Goodbye if You Call That Gone
The Whip and the Body (1963)
directed by Mario Bava
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Mario Bava came closer than almost anyone to directing classic Hollywood productions after the studio era was gone. He did it for pennies, and often behind a pseudonym, but those pools of primary colors sink clear to the cold October stars. His best films star Christopher Lee, a favorite actor of mine, introduced in The Whip and the Body as he spurs his horse along a darkening beach to assert his former position in a house - no, a castle - that hates him. But the real story is the woman he loves, a masochist named Navenka betrothed to someone dull as dirt. Lee's Kurt Menliff understands her secret, and indulges it. She curses him beneath the titular whip on an abandoned stretch of rocky coast and a cinematographer's dream of sunset on her back.
The elderly servants wish Kurt dead - pain is absent in their own definitions of love - and with so much collective animosity, King Death appears. But Kurt is devoted, even past death, and Lee's aristocratic face bears class resentment with a grin. So he returns, and this Technicolor romance for the ages is everything I want a ghost story to be. Lovely and macabre, sometimes sordid but never cheap, and spooky of a night at the end of an ordinary day. It's the Laura of Italian horror, only everyone's in love with a dead man.
directed by Mario Bava
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Mario Bava came closer than almost anyone to directing classic Hollywood productions after the studio era was gone. He did it for pennies, and often behind a pseudonym, but those pools of primary colors sink clear to the cold October stars. His best films star Christopher Lee, a favorite actor of mine, introduced in The Whip and the Body as he spurs his horse along a darkening beach to assert his former position in a house - no, a castle - that hates him. But the real story is the woman he loves, a masochist named Navenka betrothed to someone dull as dirt. Lee's Kurt Menliff understands her secret, and indulges it. She curses him beneath the titular whip on an abandoned stretch of rocky coast and a cinematographer's dream of sunset on her back.
The elderly servants wish Kurt dead - pain is absent in their own definitions of love - and with so much collective animosity, King Death appears. But Kurt is devoted, even past death, and Lee's aristocratic face bears class resentment with a grin. So he returns, and this Technicolor romance for the ages is everything I want a ghost story to be. Lovely and macabre, sometimes sordid but never cheap, and spooky of a night at the end of an ordinary day. It's the Laura of Italian horror, only everyone's in love with a dead man.
posted by NPK at 10:32 PM
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