|
The title is part of the effect in Mario Bava's grand erotic hallucination, the curled whip that becomes erect in the scoundrel's hand. Velvet credits yield to a cobalt dusk with a castle on rocky shores, inside are secret passageways and old traumas rekindled by the sadistic brooder (Christopher Lee). His beloved (Daliah Lavi) has married his brother (Tony Kendall), his father (Gustavo De Nardo) has disowned him, the vengeful servant (Harriet Medin) keeps a dagger with his name on it under glass. The reunion on the beach doesn't take off until he's covered his sister-in-law's back with welts, soon he's a corpse taken by crimson-robed monks into a glowing green crypt. "You can't stop the hand of fate," a circular pan around Lavi at the piano is followed by a zoom to the window, where Lee stands with a bloodied neck. James, Poe and Brontë are the uncredited modalities, Liebestod is virtually called out for the heroine's trajectory from corseted noblewoman to bedeviled wanton. Love and hatred as two sides of the same coin, the spirit of the tormenter with the lash of desire. "Why do you torture me?" "You've always loved violence." Hammer horror is the point of departure for the blur of the carnal and the spiritual, building to a Munch amalgam (Madonna, Death and Love) gleefully set ablaze. Bava has the perversely liberating romance as a master class in color and movement: A tracking shot down a torch-lit corridor contemplates highly variegated pools of light, in the signature image Lee's ravenous leer slides from baleful azure to ecstatic scarlet as he floats toward the delirious maiden. Corman's Gothic visions are stylistic comrades, the deeper kinship though is to Buñuel's Abismos de Pasión. With Ida Galli, Luciano Pigozzi, and Jacques Herlin.
--- Fernando F. Croce |