Category: 1964

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

Sergio Leone | 1hr 39min

When the Stranger first arrives in the rural border town of San Miguel, the reception from its locals is foreboding. A noose hangs from a withered tree, warning visitors away from the lawless justice that runs rampant. From a distance, he observes a small child trying to sneak into a building, only to be kicked out and shot at as he runs back to his mother. As he rides down the street, the civilians aren’t much friendlier to him either. “I reckon he picked the wrong trail,” one mouthy bandit scoffs. “Or he could have picked the wrong town,” his companion retorts, before their small gang sends the Stranger’s galloping off in a panic.

It only takes a couple of minutes for our hero to deliver fierce retribution. With four swift gunshots, he wins the quick draw against their entire crew, and sends them to early graves. It is also in this moment that we see three separate artists make their first major step towards culture-defining excellence.

Leone works magnificently in scenes with minimal dialogue, stretching out the silence of this opening scene with taut suspense, and offering nothing but a few signifiers of the danger that lurks ahead.

As the Stranger stands alone in his poncho against a daunting arrangement of outlaws along a wooden fence, Sergio Leone’s fine orchestration of his editing and staging ominously build their interaction to an impasse, before shattering the tension with an angry, violent bloodbath. This sequence was not only a resounding artistic breakthrough, but also marked the beginning of the Western genre’s most significant shake-up to date. Where America sought to define its own national mythology through fables of good vs evil, Leone’s importation of these archetypes into Italy infused them with a harsher, grittier edge, cynically leaning into the moral grey areas of history that never found easy resolutions. Perhaps even more impactful on his style though was the cinematic nihilism of Akira Kurosawa, with samurai film Yojimbo providing the narrative template upon which A Fistful of Dollars is based.

Superb blocking of faces in the frame, inventively using the full horizontal scope of the widescreen format for something other than a landscape.
Leone was a huge admirer of Kurosawa’s action and editing, though where his idol often drew out the cinematic brilliance of sword fights, Leone built scenes towards sudden, jarring shootouts that explode with violence.

Also key to this pivotal scene are the distinctive musical cues of Ennio Morricone – and of course the accompanying silence that he wields with solemn purpose. A sharp, short series of descending notes on a flute accompanies the Stranger’s slight head raise, matching his piercing glare as it emerges from beneath his hat brim, and a high-pitched whining on strings carries us all the way to the inevitable gunfire. From there, Morricone continues weaving textured layers all through his score for A Fistful of Dollars, creating a sound which in decades to come would be recognised as the quintessential ‘sound’ of the Western genre. Whips crack, bells toll, and male voices chant in robust unison, while underscoring the bold, silent presence of the Stranger with blaring trumpets as he daringly strides into hostile territory.

Clint Eastwood was not yet a star in 1964, but his breakout role here would ensure he would be one for many decades to come, defining the new image of a Western hero for a generation.

It is impossible to imagine A Fistful of Dollars without either Leone or Morricone at the helm, but the final part of their trio would in time become the face of Spaghetti Westerns, and eventually transcend even that niche. Clint Eastwood’s screen presence is undeniable as the Stranger, squinting into glary landscapes and mumbling past a cigar that sits in the corner of his mouth. Faced with a town that is split between two rival families vying for control, he uses his sharp mind and sharpshooting skills to orchestrate their downfalls, though it is also the mystery that shrouds his stoic demeanour which turns him into such a compelling figure. After all, he is the Man with No Name, unbeholden to any title, status, or allegiance. When asked by the captive Marisol why he is helping her escaping the factions she has been traded between, his response is vague, yet hints at a past that has hardened him into an aggrieved, avenging angel.

“Because I knew someone like you once. There was no one there to help.”

This is a man driven by an internal sense of right and wrong, and Leone holds no regard for whether we believe he goes too far in certain instances. His quick anger and readiness to kill mars the image of the classic Western hero upheld by Hollywood throughout its Golden Age, yet he is nevertheless the closest thing to a saviour that San Miguel has. Even after being brutally beaten by his enemies, still he refuses to yield, instead recuperating in a cave and eventually being reborn from it as a Christ figure destined to deliver the town from evil.

