It’s so good to give things second chances. Years ago, I’d tried watching today’s film, having read that it was really worth checking out, and I just couldn’t get into it, couldn’t get past certain oddities of its existence, and I gave up. And what a shame it would have been if I’d never come back, cause having finally watched it (multiple times now), I gotta say, it’s an (admittedly somewhat flawed) frickin’ masterpiece! So, let’s just get right into it and dig into Mario Bava’s eminently gothic, eerily old fashioned, surprisingly kinky, and mind blowingly beautiful 1963 classic, The Whip and the Body.
The Whip and the Body (1963)
So let’s begin with what I couldn’t get past the first time as I think it could be a hurdle for many. This movie is Italian (though you might not know it from the opening credits where everyone goes under an English name – Mario Bava is listen as John M. Old). Generally, genre pics in Italy in this era never shot sound on set, often featuring a polyglot cast, each speaking their native tongue and dubbing it all in post for each market where the film was to be released. That’s just par for the Italian horror course.
This film also stars the inimitable Christopher Lee, an actor with both great physical presence and a voice of rich and silky timbre. But he didn’t do his own ADR for the English language release (something he said he’d always regretted) and the first time around, hearing him dubbed by another voice was just so offputting that I couldn’t take it and had to stop. Fortunately, when I decided to try again, the version I found on Shudder only came in Italian with English subtitles, which really did make it better. Since then, I’ve rewatched in both languages and I think the Italian dub is just superior all around – the sound mix is more effective and the voice actors simply more expressive. The English voice work feels stilted and artificial in comparison. Though the lead actors were actually speaking English, if you have the option, I strongly recommend the Italian – and you will be rewarded with a real gem.
In short, Bava’s film is about Nevenka (Daliah Lavi), a young noblewoman who has just married the milquetoast younger brother of her former lover and lives in his family’s castle on a craggy coast where the wind literally never stops howling. Her husband, in turn, still carries a torch for his cousin, Katia, who lives in the castle as well. Along with Nevenka’s aged father-in-law and a couple of servants, they all live in unsatisfying stasis, until one day when Kurt (Christopher Lee), the older brother and lover in question, returns. He’d been sent away for murdering (after probably abusing) a servant girl and no one is happy to see him back.
But no matter how Nevenka hated him and how he’d physically and emotionally abused her (and others), she can’t help but respond to his unfeigned desire (so unlike her husband), and though I don’t think she understands herself and is disgusted by her own feelings, she does get off on the beatings, as in an early scene where he finds her on the beach and brutally whips her before they passionately make love among the rocks and crashing waves as he coos, “You haven’t changed I see. You’ve always loved violence.”
Then in rapid succession, first Kurt and then the Count (her father in law who’d hated and feared Kurt) are both murdered in the dark of night with the same dagger (the very one that he’d previously used to dispatch the poor servant girl) and the film’s (psychological?/supernatural?) horror begins in earnest as Nevenka keeps seeing Kurt outside of every window, looming over her bed, creeping from his tomb, leaving muddy footprints that only she can see. His voice coasts on the howling wind, and his ghost haunts her conscience, her heart, and her yearning flesh. And it goes from there.
First off, it must be noted just how much this resembles an entry in Roger Corman’s Poe cycle: the castle on the rocky coast, the indeterminate setting (in the past, some time; in a castle, somewhere), the particular psychological flavor of repressed feeling surfacing as violence and madness. All of this is for very good reason. Apparently the producers had shown co-screenwriter/assistant director, Ernesto Gastaldi, Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum and requested something in that vein. And I can really see it. Watching the film, Poe came to mind more than once, especially in terms of pathetic fallacy, wherein a character’s internal state is externalized in the setting, in the environment (think The Fall of the House of Usher).
This castle, lashed by the wind, by the sea, locking up so many warring emotions, its characters isolated together, doubting one another, sometimes both loving and hating each other and themselves in equal measure, feels quite like something old Edgar could have written, or at least like something old Roger could have adapted, walking that blurry line between insanity and a real ghostly threat. I particularly liked a haunting scene in which Nevanka is draw to her late lover’s room late at night by the sound of whipping, but in a bit of a jump scare, hanging vines that have been beating against the window knock it open, letting in the omnipresent gale. For her, he is everywhere – on the wind, in the trees, invading the castle of her mind.
