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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 isn’t much of a mall, truth be told. It’s 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 didn’t 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 didn’t they have it, they hadn’t 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 don’t know about the mall video retailers where you live, but the mall retailer we have stocks a strange and wholly unsatisfying combination of the latest hits, public domain titles, anime and kung-fu movies, action figures, and manga. They have a section devoted to horror, too, a section dominated by Anchor Bay retreads of the Evil Dead movies and a scattering of the MGM Drive-In Classics titles. All at a premium price. My next choice was the recent DVD of Dark Passage, but I couldn’t bear to spend all $20 of the card on a title that I can get online for $13 (shipping and our local sales tax being a wash...). Eventually, I settled on Mario Bava’s The Whip and the Body, a film I had seen many years ago in a cropped and highly edited form (under the title of “What!” a title that was more apt than its American distributors probably knew...), and Warner’s recent House of Wax disc, both of which were on sale for less than ten dollars. What kind of video retailer has a fairly obscure S&M horror movie from Bava, but DOESN’T have Once Upon a Time in the West, I leave to your imagination...

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 hasn’t 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.

In any event, The Whip and the Body is an interesting item. The story here involves a decadent family of aristocrats who are shaken up by the return of black sheep son, Kurt (Christopher Lee), who was banished at some earlier date. Particularly perterbed by Kurt's return is Nevenka (Daliah Lava), whose relationship with Kurt is deeply and overtly masochistic. When Kurt turns up dead soon thereafter, the whole clan falls to pieces.

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 film’s heroine derives from being whipped by Christopher Lee’s character. In the context of the film, this particular drive is key to the plot (trust me, it’s 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 isn’t 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 movie’s 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.