Only when the Stranger is brought to his lowest can he rise again to claim victory – it is the story of Christ and so many other mythological figures of history.
Only with his wide-angle lenses and wide aspect ratio can Leone achieve shots like these, essentially capturing both a wide and close-up in one.

After all, the feud which divides San Miguel is deeply entwined with matters of prejudice, greed, and corruption. On one side, the Mexican Rojo brothers control the flow of liquor, while the white American Baxter family smuggle guns across the nearby border. Outside of both, the Stranger proves his wits in outsmarting them equally, spreading a rumour in the wake of a recent assault from the Rojos that two survivors escaped and are willing to testify against their attackers. After he props a pair of exhumed corpses against a gravestone outside town to appear alive, both families race to the cemetery and engage in a gunfight, shooting the ‘survivors’ in the process.

The distraction couldn’t have worked better for the Stranger. This is the opportunity he needed to empty the town and poke around the Rojos’ base, which Leone deftly intercuts with the battle he instigated unfolding several miles away.

Perhaps the Stranger’s most ingenious trick, setting up two dead bodies as survivors from a recent massacre, and forcing both rival families to meet at the graveyard.

It is ultimately this mutual, self-destructive hostility between the clans of San Miguel which sets in motion their own demise. Falsely believing that the Baxters helped the Stranger free Marisol from their grip, the Rojos retaliate with unrelenting fury, setting their house on fire and mercilessly massacring those who try to escape. If it weren’t for this display of utter cruelty, perhaps the Stranger’s attempt to dismantle these corrupt power structures might have been a little more forgiving. Now as they sadistically torture his closest ally Silvanito out in the open though, Eastwood projects a ferocity unlike anything we have seen from him before, commanding a wide shot that establishes him as the true law and order of this town.

Low angle, centre frame, dust swirling in the air – the Stranger’s return is an image of indomitable power.

Bullets cannot harm him as he fearlessly strides down the main road to face his would-be killers, instead lodging in the handmade plate armour protecting his torso. The rhythmic, accelerating pace of Leone’s montage, Morricone’s score, and the magnificent blocking of actors once again drive up the tension, though with a few added camera zooms and extreme close-ups studying each bead of sweat, the suspense also becomes unflinchingly visceral. With six gunshots, the Stranger disarms the leader Ramón, and dispatches his band of cronies. With a seventh, he severs the rope binding Silvanito’s wrists, and after challenging Ramón to a quick draw, the eighth takes his life.

Leone plays the final shootout to perfection, using every cinematic tool as his disposal – including his trademark extreme close-ups which study every bead of sweat glistening on these brows.

In using every cinematic element at his disposal to craft suspense and set pieces, Leone stands right next to a select few elite filmmakers in cinema history, including both Hitchcock and Kurosawa. Even outside of these gripping sequences though, A Fistful of Dollars also reveals his magnificent command of establishing shots, particularly using Techniscope technology to stretch vast, dusty landscapes across a wide canvas and draw dynamic compositions from beautifully designed interiors. When the arresting majesty of his crane shots is considered next to his creative framing of faces, Leone can’t help but reveal the influence of D.W. Griffith in his camerawork as well, proving his similarly extraordinary mastery in capturing both the epic and the intimate.

Three layers to Leone’s depth of field, pressing faces up against the camera while others linger in the background.
An arrangement of bodies in the frame to rival the masters of Old Hollywood.
Horizons stretch far across Leone’s long shots, revelling in dusty, desaturated landscapes.

The cumulative result of such varied techniques is operatic, serving a narrative that carries a far greater scope than its 100-minute runtime would suggest. Next to such grand achievements, the awful voice dubbing in A Fistful of Dollars barely warrants a mention, besides an appreciation for Leone and his crew’s perseverance through such a trying production. It seems that all it took to push the genre forward was the voice of an outsider who had never stepped foot in America, yet nevertheless had the talent and vision to cynically undermine its revered mythology, delivering a portrait of the Old West drenched in blood, sweat, and violent anarchy.