But while I really do like Corman’s work, the visual splendor that Bava brings to the proceedings just raises this all up to another level. It is just breathtaking filmmaking, and at the same time, it must be said that it is all so effective – not simply pretty shots to be pretty, but it all serves the film, it all helps to get into Nevenka’s tortured mind and body, and it absolutely sings. The camera glides around, looking for the nuances of fear and passion in her expressions, finding the sadistic glint of joy in Kurt’s eye. The camera brings to life what could sometimes be a staid and static family drama, highlighting beauty and monstrosity, often at the same time and in the same place. I felt such cinematic joy in its stunning presentation of psychological horror and trauma that come with a searing pinch of beauty that can lead a character to her own destruction, making me feel for her while at the same time grinning from ear to ear at the absolute glory of it all. It’s the kind of movie that makes my attempts at description inexcusably, self-indulgently florid.
It’s often said that a given film couldn’t be made today, and I think in this case that may be true. In many aspects, it’s all pretty old fashioned, but it works so well. More on this in a bit, but Nevanka’s portrayal is one we don’t generally get any more (which is probably for the best): the trembling woman, in love with not only her abuser, but her abuse. While that kind of representation can even be harmful when writ large across culture, in the isolation of this one story, it is poetic and gorgeous and tragic, and I adored every melodramatic moment of its distillation of awful need and sublime suffering. But it’s not only issues of outdated gender issues. The filmmaking itself is quite old fashioned as well, but in ways that really work for it.
These days, when we make a historical piece, there tends to be a lot of care put into accuracy – caring about the buttons a man would have on his jacket in 1906 that he wouldn’t have had in 1850 for example. Now, there are often failures (my wife is into historical costuming, so I hear about them – apparently hair is pretty much always disastrously wrong), but effort is made, and there is an industry of professionals who do the work. That wasn’t always the case. Often when watching older films set in an even earlier period, everything is more non-specifically “old” (and this is especially true for low-budget genre work). Are we in the late 19th century, the early 18th? Who knows, but men sometimes toss on a cape, and women’s dresses are long and pretty. I’m pretty sure they also have long fake lashes, which look more 1963 than anything else, but are striking when a small band of hard light falls across eyes in the darkness. All of those anachronisms are certainly present here, but as the saying goes, I think that’s a feature, not a bug.
In being so ahistorical, the location never specified (the Wikipedia entry just says that it is set “in Europe”), it all takes on the quality of a fairy tale / psychological allegory / dream-nightmare. Thus, all of the fear and desire is lent a broader significance. It feels bigger than itself in what I can best describe as a theatrical fashion. Not anchored by base realism, not flattened into something “natural,” the viewer’s willing suspension of disbelief can go further, can make other connections, approaching the ineffable, the subconscious. And the same can also be said for other aspects of Bava’s work.
I’d previously mentioned the beauty of the filming, but past the camerawork, I must praise how the film is lit, which is something we don’t often discuss with more modern movies. For quite a while, it has been in vogue to “realistically” light every shot when possible, even going so far as to film night scenes only with natural sources (the moon, candles, etc). As I understand, technology has developed to make this more and more viable (it was a great technical feat when Kubrick did it in Barry Lyndon, but is now much more easily achievable), but even when standard lights are still used (which is usually the case), the approach tends to be attempted realism – light that looks like it comes from real sources in the filmic space. That wasn’t always true. Bava lights scenes so expressively; in one shot, Lee passes out of a pale blue light from the left, into a sickly green light from the right, into shadow, into a red light from below – where are these well focused lights coming from, and how are they colored with such saturation in this old timey setting?
It is totally unrealistic, but each offers a different view of his character – ghostly and dead and monstrous. He is such a fearful presence, but looking out of Nevanka’s eyes, she doesn’t pull away from his kiss, and we are treated to a really special, creepy, unsettling moment. Throughout the film, expression and feeling trump “realism,” and this is a breath of fresh air in this era when even well-shot films can sometimes feel dark and muddy. That said, this isn’t a neon lit exercise in pure color. It isn’t “style over substance.” Everything serves the piece – it’s just that it serves it by underlining emotion and atmosphere rather than just making it look like a place being lit by a source.
