Danger: Diabolik 9780231851121

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Diabolik, chi sei?
1. From fumetto nero to ‘wild and kooky cape-opera’: Production, promotion, initial reception
2. ‘Uh-oh – it’s getting groovy!’: The cult afterlife of Danger: Diabolik
3. Fantômas all’italiana: Analysis
4. Genius of Crime: The place of the film
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

CULTOGRAPHIES

CULTOGRAPHIES is a list of individual studies devoted to the analysis of cult film. The series provides a comprehensive introduction to those films which have attained the coveted status of a cult classic, focusing on their particular appeal, the ways in which they have been conceived, constructed and received, and their place in the broader popular cultural landscape.

OTHER PUBLISHED TITLES IN THE CULTOGRAPHIES SERIES:

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW Jeffrey Weinstock

DONNIE DARKO

BAD TASTE Jim Barratt

QUADROPHENIA Stephen Glynn

Geoff King

THIS IS SPINAL TAP Ethan de Seife

SUPERSTAR: THE KAREN CARPENTER STORY

FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! Dean DeFino

FRANKENSTEIN Robert Horton

Glyn Davis

THEY LIVE

BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA

D. Harlan Wilson

Ian Cooper

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

MS. 45

THE EVIL DEAD

DEEP RED

Kate Egan

Alexia Kannas

BLADE RUNNER

STRANGER THAN PARADISE

Matt Hills

Jamie Sexton

THE HOLY MOUNTAIN

SERENITY

Alessandra Santos

Frederick Blichert

DANGER: DIABOLIK Leon Hunt

WALLFLOWER PRESS LONDON & NEW YORK

A Wallflower Press Book Published by Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York • Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2018 Columbia University Press All rights reserved. A complete CIP record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-231-18281-2 (pbk: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-85112-1 (e-book) Series and Cover design by Elsa Mathern

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

1

Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction: Diabolik, chi sei?

1

From fumetto nero to ‘wild and kooky cape-opera’: Production, promotion, initial reception

13

‘Uh-oh – it’s getting groovy!’: The cult afterlife of Danger: Diabolik

37

3

Fantômas all’italiana: Analysis

56

4

Genius of Crime: The place of the film

2

102

Notes

118

Bibliography

122

Index

132

v

This book is dedicated to the memory of my sister Lisbeth Hunt

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to Jamie Sexton and Ernest Mathijs for their enthusiasm for this volume and for bringing it to the Cultographies series, and to Yoram Allon, Commissioning Editor at Wallflower Press, for seeing it through to publication. The following people read draft chapters and offered comments and suggestions: Susy Campanale, Erin Pearson and Milly Williamson. Thanks also to Iain Robert Smith and the Cult Reading Group. Peter Stanfield first prompted me to think about Lawrence Alloway at the Repetition/Repetition symposium he organised at the ICA in 2012. Russ Hunter provided good advice on conducting research in Italy, and Gavin Hogg drew my attention to Il giaguaro magazine (and generously supplied me with copies). The Bibliomediateca ‘Mario Gromo’ at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin could not have been more helpful. The BBFC quickly and patiently answered all my questions regarding the single cut they made to the film (even though the cuts made subsequently remain a mystery for now – Maledizione! as Diabolik is fond of saying).

vii

INTRODUCTION DIABOLIK, CHI SEI? ‘Which comics do you prefer?’ ‘The masked man. I’m a romantic.’1 – La decima vittima/The Tenth Victim (1965) According to J. P. Telotte, the film cultist experiences a ‘movement beyond reason, beyond the usual ways of seeing, caring about and identifying with a film or its characters’ (1991: 5). But as several volumes in the Cultographies series confirm, not all cult films are immediate in triggering this departure from rational engagement with cinema. Others take longer to insinuate their way into our affections. This was my experience with Danger: Diabolik (1968; original title: Diabolik). I can think of other cult favourites that had a more dramatic effect on first contact – Enter the Dragon (1973) and Suspiria (1976), for example, two life-changing films that I saw close to their original releases. My encounters with Diabolik were shaped more noticeably by context, by viewing conditions and by my developing Italophilia, which led me also to the comic on which it is based. If the other two films might have provided more dramatic opening scenes for this book, perhaps I have a more interesting story to tell about Diabolik and me. 1

