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"Weeping bride, laughing wife, laughing bride, weeping wife," as the proverb goes. Bridal veils with sanguine stains comprise the central image, used by Mario Bava like Hitchcock used blondes, "the virginal snow that shows up bloody footprints." The hunky industrialist (Stephen Forsyth) contemplates the word "paranoid" with his half-shaved jaw before a mirror, and finds it delightful: "The fact is, I'm completely mad," he narrates, and proceeds to illustrate it by applying gleaming cleaver to newlyweds. The fashion rituals of Blood and Black Lace ("husbands buy the garments for their wives, and the models for themselves"), extended to a society obsessed with imposing and deforming ideals of female purity. The criminal mind is a hothouse filled with gaudy flowers, says the police inspector, for the protagonist it is closer to the harem of mannequins he keeps underground—a mock-lyrical realm contrasted with the razzing of his wealthy wife (Laura Betti), femininity at its most docilely static versus at its most riotously discordant. Their matrimony is slashed short, though Betti's spectral Mona Lisa smile continues to materialize to spoil his newfound bachelorhood. (A deft reversal: The nagging phantom is seen by everybody but the culprit, until she decides otherwise.) The "ridiculous and brief drama" of life, the Freudian mystery at the bottom of it all, the handbag full of ashes that won't stay put. Buñuel's Ensayo de un Crimen is evident enough to suggest a conscious analysis, so are Germi's dissections of macho befuddlement (Divorzio all'italiana). With its flashes of grinning opulence, Bava's comedy modulates voluptuously toward a madman's Rumpus Room, and the fertile junction of Italian and Spanish Seventies horror. With Dagmar Lassander, Jesus Puente, and Femi Benussi.
--- Fernando F. Croce |