Furthermore, I think that when a director has a heavy hand with light and shadow and color and camera angles, it’s easy to imagine a lessened focus on the work of the actors, the performers simply being flexible props to costume and light and move through the shots in service of visual storytelling – and it’s even easier to expect that in a case like this where we can’t even hear their original voices, but it is absolutely not so. Though this must have been a very technical shoot, with actors having to hit very precise marks to achieve the director’s vision, I feel they are also given real room to do their work. There are great stills I can capture and include in this post, but you have to watch the film to see how gently the lens explores the contours of the actors’ faces, the light and shadow catching and amplifying the delicate and nuanced work they are doing. And particularly in the case of the two leads, Lee and Lavi, that work is tremendous: layered, intriguing, and exhilarating.
I came to this movie because I knew I knew and loved Lee and Bava, but I hadn’t known anything about Daliah Lavi, who I must say floored me as Nevenka. What a performance! I knew Lee’s name first, but it is absolutely her film, revolving as it does around her inner turmoil, and she gives such an exquisitely detailed performance. An Israeli actress and model, it looks like she did a fair amount of work through the 60s, but I’ve not seen any of it. Seriously, judging from what she did here, I don’t know how she wasn’t a bigger star.
There is a centerpiece scene that serves as an encapsulation of the film’s strengths – the performances, the camera, the music, the lights. Nevanka, terror stricken, seeing Kurt’s ghost around every corner, and who is furthermore haunted by her scandalous desire for this man who had been so cruel to her, overhears her husband declare his love to his cousin. It had been, I think, pretty obvious, but explicitly hearing it wounds – even if her feelings for him were cool to begin with, the betrayal lands. In the next shot, we see her before her mirror, running her hand over the skin of her neck, over her bodice, her body hungry for contact, needing to be needed, when suddenly Kurt’s dead and ghostly face appears behind her.
Over a wordless minute, as they rotate around each other, his face is almost perfectly still, but a question seems to pass over it, while she is in turn terrified, lustful, defiant, amorous, and hateful. And as she moves in and out of shadow, the light somehow enhances each of these expressions in different ways. Finally, she takes up her scissors in defense, but he gingerly plucks them from her hand. She leaps across her bed to ring a bell and call for help, but his whip easily binds her wrist and he proceeds to lash her bodice off, leaving her lacerated and beaten. She cries out how she hates him, but bites her knuckle and sinks into her bed, giving herself over to sensation, to this extremity. By the end, no matter what she says, her eyes tell a different story – she is bound by desire for him. For this. The ghoul moves in for a kiss and we fade to black. It is an absolutely delicious performance.
For a period piece made 62 years ago in which there is no nudity, this is an extremely horny movie. So much desire and almost all of it repressed – so terrible is that desire for Nevenka, so confusing. In modern times, there can be some effort made to present kinkiness with some model of best practices: safe words and explicit consent and all that good stuff. Here, there is none of that, but there is a nexus of sexuality and self-recrimination and anger and need that rings true – complicated and not at all nice, but significant and real, making demands that can’t be denied. Kurt is a monster and an abuser, and she gets off on it, and she needs that release – perhaps she even needs the shame that comes with it – human psychology is complex. The buttoned up existence she otherwise leads will never satisfy her and that is part of her horror. He is a monstrous threat, but for her, the unquenchable need she feels is even worse. Just as her body is scoured, her psyche is possessed, her agency broken – by her own nature, her carnal drive that will not be denied. That is her nightmare, her horror. And in true Freudian fashion (without going into too many spoilers of the ending), it is the inevitably failed repression of these impulses that results in murder and madness.
Unsurprisingly, this didn’t fare well with the censors in the early 60s. It got banned in its native Italy, and the English language version cut 14 minutes, including all of the sado-masochistic stuff, resulting in a story that was entirely unintelligible (and was released in America with the title What! which seems fitting for a film that makes no sense, having had its very heart removed). For all that it has many old fashioned elements, its boldness in terms of unconventional sexuality is quite modern (or is it – I mean the works of both de Sade and Sacher-Masoch predate it by more than a hundred years). And its horror, Nevenka’s horror, lands.
There is little killing and almost no gore (though there are some graphic whippings and throat cuts), but this piece lives somewhere between the sumptuousness of the gothic and the tension of the psychological – and it is a treasure. The dubbing is really unfortunate and I can’t say I was totally enamored of some scenes with characters who weren’t Kurt or Nevenka, but all of that said, I am so glad I watched it. Give it a try – stick out the language issues, and I think it will be more than worth your while.