LISA AND THE DEVIL (1974)

Mario Bava’s Lisa and the Devil opens with what could well be a preamble to either a jet-set giallo or a supernatural horror. It turns out to be not quite both. Carlo Savina’s fantastic 1970s lounge music sets the mood over some seemingly incongruous and undeniably cheesy shots of the actor, Telly Savalas, and Tarot cards, with orchestral strings, twanging guitar, and the unmistakable vocals of Edda dell’Orso. The score remains integral throughout, holding an increasingly fractured narrative together with recurring cues offering continuity clues.

The first few scenes follow a familiar pattern, not unlike The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963), the director’s low-key Hitchcockian thriller that would later be recognised as his preface to the giallo as a genre… a smartly dressed blonde woman, Lisa Reiner (Elke Sommer), is a tourist in Toledo, following a guided tour around a grand church. The main attraction is a partially preserved fresco depicting the Devil carrying away the sinful dead. The guide explains that most of the medieval image has fallen away and local superstition holds that the remaining section is preserved by the power and vanity of the Devil himself. Having just been reminded in the opening credits, we instantly recognise his face is that of Telly Savalas. Lisa seems to be transfixed for a moment before wandering off on her own.

She’s drawn by the sound of a music box—one of those recurring cues–down a narrow alley to an antiques shop where two men are discussing the restoration of a mannequin. The music box is topped by a rotating parade of six figurines that foreshadow some of what’s about to transpire, for one of them is clearly a reaper and another is a veiled bride… Lisa asks to purchase the box but is told that it’s not for sale and when one of the men, dressed in black, turns to speak to her, she recognises his face from the satanic fresco. She makes a swift exit, leaving by a different door into an eerily silent and deserted part of town where she quickly becomes lost among the labyrinthine streets.

A man (Espartaco Santoni) with an uncanny resemblance to the mannequin she’d seen earlier confronts her on the city walls. He clearly thinks she’s someone else called Elinor and becomes distraught that she doesn’t recognise him. Fearing his impassioned advances, she shoves him away, resulting in his fatal fall down stone steps. We’re just 10 minutes in but have already bought into a dreamlike breakdown of reality and don’t question the non-sequitur transition to night. Or has Lisa been wandering the empty streets for hours without coming across another soul?

A light in the darkness turns out to be the headlamps of a vintage 1922 Packard automobile suffering engine trouble which George, the chauffeur (Gabriele Tinti), is attempting to fix. The two passengers, Francis Lehar (Eduardo Fajardo) and his wife Sophia (Sylva Koscina), agree to give Lisa a lift. It doesn’t take long for Lisa to notice that there’s something between the lady and the chauffeur, and that the husband is aware of it. Finally, the car breaks down near a classic ‘old dark house’. Leandro the Butler (Telly Savalas) opens the door and after explaining they have no telephone to call for help, a woman’s voice is heard from within telling him to see them off. Of course, Lisa is quietly freaking out when a handsome stranger, Maximilian (Alessio Orano), emerges from the darkness and pleads for her to stay, explaining that his mother, the countess (Alida Valli), is not used to strangers, but he will convince her to let them stay the night…

We have no sense of the surroundings, and the house may as well be isolated by fog or flood waters. It’s the classic combination of an Agatha Christie-style set-up where circumstances bring a bunch of characters together in a contained environment, with the old dark house trope where travellers are stranded in a mysterious mansion with its strange and dysfunctional residents. Thus, it harks back to some of the earliest horror movies–classics like The Cat and the Canary (1927) and The Old Dark House (1932)—while at the same time standing apart from anything else in the genre. Mainly, it’s Mario Bava’s stylistic achievements and experimental narrative structure that marks it aside. Plus the intensely personal nature of its iconography that touches upon his lifelong obsessions in such a personal way as to be baffling to a good proportion of its audience.

Mario Bava and David Lynch have a lot in common. Both are auteurs of idiosyncratic films with intricate psychological narratives told with stylistic flair. Lynch openly acknowledges Bava’s influence, including an overt homage in the second season of Twin Peaks (1990-91) to Bava’s Kill, Baby… Kill! (1966). There is one big difference though. When David Lynch is afforded free rein, the resulting weirdness still seems to win over a significant audience. Sadly, for Mario Bava’s most personal project, this was far from the case.

