Mario Bava’s 1963 film The Girl Who Knew Too Much is generally considered the first Giallo ever made. While it does contain many of the hallmarks of that genre, it is missing one important ingredient: color. It was filmed totally in black and white.
As if correcting his own mistake Bava’s next turn into the genre would be absolutely exploding with color. Blood and Black Lace is one of the most colorful films I’ve ever seen. The genre forevermore would make great use of bold color schemes.
Bava was an artist and cinematographer before he became a director and it certainly shows with this film. Every scene is a painting. Every shot is beautiful. Even the violent ones.
He constantly uses different colored spotlights (red, blue, green, etc.) and will shine them on a specific object in his scene so that in any given shot, multiple things will shine bright in specific colors. One set is filled with mannequins, all of which have their own colored lights, and billowing curtains, again with different colored lights shining on them. It gives the entire thing this beautiful, yet eerie look.
His use of shadow and light is entrancing. Everything truly is astonishing-looking.
It is the story that lets me down. A black-gloved, masked killer is murdering beautiful women at a modeling agency. A police detective tries to solve the case. Everyone is a suspect. Everyone has an opinion on who the real killer is. A secret diary, red herrings galore, and all sorts of backstabbings and skeletons are in the closet. That sounds good, but something about its execution just doesn’t do it for me.
I think the lack of a real protagonist, or at least someone to root for causes my interest to lag. We wander from character to character, learning their dark secrets and thus their potential to be the murderer without ever really caring for them.
But Giallo has never been a genre that was all that concerned with telling a good story. It is about style, and Blood and Black Lace has that in spades.
What’s amazing is how this film, the second-ever Giallo, has pretty much every hallmark of the genre. This is the gold standard by which every other Gialli came into existence.
The killer has a black trenchcoat, a black hat, and black gloves. Here he wears a faceless mask that obscures everything about him, even his gender. He prefers blades over guns. The motives are psychosexual (presumably), and the victims are beautiful women. The camera is all gaze, objectifying the women as they become victims. Implicating us as it thrills us. And as I say it has style for days.
If you are interested in Giallo this is where you begin.
I previously wrote a review of Blood and Black Lace for Cinema Sentries, you can read it here.
themidnightcafe.org 