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SEI DONNE PER L'ASSASSINO (Italian-French-West German co-production,
1964)
Director/Cinematographer: Mario Bava
Story and screenplay: Marcello
Fondata, with the collaboration of Mario Bava and Alberto Bevilacqua
Camera operator: Ubaldo Terzano
Editing: Mario Serandrei
Music:
Carlo Rustichelli
Main players: Cameron Mitchell (Massimo Morlacchi);
Eva Bartok (Countess Christina Cuomo); Thomas Reiner (Inspector
Sylvester); Dante Di Paolo (Frank Scaolo); Claude Dantes (Tao-Li); Mary
Arden (Peggy); Arianna Gorini (Nicole); Luciano Pigozzi (Cesar Lesar);
Massimo Righi (Marco); Franco Ressel (Marquis Richard Morrell);
Francesca Ungaro (Isabel)
Alternate titles: Six Women For The Murderer; Blood and Black Lace; Fashion House of Death; Bloody Murder
Aspect ratio:
1.85:1 |
SYNOPSIS:
Isabel, a model at the chic Haute Couture fashion house, which is owned
by the recently widowed Countess Christina Cuomo and managed by Massimo
Morlacchi, is brutally murdered by an unknown assailant. The subsequent
police investigation, represented by the arrogant Inspector Sylvester,
reveals the salon to be a veritable hotbed of drugs, corruption and
blackmail. When it is discovered that Isabella kept a diary which
detailed these indescretions, everything is thrown into a quandary.
Initially the diary falls into the hands of Nicole, who promises to take
it to the police, but another of the models, Peggy, manages to get it
away from her unnoticed. Later that night, Nicole goes to visit her
lover Frank at his antique shop; while there, she is terrorized by
strange sounds and fleeting shadows, but before she can escape, she is
attacked and killed by a mysterious figure dressed in black.
 Finding that the dead girl no longer no longer has the diary, the
murderer flees from the antique shop and kidnaps Peggy from her
apartment. Although the terrified girl assures the killer that she has
burned the diary, he refuses to believe her, and so proceeds to torture
her. When she removes her assailant's mask, revealing the guilty party
to be Massimo, she is forced to pay with her life.
Massimo had previously assisted his lover Countess Christina to murder
her husband, but when Isabella discovered the murder, she blackmailed
him. Once her demands became too high, he killed her, not realizing
that she had written everything down in the diary. Now that the diary
and all that had privy to its information has been disposed of, Massimo
seems to have nothing to fear. However, the inspector is convinced that
the murderer is right under his nose, so he places all of the men
connected to the crimes under arrest. In a bold move to shift suspicion
away from her lover, Countess Christina dons the killer's atire and
slays another model. Since this crime takes place while the men are in
jail, they obviously can't be guilty, so they are set free. Yet Massimo
is well aware that he is not out of danger yet, so he instigates a
cunning plan to lure Christina to her own death, at the same time giving
the police the impression that she was the maniac they have been
seeking. Things backfire, however, and the guilty lovers die in each
other's arms.
CRITIQUE:
Initially designed by the West German co-financiers to be a routine,
by-the-numbers police thriller in the Edgar Wallace mold, SEI DONNE PER
L'ASSASSINO represents a tremendous advancement in the development of
the modern horror film. It is, in fact, arguably the first ever slasher
film, though that label cheapens Bava's achievement for reasons that
will soon become apparent.
 In this film, Bava de-emphasizes character and psychological motivation,
thereby creating a literal symphony of violence in which nobody is what
they appear to be. In the film's paranoid millieu, nobody is to be
trusted. Seemingly respectable business men turn out to be sadistic
killers; everybody else is either self-righteous and holier-than-thou
(for instance, the inspector) or a treacherous blackmailer. Needless to
say, viewers looking for an up-beat movie about wonderful, happy people
need not apply here. Bava uses his camera to physically make the
audience a part of the action, yet he does not encourage the viewer to
sympathize with the characters; for this reasons, many critics continue
to vilify SEI DONNE, taking Bava to task for creating a remorseless
celebration of sadism.
