Lisa and the Devil

Mario Bava entered the Italian film industry as an extremely resourceful cameraman, make-up artist, special effects worker and screenwriter way back in the late 1930s. However, he did not make his officially credited solo debut as director until 1960 with the exceedingly stylish Barbara Steele vehicle Maschera del Demonio (Black Sunday). That the versatile Bava’s reputation has continued to grow in the nearly 50 years since his passing is largely attributable to the international market’s embrace of horror films¹ but also because of the novelty, innovation and artistry he brought to otherwise rickety productions and lurid material in the bustling boom years from the 1950s onwards. Bava’s prolific, if precarious career, much more so than that of his successor in the horror field Dario Argento, was determined by a specific commercial expedient exemplified in the filone phenomenon – intensely exploitable but quickly exhausted fads – that underpinned Italian popular film production of his time. Mary P. Wood explains: “A filone is a strand of similar films, rather than a genre. Trendspotting successful subjects, names, themes and stars resulted in quickly made similar films, until public interest was seen to wane.”²

The strategy worked. Kristin Thompson and David Bordell point out that “[b]y the early 1960s, Italy had become Western Europe’s most powerful production center […] Expansion in the industry also enabled dozens of new directors to embark on careers. Most went immediately into the popular genres, but a few became celebrated and influential.”³ In being celebrated, influential and popular, Mario Bava’s reputation is probably second only to Sergio Leone’s. Wood clearly sees Bava as a major filmmaker: “For producer, distributor and exhibitor, economic rather than critical recognition was the primary basis for evaluating Bava’s type of cinema, but he should not be regarded as inferior to his overtly auteurist contemporaries.”⁴

By the time Lisa e il Diavolo (Lisa and the Devil, 1973) was made, Bava was in his late 50s. Although very highly respected within the industry for his formidable artisanal skill and ability to work quickly while making films that belie their cost, he was never really taken seriously as a director, despite having directed what many now consider defining classics of horror and giallo cinema. These include La frusta e il corpo (The Whip and the Body, 1963), Sei donne per l’assassino (Blood and Black Lace, 1964) – another film in which mannequins figure prominently in the story – and the hugely influential and much imitated (as well as widely banned) slasher movie blueprint Ecologia del delitto (A Bay of Blood, 1971). Brooklyn-born producer and credited co-writer Alfredo Leone gave Bava a once in a lifetime carte blanche to take on any project of his choosing after they had scored a sizeable commercial success with Gli orrori del castello di Norimberga (Baron Blood, 1972). According to preeminent Bava scholar Tim Lucas, “Bava looked upon Lisa and the Devil as his last chance to make a name for himself as a serious director.”⁵ In this respect, Lisa and the Devil is something of an anomaly. Roberto Curti writes that Bava, alongside four uncredited scenarists, “concocted an elaborate story that touched such themes as eternal return and the circularity of destiny.”⁶ Still, Leon Hunt is possibly correct in claiming that “[t]here are signs that the film wants to be taken a bit more seriously than Bava’s 1960s gothics, although [Telly] Savalas’s amused performance suggests that we are probably not intended to take it too seriously.”⁷

Lisa and the Devil

Bryan Turnock argues: “For all its adaptability, the plot of the horror film almost without exception has a straightforward linear structure, and obeys the classical Hollywood narrative of cause-effect […] For this reason it is unusual to find any ‘art’ films in the [horror] genre.”⁸ I think there are a lot more exceptions to this rule than Turnock supposes, and Lisa and the Devil could certainly be seen as one of them. Visually evocative to a degree few films of this kind can match, a preoccupation with the visual arts is as evident to me in Bava’s movies made on a shoestring as in the works of current filmmaker and once boisterous bad boy of the 1980s New York art world, Julian Schnabel.⁹ Indeed, Lisa and the Devil has horrible pleasures that can be said to hinge on a mysterious, slightly El Greco-inspired fresco. The opening scenes of Lisa and The Devil play like models of 1960s art-house ambiguity, closer perhaps to the architectural ennui of L’Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960) than to Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968). One can certainly discern an affinity with that artiest example of supernatural Americana, Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962). David Bordwell writes:

