Blood
& Black Lace – Unslashed Collector’s Edition (2 DVD
Set)
Picture: B-
Sound: C+ Extras: B Film: A+
The latter half of 2005 not only saw the release of two
new upgraded DVD editions of Mario Bava’s murderous masterpiece Blood &
Black Lace (one German, one domestic), but also the world premier CD
release of Carlo Rustichelli’s magnificent score.
With the highly possible exceptions of Black Sunday
and Lisa & The Devil, Blood & Black Lace (1963) could
very well be Bava’s best film. I find it
to be without flaw, a true masterpiece.
On this one everything came together for Bava: a comprehensible plot, a
solid script, a great cast (Cameron Mitchell’s rendering of Max Moriand is an
icy delight, and the actresses playing the parts of the models are consummate
in the manner in which they physically/visually complement each other), classy
production values, and, of extreme importance, Carlo Rustichelli’s score. All of Rustichelli’s work for Bava is
exceptional, and his effort for Blood & Black Lace is a classic
example of everything that is unique and superior to the Italian soundtrack.
The opening credits (American) of Blood & Black
Lace begin with a stylized image of womanhood, a female silhouette is seen
isolated in a corner of the screen and engulfed in darkness. The music is threatening. Abruptly the silhouette becomes illuminated
with an eerie blue-green glow, and as it does the music registers sudden
violence. There follows a series of
medium overlapping tracking shots past various female mannequins, all in
darkness, each glowing in primary colors: red, green, blue, yellow. For this strange panorama of anonymous
femininity the music becomes a tango.
During these first seconds (less than a minute) of the opening credits
much is said about the nature of the following narrative. The mannequins are an obvious metaphor, and
one that Bava imposes upon the whole film; they represent the anonymity of the
female victim. In Blood & Black
Lace women are commodified as having aesthetic value – they are objects of
beauty (the fashion models and the mannequins) and they ostensibly have
psycho/sexual value for the film’s male viewers as sadian-sexual objects. Consider that mannequins are pre-made as
perfect symbols of the immature sexual object; they all have permanently
idealized figures and blank faces, faces which can never change to register a
complaint. Bava also enforces an aspect
of aesthetic value onto women with his colored lights. By “dressing” the mannequins in color he
mimics the agenda of the fashion designer who depends on women as the most
suitable armature for decoration.
Rustichelli’s main title’s overture also speaks for the rest of the
film, inclusive of his score: it predicts that there will be music of suspense,
violence and depersonalized sexuality.
The “Tango Fatale”, Rustichelli’s primary motif for Blood & Black
Lace, is a thematic format/dance that, although erotic, denies all the
intimacy and individualized passion of human sexuality. By stiffly ritualizing male/female coupling
the traditional tango leeches all the spontaneity and much of the healthy heat
from heterosexual union and leaves a soulless maneuver, one that can only be
repeated again and again without ever achieving resolution/catharsis/climax. This quality of formality and subsequent
impotency of the traditional tango are demonstrative of Black Lace’s
faceless assassin. He repeats the same
basic ritual/murder several times throughout the film, but a desired conclusion
is never arrived at. The film’s pair of
murderous prime movers can only finish by eliminating each other.
Immediately after the credits there is a scene of
dialogue, which sets forth the film’s fragile false premise – illegal drug
trade. Blood & Black Lace is
not about drug abuse, nor is it a detective mystery; it is an expressionistic
tone poem epitomizing wonderfully enthusiastic sadistic excess, and this in
hard contrast to feminine vulnerability.
Understandably Rustichelli all but ignores the bit of dialogue between
an addict and his girlfriend, however his score kicks in for the following
moment, and it is an instance of subliminal warning. An employee of the Christian Haute Couture fashion salon sets up
a ladder, and nervously attempts to reattach the salon’s large outdoor
plaque. The fact that visual emphasis
is placed on the metal sign being dislodged (it swings precariously in the
bitter wind of a night rain) makes clear it is an omen – beware of the
Christian Salon, its karma has turned black and death lurks. Rustichelli scores the scene with a very
unsettling Herrmannesque fragment of descending minor chords for strings. Later, his percussive accompaniment (bongos
and kettle drum over brass and cello) for footage of the assassin stalking his
first victim doesn’t merely promote tension; it also tints the killers’ actions
as being relentless and methodical. It
is practically a “work theme”, saying that this is not a one shot act of
passion but rather an enjoyable job to be done, and the killers’ labors will
continue. The alluring state of undress
that the initial victim, Isabella, is in as the killer drags her corpse away
reinstates the formula of woman as victim/object/mannequin. Isabella’s body, once it is cold and inert,
is exposed and eroticized.