Quite frequently, Bava's characters are marked by their inability to
love. Nowhere is this concept more apparent than in this film. Though
most of the major characters are involved in relationships, they are
still too caught up in their own worlds to actually feel for one
another. The sleazy antique dealer, Frank, for instance, brags to the
inspector that he "doesn't believe in permanent, exclusive
relationships." What is more, he seems genuinely unaffected by the fact
that two of his lovers have been savagely killed. It is only when the
police suspect him of the killings that he begins to show interest in
anything beyond sex and drugs. The inspector, too, lacks any passion,
even apparently for his work; he can almost be seen as a parody of the
Joe Friday / DRAGNET school of "just the facts, ma'am" authority
figures. Only Countess Christina exhibits any true emotion, though
paradoxically this leads to her demise. Her love for Massimo is quite
genuine, so much so that it blinds her to his faults and compels her to
commit heinous acts in order to keep him at her side. By contrast,
Massimo is exclusively concerned with possessions: fast cars, expensive
clothing, the fashion center, etc. It is he who compels Christina to
murder her husband, thus enabling him to take control of the fashion
business. Finally, when he tires of her, he coldly arranges for a way
to dispose of her by making her a scapegoat for his crimes. In his
inability to love Christina, Massimo literally destroys himself. While
he may feel that he can use anybody to get what he wants, he fails to
take Christina's strength and resourcefulness into account. Christina
is totally blinded by her emotions -- there is nothing she can do to
control this -- but, ironically, if Massimo had only invested some
genuine love into their relationship, he could probably have gotten away
with his crimes; it is HIS emotional impotence that destroys him, not
any weakness on Christina's part.
 Many Bava films deal with morally bankrupt pseudo-aristocrats, and SEI DONNE is no exception. Christina is distinguished by her title: she is
a Countess, and this title renders her socially elite. With her social
class, of course, comes money -- the very thing which fuels the
characters' motivations. In the same way that the Menliff family of LA
FRUSTRA E IL CORPO uses their social "superiority" to cut themselves off
from society, Christina inhabits a world of her own design. The
Christian Haute Couture Salon is less a business than a symbol of social
graces; the dresses/fashions which she helps to promote lines her own
pocket, enablimg her to cut herself off from the "commoners" of Rome.
Bava's obvious mistrust of such privileged people -- which stems from
his core mistrust of taking people at their face value -- come through
quite strongly. Christina, pawn though she is in Massimo's game, is
still a deceptive murderess. Whatever sympathetic characteristics she
may possess stems from her inability to find love and attention from the
right people; she is surrounded by sycophants who secretly gossip about
her and who, as in the case of Massimo, plot to take from her wealth.
Even more revealing is the character of Richard Morrell, a so-called
Marquis who possesses a fancy title and little else. A preening buffoon
of a man, Morrell objects to being man-handled by the police and proudly
anounces that, as an aristocrat, he is above such treatment. Like
Christina, Morrell also lives in very "exclusive" surroundings: a plush
villa which is seemingly haunted by the ever-present figure of a
singularly sad-looking, ancient family retainer. Morrell is a leech who
lives off of the wages of his attractive fiancee Greta, one of Countess
Christina's models. It is Morrell's fear that his debts to Isabella
will be discovered, thus shattering his image as a wealthy playboy, that
embroils Greta in the tragedy. The irony of Greta's death is that
Countess Christina, who already uses the girl's image to promote her
business, uses her death as an iron-clad aliby for Massimo's innocence
(she is killed while Massimo and Morrell languish in jail). With her
death, the real murderer is set free, while the worthless Morrell is
spared any embarassment. The subtle allegory her is one of immoral
aristocrats using the more accessible, "inferior" working classes to
their own nefarious ends. The notion of the overly privileged elite
sealed off from the rest of the world, indulging their every whim,
informs many of Bava's others films, including ECOLOGIA DEL DELITTO and
LISA E IL DIAVOLO (both of which deal with overly protective
mother/Countess figures who attempt to keep their off-springs mental
aberrations from spreading), IL ROSSO SEGNO DELLA FOLLIA, and OPERAZIONE
PAURA. This idea also works its way into Bava's first western, LA
STRADA PER FORT ALAMO, in which the European settlers are depicted as
money-grubbing racists, while the so-called undesirables (Native
Americans, outlaws) are shown more humanistically. Bava's suggestion
seems to be that lack of contact with every day reality is a dangerous
thing, even if the world at large is far from perfect (cf. CANI
ARRABBIATI).