His first pairing with producer Alfredo Leone was the satirical thriller Four Times That Night / Quante volte… quella notte (1971) about a case of alleged rape told from four different points of view—the woman, the man, a doorman, and a psychoanalyst – all unreliable narrators. Basically, that film was a 1970s reworking of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950)… but as a sex comedy, unsuccessfully played for laughs. Though its sociological examination of Italian gender roles of the era may still be of interest. Their second project together was Baron Blood / Gli orrori del castello di Norimberga (1972), a full-blooded Gothic horror complete with creepy castle and undead monstrosities. Its critical reception may’ve been lukewarm, but it performed well at home in Italy and across the Atlantic.

While discussing the box office success of Baron Blood and what their next collaboration could be, Bava mentioned to Leone that there was a script he’d been waiting to develop for some time and would love the opportunity, just once, to have a decent budget and complete creative control of a project from beginning to completion. Leone was convinced it was an interesting proposal and worth the risk.

It seems the screenplay already had a long gestation of around a decade during which it had grown from an initial treatment for a comedy ghost story into a fusion of supernatural suspense and Gothic horror with a convoluted psychological puzzle at the heart of its plot. The script had already passed through several hands during the writing process. Many contributors weren’t credited but inserted ideas or had simply been in discussion with Bava during the process. In addition to the credited writers, Mario Bava and Alfredo Leone, a couple of others who were probably involved were Romano Migliorini and Roberto Natale, co-writers of the excellent Kill, Baby… Kill!

Initially, Bava wanted to spend money on an attention-grabbing cast and approached Bette Davis and Anthony Perkins (Psycho) to play a mother and son that could’ve been lifted straight out of one of Sigmund Freud’s notebooks. Both actors turned him down and the parts went respectively to Alida Valli, as the countess, and Alessio Orano, as Maximilian. For me, this befitted the production because Valli is a better actress than Davis and Anthony Perkins was already indelibly associated with a psycho with mummy issues.

Alida Valli had been a renowned beauty in her youth and a promising actress destined for stardom after her starring role in The Third Man (1949). However, her career took a dive after she was associated, via her partner at the time, with scandal surrounding the investigation of the death of Wilma Montesi, a young woman linked to high society. The case had been alluded to in Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960) and part-inspired Mike Hodges’ Pulp (1972). Like Davis in her later career, Valli became typecast as bitter matriarchs and cruel mothers, though I know her best for her memorable cameos in some of the great Italian cult horror movies. In addition to Lisa and the Devil—in which she turns in the finest performance among the able cast—these include unforgettable appearances in Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980).

The international star who did accept Bava’s offer was Telly Savalas. In the script, Leandro was habitually popping gummy sweets into his mouth and chewing but Savalas didn’t like the sweets or chewing while delivering his dialogue. So, Bava suggested a lollipop instead because it was visually interesting and the actor could easily take a break from sucking to speak his lines and gesture with it, too.

The Marcus-Nelson Murders, a TV Movie featuring the character of Lt. Theo Kojak, aired earlier in 1973 and became the pilot for what was to be a hugely popular CBS crime show, Kojak (1973-78), which would be known for dealing with difficult subjects and for its grittier style. However, Telly Savalas was filming the first season in parallel with Lisa and the Devil, and the character doesn’t suck a lollipop until the eighth episode, “Dark Sunday”. Now, it’s important for younger readers to understand how iconic the ‘Kojak Lollipop’ was in the 1970s. They were ubiquitous on the counters of petrol stations and pretty much any shop, no matter what else they sold, and were among the best-selling candy products of the decade. They were bigger than Columbo’s cigars!

In the early-’70s, smoking was less fashionable as the harmful effects were becoming common knowledge, and, like many, Savalas was trying to quit. He found the lollipops helped with this and became uncomfortable with smoking in character. Hence, it was written into the scripts that Kojak was also giving up cigarettes and employing the same behavioural displacement using lollies. In a roundabout way, Bava and Savalas may have improved public health, albeit sending more business the way of dentists.

At the time he was cast, Telly Savalas hadn’t cultivated his ironic persona and was known for playing tough guys, cops, and criminals. He already had a long résumé of television appearances with his big-screen breakthrough opposite Burt Lancaster in The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962). His role of the psychopathic racist and misogynist, Archer Maggott, in The Dirty Dozen (1967) and James Bond’s recurring nemesis, Blofeld, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), proved his range. Though it was Abraham Merritt’s description of the solidly built and bald Devil in his 1928 novel Seven Footsteps to Satan that, according to Bava biographer Tim Lucas, may have influenced the casting of Leandro. That and a vague resemblance to Italy’s wartime dictator, Benito Mussolini. It’s not difficult to read the insular world of Lisa and the Devil as an allegory of Italy under his fascist regime that manipulated the masses and exploited the weak-willed, causing good people to do bad things, corrupting the collective soul of the nation.

