The Whip and the Body

The Whip and the Body
Blu-ray
Kino Lorber
1963
Starring Daliah Lavi, Christopher Lee
Written by Ernesto Gastaldi, Ugo Guerra, Luciano Martino
Photographed by Mario Bava, Ubaldo Terzano
Directed by Mario Bava

The title sequence of Blood and Black Lace may be Mario Bava’s defining moment. Staged in a shadowy fashion salon, the cast is seen posing alongside multicolored mannequins while a trumpet makes the kind of sound you’d hear in a soho strip club. The music is hilarious and arousing, the camera moves are scintillating, and the actresses are dressed to kill.

What gets at the heart of Bava’s peculiar style is the transformation of his actors into mannequins themselves—like Hitchcock, Bava’s actors are part of the scenery, objets d’art, but objects nonetheless. The sequence doesn’t go for the jugular like the grisly black and white prelude to 1960’s Black Sunday, but it does have color—color that screams louder than any of the movie’s victims. Bava implies, “Look what I can do with so little.”

1963’s The Whip and the Body features all of those characteristics and more; Bava’s cinematic kinks and obsessions combine for a purely visual essay about the fatal sting of romance. The director’s theme is suggested in the movie’s own title sequence, a red-curtain riff on Stanley Kubrick’s overture to Lolita in which a lushly romantic melody portends the story’s inevitable tragedy. The Whip and the Body has its own Lolita too, but Bava’s embattled heroine is also his villain, a troubled 19th century damsel who harbors a dangerous obsession. That may sound like the blurb for a sleazy paperback but as the author of Lolita said, “Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.”

Daliah Lavi plays Nevenka, a doe-eyed sphinx and a snake pit of appalling desires. And what desires. This is a woman who doesn’t get turned on unless she’s bleeding. Christopher Lee plays Kurt Menliff, her former lover and the man who inflicted those wounds. Menliff is the black sheep of his family—and for good reason: he seduced a beloved servant girl who then committed suicide. After years in exile, Menliff has returned to the fold and Nevenka is once again enjoying her time under his lash—it seems her original wounds have never truly healed.

Menliff has made an enemy of everyone in this exquisitely decaying castle perched, where else, on the edge of a craggy cliff facing the ocean. And when Kurt’s throat is cut one stormy night (it’s always a stormy night in this film, the wind never stops wailing) it’s anyone’s guess who’s to blame. Fingers are pointed everywhere except at Nevenka whose enigmatic reaction to Kurt’s death leads to a breakdown of sorts—she remains terrified of her tormentor yet aches for the lacerating fun they had together. Is it Nevenka’s wish-fullfillment that allows Kurt to reappear at her window? If this is a dream, it’s a particularly visceral one—she wakes each morning with new welts on her back. Those moonlit visits become a nightly ritual and the close-ups of Lavi’s face as she prowls the halls in search of more fun are a case study in erotic expectations. She almost licks her lips.

It’s shocking to consider this film had three screenwriters, Ernesto Gastaldi, Ugo Guerra, and Luciano Martino—did they all share the back of the same envelope? Though their storyline is shorter than the titles of some films, the movie that Bava made out of it is one of his triumphs. It’s an 87 minute mood piece that has the visual audacity of a silent film; Lavi’s tortured countenance resembles a possessed Lillian Gish and a ghostly green hand emerging from the shadows is so vivid it qualifies as a 3D effect.

The film has the added attraction of showing us what Black Sunday might have looked like in color. Bava’s typically stunning photography (assisted, to a point, by Ubaldo Terzano) is glorious and even though his usual pallette is more subdued, his emphasis on the color red is striking, the roses that seem lit from within, a procession of pallbearers in crimson hoods, and of course the tastefully distributed streaks of blood lining Lavi’s bare back.

Kino Lorber has produced an unusually fine Blu ray of this gorgeously twisted ghost story and it features Tim Lucas’s feature-length commentary as the main attraction after the film itself. Also included is a generous supply of trailers for Bava’s films.