 Executed with morbid flair and filled with the kind of dazzling stylistic touches that have had such a profound influence on Dario
Argento and Martin Scorsese, SEI DONNE represents a logical step in
Bava's growing maturity as a filmmaker. The somewhat limited restraints
of the gothic/peplum genres had the director chafing at the bit to try
something new. Though LA RAGAZZA CHE SAPEVA TROPPO did enable him to
leave the artificial trappings of the period film behind him, it still
suffers from a certain lack of maturity -- it may be the first first
giallo, but it is an uncertain one. In I TRE VOLTI DELLA PAURA, the
director took a step in the right direction with the "Il telefono"
segment (his second modern dress thriller), but SEI DONNE remains the
first full-blooded example of the giallo. It is a film of such
remorseless cruelty and embittered cynicism that it shook the genre to
its very foundations. Even if it is not the finest thriller to have
emerged from Italy (that honor belongs to Dario Argento's PROFONDO
ROSSO, 1975), it is a textbook example of what endears Bava's work to
the congnoscenti, and of what others find to be lacking, or just plain
offensive.
Visually speaking, SEI DONNE is one of Bava's most beautiful films:
there is not a single shot that does not seem to positively glow.
Though criticized in BROKEN MIRRORS / BROKEN MINDS: THE DARK DREAMS OF
DARIO ARGENTO by Maitland McDonagh for being inconsistent, there is
nothing slapdash about the film's visual look. Predating Argento's
artfully choreographed massacres by several years, Bava does not miss
any opportunity to give his unconventional imagination full reign. A
woman has her face repeatedly smashed against the trunk of a tree, yet
another girl's face is ripped apart by a blade-lined metal glove (shades
of LA MASCHERA DEL DEMONIO's opening execution), and another victim is
scalded to death by a red-hot furnace. Bava's seductive staging and
impeccably orchestrated use of color lends these scenes a disturbing
beauty; Hitchcock might well have pioneered the self-analytical,
voyueristic aspect of filmmaking, but Bava was the first to blatantly
confront audiences' mordbid obsession with violence. The violence is
intense, far moreso than anything in Hitchcock's PSYCHO (1960) or
Michael Powell's PEEPING TOM (1960), but there is hardly any blood
spilled. The color red, irrevocably associated with acts of violence
for obvious reasons, is predominant in SEI DONNE's candy-colored
palette, from the red telephones and draperies of the Haute Couture
salon to the lipstick and nail polish which adorns the bodies of the
model-victims; Massimo's guilty conscience is reaffirmed by the
crimson-spotted vest he wears. This use of color is not hyperbolic, but
rather serves as a symbolic representation of the blood-stained
narrative.
 Bava's use of setting gives SEI DONNE particular impact. The very idea
of setting a violent murder thriller in the confines of a fashion house
is a deliciously ironic concept, immediately establishing an uneasy
conflict between action and setting. Superficially, the salon
represents the height of beauty and culture -- it is here that people go
to look beautiful -- but, again, things are seldom as they appear in
Bava's universe: to say the least, the corruption that lurks beneath
this exterior proves to be destructive and deadly. Through his
ever-creative use of color and shadow, Bava gives the salon a look that
is both sinister and beautiful. In the same way that the director finds
beauty in the various murders strewn about the narrative, so do the
setting manage to be both unsettling and pleasing to the eye.
In a very laudatory review of SEI (cf. FANGORIA #100), Tim Lucas
comments on the film's "ripely mysoginistic" point of view, yet there is
no denying that the male characters are presented very unfavorably.
There are no heroes in this film, and Bava does not encourage the viewer
to sympathize with anybody. The black-garbed killer, his face concealed
with a white silk scarf, represents the evil side of every man. Unlike
later "serial killers" like Freddy Krueger, Bava's killer is presented
without any personality whatsoever. Part of the reason that the slasher
genre has reveived so much negative criticism is that, intentionally or
not, lesser filmmakers have presented their killers as heroic figures
who are out to punish deserving people who have, in one way or another,
broken the moral codes of society. Bava never makes this mistake.
Instead, by provoking an exhilarating response from the audience during
the murder scenes, Bava is encouraging the audience not only to step back
and examine his or her own moral code, but to think of the power of the
visual medium. In a very concrete, non-abstract way, Bava forces the
viewer to see cinema's awesome potential to make even the most horrific
acts look disturbingly beautiful.
Even if the films it has inspired (including John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN,
1978, and Martin Scorsese's CAPE FEAR, 1991) are not, SEI DONNE remains
a film of substance and power, and a classic in its own right.
Review © Troy Howarth
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