Blood and Black Lace (1964) Style Over Substance in Vignettes of Violence (Review)

Newly restored from its original negative and presented in its original uncut form, Mario Bava’s classic 1964 giallo Blood and Black Lace has recently been released by the good people at Arrow Films. Starring Cameron Mitchell and Eva Bartok, this stylish slasher concerns a series of murders centring around Rome’s famous Christian Haute Couture fashion house. It’s a seminal movie that effectively drew up the rulebook for the giallo genre and, in turn, influenced the innumerable Hollywood slashers that followed, as well as the work of auteurs such as Martin Scorsese, Pedro Almodóvar, and of course, Dario Argento.

Now I guess all good murder mysteries require a confession, so here’s mine. I love Italian cinema – and I truly love the neo-realist classics that summarised the immediate postwar reality of the nation, the spaghetti westerns that served as allegories for Italy’s political sympathies, and the poliziotteschi that depicted the socio-political turmoil of the so-called ‘Years of Lead’. I’m sure regular readers of my reviews will no doubt be able to testify to all of that, but I’ve never really been a big admirer of giallo.

I don’t even know why that is because, as a child, I loved reading my grandmother’s Agatha Christie collection, and given my fondness for all things Italian and my adolescent reading, you would think that these films should be catnip for me but, in truth, they always leave me a little underwhelmed. In reality, I only really rate 1970’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and 1975’s Deep Red – both of whom were directed by Dario Argento. It’s this ambivilence that meant that my watching of Blood and Black Lace for this review was actually the first time I’d laid eyes on this much respected example of the genre. So what did I think, and am I now a convert to giallo?

The first thing that anyone must say about Blood and Black Lace is that it is an absolutely beautiful film that’s a real visual treat, and Bava’s use of colour is nothing short of astonishing – literally popping out from the dimly lit, shadowy baroque sets. It’s only fitting that a movie about a masked serial killer stalking and slaying the models of a prestigous fashion house should look so stylish and gorgeous, and Bava’s decision to shoot even their brutal demises with an appreciation for colour lends the film an almost pop art visuality. This is best exemplified by the now notorious sequence featuring the murder of Tao-Li (Claude Dantes), lying supine in the bath as her assailant slits the wrists (off screen), of her already drowned body to make her death look like suicide. A cloud of scarlet blood blossoms across the clear, still water surface until it eventually obscures her wide-eyed, lifeless features.

It’s not just the look of the film that screams cool, cosmopolitan sixties style either, as there’s also the percussive, jazzy score from Carlo Rustichelli, whose main theme – ‘Atelier’ – easily sets up the chic mood. This goes hand in hand with Bava’s impressive opening title sequence that introduces each character as they stand silently and impassively in the shadows. Interestingly, Rustichelli doesn’t to go for the obvious in complementing the plot of Blood and Black Lace, and where most composers might reach dizzying crescendos once the body count starts to rise, Rustichelli actually strips the orchestration right back as the bloodlust of our masked killer takes its inexorable hold.

So, it’s a visually gorgeous film, but is it a good movie? Well, here’s where my usual reservations make themselves known.

There are no characters here (seriously, none at all), as everyone is just two-dimensional, and when the purpose of their existence is just to be bumped off, my attention starts to wane. To its credit, Blood and Black Lace has an interesting red herring at its heart – the murders only appear to be erotically charged as a means to throw the police off the scent of the real perpetratror and their MO. That doesn’t stop my feeling that the female victims are little more than objects to be brutally dispatched, even though Blood and Black Lace is one of the tamest giallos in terms of violent spectacle (they can get much more lurid and gory than this). It does leave me a little cold when the murders are just violent, sexually-implied spectacles with nothing underpinning them beyond the culprit going ‘ha, fooled you’, and given that the killing spree actually builds towards something revealed in the last act, it’s a real shame that the characterisation remains so flat. If you want to pay that off you really need to make the audience feel something about these people.

I get that this was intentional, and that Bava wanted style over substance as he really wasn’t interested in making a movie about a murder investigation – the kind of film that would indeed require character. What he really wanted to do, and what he undoubtedly achieved, was a flamboyant movie in which the mise-en-scène was key, which is why the visuals are so glorious and do all the work. It’s the vignettes of violence that have Bava’s attention, and that’s what he wants you to remember, appreciate and praise.

Yes, there’s easily a really good film in this about the nature of misogynist violence in a capitalist enterprise that is ostensibly for women, but is hidebound to operate within a patriarchy. A film about kink and repression giving way to pure financial greed, and an investigation that concludes with the sobering knowledge that, despite finding the killer, the crimes represented by their actions will continue in a wider context. But that’s not really Blood and Black Lace. That’s a film for someone like Elio Petri, who subverted the poliziotteschi from within in 1970’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion. Bava made the film he wanted to make, and maybe I just need to appreciate giallo films for what they are.

After all, it is a beautiful film.

The extras for this beauty are also a real treat, and include an audio commentary from Bava’s biographer, Tim Lucas. The extras also contain a documentary entitled Psycho Analysis, that looks at the origins of giallo and contains interviews from the likes of Dario Argento, Lamberto Bava and Steve Della Casa, each of whom also take part in the 2014 panel discussion on Bava’s filmography. There’s an appreciation of the movie from Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani – the husband and wife creative duo behind The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears and Gender and Giallo, and a visual essay by Michael Mackenzie (a.k.a. crime writer M.R. Mackenzie, whose novels I have reviewed on here from time to time), that looks at the genre’s relationship to societal upheavals of the 60s and 70s. Also included in the extras is also an episode of David Del Valle’s TV series The Sinister Image that’s devoted to star Cameron Mitchell, the usual compendium of trailers, galleries, alternate opening sequences and, a limited edition sixty page booklet featuring writing – new and old – about the film, a fold-out, double-sized poster with new and original artwork, and six double-sided collector’s postcards.

Mark’s Archive: Blood and Black Lace (1964)