1963 thriller
Rating: 16/20
Plot: While vacationing in Italy, pretty Nora either witnesses a murder or imagines that she witnesses a murder. At any rate, she now knows too much which might make her a target. She desperately tries to get somebody to believe her story while taking cues from the mystery novels she loves and doing a little detective work of her own.
This is also known as The Evil Eye for some reason, but I prefer the take-off of the Hitchcock title. This is a better movie than Hitchcock’s whatever title you go with. This is Bava’s last movie in black and white, and it’s considered the first giallo movie which Wikipedia tells me is a “mixture of thriller, sexploitation, and horror conventions.” The black and white is appropriate because it allows a lot of the story to take place in shadows where it belongs. Bava didn’t like the story much and wanted to focus more on film techniques. He said it was “too preposterous” and added, “Perhaps it could have worked with James Stewart and Kim Novak, whereas I had. . .oh, well, I can’t even remember their names.” Their names are Leticia Roman who is absolutely fetching as the titular girl and John Saxon as her love interest. But the style probably is the real star of the show here. There’s a jazzy score (not Les Baxter who was used for the American release), another cool-looking dead lady and a bizarre scene where a cat rocks her bed under blinking lights, all these off-angles that show how our girl’s world has gone askew, all that greasy black and white, general fuzziness, shots looking up at nuns and creepy daughters, swinging light bulbs, and cameras looking up from newly-dug graves. I loved one shot where a murderer spends an inordinate amount of time trying to pull a knife from somebody’s back. Another great, and admittedly preposterous, scene involves Nora setting a trap for a suspected prowler which adds a little goofy humor to the thrills. Despite what Bava said, I thought the story was solid, and although I probably should have seen the surprise ending coming from a mile away, I only sort-of guessed it correctly. It was really well done though. This is a very likable and accessible Mario Bava movie and maybe not a bad place to start if you want to get your own Mario Bava Fest going.