So strong was the intellectual presence of 1960s art cinema that it shaped conceptions of what a good film was […] A cinema of ambiguity required a machinery to interpret it. During the 1960s film criticism took up a task it has for the most part clung to ever since. Now a critic was to explain what a film meant – to fill in the gaps, explicate the symbols, paraphrase the filmmaker’s statement.¹⁰

Lisa and the Devil

As such, Lisa and the Devil is a richer furrow to plow than most “haunted house” films. American tourist Lisa Reiner (Elke Sommer)¹¹ is sight-seeing near the Catedral Primada Metropolitana de Santa María in Toledo when she comes across a transfixing mural depicting the devil carrying away the souls of the dead. Hearing the beguiling melody of a music-box, she wanders into a back-alley antiques shop, where the shopkeeper (Franz von Treuberg) is helping the elegant but diabolically sinister Leandro (Telly Savalas, sporting his trademark lollipop for the first time) with a life-sized dummy. Leandro is a spitting image of the fresco Lisa has just seen. Unnerved by the mental association, which is underlined by an optical superimposition, Lisa exits the shop and gets lost in the narrow alleys and cobblestone streets. Before long, she again mysteriously encounters Leandro and his mannequin, at which point the doll, through a straightforward but clever edit, seems to morph into an actual man who lunges at her.

Soon thereafter, Lisa meets the dapper Carlos (Espartaco Santoni), who looks exactly like Leandro’s doll. Overjoyed, Carlos addresses Lisa as Helena (in the film’s case, the face that launched a thousand deaths, rather than ships), welcoming her as one would a long-lost love, and claims that he has come back for her. Frightened, Lisa pushes Carlos away and he falls backwards down a flight of stairs, seemingly unconscious or dead. As a distraught Lisa runs for help, the camera moves into a close-up of Carlos’ pocket-watch, which has stopped. Without transitional scenes, night has fallen. Lisa hitchhikes with rich, bickering married couple Francis Lehár (Eduardo Fajardo), his wife Sophia (Sylva Koscina)¹²   and their chauffeur, George (Gabriele Tinti). When their pristine-looking 1920s Packard – a museum piece by the time of the film’s nominally contemporary framing story in the early 1970s – breaks down outside a remote, old-fashioned villa (actually Villa Frascati on the outskirts of Rome), they are invited to spend the night.

The escalating proliferation of timepieces in the increasingly distended time-space continuum as the story shifts locales, a skeleton is revealed in one of the bedrooms, perverse secrets emerge and the murders pile up, is extremely striking. Bava is obviously referencing Salvador Dalí’s most famous surrealist painting, The Persistence of Memory. Indeed, Lisa and the Devil adheres much more closely to Dalí’s artistic principles than a famous example of surrealism as filmed Hollywood entertainment, Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), does (even though that film ostensibly prided itself on the artist’s more or less direct involvement in the dream sequences as kind of marketing ploy). That neither film quite attains the enduring shock value or artistic brilliance of Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, 1929) is more down to the considerations and compromises of commercial feature films than the filmmakers’ talents in either case. Karl Ruhrberg’s general description of Dalí’s concerns also holds true for Bava, especially when it comes to Lisa and the Devil: “The essence of this art […] was a hallucinatory exaggeration of sexual, sadistic, masochistic, and compulsively neurotic ideas […] The disgusting and the obscene, the satanic and monstruous, were presented in a veritably theatrical way.”¹³ While there are several literary influences, including the morally committed works of Leo Tolstoy, Lisa and the Devil seems to me primarily a variation on Lewis Carroll’s children’s classic Alice in Wonderland for grown-ups, very much like the otherwise completely different but equally remarkable (as well as almost equally commercially disastrous) Black Moon (Louis Malle, 1975).