The perfect crane shot to end this Western fable, lifting us far above the carnage that litters the main road.

A Fistful of Dollars is available to rent or buy on Apple TV, YouTube, and Amazon Video.

Red Desert (1964)

Michelangelo Antonioni | 1hr 57min

Ever since young mother Giuliana was caught in a car collision that left her with lingering trauma, the world hasn’t seemed quite right. The industrial Italian town where she lives with her husband Ugo and son is an inhuman landscape of bizarre, alien structures, twisting steel beams and pipes around engines that never seem to stop churning, and chimneys that spit out blasts of fire. There is nothing vaguely hospitable about the harsh angles they impose on their environment, and neither is there any warmth to be found in strange beeps and clangs that constantly echo through polluted open spaces.

Still, under Michelangelo Antonioni’s dreamy direction we are left to question – how much of Red Desert is simply the perception of an unstable psyche, and how much is the real degradation of modern society? It is often difficult to discern where the cold, metallic sound design ends and where the synthesised score begins, ringing electronic wavelengths through the atmosphere to maddening effect. Few others who live here seem as disturbed by the ravaging of nature as Giuliana, who wanders its greasy factories and contaminated estuaries in a state of lonely discontent. She desperately desires the company of others, but even more than that she yearns for them to protect her from the sickness of the world, blocking it out like a barrier of empathy rather than steel or cement.

“I don’t know myself. I never get enough. Why must I always need other people? I must be an idiot. That’s why I can’t seem to manage. You know what I’d like? I’d like everyone who’s ever cared about me… here around me now, like a wall.”

A marvel of location shooting following in neorealist tradition, as Antonioni sets his psychological drama around the petrochemical plants and rustic docks of rural Italy.
Steel pipes and machines hem Giuliana into tight spaces – harsh, unwelcoming, and austere mise-en-scène.
Formal rigour in the repeated patterns of industrial structures, dominating Giuliana with sheer mass and multitude.

For now though, all that surrounds Giuliana is the industrial “architecture of anxiety” as critic Andrew Sarris labels it, physically dominating her slight frame at every angle. Red Desert is visually distinct from Antonioni’s previous works as his first film shot in colour, but it is also very much a thematic continuation of his ‘Alienation’ trilogy, using the shapes and patterns of modern infrastructure to lose his characters in confusing, inhospitable environments. Rather than islands or cities though, Red Desert is primarily shot on location around the petrochemical plants and rustic docks of rural Italy, uncovering an awe-inspiring beauty in those manufactured structures that were not designed with aesthetics in mind. Instead, it is the purely functionality of these formations that Antonioni relishes, framing their spatial symmetries, parallel lines, and geometric configurations with rigorous precision in his astounding long shots, and carefully blocking his tiny human subjects among them.

Not content with limiting himself to the landscape’s natural colours though, Antonioni pushes his visuals even further with tints of vibrant artifice that break through the monotonous, desaturated greys. Proclaiming his desire to “paint the film as one paints the canvas,” the Italian filmmaker took to his mise-en-scène with literal cans of paint, subtly accentuating the scenery’s neutral tones while aggressively splashing lively reds across the frame.

A thorough dedication to every detail in his mise-en-scène, painting the fruit, cart, wagon, and wall slight variations of a dull, grey palette.
Antonioni aggressively interrupts the noxious grey scenery with jarring flashes of red.
Excellent formal consistency in Red Desert’s aesthetic, delivering an array of astounding compositions throughout minimalist interiors and industrial exteriors.

The strongest use of this palette comes in the radio telescope set piece, stretching an enormous length of crimson scaffolding far into the distance while workers climb its triangular trusses. Given its alien appearance, the structure’s purpose is not immediately obvious, though the explanation that it allows humans to “listen to the stars” makes sense. This is a culture with its eyes turned upwards rather than inwards, paying far more attention to the undiscovered ceiling of human progress than the quality of day-to-day living. While impressive leaps are made in astronomy and energy technologies, the Earth and its inhabitants waste away in silence, struck by physical and psychological illnesses that all originate from the same place.

