BLOOD AND BLACK LACE @ 60

A model is killed for knowing too much. When her incriminating diary is discovered both suspicion and potential victims pile up. On the trail of murder we'll know too much about the guilty and the innocent right up to the last bloody minute. This is a giallo. It's one of the first. It's one of the best. For optimum results, assume that whatever happens during a scene fits in at the time, regardless of what the film has already told you. This is sometimes intentional red-herringism and at other times sheer lack of concern.

Mario Bava, maestro of genre, fresh from inadvertently making the first giallo proceeded to break the rule book for this one. While his gothic horrors could be shot in lurid colours, thrillers and dramas were expected to be in monochrome. This one is in edible lurid colour from start to finish. By the time you notice how long some of the takes are you might get a little dizzy. If you get confused between characters and mistake the motives of one for those of another just wait until one of the pair gets offed. If you're expecting Hitchcockian suspense you might have to relax into the cruelty of the violence instead. There is gun play on screen but gialli developed more along the lines of revenge tragedy where murders involved more sadistic and lingering torture: people are more likely to die from prolonged and severe scalding or the claws of suits of armour than a bullet.

Does that sound terrible? Would you prefer a logical plot that tied up after a thrill ride? You have plenty of options. If you like the idea of wading through a bloody mire of threat that, if you let it in, will begin to feel more like a real dream. Even the credit sequence to Blood and Black Lace encourages this. The cast are seen posing in settings of the fashion house. A committed Hitchcockian might have established character traits or suggested relations between them but here they are like mannequins come to life, awaiting the programming to move and act in a gallery that presages the lurid colour pallet they'll call home. There's an American version of the opening credits which is far more direct about revealing the progress of murder and violence we're in for but, while it is more accurate, it is less effective in conveying the tone. This is a dream, if not ours than someone's.

As a further layer, a between meal snack, if you will, Bava gives us a kind of opinion piece on the commodification of beauty and in abstract form its logical extension through class and capitalism in the parade of workers left to bicker among themselves while their user group in management can pick and choose which to keep and which to replace. The idleness of the rich and controlling is almost always centre screen as the murders appear to increasingly relate to the stratification keeping this corner of the fashion industry up.

If you've made it this far you will understand how hard this film is to describe and how harder still it is to entice viewers to it. Remember that it was a precursor to a genre that became as much a staple of a national cinema as J-Horror did in its time decades on. The trait of loosening the details toward a dreamlike feel while keeping the violence confronting and difficult is more fully developed here than in Bava's OG giallo. You might even find the investigation by the detective annoying rather than thrilling but it does feature some sensational breakthroughs and intriguing setbacks. 

At the end of its decade, new blood like Dario Argento took the baton to produce ever tougher gialli as the genre took wing with audiences, the violence getting more extreme and the overall look more beautiful. But here, back in 1964 with these strange scenes of murder and fear in settings of extraordinary colour we are looking at a prototype that, for all its spiky edges and ugly duckling tries, carries the beauty of invention.