The Girl Who Knew Too Much

Román Holiday

The Girl Who Knew Too Much
aka La ragazza che sapeva troppo
Italy 1963
Directed by Mario Bava
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B
As part of Arrow’s
Macabre Visions Blu Ray Set

First of all, I’d like to point out that for this re-watch of the classic giallo, I watched the Italian version of The Girl Who Knew Too Much and not the version re-dubbed and re-cut for the American market as The Evil Eye. The main reason being that there aren’t enough hours in the day to cover everything I want to cover on this blog but I mention this because the American cut is very different from the Italian version. Both have scenes exclusive of the others and additional differences, like the identity of the voice over narrative, give each film a slightly different feel, as does the extra emphasis on humour in the US version but, possibly, also a more organic version in The Evil Eye with regards to how the characters relate and bond. Both have slightly different endings too but I honestly can’t remember the last time I watched these... it was well over a decade ago so forgive me for not remembering more thoroughly.

And, I will get around to revisiting the US cut one day and, when I do, I’ll probably tack it onto the end of this review and republish it. I’m not sure I’d advise that the US version is better (as some people do) but, anyway, I’ve plumped for the version which would have been shown in Italian cinemas. This transfer of the film is from the barely released Arrow Blu Ray box set from a couple of years ago called Macabre Visions - The Films Of Mario Bava. I say barely released because this was so limited it sold out before it hit physical shops, just before Arrow’s licence for the films in it expired (from what I can tell, please enlighten me further if you know differently) and the shop I’d pre-ordered it from and paid a significant deposit with, informed me on the day that they couldn’t get it in after all and could only offer me a refund. I quickly jumped on the internet and grabbed what I believed was one of the very last copies on Amazon, which sold out later in the same release day, if memory serves. For people who missed out on this set, all I can say is that it’s probably not the last time we’ll see these on Blu and my gut tells me there will be a much more comprehensive (and costly) Blu Ray edition of Bava films from somewhere else at some point, possibly from one of the ‘usual suspects’ labels in the US like Severin or Vinegar Syndrome.

The Girl Who Knew Too Much is considered by many to be the first Italian giallo and, well, there’s certainly an argument to be made for it being the first famously remembered one at any rate. It’s shot in black and white by the late, very great Mario Bava who continues to prove, along with his earlier black and white movies (I think this was his last monochrome film where he was actually credited as the director rather than cinematographer), that he was just as much of a visual genius with a chiaroscuro tonal palette as he was with his amazing colour films. The claim that he more or less invented (not quite I think) the Italian giallo would be further enhanced when he released the brilliant movie Blood And Black Lace a year later (reviewed by me here) which really strengthens the claim although, of course, it was Dario Argento’s borrowing of the format in The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (reviewed here) in 1969 which really opened the floodgates of the genre from that point on.

The plot of the film is very simple but proceeds with a very convoluted unravelling to get to the resolution of what is, to all intents and purposes, a standard whodunnit. The film started out as trying to be a simple, romantic comedy in the Roman Holiday vein but Bava wanted to take the slight thriller aspects of the earlier script and push them full on. I don’t know when famous director Sergio Corbucci jumped on to write one of the screenplays but I’m guessing he was at least partially responsible for the way the material changed.

Either way, the plot deals with an American girl, Nora Davis, played by the extraordinary beautiful and interesting... and subsequently somewhat wasted in her short movie career... Letícia Román. She flies in to stay with an older lady friend in Rome for a vacation but, when the old lady dies and she tries to get to the hospital, in a sequence I’ll detail a little later, she witnesses a murder which is covered up the next day. The old lady’s doctor, Marcello Bassi, played by the dependable John Saxon, then tries to help her solve the puzzle as the killer appears to be honing in on Nora to be the next victim in the ‘Alphabet Murders’, the last of which happened ten years prior. She goes to stay in a new but absent friend’s apartment  (played by Valentina Cortese) that looks out onto where she saw the murder and she uses that as her base for the rest of the movie. And that’s pretty much all the plot details I want to give as I don’t want to spoil this for you. Although I will say that this is so early in the giallo cycle that the portrayal of the police as either ridiculous or incompetent is not yet a thing here. Instead, while they’re just as ineffective in terms of coming up with a credible investigation, they’re not portrayed as being bad at their job, as they would often be shown in various gialli as the years went by.

Bava’s shot compositions are, as usual, extremely beautiful and a constant all the way through this good looking movie. He will often do things like pitch a figure in one half of the screen in close up and then have the depth of the shot a lot greater on the opposite side of the screen (say where the corner of a wall gives way into a bigger space) to show a background which ensures your eye is focused on the figure in the frame. Another nice piece of directing the audience eye occurs when Nora is lured to a room in an apartment and the view from an open door as we look out at her from within, has the doorway showing the only details of the shot placed in an upright vertical slat of the screen representing the door, with all the rest of the frame either side as just black space... with Bava effectively shrinking the frame for that one shot.

There are also some great and quite long camera movements in the piece. Sometimes he’ll start off on a detail of a shot which doesn’t mean much and then move the camera to focus on a person or group moving through a space and then start following them before suddenly stopping as the character(s) move on, as he takes note of another detail in the background of the shot, for instance. Asides from the gothic tinged atmosphere he manages to achieve in the well lit streets of Rome at night, he also makes good use of the interiors, especially in a sequence where Nora sets a trap for the killer by sprinkling the floor with talcum powder and running a cats cradle of interconnecting string all around the house... it’s almost like Bava came up with the string just so he could photograph it, as it doesn’t really add anything to the plot in this scene.

The film is quite fast paced and Bava uses a lot of short, visual stings (almost) in the sequence which starts off with the death of the old lady. While Nora is putting some drops into a glass for her, not realising she’s passed away as she’s doing this, we get the reveal of the death as a sequence of four beautiful shots when she goes to give the old girl her medicine as... a close up shot of Nora’s face, a close up shot of the old lady’s face, a close up shot of a cat against a mirror signalling fright and then a beautiful shot of Nora’s hand dropping the glass in profile.

As the sequence carries on after Nora can’t raise the nearby hospital on a telephone, Bava really piles on the assault on Nora’s senses with another little sequence of short shots (something I don’t usually think of in association with Bava). So we see her get mugged for her handbag and knocked unconscious, then she wakes up and sees a woman who has been stabbed with her possible murderer pulling the knife from the lady before dragging the body away... causing Nora to faint again, then someone trying to revive her the next morning by pouring alcohol down her throat before he runs off when a policeman finds her and she wakes up again. The next sequence begins with an amazing shot of white nuns’ hats pressed together and looking like the petals of a flower before the nun’s heads depart from their close huddle, like petals peeling away and revealing the shot of Nora in a hospital bed (and only then do you realise what the ‘giant petals’ were when we see the nuns in a reverse shot). It’s all good stuff and the pace is certainly dazzling.

The acting and chemistry between Román and Saxon is great too (much more so than in real life, from what I understand) and there are certainly some hangovers, even in the Italian version, where the comedy of what must have been the original script is seeping through and invading the thriller element (such as the slapstick conclusion to the ‘talcum powder and string’ sequence). Bava manages to pull it off and make the elements work together even when, in some cases, Roberto Nicolosi's wonderful score is perhaps playing to the comedy a little too much (I can’t remember what Les Baxter’s score for the US version is like). In short, the ‘first screen giallo’, The Girl Who Knew Too Much, is an absolutely brilliant and entertaining movie and is up there with the director’s best. Any fan of giallo or, indeed, Italian cinema in general, should definitely take a look at this one. An essential film among many essentials in the director’s body of work, for sure.