I Hate the Sight of Blood but It's in My Veins

I have a couple of short reviews of films soon to be released on DVD and Blu-ray. Read on, you son of a bitches!

The Girl Who Knew Too Much/Evil Eye (d. Mario Bava) - In his commentary track for Mario Bava's 1963 thriller The Girl Who Knew Too Much, Tim Lucas notes an early difference between the original European cut of the film, which bears the aforementioned title, and the Samuel Z. Arkoff-shepherded American cut, which, in a reversal of the expected, is slightly longer and goes by the title Evil Eye. The star, Leticia Roman, is on a plane. In Bava's original cut, after some establishing stuff and credits, there's a hard cut to Roman and we get some narration about who she is and why she's flying to Italy. In the American cut, before the camera lands on Roman it drifts along the plane's aisle and we hear the thoughts of various other passengers. They're all mundane, everyday thoughts until we reach Roman, who is thinking about murder. It turns out her character, an American named Nora Davis, is obsessed by mystery novels, and she's simply thinking deeply about the one she's currently engrossed by. This opening, Lucas informs us on the commentary, is considered by Quentin Tarantino to be one of the greatest openings of all time, and it, Lucas goes on to say, along with other tone-lightening elements to be found in the Evil Eye cut, are missed when one watches The Girl Who Knew Too Much.

Maybe, maybe not. I have Evil Eye playing now as I write this, which I offer in the spirit of full disclosure, and because having seen neither, when I received the new Kino Lorber Blu-ray that contains both versions, I opted for The Girl Who Knew Too Much, it being a Bava film I'd never seen, and it being Bava's preferred cut, or so I've inferred, although since Bava went on to more or less dismiss the whole enterprise who can say, and, even if one could, would it matter? On top of this is the fact that, for what I presume are rescued-from-obscurity reasons, Kino gives Evil Eye preferential treatment on the cover, The Girl Who Knew Too Much snagging only a "Plus The Girl Who Knew Too Much" credit.

In any event, The Girl Who Knew Too Much is somewhat less spirited than Evil Eye (which in fairness to myself is nearly over) and a big reason for that is that Bava's cut makes Nora's obsession with mystery novels less of of a fun tone-setting idea than a plot contrivance, and, in fact, it's the film(s)'s plot that came to bug him later in life. He called the plot, which has to do with a series of murders in Rome the victims of which, all women, have last names that progress through the alphabet, hence the designation "The A-B-C Murders," the most recent of these Nora witnesses, anyway, Bava called the plot "preposterous." I guess it is, but if preposterous plots were a barrier to be avoided in making these kinds of films, I'm not sure we'd even have these kinds of films. In the end, none of that matters. What matters is what Bava does with it. That beginning to Evil Eye is pretty good and a very Hitchcockian idea, Hitchcock being the artist Bava is clearly pursuing here. There's lots of nice touches, such as Nora walking through a deserted series of hallways and rooms while the voice of, one assumes, the killer plays over a tape recorder. That bit is very stark and creepy, and not particularly light-hearted -- when Hitchcock wanted to make a light movie he tended to do so top to bottom, but Bava doesn't, or couldn't, which might explain why he removed those elements for the final version of The Girl Who Knew Too Much. Maybe he thought it was an uneasy marriage; if so, I'm not sure I agree. When Nora witnesses the murder, she sees the killer (face obscured) pull the knife from the dead woman's body, and Bava shoots this so we get the killer, the body, the street, the low brick wall, trees, the night, and we see the body move with the killer's effort to retrieve the knife. It's a terrific bit of restrained gruesomeness that adds weight to the proceedings without getting in the way of the fun. As I watch Evil Eye now I think that, surprisingly, Samuel Arkoff had the right idea. It's a better time at the pictures. Either way, John Saxon is in both versions and he's pretty young, and young John Saxon looks like Walter Koenig. So there's that too.

Limelight (d. Charlie Chaplin) - Charlie Chaplin turned 63 in 1952, the same year he released this film about an aging, alcoholic vaudeville comedian who noticed some time ago that the world no longer has much interest in him. At the beginning of the film, Chaplin's character, Calvero, is stumbling drunk into the boarding house where he lives when he discovers that another tenant, a young woman named Terry (Claire Bloom) has attempted suicide. Calvero saves her and the two become friends. Terry is a ballerina whose depression and crippling lack of confidence keep her from performing, while Calvero, even with all he knows about show business, maintains a perhaps unreasonable optimism. The two encourage each other to keep trying, to find work performing. Calvero stops drinking. He and Terry fall in love but don't do anything about it.

