A Black Veil For Lisa

Veil Bait

A Black Veil For Lisa
aka La morte non ha sesso
Italy 1968 Directed by Massimo Dallamano
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B
plus alternately sourced Italian Version.

Warning: Big story spoilers.

Well now... I have really mixed feelings as I sit down to write this review of my first (two) watches of A Black Veil For Lisa because, although it’s an absolute masterpiece of giallo cinema, it’s also not been presented in a correct version for the international market and I’m very, very angry at finding out the 88 Films super duper limited edition Blu Ray I bought a couple of years ago only has the truncated, rescored, heavily compromised US version of the film on it (and so does the US Olive films release, apparently). So I watched this, admittedly superb transfer of the US print in ignorance and absolutely loved it, followed by Rachael Nisbet’s absolutely great 20 minute talk on the film as an extra (the one stand out thing, it turns out, on the UK Blu Ray which alone is worth the price of admission) but then got completely destroyed when, on reading the booklet, it became clear this was a totally inferior release. Luckily for me, I had an unwatched DVD-R of the Italian DVD release which contains the full length Italian version (donated to me by somebody at some point) but... even that doesn’t tell the whole story because there are no English subtitles on the Italian DVD.

With me so far? So you can watch the Italian version with the English language track but, inevitably, in footage not fond in the US version, the dialogue switches to untranslated Italian. Also, the English track has the heavily ‘rescored by the US people’ music on it, so in order to get a true flavour of the Italian version, I had to keep toggling between the two audio sources so I could hear just how different each film sounded tonally. Not an ideal set up but at least now I feel confident enough to write this review armed with a little more knowledge. And I’ll try to review it side by side simultaneously, to point out the differences and issues I have with it.

The basic plot is very simple. We have the brilliant John Mills playing Inspector Bulov, head of the narcotics division in Hamburg. He brings to this film the most amazing performance I’ve seen in a giallo and, also, most of the acting by anyone in this film is pretty good. It’s not terrible and stilted like many a giallo (and the acting is not what you watch a giallo for anyway... even actors like David Hammings are usually scuppered by the performances of their co-stars) and it all feels pretty naturalistic. But this is not a typical giallo in other ways too... I’ll get to that in a minute. Anyway, Bulov is married to Lisa, played by Luciana Paluzzi (who most people outside of her own country will recognise from her role as the femme fatale in Thunderball, reviewed here). He thinks she’s unfaithful and, while on the trail of the giallo killer of the movie, Max, played by the jovial Robert Hoffmann, he is constantly worried about her sleeping around, as well as her unproven links to the Italian underworld. At one point half way through, the film takes a serious U-turn and derails the narrative by having Bulov, once he’s caught the killer, hire him to kill his wife instead of bringing him in. And then more shenanigans are afoot until the film reaches it’s... well, I’d like to say inevitable conclusion but, again, both versions of the film have different and contradictory endings too. In the US version, Lisa is found to have been playing Bulov all along and, after he and Max both perish, she is left alone with her gang boss boyfriend. Crime is unpunished (which is not what I’d expect from an American release at this time). In the Italian version, just after this scene, the cops arrive and arrest both Lisa and her partners-in-crime lover and justice is served (not something I would have expected to see in an Italian release of the time).

So that’s the story and truly astonishing acting performances covered but, like I said, who watches a giallo for story and acting. It’s all about stylish shot designs and music for many... and this film has style in abundance. Dallamano does some wonderful stuff with the camera. The US version opens briefly on the funeral of Bulov before flashing back but not so in the Italian one which is more linear. Both then start off with a beautiful shot where the camera pans down in a street to the grid like windows of a pub front, moving right and tracking the many windows until it comes to a specific set of gridded windows, with a man’s head positioned visually in one small square window before it then zooms in on him. 

Then a curious thing happens in the US cut which I assumed, on my first watch through, was an interesting stylistic choice from Dallamano but, it turns out... not. We get a brief shot of Max watching his victim from across the street and then the shot cuts back to the end of the last shot where the camera closes in on the victim in the window... so a nice little visual echo/stutter, or so I thought. Not so though... when I saw the Italian cut, the view across the street were a few more shots and lasted longer and, when it cuts back to the victim, it’s not a repeat shot as in the US version at all. As it turns out, that was just a ham fisted, totally intrusive way of cutting out a few seconds of completely innocent footage by the Americans. One nice thing it does with Max’s character in the Italian one is, just before he kills someone, it focuses on a stylish close up of his upper face bathed in red with the whites of his eyes jumping out visually from the surrounding red, accompanied by a little musical stinger. Alas, this beautiful stylistic flourish is totally absent from the killings in the US print. 

By the way, Max is dressed as a typical giallo killer in these shots (bearing in mind this was just after Bava had made some gialli... The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood And Black Lace... but before they exploded in popularity in the wake of Dario Argento’s directorial debut, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage two year later), wearing the typical hat, black coat, black gloves and carrying a flick knife. In many ways the film is more a polizei in nature (like other films in Dallamano’s canon) but it soon shows it’s true giallo nature in scenes like these and the idea of Bulov hiring the killer for his own purposes. Bulov, as brought to life by future Professor Quatermass John Mills, is not the blundering, ridiculous policeman you find in most gialli, that’s for sure. And the identity of the killer is known almost from the start (as in The Killer Must Kill Again) so that’s atypical too.

Dallamano really likes vertical lines and uses them wherever possible. Max’s demise even comes in a forest punctuated by loads of upright, vertical tree trunks he can hind behind. In some rooms in this movie, though, it’s almost like he’s added vertical patterning on the decor in sections where you wouldn’t expect to find them, just so he can split the actors up into little compartments in the frame. While this is fairly common in a lot of these kinds of films... it almost looks a little too unnatural here, as the office of Bulov’s boss looks like it’s somewhat bizarrely vertically pitched, if you know what I mean. Some nice use of reflections in mirrors in some sequences too.

He also makes good use of space. For instance, he has a shot where Mills’ head is seen up close in profile on the left of a shot while his wife runs off and up stairs in the rest of the deep room behind him. Some wonderful camera movement too, in places. Such as when a camera tracks left down a street to follow a car which turns right into another street as the camera pauses to watch it turn yet another corner, before carrying on left to the other part of the original street to catch a police car careening in and then following it back right to end up in the camera’s original placement. Such great stuff.

And then there’s the score and the protracted, sinister whisperings of ‘Liiiiiiisaaaaa’ on it. Okay, so when I switched back to the Italian language, the score is totally different and, I’m sad to say, seems somewhat less appropriate than the American patch up job (I have the Italian score on order on CD so I’ll be able to listen to it properly at some point soon). Also, the Italian version has a few places where it kind of sounds like it’s plagiarising the James Bond theme... so I can see why the Americans wanted to replace it. However, quite often on the American score (which also sometimes replaces silence on the Italian one... fairly badly), it lapses into something like what Nelson Riddle would have composed for the 1960s Batman TV show so, yeah, also not quite appropriate to the action for sure. So you take you choice... Bond or Batman I guess.

Either way, the scores do nothing to detract from the brilliance of the film in total and I would have to say that, if you can somehow find the magical Holy Grail of a correct Italian print with English subtitles on it (which is now my mission), then I would recommend A Black Veil For Lisa to pretty much all fans of the Italian giallo. It’s a superb film marred heavily by imperfect releases by, I’m guessing, companies that won’t spend the money to do the subtitling. Companies which I am now very angry at but, at least the 88 Films version has the brilliant Rachael Nesbit interview... and that’s definitely a big weighing in factor to purchase, on releases like this.