Knives of the Avenger begs a mythical origin story involving Mario Bava, a drinking game with Sergio Leone and/or Sergio Corbucci, and a bet he couldn’t make a gothic-tinged spaghetti western with Vikings. Reality is more prosaic: Bava was asked to take up the reins from another director sacked scant days before filming, quickly revised the script, and rattled off this Norse action flick, a seemingly strange excursion for the great Latin fantasist. Knives of the Avenger has more in common with the burgeoning strain of Italianate western than with Bava’s horror films, and bears the hallmarks of a quickie production which Bava was late boarding. But Bava had first broken into directing rescuing Riccardo Freda’s films under similar circumstances, and he knew the drill well by this time. Knives of the Avengerstraddles common visual territory with The Body and the Whip (1963), with the eerie coastal setting stricken by the wind and roiling sea, as if perched on the edge of all creation, and the lucidly mythological, bare-boned world of Hercules at the Centre of the Earth (1962). The theme of protagonist dogged by their past wrongs, both done to them and committed by them, is moreover all too apt for Bava’s oeuvre of guilt manifesting as possession, and moral putrefaction infesting organs human and natural. Bava expertly negotiates the low budget in regarding his stockades and model long ships, managing to make the proceedings seem all the more starkly historical and legendary. The setting is somewhere in Viking-age Scandinavia, in the nexus of stockaded town, blissful riparian cottage, and foreboding sea: the opening shot is quietly epic as Bava scans a Volva’s elaborate beachfront shrine, drawing the Fates as maps in sand ready to be washed away by the next tide.
Karin (Elissa Pichelli, billed as Lisa Wagner) lives with her son Moki (Luciano Pollentin) in a hut, on the advice of the Volva, to hide from marauder Hagen (Fausto Tozzi). A mysterious wandering stranger with incredible knife-throwing skills, Helmut (Cameron Mitchell) passes by Karin’s farm and begs a place to rest, and Karin lets him camp by the stream and catch fish. When a pair of Hagen’s henchmen discover Karin and Moki’s hut, they try to abduct mother and son, but Hagen intervenes, killing both men in a prolonged, violent hand-to-hand battle. Karin and Moki trust Helmut after this and rely on his protection. But things are not what they appear to be, in a film where Bava’s sleight of storytelling hand spins off a complex tale of human motivation and violence from a very simple precept, and all the strands on his loom tie back to one singular incident in the past. Karin is the wife of Arald (Giacomo Rossi Stuart, who starred in Bava’s Operazione Paura the same year), king of a Viking town, but he’s been missing for years since going on a raid to Britain. Hagen, formerly a military leader under Arald’s father the former king (Amedeo Trilli, billed as Michael Moore), broke a peace treaty by attacking the city ruled by Rurik, a famously honourable and brave warrior, during which Hagen killed Rurik’s wife and children. Hagen was exiled for this, but Rurik launched a vengeful attack anyway, during which he wounded Arald, killed the king, and raped Karin. Rurik left Arald alive, who then vowed his own revenge in the smouldering ruins of his kingdom. Fate and Bava are memorably wicked however, because Helmut is actually Rurik, a tormented man of conscience in self-exile, hunting for Hagen and now charging himself with protecting Karin and Moki, who might well be his son.
Bava, characteristically, aims exactly at the point where most of the western plotlines Knives of the Avenger evokes tend to be evasive. His film has elements of Red River (1948), Shane (1953) and The Searchers (1956) in its make-up, but where those films were vague about the possibly villainous pasts of their protagonists, Bava is explicit, and he turns the shadow-play of family roles in those films and other classic westerns into outright family perversity. Where Leone purposefully stripped psychology from his death-operas and held revenge as the one, honourable motive for violence, Bava is contemptuous of those propositions, and makes the fraught interior battle of his characters the essence of his drama. Hagen’s unrestrained psychopathy drives the plot, but Bava is most interested in the theme of good people driven by the circular nature of brutality to contemplate deeds that disgust them, both Rurik and Arald, who turns up at a suitably fraught moment in the storyline. The pseudo-historical setting allows Bava this leeway; Knives represents an exact mediation between the classic peplum movie and the western which was supplanting it in popularity in Italian genre cinema, both chronologically and thematically. Bava had proven how well he understood the clear-cut nature of myth with the vividly illustrated Manichaeism of Hercules at the Centre of the Earth, and here depicts the corruption of the noble hero, which Bava’s Hercules exemplified, through Rurik’s plight, remaking him as the modern antihero: a loner, wounded and purified by loss, unable in spite of his heartbreaking desires to regain a place in society. Bava’s love of Hitchcock may well have influenced the mid-film flashback that completely reorientates the story and reveals the truth about Rurik, a la Vertigo (1958), and he makes sure that Rurik becomes more, rather than less, empathetic once his shame is revealed, including his hope, at once pathetic and wistful, that one day Karin might forget Arald so he can take his place.