The radio telescope set piece is an extraordinary highlight, stretching an enormous length of crimson scaffolding far into the distance while workers climb its triangular trusses. This is a culture with its eyes turned upwards rather than inwards, paying far more attention to the undiscovered ceiling of human progress than the quality of day-to-day living.

As a result, the settings that Antonioni captures in Red Desert often border on apocalyptic. Piles of corroded debris obstruct shots of Giuliana’s aimless roaming in junkyards, and a brief retreat into a riverside shack with friends offers only temporary respite from the dense fog gathering outside. Antonioni’s blocking of bodies remains impressive even in medium shots here, tangling them around each other in lounging positions that look none too comfortable, and continuing to weave in his red palette through the tarnished wooden walls.

Frame obstructions in the vein of Josef von Sternberg, crowding out the foreground while those in the background are visually subjugated.
Bodies twist around each other in uncomfortable positions – there is intimacy to be found in this dying landscape, but it is forced and unpleasant.

The moment a ship carrying diseased passengers drifts into shot through a window though, the brief comfort that Giuliana that found here immediately dissipates, and she reverts to the hysterical state that her nightmares have often brought on. Not only did she attempt suicide shortly after her car accident, but her following experience being hospitalised left her with a harrowing fear of “Streets, factories, colours, people,” and of course any illness that might once again render her helpless. The silhouetted figures of her friends staggered through the mist outside are more ominous than they are comforting under these circumstances, agitating her to the point that she tries to escape in a panic and nearly drives off the end of the wharf. The visual metaphor that Antonioni composes here of Giuliana’s car ready to tip over the edge of the world is devastatingly bleak, with the tall, unlit beacon tower diminishing her presence and the grey negative space eerily beckoning her into the void.

Physical and psychological sickness docks outside the cabin, dissipating Giuliana’s brief comfort as she reverts to her hysterical state brought on by nightmares.
An ominous staggering of bodies throughout the frame in the heavy, suffocating fog, using three different depths of field.
Antonioni’s visual metaphor is devastatingly bleak, with the tall, unlit beacon tower diminishing Giuliana’s presence and the grey negative space eerily beckoning her into the void.

When Antonioni isn’t trapping Giuliana within wide open expanses and behind architectural obstructions, it is his shallow focus which softly detaches her from these surroundings, envisioning her subconscious defence mechanism. It is an unusual device for a filmmaker so attached to his crisp depth of field, and yet its formal introduction in the out-of-focus opening credits and emphasis on Monica Vitti’s subtly expressive face in close-ups is wielded with exceptional care, isolating her marvellous performance against red, liquefied backdrops. She is filled with an aching hunger to simply connect with another being, and yet the more she reaches out, the more lost she becomes. When she finally makes love to a man, Antonioni’s disjointed editing keeps their passion at a cold distance, and her attempt to communicate with a German sailor by the dockyard is painfully hindered by the language barrier between them.

The shallow focus of the opening credits is often brought back through close-ups on Giuliana, placing us in her detached head space.

Unfortunately, the emotion that Vitti pours into this role is not always reciprocated by Richard Harris as Corrado, her husband’s business associate and the one man she connects with on a personal level. Neither does the magical realist bedtime story interlude that whisks us away to a distant island paradise formally integrate so well with the rest of Red Desert’s grim naturalism. Still, Antonioni’s stark cinematic ambition cannot ultimately be overshadowed by these flaws as he works his obsession with rich pigments into Vitti’s capricious character.

Though she erratically claims to be scared of colour, she also dreams of filling her unopened ceramics shop with it, opting for light blues and greens in a subconscious reaction against the angry red steel of her outside environment. Whether it is the pink walls of her bedroom of the green décor of Corrado’s tidy living room, Antonioni often uses the soft palettes of his interiors to offset the vibrancy of his landscapes, though visually these amount to little against the sheer mass of the world’s barren greyness.

Various interiors briefly diverge from Antonioni’s monotonous palette, offering fleeting respite from the world’s barren greyness.

