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The title appears on a widescreen close-up of the eponymous rogue bwahaha-ing over his latest caper, and the ideal note of ars gratia artis is struck in a puff of candy-colored smoke. (Rush ends The Stunt Man on a similar fumetti pun.) Clad in rubber suits that let his eyebrows do the acting, John Phillip Law's Diabolik is Judex adjusted to the decade's opulent hedonism—days of derring-do are rewarded with nights at the underground lair, fully equipped with modernist jungle-gyms, Morricone ululations, and a rotating boudoir on which to roll with the micro-skirted accomplice (Marisa Mell). The inspector (Michel Piccoli) has no clue, the kingpin (Adolfo Celi) has the know-how, the government has a Terry-Thomas sputter and guffaw. "How romantic! It makes me think I'm living in the old days of Robin Hood." Where Losey's disdain for the spy-a-go-go genre in Modesty Blaise accentuates productive ugliness, Mario Bava's eye for psychedelic mayhem here augments comic-strip splendor. Animated ink spreading across a map is just the effect for these panel-like frames, vast spaces distorted by lenses and flattened by zooms. Fluttering bills, "exhilaration gas" and accompanying "anti-exhilaration gas tablets," emeralds in the incinerator. The surveillance camera hidden in the classical painting is fooled by a snapshot, the anarchic protagonist is elsewhere resurrected in an upside-down view at the autopsy table. Dalí's Le Gare de Perpignan for the 20-ton ingot on the train, a cultivated sense of pop-swank. "All I can say is it will be... sensational." The hero himself ends up a Sixties objet d'art, appropriately sculpted into a Cocteau icon under a deluge of molten gold, winking at the sequel that never came. (Or did it? The Spy Who Loved Me, Flash Gordon, Austin Powers...)
--- Fernando F. Croce |