Such fascinating gymnastics of narrative and character allow Bava to explore the sort of dualism that in horror films was usually rendered more safely metaphoric, like the possession of Katia by Asa in La Maschera del Demonio (1960), as a common human condition. Westerns and peplums both concerned themselves with moments in time when anarchy and tyranny are replaced by justice and civility; Bava depicts rather a shift between modes of justice as well as concepts of the self. Drama is built around a series of severed relationships and doppelganger fill-ins, and the crucial moment that was Karin and Arald’s wedding – an interrupted ritual that recalls both John Ford’s westerns and ancient mythology at the same time – proves to have been the severing point for past hopes and future confusions. Bava recalls Anthony Mann’s gift for depicting violence as genuinely painful and distressing on screen (indeed, Knives has aspects of a miniature sequel to Mann’s massive but equally ethically concerned The Fall of the Roman Empire, 1964, whilst the final moments recall El Cid, 1961), as the various battles scattered throughout sport moments of wince-inducing epiphany, like when Rurik finally fells one of Karin’s attackers with an axe, after a fight sequence that’s almost as tightly and intensely choreographed as a Jackie Chan tussle. The stringent budget, lack of time for preparation, and setting generally precludes Bava working up such heights of stylised visualisation as marks his best work. But even with such a straitened production, Bava works some camera magic: the opening scenes set a tone of raw, totemic drama with an ambience of fatalistic beauty, and a long single-take early shot (interrupted but not disguised by a jaggedly edited-in cutaway) is an elegant blend of stop-gap invention and aesthetic coup, recalling Sam Fuller’s similarly throwaway legerdemain, as a simple pan onto breaking waves and back gives a moment for the credits to roll whilst covering a passage of time. Karin and Moki are filmed from a low angle, their footprints in the beach sand erased as they move, as figures from dreamtime. Hagen is shot in huge close-up whilst his mounted men fill the background, making fullest expressive use of the widescreen ratio, conveying the nature of Hagen’s power and egotism, and tipping a hat to Leone’s framings all at once. Bava makes his nods to Leone even more literal as he depicts Hagen adopting improvised body-armour like Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars (1964),
Rurik is envisioned in flashback as a towering figure with face hidden by a steely mask that at once evokes the new face bashed onto Asa in La Maschera del Demonio and the implacable visage of Darth Vader, and also the sweeping, sepulchral force of the vampire paterfamilias in “The Wurdalak” episode of I Tre Volti Della Paura (1963). Rurik’s dehumanisation, and depersonalisation, in thrall to his irrational fury transforms him into one of Bava’s monsters, clasping at a prostrate, screaming Karin like Mitchell’s outright villain in Sei Donne per l’Assassino (1964): to twist the knife further and clearly signal Rurik and Helmut are the same man for the first time, Bava match-cuts from flashback to present with the same framing, only this time Rurik’s hand reaches out to comfort. The tavern in the Viking town is built like a bullfighting pen, with high circular walls and stalls, setting the scene for the repeated struggles that occur there, including a vicious confrontation between Rurik and Hagen, and Rurik facing Arald, who he tries not to fight, as the upright, gallant, unforgiving husband pushes the penitent defender to make it easier to kill him in clean conscience. But Bava swaps that setting for a plunge into the underworld, returning the film to a mythic frame, filming in what looks awfully like the same underground location where Bava shot much of the finale of his Hercules entry, as Rurik and Arald launch an uneasy partnership to rescue Moki from Hagen, who kills the Volva and claims the labyrinthine tunnels of her sacred cave. Rurik’s brilliant knife-throwing saves the day and underlines his redemption, but perhaps the most telling gesture is the absolving hand Rurik places on Arald’s shoulder as they part, and the lingering look Karin gives Rurik as he vanishes from the dark caverns into the light of day: these brief instants have more stirring, moral complexity in them than dozens of other films ever accumulate. Knives of the Avenger is one of those oddities that prove just how much a good filmmaker can pack into nominally brief, cheap, disposable product.
