Dr Lenera
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Joined: 19/10/2005
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THE WHIP AND THE BODY [1963]
Debauched aristocrat Kurt Menliff returns to his ancestral home in the hopes of taking over the estate from his ailing father. However, he finds that that his brother, Christian, is now next in line. Christian is now married to Nevenka, with whom Kurt used to have a sado-masochistic relationship. Although initially hostile to the return of her lover, she can’t resist her impulses and lets Kurt seduce on the beach. Then someone kills Kurt, but is he really dead............
Insanely romantic, deliciously perverse, psychologically complex and visually ravishing, The Whip And The Body is in my opinion one of Mario Bava’s greatest movies and yet it’s still not that well known. This is obviously partly because when it was released in 1963 it received only limited release due to it’s depiction of sado-masochism. In Italy the distributors insisted that the credits be altered, so that for instance Mario Bava became ‘John M.Old’. This was so that the film at first would seem to be not an Italian production, though it didn’t stop one enraged male viewer from suing Bava and the producers for offending him so much! Elsewhere it was usually heavily cut including in the UK, where, entitled Night Is The Phantom, all references to sado-masochism were removed making the story almost incomprehensible, and the film virtually slipped into obscurity. It’s basically a mixture of ghost story, love story, murder mystery and psychological drama, which is superficially similar to some of the Roger Corman-produced Edgar Allan Poe adaptations such as The Fall Of The House of Usher. One could almost call it a twisted variation on Ghost, if that movie hadn’t been made many years later, but to be honest to compare with any other film does it an injustice, as it’s almost totally unique.
It’s often said about directors like Bava and Dario Argento that their films are all style and no content. That may often be the case, but I don’t think you can say that about The Whip And The Body at all. It has a script by Ernesto Gastaldi, Luciano Mantino and Ugo Guerra which is confident, well balanced, and in the end quite rational. It’s certainly good enough to have worked if filmed by a more run-of-the-mill director. Fortunately though Bava decided to make it his most visually amazing film ever. There are lots of beautifully constructed long shots composed of different colour areas which are just amazing to look at. The primary colours are black, violet and moave, with almost every shot perfectly composed and simply gorgeous to look at, but Kurt’s nightly visits to Nevenka are bathed in startling splashes of red, green and blue. There is nothing that could have actually caused this light, but it’s certainly not style for style’s sake, it’s used to mirror Nevenka’s disturbed state of mind.
Things move at a fairly leisurely pace but never once does the film lose focus. However the film is at it’s most brilliant in it’s midway section, just after Kurt’s death. Nevenka starts to be haunted, and we are treated to a truly masterly build up of tension and horror. As Bava’s incredible lighting schemes go into overdrive, normally harmless things such as mud on the floor and a branch hitting a window like Kurt’s whip, create a great feeling of fear. Kurt appears in silhouette, and Nevenka shuts her eyes, but when she opens them a horrible huge gnarled hand reaches out from the dark, in an especially frightening moment. When Kurt finally appears properly to whip Nevenka, Bava of course could not show them actually having sex, so he tries a more expressionistic approach that is incredibly effective. When Kurt goes to kiss her, his face, advancing right towards the camera, is bathed in intense blue, than green, than finally red as it seems to hits the camera and then evaporate. The actual whipping scenes remain very uncomfortable, partly because they are filmed in a certain way as to implicate the viewer. Kurt is a bad man and Nevenka a disturbed woman, yet the film remains non-judgemental on their actions.
All this wouldn’t work so well if it wasn’t for the two central peformances. Kurt in my opinion is Christopher Lee’s second greatest role [I’m sure you can all guess the first!], and he’s hypnotic in the role, cruel,scary but incredibly charismatic. Sadly his voice, like everyone in the cast, is dubbed in both the Italian and the English langauge prints, and this is a bit of a shame, as hearing his distinctive voice would have doubled the effectiveness. Watching the film, I kept thinking that it was a shame Lee never played Heathcliff, he would have been perfect. Daliah Lavi as Nevenka is possibly even better, in that it’s a harder and braver part. She is heartbreaking as a woman engulfed in a love that may destroy her and frightening as someone on the edge of sanity. There’s a scene where Kurt whips her, and her expression goes to terror and pain to exceptance to sexual pleasure, and I can’t think of many other actresses that could have conveyed that so well. All the other cast members are fine, and the icing on the cake is provided by Carlo Rusticelli’s passionately romantic score. After I first saw this I couldn’t get the beautiful music out of my head, and it gives the proceedings both an ironic element and the feel of a great love story, which The Whip and The Body ultimately is. Beneath it’s darkness, it’s fear and it’s pain is a really moving story of two people who need each other and don’t let a little thing like death stop them.
10/10
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check out more of my reviews on http://horrorcultfilms.co.uk/
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RE: Mario Bava - Master Of Italian Horror - 
.Sad but true. 
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