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"Beauty, what a weapon!" (Coco Chanel) The gag is that it's Antonioni's Le Amiche as a grisly whodunit, the beguine on the soundtrack is Mario Bava's chortle. "Christian Haute Couture," a sign clanging in the wind while a maiden is killed, the camera tilts from the dragged corpse to marble effigies in the fountain. The dark woods outside the fashion palace, inside is a massive doll house where suspects rattle: Contessa (Eva Bartok), manager (Cameron Mitchell), pill-popping epileptic (Massimo Righi), dress designer (Luciano Pigozzi), antique dealer (Dante Di Paolo). Red herrings, red diary in leather purse, red ooze on satin skin. "A sex maniac in a homicidal fury" is the summary of the police inspector (Thomas Reiner), the upshot is a pile of comely cadavers. One blonde (Arianna Gorini) languishes in a sumptuous trap (darkened screen, pulsating green and purple corners) and takes a medieval spiked claw to the puss, another (Mary Arden) burns the incriminating journal and pays dearly by having her visage sizzled off on a dungeon furnace. A cinema of delirious cruelty, resplendently sinister surfaces for the fatale beauté factory. Fabrics cover unsavory desire, split the frame like scrims, veil the murderer's face. "Isn't everyone scared enough already?" Models are cut from the same mold, bodies in Bava's cosmos are at their most expressive following brutal violation. (Mannequins are mocking witnesses, parodies out of wire and infernal cloth.) The director is his own cinematographer, nothing escapes his eye, a sustained POV prowl in the opulent salon gives birth to Argento. Pièce de résistance, brunette (Claude Dantes) in bathtub with staring eyes and a billowing gore cloud. "Pretty and well-dressed until we drop," as Wharton would say, into Almodóvar's Matador it goes. With Franco Ressel, Lea Lander, Giuliano Raffaelli, Francesca Ungaro, and Harriet White Medin.
--- Fernando F. Croce |