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I can put an exact date on my first viewing of the film – 19 November 1982, when it was shown in the ‘Late Film’ slot on BBC1 at 10.50pm. The Radio Times synopsis describes the film as follows: The hijack of a ten-million-dollar gold shipment is the latest in a series of robberies by daring master criminal Diabolik, and Inspector Ginco (sic) is out to trap him. Italy’s finances totter as a million-dollar necklace is used as a lure for Diabolik but he has some cunning tricks to outwit his pursuers. Hero-villain Diabolik pulls off some superior triumphs in this entertaining comicstrip adventure. (Anon. 1982) The spelling of Ginko’s name can be traced back to the film’s (English-language) screenplay (Maiuri et al. 1967), but more striking here is the identification of the film’s setting as Italy, something which, as we shall see in later chapters, is by no means clear. Television has often played an important role in the cult film experience, late night screenings providing experiences of films that arrive as unknown quantities but leave indelible marks. The cultification of British horror film The Wicker Man (1973), for example, seems to owe as much to its TV screenings catching viewers unawares as its original theatrical pairing with Don’t Look Now (1973). Seeing Diabolik for the first time, I knew one important thing about it – it was directed by Mario Bava. I had not at that point seen any Bava films, but I had read enough about him (thanks mainly to House of Hammer magazine) to know that he sounded like my kind of filmmaker. Moreover, I had already had some encounters with Italian horror, fantasy and what now gets commonly referred to as the giallo. Suspiria had blown me away, and I had seen Sergio Martino’s I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale/Torso (1973) on a double-bill with 2

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Flesh Gordon (1974), although I was probably unaware at the time that it was Italian, merely that it was dubbed and European. The Bava films I most wanted to see were his Gothic horror films, but they had long since disappeared from cinemas, had not been shown on TV in the UK, and I did not yet have access to a VCR. I was intrigued by Diabolik, certainly. It felt a bit like a superhero film (especially when one of Ennio Morricone’s cues resembled the Batman theme), but clearly wasn’t. Its genre was difficult to determine, in fact. The casting of John Philip Law put me in mind of Barbarella (1968) (which I had already seen), and Adolfo Celi immediately evoked Thunderball (1965), even down to having a luxurious boat in both films, but what exactly was Terry-Thomas doing here? This was a curio for which I didn’t quite have sufficient context to fully understand, and it left me feeling that the ‘real’ Bava was probably to be found elsewhere – amongst vampires and spiked masks, not futuristic burglars climbing walls and driving E-type Jaguars. My second encounter with Diabolik took place seven years later, on 9 May 1989, at arguably the most cultish of British locations, London’s Scala cinema, a unique (at least in the UK) combination of cutting edge arthouse repertory cinema and dissolute grindhouse. Originally built as the Kings Cross Cinema in 1920, at various points in its history it was a Gaumont cinema, an adult film cinema, a live rock venue, and even a Primatarium (appropriately enough, when it reverted to being a cinema, it both re-opened and eventually closed with King Kong). But the Scala is best remembered for what it became between 1981 and 1993, the year it went into receivership partly as a result of illegal screenings of thenbanned A Clockwork Orange (1971). Originating at another venue in London in 1979, it moved to the Kings Cross cinema in 1981. Nostalgic accounts of the Scala are remarkably consistent, and accord largely with my own memories of it. Mark 3

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Pilkington recalls the ‘lurid psychedelic comic strip mural of Bmovie moments’ in the foyer and ‘the cavernous darkness of the auditorium’ (2011) – one frequently found oneself sharing the latter with the cinema’s resident black cat. Richard Stanley makes it sound even more like a cinematic demi-monde: ‘a house of dreams redolent of an opium den with its haze of psychoactive smoke and its delirious, half-glimpsed denizens’ (2002: 185). Little wonder that more recently the Scala has given its name to UK-wide seasons of film club screenings such as Scala Forever and Scalarama (see Paley 2011). The Scala was where I first saw Bava’s La maschera del demonio/ Black Sunday (1960) in its censored UK cut Revenge of the Vampire, Dario Argento’s L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo/Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1969) and his otherwise elusive 4 mosche di velluto grigio/Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971). The Scala’s speciality was double- and triple-bills or all-nighters devoted to the likes of Argento, Walerian Borowczyk and John Waters or themed programmes with a subcultural or transgressive flavour. On one occasion it screened William Castle’s The Tingler and House on Haunted Hill (both 1959) in their original ‘Percepto’ and ‘Emergo’ formats (in other words, electric shocks for the former, a plastic skeleton on a wire for the latter). Annual membership was less than a pound and the programme took the form of a foldout poster-sized calendar. If you didn’t live in London (which I didn’t at the time), the all-nighters provided a convenient way of staying over in the capital on a Saturday night, although they were often raucous affairs, a lairy mix of alcohol and cinematic mayhem. If you attended enough double and triple bills, you were destined to eventually encounter perhaps the most Scala-ish of all films, Thundercrack! (1975). Daytime screenings were generally calmer affairs, and this is how I saw Diabolik on a near-perfect triple-bill with Barbarella and Batman (1966), billed as ‘Campy Comic Strip 4