Such is the basic plot of Limelight, the one Chaplin masterpiece that has really struggled to be recognized as such. When it was released, Chaplin's life was in upheaval due to accusations that he was a Communist; this essentially scuttled the US release, which can only be regarded as ironic since Limelight is perhaps his least political film. It's about art, creativity, performance, the past, love, and death. It really is an immense piece of work. Watching it again today after many years, on the new Criterion Blu-ray that comes out Tuesday, I was struck most by what a confident, natural all-around actor Chaplin was, as at home in the sound era that he resisted as he was in the silent films that made him famous. His Calvero is a man battling despair and finding it both tempting to surrender as the time left to him to begin a new life on stage quickly runs out, and easy to keep going, to let his natural optimism and frothiness win out in the face of a young, beautiful, talented woman who has unaccountably given up. Chaplin is able to play all of this, from one scene to the next, within the same scene, from the beginning of the film until it ends over two hours later, without ever letting his performance seem messy or overstuffed. Simple things like Chaplin's ability to make his voice break as emotion threatens to overwhelm Calvero feel not just like good acting, but like brilliance.

The biggest criticism Limelight has had to fight against over the years is the charge that it is sentimental. Oh, it's sentimental, all right. Lots of Chaplin's films are sentimental. The problem with this accusation is that it accepts the corrupted definition of "sentimental," which sees the word only as a pejorative, and leaves behind its original, more Victorian (and Limelight is a very Victorian film in a lot of ways) meaning, which merely describes a thing or person that is nostalgic or tender or sad to large, perhaps exaggerated degree. Excessively so, one might even argue, and of course this is where the anti-sentimentality crowd gathers their ammunition. It's funny, though, how an excess of just about any other emotion is considered acceptable. No one would complain that a horror film had too much fear in it. Melodrama (which Limelight might have been had Chaplin's visual style matched his emotional pitch) has fought this same battle, but in critical circles, at least, the understanding of melodrama as a genre, or a form, won out long ago. With sentimentality, it's still not appreciated that like anything else it can be used well or badly, it can be executed well or badly. And if you think that Calvero marveling at the grace of Terry's dancing, or Chaplin and Buster Keaton, as Calvero's partner for one show, appearing together on screen for the first and only time, or Nigel Bruce, in a wonderful performance as a theater producer, simply and devastatingly delivering the line "Carry the sofa out to the wings," counts as bad sentimentality, or is bad because it is sentimental, then I guess we'll have to leave it at that. There's no talking to you.

Here Comes a Chopper to Chop Off Your Head

Today, Kino Lorber is releasing three Mario Bava films to Blu-ray, and while I could do no more than speculate about why these particular titles were chosen, it is interesting that they keep Bava within the horror genre – a genre he’s known for, but which he certainly didn’t work in exclusively – yet still provide a pretty nice sense of the man’s range. The films are the ultra-Gothic, and black & white, Black Sunday, the surrealist and sunny, until the sun goes down, Lisa and the Devil (paired here, as it often is, with the producer-mandated re-edit House of Exorcism), and the strange, subdued (in some ways) and very sly Hatchet for the Honeymoon. This last one became of particular interest to me as I watched it recently, it being the only one of the three I hadn’t seen before, but also because of its regular over-turning of genre conventions, whether the genre being overturned is an old classic, or one that Bava himself essentially invented just a few years previously.

I suppose I should say here, not that I can imagine it doing me any good, that Italian horror is something to which I seem to have a mild allergy. If it matters, I'm quite fond of Michele Soavi's Stagefright, while being thoroughly disdainful of Soavi's Cemetery Man. I like Fulci's Zombi or Zombi 2 or whatever well enough, and I remember that other Fulci movie where the chick vomits up all her intestines, but it is beyond me why Fulci should be taken seriously. The New York Ripper certainly is repulsive, though! I like Who Can Kill a Child? quite a bit, but that movie's Spanish, so why even bring it up? Meanwhile, Argento...you know, my Argento viewing has been so scattershot that I'm not sure it's really fair to mention him. I saw Suspiria when I was a kid and haven't gone back to it, I stopped watching the copy of Deep Red that I got from Netflix when the English dubbing dropped out and wasn't replaced with subtitles, which I've since gathered is for some reason just sort of what happens with that film on DVD, Opera pretty much just proved that I was right to be wary of this kind of thing, I liked Tenebrae...but my entry point to Argento, as an adult with a memory, was stuff like The Card Player and Do You Like Hitchcock? "Unfair!" most would cry. In any case, my issue with this stuff is that I'm rarely able to convince myself that the nonsensicality that is so often a feature of Italian horror is part of any kind of larger purpose, rather than a symptom of incompetence. Not that I'm saying Argento, for instance, is incompetent (well, he might be now), but rather that he's very good at the stuff he cares about, which leaves quite a lot of things that interest me in cinematic storytelling that he can't be bothered with. The set pieces can be wonderful, but everything else needs to just be gotten through.

