The Girl Who Knew Too Much

“It happened right there,” Nora says to her new friend Laura, pointing with her eyes to the place where, on her first night in Rome, she witnessed a brutal murder. “How could that be?” Laura responds nonchalantly, looking through her purse for her keys. “We were at home and we didn’t hear a thing.” Indeed, how could that be? The previous shot in Mario Bava’s La ragazza che sapeva troppo (The Girl Who Knew Too Much, 1963) has located us at the Piazza di Spanga (Spanish Steps): a landmark whose architectural iconicity has been framed by the film like a picture postcard via a low-angled pan. Now Nora turns to look at the city once more, narrowing her eyes in confusion as she tries unsuccessfully to reconcile two contradictory images of Rome. In its unsettling oscillation, this characterisation of the eternal city is one of the great pleasures of Bava’s film, where the dynamic that propels all action is the exquisite play between light and dark.  

The Girl Who Knew Too Much stars Letícia Román as Nora Davis, a young American who travels to Rome on vacation. When her elderly host dies in the middle of the night and she goes to look for help, Nora is mugged and knocked unconscious. As she comes to, she sees through bleary eyes a man in the Piazza pull a knife from a woman’s body before dragging her into the shadows. In her confusion, Nora collapses again and is found in the morning by a police officer – but when she tries to report the crime she witnessed, no one will believe her. The young doctor Marcello Bassi (John Saxon) does all he can to distract Nora from dwelling on this traumatic event, but the young tourist cannot forget what she saw. As an avid fan of pulp murder mystery novels, Nora is propelled by her literary training to solve the mystery herself.

Made between Bava’s directorial debut La maschera del demonio (Black Sunday, 1960) and 6 donne per l’assassino (Blood and Black Lace) – the 1964 film which would cement the generic parameters of the cinematic giallo – The Girl Who Knew Too Much has good-looking lead actors, a title track by pop star Adriano Celentano, and a clearly signalled affinity with the murder mysteries of Alfred Hitchcock, but it was Bava’s least commercially successful film. It is, by conventional standards, tonally uneven, and is the last black and white film shot by a director who would soon come to be known for his groundbreaking use of lurid and deeply saturated colour. But it is a very important film in the contexts of Bava’s filmography, the history of the Italian film industry, and the giallo genre’s development – where it not only represents but self-consciously enacts a transition from the literary to the cinematic.

As an homage to Hitchcock’s work (especially The Man Who Knew Too Much, which Hitchcock made in 1938 and then remade as a Hollywood picture in 1956), The Girl Who Knew Too Much foregrounds a great affinity between Bava and his British counterpart’s stylistic and thematic predilections. But the Italian film’s pointed reference Hitchcock’s popular thrillers was also a marketing strategy designed to appeal to Italian audiences who, by the early 1960s, were more interested in genre films coming out of Britain and the U.S. than home-grown horror. In 1962, the Italian government lifted the import restrictions, screen quotas and dubbing taxes implemented to support and protect its domestic film industry in the post-war period; these policies had been highly successful in establishing the industry as an international powerhouse of film production, so they were no longer necessary to keep in place. But the change meant that smaller Italian productions suddenly found it more difficult to secure financing. In response, local producers of low-budget horror movies and Westerns established co-production deals with U.S. distribution companies like American International Pictures (AIP). This arrangement was especially important for financing Italian horror films in the early 1960s because, at this time, English-language audiences were Italian genre cinema’s most important markets. Writing about this period, Kevin Heffernan notes that “Italian audiences disliked locally produced horror films so intensely that the credits of Italian horror films were often Anglicized in the hope that moviegoers would think they were British imports from Hammer or other companies.”¹ 

While Italian productions tried to cater to their local audiences’ taste for American and British movies, U.S. distributors would release alternative edits of Italian genre films to cater to American audiences. It was this particular transnational industrial context from which The Girl Who Knew Too Much emerged. Having acquired Bava’s directorial debut La Maschera del demonio from Italian studio Galatea in 1960, AIP released an English-language edit of the film (retitled Black Sunday) for a theatrical run in America, where it achieved significant critical and box office success. Seeking to capitalise on this lucrative partnership, Galatea and AIP entered into a co-production deal which helped to finance, amongst other films, Bava’s Il tre volti della paura (“The Three Faces of Fear”), known in the U.S. as Black Sabbath. For this film’s 1964 theatrical release in North America, AIP chose to screen it as a Bava double-feature with The Evil Eye: an alternative edit of The Girl Who Knew Too Much distinct enough from the 1963 version released in Italy that it can be considered a different film. 