The dehumanising control methods of fascism are alluded to in the mannequins that Leandro keeps in a wing of the mansion, tending and repairing them throughout in a way that indicates that they are somehow linked to the real guests. Perhaps something like full-size voodoo dolls that either cause or echo the trauma suffered by their counterparts. Lifelike dolls and dummies were a mainstay of Surrealist art because they cause us to question the difference between the animate flesh and the inanimate object. What changes when living flesh transitions to dead meat? Approaching Lisa and the Devil as a work of Surrealist cinema, more akin to the films of Luis Buñuel than Alfred Hitchcock, is key to engaging with and enjoying the whole experience.

The imagery of mannequins in a domestic setting no doubt recalls Bava’s own home when growing up. His father, Eugenio, was not only a notable filmmaker but also a master sculptor who carved statues of saints for churches and commemorative busts of the departed out of wood, wax, or resins. He would later use these skills in movie special effects for Mario. Bava was fascinated by how lifelike these sculptures were, yet how inanimate and obviously dead they were, too. This lingering fascination with mannequins is also conspicuous in his seminal giallo Blood and Black Lace (1964).

Bava was interested in the case of Viktor Ardisson, a necrophile who was studied and documented by psychologists after his arrest in 1901. He’d been a gravedigger who couldn’t understand the difference between the living and the dead. He became emotionally confused and violent when the corpses of young women would not reciprocate his affections. Also feeding into the script were ideas and motifs inspired by the H.P Lovecraft short story of 1925, The Vault, which suggested the solution to the problem of fitting the corpse of a tall man into a short coffin that Leandro employs.

Another source of inspiration was Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1872 novel The Possessed, which explores a similar family dynamic and features a female protagonist named Liza. Apparently, Bava paraphrased lines of Dostoevsky’s dialogue in the script for Lisa and the Devil to add some literary gravitas.

As with several stories by Edgar Allan Poe, the dilapidated mansion echoes the psychological state of its occupants. It serves as a metaphysical proxy for the accrued psychological trauma of past sins and the presence of the past affecting the present. The recurring motifs of revealing reflections and mirrors, along with concealing curtains and veils, bring ideas of self-reflection to the fore. A mirror shows us an image of ourselves, a reflection that looks and acts like us but is an illusion, an immaterial ghost. Of course, curtains and veils are used to conceal but are flimsy barriers that can be pulled aside. All these motifs speak of transitions from one side to the other side or from here to the hereafter… Lisa and the Devil is definitely a ghost story, but who is or isn’t the ghost is, at times, unclear.

It seems that Alfredo Leone regretted his decision to give Bava carte blanche and began interfering during the production. He suggested working in more sex and violence and shooting scenes in a more straightforward way, providing a more explicit explanation for the events. However, it was Leone that suggested the particularly surreal and perplexing final scenes set on board a passenger plane which clearly bewildered audiences at the time. Despite touting the finished product at Cannes in May of 1973, the film never attracted a distributor. A slightly re-edited version did get a limited theatrical run in Spain.

In an attempt to recoup losses, Alfred Leone decided to shoot an entirely separate narrative thread and recut the whole movie. He was, perhaps, inspired by how Bava had rescued the unfinished I Vampiri (1957) by reworking and reshooting an alternative version. So, Leone directed additional scenes with the assistance of Mario’s son, Lamberto, and created a similar yet different film. This bastardised redux was released as The House of Exorcism / La casa dell’esoercismo, which was distributed in Italy and the US in 1975.

Mario Bava disowned that version, and his Lisa and the Devil was largely forgotten for half a century. The home entertainment boom of the mid-1990s saw copies beginning to appear on VHS, mostly pirated from rare, and invariably cut, television broadcasts until the release from Redemption Video—a marque responsible for resurfacing many classics of Italian pulp, exploitation, and horror. It has since gained the respect it deserves as a beautiful anomaly among the works of Mario Bava and has been treated to various DVD and Blu-ray releases.

ITALY • WEST GERMANY • SPAIN | 1974 | 95 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ITALIAN

Cast & Crew

director: Mario Bava.
writers: Mario Bava, Alfredo Leone & Giorgio Maulini.
starring: Telly Savalas, Elke Sommer, Sylva Koscina, Alessio Orano, Alida Valli, Gabriele Tinti, Kathy Leone & Eduardo Fajardo.