An MIA ‘film prodigal’ has been returned to the fold, thanks to this well-curated restoration and remaster. Long unavailable in good condition, we can finally enjoy Riccardo Freda’s Gothic masterpiece as it should be seen, in glowing color and with a choice of language tracks. The tagline “His candle of lust burnt brightest in the shadow of the grave!” only hints at the taboo of necrophilia, but the movie doesn’t play coy: mad surgeon Robert Flemyng loves Barbara Steele not for herself, but as a body on which he can project memories of transgressive sex games with his previous wife. Bring the kids!  It’s told with powerful expressionist images — and playful hommages to Alfred Hitchcock.

The Horrible Dr. Hichcock
Region B Blu-ray
Radience
1962 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 87 & 76 min. / Limited Edition / Street Date October 23, 2023 / Raptus: The Secret of Dr. Hichcock, The Terror of Dr. Hichcock / Available from Radience / £19.99
Starring: Barbara Steele, Robert Flemyng, Silvano Tranquili Montgomery Glenn, Maria Teresa Vianello Teresa Fitzgerald, Harriet White Medin Harriet White, Spencer Williams, Vera Drudi
Cinematography: Raffaele Masciocchi Donald Green
Production Designer: Franco Fumigalli Frank Smokecocks
Art Director: Joseph Goodman
Costume Design: Italia Scandariato Inoa Starly
Film Editor: Ornella Micheli Donna Christi
Original Music: Roman Vlad
Written Screenplay by Ernesto Gastaldi Julyan Perry
Produced by Luigi Carpintieri, Ermanno Donati Louis Mann
Directed by Riccardo Freda Robert Hampton

I guess the time has finally come to trash that old 16mm TV print of this movie. The thing is in blurry B&W, missing bits of scenes and riddled with bad sprockets. Yet back in the 1970s we watched it again and again while trying to figure out what was going on. It led to the writing of a 1997 Images article, aided by conversations with a friend from UCLA, author James Ursini.

We worked at the Theater Arts Reading Room in UCLA’s special collections department, which had full catalogs of key film culture magazines. Two concentrated paragraphs in a 1962 issue of The Monthly Film Bulletin nailed the film’s concerted hommages to key images from The Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. It enumerated what it characterized as playful re-creations of visuals remembered from Rebecca,  Suspicion,  Foreign Correspondent,  Under Capricorn and  Vertigo. Non-Hitchcock Gothics quoted or subsumed into this show are Cukor’s Gaslight (you’re going crazy, Cynthia!) and Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (the nighttime walk down the scary path). This was of course years before Brian De Palma made the re-staging of Hitchcockian visuals serve as the backbone of his thriller Sisters.

Also an inspiration was the film criticism of Raymond Durgnat, who as early as 1967 described the cult surrounding the swooning fan adoration of star Barbara Steele. Durgnat claimed High Art status for the film’s funeral scene. Rain pours, but a glint of sunlight hits the lens with a momentary prismatic rainbow effect — a effect Durgnat described as poetic.

Before home video every fan and film critic harbored lists of ‘unavailable’ movies they badly wanted to see again. A picture seen in Technicolor on a giant screen in 1960, might only be accessible in infrequent TV airings, or not available at all. During the 1970s a list of key Alfred Hitchcock pictures were almost completely out of circulation. Rare museum and FILMEX screenings of Vertigo were almost legendary occasions. After getting a quick look at poor copies of  The Seventh Victim and  Eyes Without a Face, we waited ten years to see them again.

Only now has The Horrible Dr. Hichcock surfaced in a truly worthy home video presentation — unfortunately, only for collectors with Region B accessibility.  ^*  Our first thoughts on the movie can be read online in the 1997 Images essay Women on the Verge of a Gothic Breakdown and a review of the not-so-desirable 2016 Olive Films Blu-ray.

After seeing L’Orribile Segreto on this terrific new disc, we’ve collected a few thoughts to revisit.

1) Roman Vlad’s music is an enormous asset.  The music score haunts the movie. The funeral dirge and the lighter hallucination theme alternate throughout yet never grow repetitive. So little of the picture is communicated through dialogue, it’s practically a Gothic Concert, functioning like the operatic music scores of Bernard Herrmann and Ennio Morricone. It mirrors Dr. Hichcock’s obsession, which is felt as much through the music as through Robert Flemyng’s intense performance.

Beware ‘original soundtrack’ offerings of the Roman Vlad score. Those I have heard are sourced from the rough, mediocre-quality audio of the American release version, editing around dialogue and sound effects.