If our humanity is to break through at all, it is not in acts of individual expression, but the giant displays of human industry mounted on arid plains, spewing yellow smoke into the dirty air. Passing birds know not to fly there, Giuliana poignantly explains to her son, though it is a sad state of affairs to begin with that such innocent creatures must be taught to navigate manmade danger in a world that no longer has a place for them. At this point, there are no easy solutions to reverse society’s reckless pursuit of progress and profit, Antonioni realises. To live is to merely survive, and yet in though slow deterioration of Red Desert’s earth, air, and water, even that is dangerously at risk.

Yellow fumes spew from industrial chimneys, filling the air with poison that keeps the birds away.

Red Desert is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and the DVD or Blu-ray are available to purchase on Amazon.

All These Women (1964)

Ingmar Bergman | 1hr 20min

There is little wonder why All These Women has been so maligned over the years as one of Ingmar Bergman’s worst films. This brightly coloured pastiche is about the furthest thing one could imagine from the black-and-white meditations on faith and love which have defined his greatest artistic triumphs up to this point. Even his previous comedies such as Smiles of a Summer Night carry a more eloquent wit than the slapstick and buffoonery he happily indulges in here, and which one snobbish music critic awkwardly inflicts on the film’s country chateau setting while visiting famed cellist Felix. Cornelius hopes to write a biography on the reclusive musician and additionally get his own composition broadcast on the radio, but unfortunately his host has made himself scarce, leaving the writer in the hands of his seven female companions. Bergman is swinging wildly in all directions with his comedy, but the point of his derision is firm – this industry of artists and critics is a totally vacuous farce.

Quite significantly, All These Women also marks Bergman’s foray into colour filmmaking, imbuing Felix’s grand summer estate with a Baroque radiance that is ironically tempered in a largely monochrome production design. The towering candelabras, marble floors, and undecorated walls are pristine in their silvery whiteness, while costumes and the odd piece of furnishing imprint dark shapes on the mise-en-scène. As such, the small flourishes of colour that Bergman inserts truly stand out in his scenery. The flowing pink gown Cornelius wears while in disguise, the dusty orange sunrise shedding light across Felix’s bedroom, and the vivid red outfits at his final concert each become the centrepiece of multiple compositions, many of which carry the symmetrical precision of Peter Greenaway’s films.

Bergman’s first film shot in colour is a lush display of vibrant visual direction – clearly influences of Michael Powell and Jean-Luc Godard in the set and costume designs.

Of course, Greenaway was still sixteen years away from his cinema debut at this point though. Bergman’s actual influences here are incredibly diverse, appropriating the Technicolor vibrancy of Michael Powell’s mannered dramas, the heightened physical comedy of the Marx Brothers’ zany hijinks, and the formal self-reflexivity of Jean-Luc Godard’s genre deconstructions. Though a little subtler, the parody of Federico Fellini’s 8½ in All These Women is also notable. Both films share a dazzling Italian spa set and a postmodern critique of artistic egos, but Bergman’s strongest critique of the Italian filmmaker is directed at his relationship with women.

Despite the choice to shoot in colour, Bergman still often builds sets out of black-and-white, emphasising isolated splashes of vibrant hues – here, the red quill.

Much like Guido’s dream in 8½, Felix is surrounded by a harem of adoring female fans in All These Women, played by many of Bergman’s frequent collaborators including Eva Dahlbeck, Harriet Andersson, and Bibi Andersson. There are seven in total, many bearing nicknames drawn from art history, Irish legend, and Christian theology. Bumblebee is his “official” mistress who takes an immediate liking to the foppish Cornelius, while Adelaide is his discontent wife, and Isolde is the flirty chambermaid. Filling out the rest of the female ensemble is Felix’s ageing patroness, his student protégé, his young cousin, and his piano accompanist, each serving their own clearly defined roles in his home, and collectively serving his outsized ego.

All These Women is closer to Peter Greenaway in its visual design than any other Ingmar Bergman. A rapid yet brief shift of gears that pays off in this instance, despite its formal flaws.