Lisa and the Devil

Lisa and the Devil is set, as the Contessa’ s very troubled son Maximilian (Alessio Orano) succinctly puts it, in “a shrine of death.” Bava expounds upon a perverse, poetic ghost story (much more visualised than actually told in any classical sense). The film is a ponderous but head-spinning nightmare, teeming with dreamy flashbacks from past lives, eloping lovers, adultery, the chloroforming and incapacitated rape of our doomed heroine, murders of passion and deceptive appearances – with impotence, necrophilia, an inverted Oedipus-complex and matricide at its black heart. A dysfunctional out-of-time family inhabit the stuffy villa, aided by the omnipresent and omnipotent butler, Leandro, to whom of course both Lisa and the audience have been introduced earlier. The matriarch of the family is a blind widow – an unnamed Countess – the always superb Aldia Valli, who is clearly channelling the painful, grandiose emotions of her greatest role, Countess Livia Serpieri in Senso (Luchino Visconti, 1954), here while, perhaps wisely, stopping just shy of her unforgettably grotesque performance as Miss Tanner in Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977).

Lisa and the Devil

Both director and producer must have sensed that Lisa and the Devil would be, in Hunt’s words, “a hard sell.”¹⁴ It screened at Cannes on 9 March 1973, but was not really accepted until a video release decades later. This complex, elegantly twisted, occasionally confusing (or perhaps confused?), plungingly romantic supernatural doppelganger-tale, beautifully underlined by Carlo Savina’s lush score (and the incomparable Edda Dell’Orso’s vocalisations), had great difficulties finding a distributor. After a minimal release in Spain under the title El diablo se lleva a los muertos, the producer re-cut the movie and added new footage in an attempt to capitalise on the then-current smash hit, The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973). The re-edited and re-titled Il Casa del Exorcismo (The House of Exorcism) was released in 1975. The by no means finicky Bava disowned the film after having shot the newly inserted scenes under protest.¹⁵

What to make of Lisa and the Devil? There is no real snobbery against Mario Bava nowadays. The reputations of previously marginal stylists in euro-cult cinema like Bava and his 13-years-younger fillone compatriot turned celebrated horror specialist Lucio Fulci, have been extremely well served by the revolution in physical media releases in the past 25 years or so. Still, I suspect that Lisa and the Devil remains profoundly unsatisfying to scores of depressingly dutiful Robert McKee acolytes who all fancy themselves as the next David Mamet. Hunt writes that “Bava’s art [is] characterized as oneiric, atmospheric, visually expressive rather than aligned with storytelling.”¹⁶ Art historians Robert Pelfrey and Mary Hall-Pelfrey are essentially correct: “Human sight is basically mysterious. Seeing always involves more than what objectively meets the eye.”¹⁷ But what meets the eye in Bava’s best films is undeniably pretty special. And as much I appreciate Ken Russell’s Gothic (1987), Lisa and the Devil suggests that Mario Bava, rather than his flamboyant English counterpart, is the true cinematic heir to romantic visionary Henry Fuseli. Bava’s most opaque and arty film above all breathes the same air of poetically imbued, familial pathology as Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, Georges Franju, 1960), to which there is a homage in the film’s devastating penultimate shot.

Lisa e il Diavolo/Lisa and the Devil (1974 Italy/West Germany/Spain 95 min)

Prod. Co: Euro America Produzioni Cinematografiche, Leone International Film, Roxy Film, Tecisa Prod: Alfredo Leone Dir: Mario Bava Scr: Mario Bava, Alfredo Leone, Giorgio Maulini, Roberto Natale, Francesca Rusica (idea, uncredited) Phot: Cecilio Paniagua, Mario Bava (uncredited) Ed: Carlo Reali Prod Des: Nedo Azzini Mus: Carlo Savini, Joaquin Rodrigo

Cast: Elke Sommer, Telly Savalas, Espartaco Santoni, Alida Valli, Alessio Orano, Sylva Coscina, Eduardo Fajardo, Sylva, Coscina, Gabriele Tinti, Franz vom Treuberg

Endnotes