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Capers’.2 I add a qualifying ‘near’ because my feeling now is that Modesty Blaise (1966) was the missing guest at that particular pop art party. The comic book movie is now dominated by superheroes and by Hollywood, but on this bill, Batman was in some ways the odd one out. The 1960s comic book movie was more likely to be European (mainly Italian or French – and Modesty Blaise casts an Italian in the titular role) and leaning towards comics aimed at adults. Batman was a spin-off from a TV series aimed at the family; thrills and excitement for children, knowing laughs for the grown-ups who recognised costumed squares when they saw them. But one aspect of the 1960s screen Batman in particular was very much in tune with the Euro-comic book movie – Catwoman, a figure who had been absent from the comic since the arrival of the Comics Code in 1954 had made DC Comics cautious about showcasing sexy bad girls. On television, Julie Newmar and later Eartha Kitt donned the black catsuit and purred their way through the role, while in the film Lee Meriwether adds a toughness to the role and seduces Bruce Wayne while disguised as the Russian Miss Kitka. Here was a figure who had more than a little in common with both Eva Kant and Modesty Blaise (not to mention Cathy Gale and Emma Peel on television). Overall, this was the perfect context in which to revisit Diabolik, both in terms of location and the cinematic company it was in. Batman and Robin, Diabolik and Eva, Barbarella and Pygar. The Batmobile and the black E-type Jaguar. Barbarella stripping in zero gravity, Diabolik and Eva making out on a revolving bed covered in money. The Batcave and Diabolik’s underground hideout, the latter looking like Ken Adam had given the former a makeover. Blond John Philip Law with wings, John Philip Law with black widow’s peak, aptly characterised by Mystery Science Theater 3000 as ‘an eyebrow-delivery system’. Things were starting to click into place. 5

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Not surprisingly, I liked Diabolik much more a second time. I’d seen other Bava films in the meantime and was feeling more and more invested in him as a filmmaker. The tone of the film made more sense alongside the other two films. Diabolik felt a bit like a version of Batman in which The Riddler was the hero and Catwoman was his girlfriend and partnerin-crime. Of the three films, Batman was the only one whose comic book incarnation I was familiar with. My knowledge of European comics was patchy, and on the basis of the films, I assumed that Diabolik and Barbarella were based on the same kind of semi-erotic graphic novel. Ideally, this should be the point in the narrative where Diabolik becomes one of my favourite films, but that didn’t quite happen yet, even if I was moving in that direction. One of the likely reasons for this is indicative of some interesting shifts in cult exhibition and home media and the way we value or fetishise certain viewing platforms. As mainstream film exhibition later moved almost exclusively to digital, celluloid unsurprisingly assumed an ‘old media’ aura for cinephiles. Screenings on 35mm have become a cult selling point at repertory cinemas and film clubs (or an ‘event’ like Tarantino’s 70mm roadshow exhibition of The Hateful Eight (2015)), and the rarer the film, the more the fragility of the format becomes a source of distinction that separates the devoted from the ‘casual’ viewer. Celluloid cinephilia requires an acceptance of flaws and a putting aside of the emphasis on completeness that accompanies home media (the only available print might be cut, damaged or missing key scenes for some other reason, it might have a different title or have intrusive subtitles in an unfamiliar language). As one London-based independent film programmer, irritated by constant questions about whether he was screening films ‘the way the artist intended it’, puts it: ‘Is it cut?’ is a home entertainment question. Distri6

