Blood and Black Lace () is a 1964 giallo film directed by Mario Bava and starring Eva Bartok and Cameron Mitchell. The story concerns the brutal murders of a Roman fashion house's models, committed by a masked killer in a desperate attempt to obtain a scandal-revealing diary.
The film began development shortly after Bava had ended his long-time association with Galatea Film, for whom he had made most of his earlier works as a cinematographer and director. Made with a budget that was lower than several of the director's prior horror films, Blood and Black Lace was an Italian, French and West German international co-production between Emmepi Cinematografica, Les Productions Georges de Beauregard and Monachia Film. Different sources and ministerial papers provide varying degrees of information on the authorship of the film's screenplay, with most sources crediting Marcello Fondato, Giuseppe Barillà and Bava as co-writers; co-star Mary Arden is credited with having adapted the script's dialogue into English. Most of the technical staff and several cast members were veterans of Bava's previous films. Principal photography began in Rome in late 1963 with an international, multilingual cast; some actors read their lines fluently, while others performed them phonetically.
Film critics and historians such as Tim Lucas and Roberto Curti have identified Blood and Black Lace as representing an evolution in both Bava's style and the thriller genre depicted in cinema. Having used thriller conventions in his earlier films The Girl Who Knew Too Much and "The Telephone", a segment of Black Sabbath, Bava used this film to combine elements of contemporary West German murder mystery films (krimis) with the lurid juxtaposition of eroticism and violence present in popular fiction of the time, namely the long-running Giallo Mondadori series of pulp novels. Though it did not start a trend in the genre, the film has retrospectively been described as being among the first giallo films, as its exaggerated use of colour photography and eschewing of a traditional mystery in favour of a focus on set pieces of graphic murder would become staples of the form.
The film premiered in Rome on March 14, 1964, where it was commercially unsuccessful. Contemporary and retrospective reviews primarily praised Bava's direction and its visual style, although some found its plot to be weak and lacking in characterisation. After the successful release of Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in 1970, a wave of gialli were made in Italy, with many sharing stylistic traits from Blood and Black Lace. Works by such filmmakers as Martin Scorsese and Pedro Almodóvar have referenced the film, and it has appeared on several "best of" lists related to thriller, horror and slasher films.
Plot Isabella, one of many beautiful models employed at Christian Haute Couture, a Roman fashion house, is walking through the property's grounds at night when she is violently killed by an assailant wearing a white, featureless mask, a black fedora and a trenchcoat. Police inspector Silvestri investigates and interviews Massimo Morlacchi, who co-manages the salon with the recently widowed Countess Cristiana Cuomo. He also questions Isabella's ex-boyfriend Franco Scalo, an antique dealer; Silvestri discovers that he is a cocaine user, and that Isabella had attempted to break his addiction.
It is revealed that Isabella kept a diary detailing the staff's personal lives and vices. One of the models, Nicole—who is Scalo's current lover—finds the diary and promises to give it to the police, but her co-worker Peggy steals it during a fashion show. That night, Nicole visits Scalo's store to supply him with cocaine where she is stalked by the murderer, who murders her with a spiked glove. The figure searches her corpse and her purse for the diary, but cannot find it. Marco, a nervous, pill-popping dresser who has unrequited feelings for Peggy, visits her at her apartment offering protection, which she politely refuses. She is then confronted and beaten by the killer, who writes a demand in a notebook for the location of the diary. She says she burned it in her fireplace because it contained details of an abortion she underwent. Enraged, the murderer knocks her unconscious. The assailant then carries her away just as Silvestri arrives, takes her to another location, ties her to a chair, and continues the interrogation. Peggy pulls off the mask and is shocked to recognize her assailant, who burns her to death using a furnace.
Silvestri surmises that the murderer is a sex maniac and is one of the men associated with the salon, so he arrests everyone he believes might be responsible. Panicking when he is identified as having visited Peggy's apartment, Marco tries to accuse Cesare, the house's eavesdropping dress designer, for the killings because of impotency; he then suffers an epileptic seizure and is hospitalised, and his drugs turn out to be medication for his condition. While the suspects are in custody, Greta, another model, finds Peggy's corpse stashed in the trunk of her car, and the killer smothers her to death in the mansion of her fiancé. Once Peggy and Greta's bodies are discovered, Silvestri releases all the men; Morlacchi retrieves the same notebook he used earlier to interrogate Peggy.
Morlacchi and Cristina later discuss their murder spree: he killed Isabella, Nicole and Peggy, and Cristiana murdered Greta to give him an alibi; the hypersexualization of the killings was merely a red herring to disguise their motivations. Isabella had found out that they had earlier murdered Christiana’s husband and tried to blackmail them.
