"Now we are going to make a movie... and when we finish, we'll all have much to be ashamed of!"
—Mario Bava, 1914-1980
Two Octobers ago, we covered Italian giallo maestro Dario Argento, but this year, we're looking at one of his friends, collaborators, and single most important influence, Mario Bava! While Argento took bits and pieces of Bava's aesthetic and adopted them into his own, Bava was a completely different kind of horror filmmaker altogether. Bava is often credited with directing the first giallo film, 1963's The Girl Who Knew Too Much, but he didn't return to that well as often as his protege. He was also, unlikeArgento, a genre chameleon, workingcomfortably within several wildly different idioms, includingtwo ribald sex comedies—one of which we're talking about today—as well as thespaghetti westernRoy Colt Winchester Jack, which we're not.Argento'sLe cinque giornatewas quite literally his only non-horror film.
Most of Bava's memorable works, however, were within the horror milieu. Black Sunday and Black Sabbath, his twomost universally well known films, are more or less monster movies, or tales of the macabre, but much more comfortably within a genre familiar to Americans. This also helped them crossover to audiences outside ofItaly, who were being overwhelmed with Atomic Age horrors and longed for a throwback to the horror films of yesterday. However, his films weren't so quaint as to not push boundaries. In 1971, he would direct A Bay of Blood, a film widely regarded as one of the first slasher films.
Born in Sanremo in 1914, Bava began his career as a camera operator in his early 20s before graduating to cinematographer, lensing films for such directors as Mario Costa and Gianni Franciolini. Perhaps it was his exposure to numerous genres during the 40s and 50s that allowed him to more comfortably and confidently step away from horror, but this is pure speculation. In 1957, while shooting the first proper Italian horror film of the sound era, I Vampiri for director Riccardo Freda, Bava stepped in to complete the film when Freda quit just 12 days into production.
A similar incident saw Bava take over in the director's chair on the following year'sDeath Comes From Space—aka The Day the Sky Exploded—the first proper science fiction film in Italian cinema history. In 1959, Riccardo Freda was back with Machiavellian plans for Bava to become a full-fledged director by agreeing to direct Caltiki: The Immortal Monster and then quitting immediately after they hired Bava as cinematographer. This would give Bava the chance to direct a full film, but because of absurd crediting deals, Bava was once again totally uncredited as the director of the film. Thankfully all of that finally changed with 1960's Black Sunday, and Bava's career was underway.
Because Bava wasn't as skin-forward a filmmaker as Argento, we're going to be skipping most of his truly influential and important work to focus on a handful of flicks, only two of which are purely horror. When Bava finally did get around to putting nudity in his films, it was the 1970s and it felt more like a way for him to keep up with the times than a natural progression in his filmmaking. However, his final two films give us a taste of what we might have expected from Bava had he lived past 1980...
Kill, Baby... Kill! (1966)
Originally titledOperazione Paura or Operation Fearin Italy, this 1966tale of a ghost—in the form of a young lady (Fabienne Dali)—haunting a Carpathian town is rife with Bava's typical visual flair. While the setting, costume, and art direction all indicate a classical ghost story, Bava's energy behind the camera is very much in sync with the more expressive style of the time. When a young villager dies under mysterious circumstances, Dr.Paul Eswai (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) is dispatched to the town to perform an autopsy. Local medical student Monica (Erika Blanc) is assigned to assist the good doctor and quickly becomes his partner in solving these horrendous crimes, which seem to be leading them toan eccentricBaroness (Giovanna Galletti).
Unfortunately, the film's only skin is of the accidental variety, though you'd likely have to talk to the film's wardrobe supervisor to find out just how accidental this was. 41 minutes in, Erika Blanc's Monica is haunted by the ghostly girl and we get a quick peek up her nightgown which reveals she's not wearing any underwear! Whether you can see her bush is up for debate, but you can definitely see her buns...
Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970)
One of Bava's most obscure films, this 1970 murder mystery didn't even get a proper American release until 2001. This Agatha Christie-esque tale, scripted byMario di Nardo, was thought by Bava to be such a poorly conceived knockoff ofChristie's And Then There Were None that he required up-front payment in order to make the film.It also found our intrepid director working with twobig stars of the moment, Edwige Fenech and Princess Ira von Fürstenberg, who brought their talents at the height of their sexiness to the project.
The plot concerns a wealthy industrialist who assembles a group of models and their significant others—along with a scientist whose recent breakthrough in the resin field has gotten the rich man's attention—to his palatial estate on a secluded island. When the scientist won't sell his breakthrough because its invention caused the death of his own partner, the real reason for their being brought together is revealed. The scientist's wife Trudy (von Fürstenberg) is having an affair with the rich man's wife Jill (Edith Meloni), and everyone else is tangentially connected to the blackmail-worthy invention at the center of the story.
Sadly, neither Meloni or the lovely Princess get nude in the flick, but Edwige Fenech—playing the wife of the rich man's second-in-command—is briefly topless twice...
Along with some brief boobage from Helena Ronee as the wife of one of Fenech's husband's co-workers...