Though the imagery he crafts from his rigorous blocking of these women clearly indicates a director who has trained in the art of visual composition, it still possesses more of a still-life, painterly aesthetic than we have seen from Bergman before. Characters pose in tableaux of upper-class elegance around lounges, sculptures, and grand pianos, making for a brilliantly jarring contrast to his otherwise lowbrow humour. While the women gossip at the poolside surrounded by Greek-style columns and sculptures, Bergman ruptures a splendidly composed wide shot with Cornelius’ abrupt appearance in a swan-shaped pool float. The critic’s humiliation only intensifies when later pushed to dress in unconvincing drag, hoping that he might finally be granted audience if Felix believes there is a new woman on the estate. Even the musician’s graceful cello music has an incongruent counterpoint in the recurring instrumental motif of ‘Yes! We Have No Bananas’, amusingly shifting musical styles with each new variation.

Visual comedy played in wides like Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, even turning to drag as a source of laughs.

Still, for a director like Bergman with such powerful command over comedy and drama though, it is evident that he is not always playing to his strengths. Some of the film’s harshest critics will point to its sped-up chase scenes, overlong physical gags, and parts of Jarl Kulle’s exaggerated performance as evidence of the film’s messiness, and they aren’t entirely wrong. Even with the targets of Bergman’s satire in mind, much of this humour is far too clumsy.

When Bergman develops his comedy with a little more self-awareness though, he hits on something far more inspired. One could almost imagine Monty Python pulling off a similar trick when he cuts away from Bumblebee and Cornelius’ sex scene, flashes up title cards reading “To avoid censorship, the act of lovemaking is depicted as follows,” and segues into a tame, black-and-white ballroom dance. Similarly, when Cornelius accidentally sets off a box of seemingly unlimited pyrotechnics, Bergman is sure to inform us that “The fireworks should not be taken symbolically.”

These comedic formal interludes are extensions of Godard’s self-reflexive whimsy, and presage Monty Python by a few years.

There’s no doubt that this is among Bergman’s most formally experimental films to date, and by far his most playful. On a structural level he is often pulling his narrative in non-linear directions, and even chooses to open the film with the final scene of Felix’s funeral. His fate is thus sealed from the start and is seemingly confirmed when an assassination plot is revealed – ludicrously motivated, as it turns out, by Felix’s own desire to be executed for demeaning his art. When the time comes for his big radio concert where Adelaide will pull the trigger though, there is no need for murder. Felix anticlimactically dies of natural causes, leaving his women to mourn and Cornelius to conjecture the rest of his biography alone.

Always hiding Felix’s face through creative shot compositions, right up until his sudden demise. Bergman builds on his mystery even further when the women can’t even agree on a single description of him.

Even in death, this object of everyone’s worship is an obscure, mysterious figure. His face has been conveniently obscured the whole time, leaving a great deal to the imagination when each women sees his dead body and vaguely proclaims “He looks the same, and yet so different.” Perhaps each of them have conceived their own unique ideas of him, as when Cornelius begins reading his biography, none can agree on a single description.

Again, the symmetry and precision of Greenaway many years before his debut – Bergman’s painstaking direction is as rigorous as ever.

Not that it really matters at this point. The arrival of a new cellist in the house immediately soaks up all the love, affection, and attention once reserved for Felix, thereby relegating him to the pages of Cornelius’ history book. That we never really knew a whole lot about the famed musician makes this a particularly smooth transition. In the conceited world of All These Women, men are but faceless idols cycling in and out of fashion, hiding with infatuated fanatics behind facades of highbrow culture. Through Bergman’s irreverent pastiche and mischievous mockery, at least one truth becomes absolutely evident – art has no real relevance to the narcissistic pretensions of artists.

Fourth wall breaks everywhere, acknowledging the artifice of the satire.

All These Women is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.