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butors like Arrow, Shameless, 88 Films etc do a wonderful job of digging through various prints and materials and creating versions of a film that arguably never saw a cinema screen before. ‘Is it cut?’ is not a question applicable to 35mm. (Cigarette Burns 2015) As these comments suggest, celluloid cinephilia – the desire to see a film on 35mm or even 16mm at almost any cost – is not an alternative to but rather complementary to home entertainment cinephilia, which has served a director like Bava particularly well, as a director whose films often existed in very different versions. It’s possible that the version of Diabolik I saw at the Scala was the shorter 88-minute UK version – I didn’t know the film well enough to determine that. What is more to the point is that celluloid did not yet have the aura of an ‘obsolete’ technology; its fragility and unpredictability still seemed more of a liability than something that might one day be nostalgically sought, let alone remediated in the simulated print damage, colour deterioration and missing reels of films like Grindhouse (2007). Given that Diabolik had yet to be released on video, and not been repeated on TV since 1982, this was the only way to see it, but that faded and scratched print, while enjoyable enough to be my favourite of the three films, was nevertheless withholding some of visual pleasures that would only become apparent on DVD. Bava’s films began to re-surface on video in the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly when specialist labels such as the UK company Redemption emerged. Given that his developing reputation was primarily that of a horror director, some titles were inevitably prioritised over others. But if Diabolik hasn’t enjoyed quite the same attention as La maschera del demonio or Sei donne per l’assassino/Blood and Black Lace (1964), nor does it have the lesser status of one of his west7

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erns or his commercially successful but still critically unloved pairing of Vincent Price with Franco and Ciccio, Le spie vengono dal semifreddo/Dr Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (1966). Its slightly late arrival on home video perhaps had more to do with its rights being held by a major Hollywood studio, Paramount, its original American distributor. According to Tim Lucas, when they finally released it in 1993, it was in response to a letter-writing campaign from Bava fans (2007: 730). Nevertheless, it was a budget release in a cardboard sleeve and an EP/SLP format, an extended play mode that sacrifices some picture quality by playing at a slower speed in order to make room for more material on the tape. Much like celluloid, video is another ‘obsolete’ platform that has generated a retro-fan subculture (see Church 2015). I will admit to some fond memories of VHS – certain beloved video cases and the pleasure of labelling tapes recorded from television – but that nostalgia does not extend to the experience of actually watching them, of films often in the wrong ratio, with a ‘soft’ or sometimes fuzzy picture and what has become the most enduring image of video ‘authenticity’, dropout. In other words, this was still not the format to do full justice to the film’s luxurious sets and colours. Nor is it the only Bava film of which that is true. Video served Bava’s black and white films and the gorier aspects of his colour films well enough. But what we might call his ‘pop’ films – 5 bambole per la luna d’agosto/Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970), for example – looked less and less ‘minor’ as each format upgrade made their strengths and rewards more apparent. Diabolik fully ‘arrived’ for me on DVD. It’s possible that if I had ever invested in Laserdisc, its earlier release in that format might have had the same effect. Paramount’s 2005 release of Diabolik is a comparatively modest DVD package compared to some of the Bava releases on niche labels, but the film had never looked better. Diabolik and Eva driving into 8

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their underground hideout and the notorious ‘money-bed’ scene felt like some of the most perfect cinema ever created. Moreover, Ennio Morricone’s glorious soundtrack, mixed a little low on VHS, came to the fore as never before (as we shall see, the music is a core component of the film’s cult reputation). In one viewing, it leapfrogged gialli and Gothic horrors to become my favourite Bava film. I started screening it to students, who generally liked it too. Thus far, this has been a very Bava-centred account, the story of format upgrades finally doing justice to the auteur’s visual genius. But that isn’t necessarily the story I want to tell in this book – if anything, I aim to de-emphasise Bava a little in order to look at the film in other ways. Nor is it the whole story of my own relationship with the film, even though that was initially driven by my fascination with Bava as a mysterious and difficult-to-see filmmaker. There is an overlapping narrative to be told, too, of my engagement with the comic and with its specifically Italian context. My first encounter with the original fumetto came via an exhibition of Italian horror and crime comics at London’s National Art Library in 1998. If the film took a while to fully find its way into my personal canon, my first encounter with the comic was even less auspicious. It struck me as just plain dull, particularly in the company of the lurid thrills offered by the fumetti neri (black comics) it spawned such as Kriminal and Satanik, let alone such semi-pornographic horror comics as Sukia or Zora la vampira. I had expected something like Barbarella (which I had also yet to read in comic book form), but it looked more like a daily newspaper strip with uninspired art and pedestrian stories. Where were the Bond-like hideouts and revolving circular beds, the sensuality and glamour of the film? This was reinforcing the picture of Bava the genius, transforming an undistinguished and presumably long-discontinued comic book into cinematic gold. 9

