Danger: Diabolik

Viavision [Imprint]'s Blu-ray of Danger Diabolik is video-wise pretty much identical to Shout! Factory's release from earlier this year. It isn't the exact same encoding, as Shout!'s framing carries the thin black bars of 1:85 matting and [Imprint]'s is opened up to 1:78. (I checked left-right in a couple of places, and am convinced that the image has not been enlarged). The difference will be negligible to all but the Aspect Ratio Gestapo. Both audio tracks seem the same as well.

I know well the luxury of being able to double back on a second commentary for the same film, to correct whatever errors one made the first time. Here Tim Lucas gets to revisit Diabolik after a fifteen-year gap. His first track was a friendly Q&A discussion with the late John Phillip Law, revealing the actor to be a down-to-earth congenial type. For [Imprint]'s exclusive commentary Tim returns to his academic-analytical route. He digs into the original Italo comic strip, the aborted first production attempt, and Bava's false start with actress Catherine Deneuve (!) as Eva Kant. We also enjoy additional details about the not-so-terrific relations between Bava and his producer.  De Laurentiis apparently saw the need to micromanage and critique every expenditure even though Bava left untouched most of the budget placed at his disposal.

Tim also offers nice info on numerous production people, like the great designer Flavio Mogherini and the experts that filmed the underwater scenes. He notes that the sitar heard on the Morricone soundtrack came before the Beatles popularized all things Indian, but after George Harrison had used the instrument in a couple of Beatles tracks. He looks at the writers assigned to the show -- I have a copy of a Diabolik screenplay by Dino Mauri with Adriano Baracco, translated into English for Paramount's files. It has many similarities to the finished film, especially near-identical dialogue bits... were they taken from the original comic strip?

The tone, context and most details are different in this first draft. Eva Kant is given a 'Robby the Robot'- like robotic valet as comic relief, besting the talking computers of Modesty Blaise and Barbarella. Eva and Diabolik have much more to say to each other, and the dialogue is more domestic, mock-argumentative. In this draft Diabolik murders at least four cops in the first scene. Diabolik shows Eva the corpse of a girl in the trunk of his car, that he used as part of a crime caper: nobody can be allowed to see his face and live.

Bava and the add-on writers reshaped the material quite a bit, dropping most of Diabolik's cynical, casual homicides. It's still a bit off-putting when he kills some ordinary policemen. In this script our 'hero' slaughters people as a daily habit.

Diabolik was Mario Bava's biggest foray into mainstream high-stakes filmmaking; Lucas affirms that he was not at all happy working that way. As a cameraman back in the 1950s Bava is said to have resisted directing at all. He likely saw too many directors frustrated by business politics and big-money interference. Rather than lose control he retreated to ever-smaller productions.

Most of Tim's technical explanations of the special effects are illuminating, and the ones I disagree with probably have more to do with terminology than a misunderstanding on his part. Tim examines the film's design theme of circles and that strange 'color tunnel' behind the main titles. My personal take always related it to the graphic transition device in the Batman TV show, the spinning comic art-thing.

The second new extra is an audio presentation by Kat Ellinger, heard over a repeating background of production and advertising images for the film. Ms. Ellinger gets deep into genre, design and textural issues, and even gender politics. Using her free-association format, Ellinger provides future students with a gold mine of thematic references to steal for term papers. She offers multiple arguments for the superiority of Diabolik's anarchic world-view over the conformist, Manichaean politics of the Marvel superhero universe.

The standard Paramount extras produced for the 2005 DVD are here as well. We still shake our heads at the clueless 1968 trailer -- Tim Lucas identifies the trailer narrator as Telly Savalas!  The Batman craze had surely become America's closest point of identification with Diabolik so it's hard to understand why Paramount's advertising would downplay the film's comic-book spoof aspect. Instead of introducing America to a new fumetti anti-hero, the U.S. trailers and posters just show a generic action-guy doing 'action stuff' like shooting a machine gun, scuba diving and squeezing a blonde girlfriend covered in money.

I'm told that by now this Australian release of Danger Diabolik might be a collector's item: [Imprint] is listing both it and Major Dundee as sold out, but perhaps that's only from the company store.

[Imprint]'s cover illustration 'flops' the movie's standard poster illustration left-to-right. For some reason the composition looks improved, although the text on the $20 bills is backwards. Yes, I had to use a magnifying glass to check.