One of the key visuals in the film is one of the
simplest. Marco, a drug addict (the
same fellow who earlier ineffectively reattached the salon sign), sneaks some
pills behind a divider of translucent glass.
Bava blocked this shot so that the man’s silhouette, seen through the
glass, shares the screen with a blood red mannequin. The image of the addict, a symbol of the narrative’s spurious
motive, is diminished behind the glass, while the mannequin, a mascot of the
film’s true focus, the female victim,
holds an undeniable position of prominence.
Rustichelli judiciously leaves the sight unadorned; such a flagrant
picture needs no support.
The “Tango Fatale” first appears full form during a
detective’s visit to the salon to investigate Isabella’s murder. It is a sultry, sleazy theme; reeking of
lust, greed and moral decay – a classic piece of noir film music – and I
believe it to be as potent and timeless as Barry’s Body Heat or
Herrmann’s Taxi Driver theme.
During the scenes that take place while the salon is in operation
(principally those dealing with Isabella’s diary) people are moving to and fro
as a boardwalk show unfolds for potential buyers. The models, designers and other employees are surrounded by
mannequins, and for the most part they are both solid and blood red (victims of
violence), or made of white wicker.
Both of these maintain a metaphor of hapless feminine sacrifice to
sadism. The wicker figures must mirror
how the faceless assassin perceives his targets, as being transparent and
hollow, and thus incapable of eliciting any compassion.
The stylistic core of the film manifests about a third
into the narrative. The model Nicole
arrives at an antiques warehouse where she intends to secret the diary to her
lover Frank. The warehouse is dark and cluttered with furniture, bizarre curios
and collectibles. The only light comes
from Bava’s rainbow palette of gel-tinted spots, and they breach the spatial
integrity of the sets with impunity, producing a disorienting expressionistic
tableau. Soon aware that only an intruder
awaits her, Nicole flees into the warehouse’s maze of queer shapes, shadows and
colored patches of illumination. Her
terror is palpable for she realizes that she has suddenly become prey. Bolstered by Bava’s luscious and
invigorating environmental inventions, Rustichelli’s “Tango” speaks that this
woman’s death run is naught but a game, a coldly erotic game, a union of sex
and violence, sex and death. Over
twenty years after Blood & Black Lace American slasher films would
showcase the same basic series of events involving the murder of women, but
these films are quite ugly and leave most viewers feeling sullied. Bava and Rustichelli are able to transcend
the horror of actual violence by encapsulating its cinematic guise in the
substance of their craft – murder is always ugly, but Blood & Black Lace
is beautiful! Bava and his composer
secure this by adhering to European post-Renaissance aesthetic principles; both
men are using the skills of classically trained artists. Other than the work of Terence Fisher, Roman
Polanski, and Coppola’s Dracula, such finely tuned artistic “common
sense” has not been a prevalent highlight of the genre apart from Mario
Bava. Dario Argento would later
successfully push Bava’s ideas and style into hyper-drive on such films as Suspiria
(reviewed elsewhere on this site) and Inferno.
A final note on Rustichelli’s score, and I refer to that
which backgrounds as Peggy tolerates Marco’s anxious and pitiful declaration of
affection for her, and later as she reads from the incriminating diary. Rustichelli circumscribes the two moments
with sounds befitting the supernatural, very effecting music. It seems that the only reason to do this
exists outside of the narrative’s fictional world, indicating a device
calculated to subconsciously unsettle the film’s audience. The two short scenes just mentioned could
have easily been left without music, or scored incidentally, but by tracking
them with such potent and strange phrases Rustichelli creates a sense of
unease, as if even the smallest gesture or innocuous action is still going to
be part of an all encompassing fabric of evil.