2) Don’t forget the Vertigo connection.  The extras and commentary on this disc don’t make much of Horrible’s most expressionistic device, the red glow that suffuses the morgue chamber when Bernard Hichcock feels his ‘secret passion’ taking over. I don’t think the effect (or the film’s lighting scheme in general) owes a lot to Mario Bava, although these working Italo filmmakers were a close bunch. Tim Lucas has shown evidence that Bava was regularly consulted by many of his colleagues, including Federico Fellini.

A literal neurotic, erotic haze of light.

Going with the  hommage flow, the red glow in the morgue is derived directly from a scene in Vertigo. Anticipating the recreation/resurrection of his beloved Madeline, James Stewart’s Scotty Ferguson has gone erotic-nuts in a way not unlike Dr. Hichcock:  he also wants to make love to a dead woman through the body of another. Hitchcock & cameraman Robert Burks express Scotty’s obsession with a weird hazy lighting effect.  When Judy/Madeline finally materializes in a doorway, she’s half-hidden in a shaft of eerie blue-green light. Vertigo’s Scotty is no less ‘sick’ than Bernard Hichcock.  Both men are engaged in ‘romances’ that abuse women as objects in a private fantasy.

Bernard’s second scene in the morgue does not use the red glow effect, even when he’s able to touch the object of his desire. But the expressionist red lighting returns for Cynthia’s subjective hallucination in the canopied ‘funeral bed.’ The drugged Cynthia confronts her husband’s ‘naked desire,’ which not only blasts fever red, but also transforms him into a ghoulish vision of lust.

Visual note: in Cynthia’s drug-hallucination scene, Bernard’s bloated, distorted face ‘rhymes’ with a much earlier image.  Cynthia presses her face against a rainy window pane, peering at a ghost vision of Bernard’s first wife. Rivulets of water produce distortions of a different kind, creating a striking expression of Gothic vulnerability.  ↓

3) The dissolves added by Technicolor for the American version.  As a film editor, I have to believe that the movie originally had almost all straight cuts, as did a great many European films that didn’t want to incur a steep optical bill. The straight cuts make for several efficient, dynamic transitions. Cutting directly from Bernard with a syringe in the O.R., to him performing the same action in his ‘funeral room,’ tells us without dialogue what he’s injecting the same drug into the compliant Margaretha.  ↓ The purposeful jump cuts ‘read’ as smooth as silk.

I would wager that Sigma III’s American editor added the dissolves to a neutral shot of a carriage for the same reason that American studios were resisting what they saw as ‘mistakes,’ affectations of the French New Wave that went against desired ‘continuity’ conventions. The prosaic American version spells it all out, showing Bernard’s coach ride home. Editorially we can see that the revision editor must freeze frame on the shots of Bernard holding the syringe, to make the dissolves possible.

Further proof of this is visible near the end, at the beginning of the aforementioned hallucination scene. Bernard bends to pick up Cynthia, and there’s a hard cut to Cynthia in the funeral room, now alone on the canopied bed. Here’s where a conventional editor would have been justified with a dissolve, as it is something of a jump cut. Only the unbroken music tells us that something isn’t missing.

The cuts/dissolves issue is not obscure. For 1969’s The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah’s editors also wanted to use ‘European’ straight cuts to transition to the film’s varied flashbacks. By 1968 straight cuts were becoming common everywhere, but Warners preferred old-school standard ‘wavy dissolves.’  Was that because straight cuts were deemed too modern for a film set in 1913?

4) I still like my fantasy embellishing the film’s Psycho connection, based on the report that director Riccardo Freda threw out the script’s entire original ending. Is the insane, disfigured woman resting in that rocking chair really Margaretha, or was she once meant to be a corpse, with housekeeper Martha impersonating her to freak out that usurper Cynthia?  Critic Chris Fujiwara reports that his researches prove that such was not the case. Given how the film’s last scene now plays as flimsy, disconnected nonsense (“I’ll use her blood to restore your beauty!”) we’ll hang on to our fantasized Psycho hommage, just because it’s such a good fit … and pretend that the film’s ‘Mrs. Danvers’ character asserted herself at last.

Radience’s Region B Blu-ray of The Horrible Dr. Hichcock is a very satisfying collector’s item. It is billed as a new restoration-remaster from original Italian elements, and the picture on view confirms it — nothing has looked this good before. The English reviewers remarked on the original show’s Technicolor beauty, and the encoding here gives the same impression. The Italian cinematographer did wonders on a movie shot in just a couple of weeks.

