer searches the corpse and her purse for the diary. When it becomes clear that she did not have it, the killer runs out of the shop.

The murderer next visits Peggy’s apartment. The killer gains entrance simply by knocking on the front door, and when Peggy opens it, the masked figure abruptly walks inside. The assailant slaps and hits her repeatedly, and she explains that she no longer has the diary and had in fact burned it in the fireplace. When her attacker checks the fireplace to see if she told the truth, she tries to pick up a telephone to call for help. Enraged, the murderer hits her over and over again in the face until she is knocked unconscious. The assailant then carries her away just as the police arrive.

Peggy is taken to another location and tied to a chair. The killer tortures her, demanding to know where the diary is. The woman reaches up and knocks off the mask. The shocked girl recognizes her assailant, who proceeds to brutally kill her by slamming her face against the red-hot surface of a burning furnace.

Inspector Sylvester is convinced that the murderer is one of the men employed at the fashion house, so he places all of those he believes might be connected to the deaths under arrest. However, while they are under custody, Greta (Lea Krugher) discovers Peggy’s corpse and is smothered to death by the killer.

Max talks to Cristina and reminds her about how he had assisted in the murder of her husband. Isabella had found out that Max had been involved in the crime, and began blackmailing him. When she started asking for more and more money, she was murdered. It was only later that Max and Cristina realized she had been keeping a diary that revealed everything. Max tells Cristina that he needs her help and convinces her that after only one more death they will be safe. That night, the voluptuous Tao-Li (Claude Dantes) is drowned in her bathtub by the masked killer who, immediately after the murder, removes the mask and is revealed as Cristina. She uses a razor blade to slice the corpse’s wrists in order to make the death seem like a suicide. Cristina prepares to leave the victim’s apartment when she is interrupted by a knocking sound on the front door followed by the loud voice of a man identifying himself as the police. She decides to escape out the second story window and then tries to climb down a drainpipe, which falls under her weight, slamming her to the ground.

Later that night, Max searches through Cristina’s desk, looking for money and documents. Suddenly, a bloody and broken Cristina enters the room, holding a gun aimed directly at Max. It turns out that Max had been the “policeman” knocking on Tao-Li’s front door, and he had known exactly how Cristina would attempt to escape. He had deliberately broken the drainpipe in such a way that it would be guaranteed to collapse. Max attempts to smooth talk his lover and almost succeeds in getting her to hand over the gun, but she abruptly changes her mind and shoots him to death. The mortally wounded Cristina collapses next to his corpse.

[edit] Production

Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960) and Black Sabbath (1963) were world wide commercial successes. As a consequence, Bava was given full creative control over Blood and Black Lace. An Italian-West German co-production, the film’s backers were expecting a routine murderer-on-the-loose yarn in the Edgar Wallace-tradition. In Europe in the early 1960’s, movies based on the murder mystery novels of the incredibly prolific Wallace had become a mini-genre of their own. Forty or so of these titles were ultimately made, most of them produced in West Germany. Although some of the murder sequences could be vicious, the emphasis was squarely on the police procedural and mystery aspects of the narrative.

But Bava was "bored by the mechanical nature of the whodunit"^[1] and decided to downplay the more accepted clichés of the genre. The stalk and kill sequences themselves were given full importance over all other concerns. He emphasized horror and sex in ways that had usually only been hinted at before. Inspired by Hitchcock’s Psycho, Bava made sure that all of his gorgeous victims were partially unclothed at the time of their deaths.

The movie was shot between November 1963 and January 1964, filmed at the Villa Pamphili on the Gianicolo, one of the Seven hills of Rome. The film's budget was low, approximately $150,000. Bava was forced to improvise numerous times during the production in order to get the technical results he wanted. Cameron Mitchell noted that in order to shoot an impressive dolly shot through the fashion house, Bava simply placed the camera on a child's red wagon. Similarly, Bava completed several crane shots by utilzing a "makeshift seesaw contraption."^[1]

Bava’s mixture of eroticism and violence would prove a potent template for both the giallo and the slasher film. Tim Lucas has written that Blood and Black Lace was "one of the most influential thrillers ever made" and "the first authentic 'body count' movie."^[1] Derek Hill, in his review of the film for the Images website, observed: "Equipped with his colored gels and his predatory camera, Bava arguably created the slasher subgenre and kicked down the door for subsequent directors to stick in their cinematic blades as well, for better or worse."^[4]

[edit] Response

Because of the film's titillating combination of near-naked women and gory murder, American International Pictures passed on releasing Blood and Black Lace, despite having had commercial success with Bava's previous Black Sabbath and Black Sunday. AIP felt Bava's movie was "too intense, too adult for the 'kiddie trade'..."^[1] The film was instead distributed in the U.S. by the Woolner Brothers (producers Lawrence and Bernard Woolner). Woolner Brothers released the movie after making only one minor change--the somewhat mundane original title sequence was replaced with a gory piece of semi-animation supplied by Rankin/Bass, featuring mannequins and bloody bullet holes.

The film received a generally negative response at the time of its initial release from the few critics who bothered to review it. In The New York Times, A.H. Weiler complained, "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."^[5]

The movie is now generally held to be an important title in the development of the giallo, and is considered to be one of the major titles in the so-called “Golden Age” of Italian Horror. Almar Haflidason, reviewing the film for BBC.co.uk, said that "Director Mario Bava stages all these murders with the flair and style that was to become a founding mantle for the Giallo films…Through a prowling camera style and shadow-strewn baroque sets that are illuminated only by single brilliant colours, he creates a claustrophobic paranoia that seeps into the fabric of the movie and the viewer."^[6] Glenn Erickson, aka “DVD Savant”, noted “Bava probably didn't mean to invent a subgenre with Blood and Black Lace, a murder story which forgoes the slow buildups and character development of previous thrillers to concentrate almost exclusively on the killings themselves.”^[7] In Slant Magazine, Fernando F. Croce stated “The roots of the Hollywood slasher are often traced back to Blood and Black Lace, yet Mario Bava's seminal giallo has a richness of texture and complexity of gaze that have kept its elaborate carnage scintillating even following decades of leeching from genre vultures.”^[8] Nathaniel Thompson commented on his Mondo Digital review website: “A stripped down, delirious tour of a candy-colored murder zone, this was really the first film to merge the fashion world with ritualistic murders, and none of its imitators have managed to capture the same level of intensity." ^[9]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Blood and Black Lace at the Internet Movie Database
• All Movie Guide: Blood and Black Lace entry

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