The film flopped upon release, likely due to it having a crummy script, as Bava himself once commented. However, he's not exactly phoning it in behind the camera, nor is he in his work on the visual effects, matte paintings,or editing. He's dialed in, but the film itself isn't worth watching more than once or twice. If you are interested, Kino Classics did a great Blu-ray restoration of the film in 2013 that's still in print and relatively cheap.
Four Times That Night (1972)
1970s Italian sex farces are a genre unto themselves and nearly every director making films in Italy at the time was prone to making one, including Bava. The plot revolves aroundtheRashomon-esque perspective changing taleof Tina (Daniela Giordano) and John (Gianni Prada), an attractive pair who have a bad date that ends in an act which may or may not have been consensual. Thankfully it'sall played for laughs as Tina's version of the story is that they didn't have sex at all, while John's is that they did it the titular number of times.Oh men!
The gorgeous Daniela Giordano goes topless three times in John's re-telling of the tale, as well as one more time in the truthful version of events revealed later in the film...
Again, Kino Classics gave this a better-than-it-deserved treatment on Blu-ray, also still in print and inexpensive. In fact, they've restored and put out most of Bava'scatalog and a great number of them are still in print.
Lisa and the Devil (1975)
Known in America asThe House of Exorcism, this flick was among actor Telly Savalas' many films shot in Italy in the late 60s and early 70s. Like many of Bava's films, the American edit leaned heavily into whatever was popular at the time—in this case The Exorcist—while adding in some footage shot by Bava's son Lamberto to appeal to international audiences. The original edit is still the best, as it always is in these cases, but it's at least worth mentioning that there are two different versions of this film.
Elke Sommer plays the titular lady whose tangoing with Lucifer, played by Savalas, after spotting him while wandering away from her tour group in Toledo, Spain. Frightened by him because he resembles a painting of the devil she just saw, she encounters him again and again across the city before finally succumbing. She is soonbrought to an ornate mansion where she becomes a pawnin an epic game of mysticism and witchcraft, resurrection of the dead and demons, and all manner of haunted beings toying with the fates of mortals.
Elke Sommer made what would turn out to be her last nude appearance on film here, baring her breasts while sleeping and having her dress pulled down...
The flick also features a hilarious scene where Carmen Silva surprises a priest administering her last rites by coming back to life, fully nude, right in front of him...
Add in a terrific topless scene from Sylva Koscinaand you've got yourself one of the best of Bava's late period flicks...
Shock (1977)
Bava's final film as a director—he would do effects work on Argento's Inferno released the year of his death and his 1973 filmRabid Dogs would finally get released posthumously—is this supernatural haunted house chiller starring Argento'spartner at the timeDaria Nicolodi. Nicolodi plays Dora, a woman who has moved into a home with her airline pilot husband (John Steiner) and her son from a previous marriage. Left alone in the house often because of her husband's job, Dora begins to feel the adverse effects of the electroshock treatments she was given after the death of her first husband.These circumstances make it less than ideal when it turns out the house she's in is haunted.
Daria Nicolodi, who never went nude in one of Argento's films, doffs her duds here to reveal her bare ass for the camera...
Gone, but not forgotten, Bava's death was now forty years ago this past April. His influence continues to be felt throughout the horror world and throughout the world of cinema at large. If you're interested in learning more, go in any order you like, but try to seek out and find his work prior to what we've covered here, along with his interesting diversions into other genres. Just see them all, there's value in every film he made, regardless of nudity!
Mario Bava Films with Non-Nude Content Available on Our Site
—Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (1966)
Check out the Other Directors in Our Ongoing "SKIN-depth Look”Series
Stuart Gordon |Tony Scott|Bruce Lee|Terry Gilliam|Alejandro Jodorowsky|Luis Buñuel|Atom Egoyan|John Boorman|John Schlesinger|James Ivory|Alan Parker|Walter Hill|Louis Malle|Mike Nichols|Allison Anders|Jonathan Demme|William Friedkin|Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Part One|Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Part Two|Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Part Three|Federico Fellini|Philip Kaufman|Miloš Forman|Pedro Almodóvar: Part One|Pedro Almodóvar: Part Two|Blake Edwards|Catherine Breillat: Part One|Catherine Breillat: Part Two|Spike Lee|John Landis|David Cronenberg: Part One|David Cronenberg: Part Two|Ingmar Bergman|François Truffaut|Bernardo Bertolucci|Steven Soderbergh|Kathryn Bigelow|Oliver Stone|Roman Polanski|Nicolas Roeg|David Fincher|Francis Ford Coppola|Pier Paolo Pasolini|Ken Russell: Part One|Ken Russell: Part Two|Robert Altman:Part One|Robert Altman:Part Two|Adrian Lyne|Martin Scorsese|Jane Campion|Park Chan-wook|Bob Fosse|Dario Argento|Wes Craven|Tobe Hooper|Todd Haynes|Danny Boyle|Stanley Kubrick|Paul Thomas Anderson|David Lynch|Brian De Palma|Paul Schrader|Paul Verhoeven
Check Out the Other Franchises in Our "SKIN-depth Look" Series
—The Halloween Franchise
—The Nightmare on Elm Street Franchise
—The Friday the 13th Franchise
—Comic Book Movies
