Horror
Movie Index
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The Whip and the Body (La Frusta e il corpo),
1963, directed by Mario Bava. Daliah Lava, Christopher Lee, Tony Kendall,
Ida Galli.
A friend of mine gave me a gift card to our local Suncoast
Video store last year on my birthday. Suncoast Video is at our local shopping
mall, which isnt much of a mall, truth be told. Its a place
I generally avoid, particularly during the Christmas season (my birthday
falls uncomfortably close to Christmas). Because I had this gift card
burning a hole in my pocket, I braved the crowds to redeem it. My intention
was to pick up the new edition of Once Upon a Time in the West,
but I looked high and low through the store and didnt see it. I
finally asked the clerk if they had it and he looked at me like I had
antlers sprouting from my head. Let me check, he said. No
luck. Not only didnt they have it, they hadnt had it since
it had been released a couple of weeks before, nor did they have it on
the way. (Sheesh, they suck, I thought: a thought intensified
by the sure knowledge that the clerk in question had clearly never even
heard of the movie in the first place, a thought I continued to have during
the entire unpleasant sojourn). In their defense, they DID eventually
get it in, though by that time I had purchased the film elsewhere. I have to admit that I paused before picking up this edition
of the movie. The Whip and the Body is on VCI, a label that has
put out some slipshod editions of public domain movies. They appear to
be moving up in the world. This edition is just lovely, presented in the
correct aspect ratio and mastered from a pristine Technicolor print. This,
in itself, is something to see: Bava was exploring the limits of expressionism
through pure color during this period and this film is at the center of
that impulse. It expands on the color experiments of Black
Sabbath by loading the screen with saturated colors that function
the same way that musical cues function: each character is given a colored
lietmotif of his or her own. Best of all, Bava hasnt yet discovered
zoom lenses--a device that begins to harm his movies soon after this one.
As an abstraction, The Whip and the Body is absolutely gorgeous,
and the disc captures that. This is one of those items from
the history of European horror that demonstrates the essential folly of
film censorship. As with the butchery of Eyes
Without a Face before it, the excision of key scenes not only
makes for an incomprehensible narrative, it fouls the entire point of
the film in the first place. The two main excisions involve the sexual
pleasure the films heroine derives from being whipped by Christopher
Lees character. In the context of the film, this particular drive
is key to the plot (trust me, its key to the plot). Without them,
the film is just another gloss on the Corman Poe movies. With them,
the movie is a fascinating subversion of both the Corman gothics and the
traditions of gothic literature in general, a movie in which the essential
masochism of the heroes of gothic literature is explicit and brought to
the foreground. This isnt a new idea for Bava--he explores it in
great detail in Black Sunday--nor is
this the first time he approached it as an examination of the Madonna/whore
dichotomy and as an aspect of feminine sexuality (again, Black Sunday).
Hell, the movies most shocking moments are pale shadows of the best
scenes in Black Sunday. But Black Sunday separated its scenes
of sex and violence. The Whip and the Body fuses them...which,
of course, is what got the film into trouble. |