Morlacchi convinces Cristiana that, although the diary has been destroyed, they must commit one more murder to satisfy Silvestri's hypothesis. Later that night, Cristiana kills a fifth model, making the death look like a suicide and leaving the mask, hat and coat strewn around the bathroom to his implicate the model as the murderer. Cristiana prepares to leave the apartment when she is interrupted by a loud knocking on the front door. While attempting to escape she falls from a second-story window.
At the fashion house, Morlacchi excitedly searches through Cristiana's desk for her jewelry. Cristiana enters, now realizing that Morlacchi had been responsible for her fall and that their marriage was merely a means for him to become the heir to her fortune. She kills Morlacchi. After calling Silvestri, Cristiana collapses next to Morlacchi's body.
Cast
Background and style In West Germany, a film genre called krimis — murder mystery films inspired by the works of Edgar Wallace — became popular in the early 1960s, with the first being 1959's Der Frosch mit der Maske (). These films were made initially in black and white, but were later shot in colour and received distribution in Italy. Italian film historian Stefano Baschiera spoke about their influence on Italian cinema, noting that Italian popular cinema attempted their own style of the krimi as they had done with the horror films of Hammer Film Productions and American genre films by "using their 'tested' imagery in order to satisfy the demand of a national market". Another rising trend of the early 1960s followed the success of Terence Fisher's 1958 version of Dracula in Italy. This led to the rise in popularity of pulp paperback novels, comics and photonovels in the horror, mystery and crime genres, which included elements of eroticism.
Italian film historian and critic Roberto Curti described the plot of Blood and Black Lace as being lifted from the themes of these novels, and adapting elements of the krimi, with a "mysterious villain with sadistic tendencies" who is seen in films like Karl Anton's The Avenger or Franz Josef Gottlieb's The Black Abbot. Bava had explored the elements of suspense and eroticism in the film genre that would become the giallo with The Girl Who Knew Too Much, which involved a woman who witnesses a murder and becomes the target of a serial killer, and the Black Sabbath segment "The Telephone", in which a prostitute is blackmailed while she is undressing for the night. The term giallo, which means "yellow" in Italian, is derived from Il Giallo Mondadori, a long-running series of mystery and crime novels identifiable by their distinctive uniform yellow covers, and is used in Italy to describe all mystery and thriller fiction. English-language critics use the term to describe more specific films within the genre, involving a murder mystery that revels in the details of the murder rather than the deduction of it or police procedural elements.
Bava's biographer Tim Lucas deemed The Girl Who Knew Too Much to be a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the giallo novels, while "The Telephone" is closer to what would become the traditional giallo film style, albeit in short form. Curti described Blood and Black Lace as predominantly a series of violent, erotically charged set pieces that are "increasingly elaborate and spectacular" in their construction, and that Bava pushed these elements to the extreme. Curti noted the film was promoted as a whodunnit in Italy but differed from both that genre and krimis of the period, specifically in its lack of humour or a string of clues as to the identity of the murderer.
Production Development
Prior to directing Blood and Black Lace, Mario Bava had directed several films aimed at foreign markets, including Black Sunday, Erik the Conqueror, The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Black Sabbath. These films were produced primarily through Lionello Santi's production company Galatea Film, which suspended their operations by 1964 because of financial hardship. This forced Bava to move from producer to producer for the rest of his career, which left him "not always happy with the results" according to Curti. Bava began work on Blood and Black Lace under the working title of L'atelier della morte () for Emmepi Cinematografica, a small company founded on November 27, 1962, which had only produced four films, and had made a minor contribution to Black Sabbath; Blood and Black Lace was Emmepi's only film as a majority investor. According to ministerial papers, Bava signed the contract to work on the film on March 16, 1963.
The film had a smaller budget than Bava's previous horror films, estimated at 180 million Italian lire, of which 141.755 million was used in production; by contrast, Black Sabbath had a budget of 205 million lire. Emmepi set up the film as a co-production with France and West Germany, with the respective investment quotas being 50% (Italy), 20% (France), and 30% (West Germany). The French partner was Georges de Beauregard, who would work with productions varying from Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless and Le petit soldat () to genre film co-productions like Goliath and the Rebel Slave and The Vampire of Düsseldorf. According to documents at Rome's Archive of State, De Beauregard's largest contribution to the film was the services of his press officer (and future film director) Bertrand Tavernier as an assistant director. Tavernier dismissed this, saying that, "These Italian credits are based on scams. French names were needed for the co-production. I have never been to Italy and haven't met anyone involved in these films." Tavernier concluded his contributions to the film were that he "read a scenario of Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace and my name is in the credits". The West German partner was Top Film, working under its Monachia Film subsidiary, which was based in Munich and financed only two other films.