The Limited Edition has everything we want. The first disc carries the full-length uncut version in original Italian and original export English. They carry the correct original main titles as well. L’Orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock has a beautiful original Italian audio mix. The dubbing of Robert Flemying and Barbara Steele into Italian is excellent, and the dialogue script sounds very natural.

The alternate export English-language version is also uncut and full length. C’era una volta, its onscreen title was no more than a rumor: Raptus: The Secret of Doctor Hichcock. Barbara Steele is dubbed, leaving the English audio track with one benefit, Robert Flemying’s distinctive vocal performance. The actor may have not liked the role, but he gives it his all. When we aren’t immersed in Barbara’s ‘Gothic corridor wandering,’ we’re absorbed by Flemyng, who putters about in a state of nervous anxiety, mulling over his guilty secret. He’s fascinating to watch even when events begin to get confused. Some of the background dialogue patter is weak in this English-language export mix. When Margaretha bids goodnight to her recital guests, the thin voice tracks are doubled up, producing an unwanted echo effect.

The second disc contains only the American (Sigma III) version of the film, a cutdown that Radiance forgivingly describes as ‘re-ordered.’ It carries the crude main title replacement The Horrible Dr. Hichcock that we’ve had to watch for years. The opening is rearranged, some scenes are dropped and others shortened. As noted above, some transitions have been altered to include unnecessary dissolves. The Sigma III audio mix was always inferior, with hissy surface noise throughout. It’s missing some sound effects but adds a few corny dialogue lines here and there.

The extras are all on the first disc with the uncut version of Hichcock. Horror expert extraordinaire Kat Ellinger is now part of the Radiance company; she shares a conversational audio commentary with Annie Rose Malamet, the self-described lesbian vampire expert with the podcast Girls, Guts & Giallo. Their track isn’t all feminist observations. Toward the end, some of their comments note elements of décor, or point out that an on-screen scalpel is a phallic reference. They’re into the film’s pursuit of sexual delirium, but speak from a position of higher learning. I’ll need to read more about the duality of forces ‘Apollonian’ and ‘Dionysian.’

Research authority Tim Lucas’s commentary is not scene specific: his proposed essay for a booklet proved too lengthy so he recorded it as an audio commentary. Tim combines much of what he’s learned about the making of the show with a detailed run-down of its various versions. The descriptions of differences between the two cuts are minutely detailed, and not always easy to follow. He identifies the ‘Raptus’ titled version as having been screened in Canada. Even more interesting are Tim’s intuitions about missing connective tissue, like the nature of Cynthia’s ‘nervous condition’ when Bernard fell in love with her — is her propensity for fainting an actual psychological condition, that Bernard could take advantage of when she’s unconscious?  Tim also muses about other scenes possibly re-ordered in editorial.

Author Madeleine le Despencer is another voice with an unusual message. Her video talk relates ideas in Hichcock to transgressions beyond mere necrophilia, themes of diabolism and extreme morbidity. She includes images of disturbing ceramic artwork of ‘rapturous autopsies’ on beautiful reclining females, fully dissected. Ms. le Despencer’s art-oriented approach reminds us of the 1962 Ornella Volta book Le vampire, the French original edition of which demonstrates that horror in art and film is an expression of taboo sexual desires.

Another interesting contact is academic Miranda Corcoran of Kat Ellinger’s magazine Diabolique, whose video essay traces the Gothic thread in film and literature. Dr. Hichcock is perceived as yet another ‘Bluebeard’ character in the context of the so-called Women’s Film.

The original Italian trailer is busy, loud, and exciting, and at almost three minutes, very long. The wait for this title is over, at least for Region B. The ‘resurrection’ by the English label Radiance has really done the Horror Film a service.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Horrible Dr. Hichcock
Region B Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements, apparently all New:
Audio commentary by Kat Ellinger and Annie Rose Malamet
Audio commentary by Tim Lucas
New interview with screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi
Visual essay on Bluebeard in gothic film by Miranda Corcoran
Madeleine Le Despencer on necrophilia and taboo gothic
Trailer
Gallery
Reversible sleeve featuring designs based on original posters
Illustrated limited edition booklet featuring
New essay by Chris Fujiwara
Archived making-of article by Alan Y. Upchurch, Tim Lucas and Luigi Boscaino interviews with Freda, Steele, Flemyng and others
Critical overview essay by Cullen Gallagher.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: Two Blu-rays in Keep case
Reviewed: November 5, 2023
(7022hich)

^*  We just heard that a Region A domestic disc of Mario Bava’s The Whip and the Body is arriving with the new year. It also was unavailable in good-quality until a German release just three months ago … but also only for Region B.

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