Blood and Black Lace (1964)

Mario Bava | 1hr 24min

An artistic paradox like Blood and Black Lace is hard to reckon with – aside from the awful screenplay, performances, and dubbing, Mario Bava crafts a visually spectacular slasher film that places an eerily uncomfortable tone and atmosphere above all else. Fourteen years later, Dario Argento would take inspiration from Bava’s lighting, colours, and camerawork to create a flawed masterpiece plagued with similar issues in Suspiria. Although Blood and Black Lace does not reach the same transcendent heights, the audacious, bloody style of this early Italian giallo film remains a singularly jaw-dropping accomplishment of horror filmmaking, disturbing our senses as much as our sensibilities.

When a masked killer starts knocking off models in a Roman fashion house one by one, a mystery emerges around whose identity lies beneath that stretched piece of white fabric and fedora, as well as a diary that seems to hold dark secrets. Narratively, Blood and Black Lace falls in the Psycho lineage of slasher films, particularly in the dual identities that reside within a single, featureless figure. Visually though, Bava’s film has more in common with Michael Powell’s psychological thriller Peeping Tom, as vividly clashing colours wage wars across his expressionistic mise-en-scene.

Shocking jolts of red bursting through the mise-en-scène, especially in these unusually vivid mannequins – like humans drenched in blood and sex.

There may not be a more appropriate setting for such a transgressive display of stylistic bravado than the fashion house of creatively brutal murders which Bava presents us with here. Aggressively eye-catching aesthetics are just as important to him as it is to this ensemble of models and designers, with its green, pink, purple, and blue lighting setups turning dressing rooms and hallways into a Technicolor fever dream. Sometimes these lights pulse rhythmically along with the suspenseful pace of the scene, like a silent ticker counting down to the next murder, and in one shot Bava even backlights the silhouette of an outreached hand against a wall, turning the killer into a Nosferatu-like figure. The boldest visual choice here though is by far the prominent red palette bursting through in unusually vibrant mannequins, curtains, costumes, and set decorations. Its significance isn’t hard to pick out in a narrative that so blatantly features bloody murders and sexual perversities.

A Nosferatu-like hand reaching out across a wall – expressionism in its visuals and references.
Bava’s camera wanders from room to room, soaking in the lighting and production design with eerie anticipation.

Supplementing Bava’s outrageous production design is his rolling camera, tracking through his dangerously stunning sets with an air of anticipation about it, at times quietly swinging from side to side as if keeping an anxious lookout. It is even active in the masterfully creative opening credits right at the start, moving across frozen tableaux of the cast striking poses like the models they are playing in the film, or perhaps like the disposable figurines Bava himself is using them as in his violently murderous plot. It is evident that he didn’t cast them for their talent, after all.

Few films have opening credits this beautifully inventive, as Bava’s camera tracks across these actors striking poses.

Much like Hitchcock there is also a distinct objectification of the human body in the camerawork, not so much gazing with sexual intent than to give us the cold perspective of a killer. With equal fascination, Bava also lingers on ordinary items given extraordinary significance within the narrative. As several characters eye off and swirl around a handbag containing the scandalous diary like a slow seduction, his point-of-view shots come at the object from several angles at a time, uneasily anticipating one of them to snatch it away.

A Hitchcockian focus on objects of desire, and a particularly effective shot here keeping the fashion show in the background of it all.

In the hands of almost anyone else, Blood and Black Lace could have easily been an utter failure. There is little that is redeeming about this screenplay of absurd logic leaps, and yet the audacity and tension of Bava’s expressive cinematic style is impossible to argue with. This is a giallo director who loves his pulp and lifts it up on the highest artistic pedestal, and in this dramatic inconsistency we find a wholly unique vision of horror as a genre that, for better and for worse, can reach across the full spectrum of cultured and trashy tastes.

Blood and Black Lace is currently available to stream on Tubi.

Marnie (1964)

Alfred Hitchcock | 2hr 10min

Alfred Hitchcock was getting clumsy as he moved into the later stages of his illustrious career, or at least in the case of Marnie, inconsistent. One could also say the same for Tippi Hedren, though she never exactly reached the same great heights. The result of their collaboration here is a film that is certainly flawed, but which still successfully weaves a captivating mystery through Marnie Edgar’s traumatic triggers, all to discover why she compulsively steals, reacts viscerally to the colour red, and is shaken so deeply by thunderstorms.