Beyond being dubbed into English, The Evil Eye edit dispenses with The Girl Who Knew Too Much’s omniscient narrator and relies instead on the protagonist Nora’s internal dialogue as voice-over narration. It also replaces the Italian version’s use of the Adriano Celentano track “Furore” with a score by Les Baxter, and substitutes key scenes from the opening and closing sequences to produce an entirely different tonal register. For Bava biographer Tim Lucas, the AIP cut is actually the superior film; The Evil Eye is lighter but more tonally consistent, and is undoubtedly funnier than the Italian version.² As Kier-La Janisse has argued, the alternative narration in the English-language edit gives its female protagonist far more agency than she has in the Italian cut by providing a resistive counterpoint to the “gothic constraints” of the film’s narrative.³ Without this insight into Nora’s experience in The Girl Who Knew Too Much, we rely on the perspective of those who question her vocalised account of events. The silencing of Nora’s subjectivity also emphasises her body: the flash of her bare legs as she lays unconscious on the Spanish Steps, or the arresting close-ups of her eyes as she witnesses and remembers the traumatic event. But within the film’s strikingly conceived and articulated aesthetic system, the image of the eye during the moment of shock foregrounds the importance of the ‘testimone oculare’: the eyewitness who is unsure of what they have seen and so must take on the role of the detective in order to understand or remember. Through its repetition in Italian murder mystery films made after The Girl Who Knew Too Much, the close-up of the eye becomes an expressive representation of what catalyses the giallo plot: a stranger sees something they shouldn’t have. 

In sketching the quintessential giallo protagonist, introducing the serial killer (whose elaborate methods of victim dispatch are rooted in psychological disturbance or trauma), and its privileging of mood and striking composition over narrative cohesion, The Girl Who Knew Too Much coalesces tropes that Bava would go on to elaborate as a cinematic schema. But the film can also be read as a response to the narrative cliché of the young woman on a “fish out of water” adventure in Rome – a trope popularised throughout the 1950s and early 1960s by films such as Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953), Three Coins in the Fountain (Jean Negulesco, 1954) and Rome Adventure (Delmer Daves, 1962). In such films, the use of location shooting and travelogue-style montage sequences position us to engage with the city via a tourist’s gaze, where iconic sites become stages for encounters with unfamiliar traditions, ancient history or European cosmopolitanism. In Bava’s film, Nora’s suitor Marcello tries to steer her towards this experience of the city: he takes her out to see what he describes as the “real Rome”, which he ensures may be “a dream, perhaps”, but “a nightmare, never”. As the couple ascend the Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti, now bustling with tourists and Romans going about their day in the sunshine, Marcello asks: “Does this look like the kind of place women get murdered?” Nora pulls him towards the scene of the crime, but the camera takes us in the other direction, to where a row of couture-clad models are posing for a fashion photographer. Nora’s story is simply incompatible with the idea of Rome that cinema has led us to believe in. 

But when night falls and Nora is alone, shadowy figures again emerge from the darkness. Her telephone rings but there is no one on the other end of the line. As Nora moves closer to uncovering the truth, the overrepresented image of Rome begins to give way to something more sinister, and Bava’s characteristically inventive compositions and extraordinary use of light reframe the city as a gothic locale. Although their endings differ, both edits of Bava’s film refuse to reconcile the two sides of Rome that Nora experiences as a tourist who also plays the amateur detective. Instead, The Girl Who Knew Too Much unsettles the eternal city in way that continues to resonate through the many films that it inspired. 

La ragazza che sapeva troppo/The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963 Italy 86 mins)

Prod Co: Galatea Film, Coronet Films Prod: Massimo De Rita Dir, Phot: Mario Bava Scr: Ennio De Concini, Sergio Corbucci, Eliana de Sabata Ed: Mario Serandrei Mus: Roberto Nicolosi Art Dir: Giorgio Giovannini Cos Des: Tina Grani

Cast: John Saxon, Letícia Román, Valentina Cortese, Titti Tomaino, Luigi Bonos, Milo Quesada, Walter Williams, Marta Melocco, Gianni Di Benedetto, Dante DiPaolo

Endnotes