This is part of the mystique of the film, that it so completely immerses
the viewer in a miasma of sin. Unlike
Hitchcock’s Psycho, Bava’s film has no heroes and offers no hope; the
great Italian director’s painterly flair and Rustichelli’s sensual score
instead make their film visually luscious and an exercise in wicked
pleasure. However, this is not
glorifying or promoting the murder of women.
The film’s murderers do die of their own vile inclinations. Nor does Bava make the experience of murder
fun for us; he merely gives the impression that the faceless assassin is
finding murder gratifying. When I watch
a giallo or murder mystery/thriller I do not want to literally experience what
it would be like to actually be present as some mental defective tears the
flesh off of a screaming woman’s face (precisely Scorsese’s great failure with
his remake of Cape Fear). I
expect a filmmaker to be responsible in his capacity as a professional
artist/entertainer and to provide some form of a buffer between me and the
awful reality of violence and death.
Bava and Rustichelli do this in Blood & Black Lace, and the
device they use as their “buffer” is optimal – they masterfully employ the
stylistic principles of the fine arts.
This is why I refer to Bava’s “visual flair” and Rustichelli’s “sensual”
score. While watching Blood &
Black Lace I never feel I am experiencing the real world, the real world
will never be as good as any great movie!
The film doesn’t make me want to go out and kill; however it does make
me wish I also could make such an elegant and sophisticated work of art. Bava’s
visuals and Rustichelli’s music aesthetically communicate specific conceptual and
subliminal notions and conceits, for instance some of the previously mentioned
symbols and metaphor, which are refined, and alternate to the crass reality of
murder and death. This is what
successful fine art achieves, it allows for people to confront any reality,
from the sublime to the most horrific, without being corrupted by the
stimulating proximity.
There are only a few differences this reviewer can detect
between VCI’s two releases of the film.
The very recent 2005 edition is slightly more tightly letterboxed with a
16 X 9 anamorphic enhancement, providing a bit more information at the sides,
and the picture appears to be a tiny bit more crisp and bright. The second distinction involves the scene of
murder which takes place in the antiques warehouse. The current “upgraded” release displays a slight problem
involving the soundtrack being out of synch with the visuals. For instance, the masked assassin attempts
to crush Nicole by dropping a heavy trunk on her. He misses, and the deep thud of the trunk crashing down is only
heard about a half-second after it hits the floor. Oddly enough, this minor flaw, which lasts for about a minute, is
not on VCI’s original 2000 DVD release of the film. The new version has a whole second disc devoted to bonus
material; including commentary by Bava biographer Tim Lucas, interviews with
Cameron Mitchell and Mary Dawne Arden, four isolated tracks of Carlo
Rustichelli’s score (lifted from CAM’s library LP), six theatrical trailers, a
photo/stills gallery, the alternate American release Main Titles sequence, and
a comparison of the cut American print to the uncut European release. The film runs 90 minutes in this region
free, NTSC DVD set.
The score for Blood & Black Lace had been a
holy grail among aficionados of Silver Age Italian film music for almost 30
years. In the 60’s CAM released a 45
with two tracks, and a rare non-commercial library platter with four cuts. Over the years various interested parties
have contacted CAM in attempts to lease rights to the score, but to no avail.
Even Carlo Rustichelli could not convince management at the label to preserve
his music to a commercial CD, and the only certainty is that no one has ever
unearthed why. With the complete CD
release of Rustichelli’s score for Blood & Black Lace (combined with
the composer’s La Frusta E Il Corpo aka The Whip & The Flesh:
Digitmovies CDDM041 – 2 discs, 40 tracks), it now appears that the CAM “iron
curtain” has come down, or at least has developed substantial cracks. Classic
scores are now starting to get out – hallelujah!
Lastly, and offered as a curiosity, the upbeat music heard
during the scenes occurring at the Christian Salon in the midst of one their
fashion shows is from an earlier 1962 film scored by Rustichelli called Bellezza
D’Ippolita.
- John Bender