She is first introduced to us as a sum of her actions and body parts – a stolen yellow handbag, a yellow key, hands ruffling through wads of cash, hair dye washing down a sink, the point of a heel, and of course, a gloriously dramatic face reveal as she whips her newly-dyed blonde hair back, shedding her old disguise. Hitchcock’s camera follows her around with a beguiled fascination, slyly tracking the back of her head through office spaces, lifting into magnificent crane shots as she loses control of her horse running across open fields, and in moments of panic, tracking in on her face as if to close the world in around her.

An excellent introduction to this character, tracking her from behind and remaining in close-ups of her action until the face reveal.
A fantastic crane shot as Marnie loses control of her horse on this open field, Hitchcock lifting his camera to dizzying heights.

The first time we see Marnie’s aversion to the colour red, it is when she catches sight of some gladiolas in a vase. Later, she faints when accidentally dripping some red ink onto her white outfit, and each time Hitchcock flashes red across his frame, enveloping her in a mindset where there is nothing else but that which causes her deep terror. Its manifestation rarely takes a single form, but simply in associating the colour with different objects and ideas, Hitchcock layers Marnie’s aversion to it with implications of romantic passion, blood, and later when she hallucinates a thunderstorm flashing red lightning through the room, the presence of physical danger.

The frame flashing red whenever Marnie’s triggers appear, a formally repeating motif tying her inextricably to the colour red.
The storm flashing red lightning, a hallucination that further builds out Marnie’s unstable psyche.

Perhaps this is why Hitchcock dresses her predominantly in cool colours, as she tries to maintain an icy distance from others. Serving a parallel purpose to this is her thieving, allowing her to indirectly interact with the world while keeping up a barrier. In an expertly composed wide shot within an office building, Hitchcock splits his frame down the middle with a wall that isolates Marnie through a doorway off to the right, trying to crack a safe. On the left-hand side, a janitor slowly advances towards the camera, leisurely mopping the floors, and with neither realising the other’s presence, the dramatic irony is thick in the air. Though she narrowly escapes in this incident, she isn’t so lucky when wealthy publisher Mark Rutland sees through the façade. In his intrigue, he decides to solve the mystery of her compulsive habits and bizarre triggers, becoming a bridge (though certainly a troublesome one) between her and the outside world that she has strived to avoid.

Hitchcock often rightly gets credit for his ability to create tension from camera movements and editing, but here the frame is completely static, and he lets his blocking of actors speak for itself.
A short, sharp cutaway of Marnie’s heel falling to the ground as she tries to make her silent escape, caught in an unexpected canted angle.

Mark is somewhat of our vessel down this winding path to discover the single, unifying explanation behind Marnie’s erratic behaviours, though Sean Connery also has no qualms about playing him as a bit of jerk. Despite this selfishness, Hitchcock frequently binds us to his observations of Marnie as a subject of fascination, and when she briefly goes missing on a cruise ship, his panicked run through its hallways and across its decks proves to be a great opportunity for Hitchcock to build out the intricate architecture of the space, shooting him against low ceilings and down narrow hallways that take on the appearance of a claustrophobic labyrinth.

Mark running through this labyrinth of corridors caught in low angles, closing in around him as he searches for a missing Marnie.

And indeed, we do eventually get answers, though unlike so many of Hitchcock’s greater films these revelations leave us hanging on an unfinished note, as if he is not sure what to do with this information. It certainly isn’t helped by Hedren’s overwrought handling of Marnie’s final breakdown immediately preceding this moment either. It is rather Hitchcock’s ability to make us lean forward in moments of unbearable intrigue and tension that turns this film into an enthralling study of compulsive behaviour, rotating through visual motifs that come to define the troubled mind at its centre. There may be a great deal more consistent psychological thrillers out there, but the dramatic unravelling of one of Hitchcock’s greatest characters gives it a power that so many others barely even touch.

Hitchcock returning to his famous dolly zoom to send us into this flashback, warping the proportions of the entire frame.

Marnie is currently available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Google Play.