Bava is different, though. I almost said "mostly different" but thinking about it, I could almost feel the first rock strike my temple. But basically I think I'm often finding more in Jean Rollin's films what I keep expecting to find an abundance of in Bava's. I've been slowly making my way through his work, and even if I'm not knocked over the head by, say, Lisa and the Devil, it's very clear to me that it's also not Opera, that there's an imagination, a full imagination, at work here, one that, as I've said, can encompass a lot. My two favorite Bava films so far are Bay of Blood, aka Twitch of the Death Nerve, and the crime film Rabid Dogs, and I've found very little about either of those to complai-genrn about, though the twisted joke of an ending to the former pretty handily obliterated from my memory any objections I may have had up to that point. And now I have Hatchet for the Honeymoon to consider, and while it may not reach the level of either of those films, or of Lisa and the Devil or Black Sunday, it does pretty handily trounce Blood and Black Lace, the Bava film from 1964 that is credited as being the first giallo, the subgenre of Italian horror/thrillers that I'm most resistant to, and the Bava film that Hatchet for the Honeymoon feels most closely connected to.
Made in 1970, Hatchet for the Honeymoon is about John Harrington (Stephen Forsyth), a hugely successful fashion designer who is also a serial killer, exclusively, it would seem, of women who are just about to get married. That's sort of your whole plot, which isn't too unusual for a giallo. What is unusual, at least in my limited experience, is that most gialli are, among other things, mysteries in the "whodunnit" mode -- someone is hacking up people, who is it? -- but you know from the beginning of Hatchet for the Honeymoon that Harrington is the killer. What you don't know, and what he doesn't know, is why he does it. But wait, why does he do it? He does it because he believes that with each bride-to-be he cuts down, a piece of the childhood psychological puzzle will be added to, and help clear up, the mystery of...why he kills young brides. Something happened in his childhood that caused him to become a murderer, and the only way to regain that memory is to murder. He murders to discover why he murders. The almost amazing part of all this is that by the end of the film, there's actually a logic to it all. The reveal, which I'm very tempted to give away because I honestly think it's so good and is part of what makes this film so interesting, is almost a punchline, but while Bava wasn't against the idea of occasionally playing his horror for laughs, I don't think that's what is going on here. Essentially, Harrington's murderous life and psychology is just a snake eating itself, which I suppose is giving away more than enough.

Along the way, Bava's able to get in a lot of other weirdness and more than a little craft. There's a terrific sequence, for instance, involving a murder that occurs in Harrington's home just before the police arrive (for various reasons, the police view Harrington as a person of interest), and with no time to cover anything up, Harrington is forced to leave the corpse on the landing of a stairway leading up from the foyer, where he and the police are eventually standing. Dripping blood and a dangling hand threaten at any second to give Harrington away, and the whole thing is just marvelously Hitchcockian, and put me in mind especially of the potato truck sequence from Frenzy -- not visually or anything, but the idea of feeling tense for the safety of an unrepentant murderer -- which is even more interesting when you consider that Hitchcock released his film two years after Hatchet for the Honeymoon came out. But since there's some very blatant Psycho stuff in this film, we'll call it a draw. Also interesting, and also not very giallo-like is the almost complete absence of graphic violence (or nudity!). Bava has never seemed to me to be the Italian horror filmmaker who was most interested in that kind of bloodshed, but he certainly had it in him. But not here, though, where you'd think he'd find plenty of space for it. No, instead he shows a woman struck down by the killer's hatchet by cutting, just as the blade is about to land, to a wild, red, still image of her face being split down the middle. It's very precisely timed and hugely effective.

Plus, there's a ghost in this movie. To go too deeply here would get into more plot stuff than I'd like, or than you'd like, but suffice it to say, one of Harrington's victims comes back to haunt him. What's so weird about this is that while most filmmakers would try to make this a "is that really a ghost or is it in his guilt-ridden mind?" thing, Bava very explicitly removes that option by reversing the way these things are generally done: everyone can see the ghost but Harrington. But Harrington knows for a fact that the woman everyone is claiming to be having a conversation with, or whatever's going on, is dead as shit. I kept waiting for Bava to pull some typical giallo nonsense out of his ass to deal with this, but he never does. It's pretty great, even if it is entirely shithouse.

In some ways, Hatchet for the Honeymoon provided me with the same kind of negative reactions I often get from such films, including, I must admit, Blood and Black Lace. Dialogue's not a big deal in these movies, I guess, and while broad acting can be fine, can be great, broadness delivered with a blank face is something I've yet to warm to. Though Forsyth is good, as is Laura Betti as his wife -- she's at least not blank-faced. But this is one of the rare Italian horror films that makes me not care so much about the more typical filmgoing pleasures that I've become used to. It's offering up some very different things, and they turn out to be plenty.