La Frusta e il corpo

"You haven't changed, I see. You always loved violence" - Kurt Menliff

In the hands of a lesser director, Whip and the Body would not have been memorable. Aside from the S & M, which could have been pointless exploitation, the story is a fairly standard gothic murder mystery; one of many chamber pieces about a quickly declining aristocratic family with many dark secrets. It's Bava's keen since of visual storytelling, his portrayal and evocation of feelings through carefully orchestrated set design, lighting schemes, camera movements, and silent the acting he gets that distinguish the film.

One of the biggest differences between the American murder mystery or horror film and the Italian giallo is that the Italians aren't afraid to explain things later or never bother to. The results are often frustrating, but they will produce brilliant moments in the hands of the right directors like Bava & Dario Argento. In most cases, the quality of these pictures winds up being determined by whether the brilliance overshadows the bizarre ultimately inexplicable red herrings or drowns in the sea of them.

The opening segment of Whip and the Body is one of those moments of brilliance. It connects a beautiful shot of the beach at sunset with a dagger. Bava loves to jar the audience and create a sense of mystery and anticipation. His revelation of the dagger combines all these aspects, as we see only the top portion shaking in a jar before he tilts down to reveal the bloodstains on the knife and link it to the surrounding roses. He doesn't linger on this shot. In fact, cinematographer Ubaldo Terzano pans left seemingly before the shot should end. While Bava's foreshadowing is at a high, he's equally successful in twisting what he's previously shown. It's only over time, really at the end, that we understand more and more what he's chose to do when.

At first we think the pan left is to reveal Giorgia (Harriet Medin) at the window, but in retrospect what's important is the red curtain, the blue illumination of the window, and the window itself. The segment ends with the focus on Katia's (Ida Galli) hands as she comes up from behind and accidentally scares Giorgia. I imagine viewers not used to the giallo will write this off as a cheap scare, but even if you do there should still be minimal registration because hands are excellently recalled in a later scene. If you don't, you'll notice that all of these locations, objects, and colors will be so key to what you'll see in the next 86 minutes.

While Whip and the Body was way ahead of it's time in many technical aspects as well as in its honest handling and graphic depiction of a taboo subject, sadomasochism, it's also very much a transitional film. Bava is much more famous for 1971's Reazione a catena (Bay of Blood), a good film that in a way it almost destroyed the horror genre because it was so horribly borrowed from by the pathetic and reprehensible Friday the 13th, the popularity of which has forever haunted fans of horror as an art form that can say something about and/or unearth aspects of human beings and their society. Those expecting that fast pace and a number of gory stylized murders will be sorely disappointed. Whip and the Body is very much an old style slow-paced atmospheric horror that's powered by what we think we'll see rather than what we actually do. To me, either style can be good or bad depending on how it's done. Whip and the Body is superior to Bay of Blood partially because it has more heart, but largely because it's more personal and thus Bava conveys himself better.

Suspense and anticipation, something so sorely lacking in what passes for horror these days at the multiplex near you, are created in many ways. One of the more uncommon ways is by actually eliminating options. Early on there's a suspicious scene where the maid Giorgia pours Kurt Menliff (Christopher Lee) some tea. He somewhat jokes saying, "poisoned?" Though Giorgia's response that he'll die the way he killed her daughter, a knife to the throat which Bava uses as the motif of the film without ever exactly showing it, pretty much takes away all other options for his death, it is a prophecy of doom that confirms that she'd more than like to see it. Kurt tells her he only cares about the forgiveness of the masters, but in the following scene as soon as he leaves them we see that his brother Christian (Tony Kendall) still holds a grudge, "You don't know him well, if you think he could be worse." Throughout the film, Bava uses such dialogue, but more so a clever array of visual techniques, to cast suspicion on everyone in the castle.

Bava establishes the secrets of the house early on when Count Menliff (Gustavo De Nardo) is terrified by his son Kurt's emergence from a trap door behind the fireplace in the Count's room. What makes a scene like this as done by Bava good is the impossible becomes possible. He sets up his shot so that we can't imagine an entrance and gives us the sounds before the images, focusing on the terror the scenario creates in the potential victim. I always wonder what Bava would have been like if silent films were still acceptable. He gets some excellent performances from his actors in scenes where they don't speak, with Lee & Lavi's work in this film being some of the best we ever saw in a Bava, but it rarely translates to the ones where they do. To make things a lot worse, while the Italian track has the real voices of everyone but Lee, the English track is entirely and terribly dubbed. This is one of the many tragedies of the film because everyone but Tony Kendall did their lines in English; it's just that at that time Italian features shot without live sound. In any case, while the fireplace scene is hardly a great example of Bava at his scariest, this is the kind of scene that makes anything possible in his world, and allows much of the rest of his film to thrive on your imagination.

Kurt's introduction when Nevenka (Daliah Lavi) is on the beach is classic. Throughout the film, Bava links objects with thoughts, feelings, and emotions. A bored Nevenka daydreams of her lover, making lines in the sand with her horsewhip. The haunting romantic piano score of Carlo Rustichelli, one of the few undisputed strengths of the film, shows her mood rather than giving away that her thoughts are going to come true. Suddenly Nevenka jumps and we see two big black boots, one stepping on the end of the whip, which is in the opposite direction that Nevenka was looking. From there the camera slowly tilts up, almost creating a black screen due to Kurt's cape, until his face is revealed.

One aspect of the film that's a problem for some people is that Kurt's intentions aren't particularly clear. What we know for sure is that he finally returned home after an elongated self-exile due to killing Giorgia's daughter to reclaim his love, Nevenka. Nevenka was to be Kurt's wife, but with Kurt gone The Count's younger son Christian married her. Kurt feels he owns Nevenka and they should be together regardless of marriage or the law.

What the film focuses on is the effects of Nevenka's need for sadomasochism. Writer Ernesto Gastaldi & Mario Bava see it as a contradiction between rapture and pain. Nevenka doesn't want the hurting in and of itself. Thus, she is afraid of the bearer, Kurt. However, Nevenka needs the punishment of his whip because it's the only thing that can sexually arouse her. I don't think there's any deep meaning to Kurt whipping Nevenka; I just think he does what he has to do to get what he wants. Unfortunately, this aspect got the film charged with obscenity in Italy and was cut completely or censored beyond the point of recognition throughout most of the world. Released in the US in an impotent form called What that could only be a more appropriate name if it was followed by The Fuck?, this is the biggest reason so many people thought Bava's film sucked for 25 years until VCI released it in its proper version. Without the two whipping scenes, in the end the film can't make any sense and amounts to nothing more than some fancy technique that comes off as only serving the point of glitzing up an otherwise pointless film. Kurt whipping Nevenka, even though at first she appears to absolutely not want it, is kind of like getting your girlfriend that always tries to refuse to go on the roller coaster on because you know once the ride starts she has the time of her life. Certainly it's partially for his benefit, but by far more for hers.