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By the time I owned the DVD, I had begun to visit Italy more regularly (and have continued to do so). I also began learning Italian – what better way to practice than buying and reading fumetti? My favourite was Dylan Dog, the Rupert Everett look-alike who investigates supernatural cases from his house in London, aided (or, just as often, hindered) by a Groucho Marx impersonator. I was intrigued by Italy’s newsstand comics culture and particularly by the discovery that Diabolik was still very much part of it. Regardless of my initial disappointment with it as a comic, I began to buy that, too, initially unsure whether these were new stories or reprints – to confuse the outsider, two of the monthly titles (Diabolik R and Diabolik Swiisss) reprint older stories while the third (Diabolik Inedito) prints new stories that don’t look significantly different from the older ones. Apart from the bi-annual Il Grande Diabolik, which showcases more ambitious stories and more exciting artwork (particularly that of Giuseppe Palumbo), the impression was of a comic that hadn’t changed in fifty years. That was not an entirely false impression, I would discover, and Italy’s love affair with Diabolik and Eva became more and more interesting. My initial antipathy towards the comic gradually turned into an obsession. Dylan Dog still seemed a better comic, wittier and more imaginative, but Diabolik was and is a cultural phenomenon, deeply embedded in Italian culture. When Diabolik’s publisher Astorina made subscriptions available to international readers, I jumped at the opportunity. In his book The Italians, John Hooper comments on the enduring visibility in Italy of icons of the era of the country’s ‘economic miracle’ such as Totò and Alberto Sordi. He attributes their continuing ubiquity on fridge magnets or DVDs sold at newsstands as a ‘cocoon nostalgia which surrounds that era of hope and prosperity’ (2015: 109). Diabolik strikes me as similarly frozen in that period, a story of prosperity and accelerated technological mo10

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dernity, just as the film leaves him frozen in molten gold in its final scene – an anti-hero who creates his own economic miracle. This began to feed into my perception of the film, which was no longer solely ‘a film by Mario Bava’ – it was an adaptation of a comic which, while no masterpiece of the medium, was of huge cultural importance (and to which I was quite addicted). In some respects, the film is faithful to its source to the point of adapting scenes and images from it, but in other ways it is very different. My overall feeling is that Diabolik is a better film than it is a comic, in that it better exploits its medium that its source does. However, to engage with the character’s place in Italian culture is to quickly become aware of the importance of Eva Kant in her own right, and perhaps to feel that in some ways the film sells her slightly short. There are a number of Diabolik stories that have taken on a ‘classic’ status with readers over the years. One of the most frequently reprinted is number 107 (or Anno VII no. 5, to use the comic’s eccentric numbering system), ‘Diabolik, chi sei?’ (‘Diabolik, who are you?’), first published in 1968, less than two months after the film was released. Diabolik and his nemesis Inspector Ginko are captured and tied up, forced to spend more time together than they might choose. Ginko seizes the opportunity to ask the question he has always wanted to ask, the question that is also the title of the story. It is a question that the comic can never afford to fully answer, even though for the first time it did provide some backstory for the character, preserving the mystery of ‘Il re del terrore’ (the King of Terror), who is partly a mystery even to himself – ‘Non so chi sono’, he replies (‘I don’t know who I am’). In some ways, ‘Diabolik, chi sei?’ is the question I have been asking since November 1982 when I first saw the film and wasn’t quite sure what I was seeing – King of Terror, 11

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Fantômas all’italiana, ‘psychedelic-era thief’ (as the VHS and DVD sleeves call him) or, as in the US trailer, ‘a bankrobbing hood who battles the cops’. This short monograph examines the origins of the film, the roles of Bava, Morricone, Dino De Laurentiis and others in its production, its reception, its cult afterlife (or afterlives), and its reputation as a ‘pop art’ movie. But underpinning all of this is that same question: Diabolik, who are you?

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1 FROM FUMETTO NERO TO ‘WILD AND KOOKY CAPE-OPERA’: PRODUCTION, PROMOTION, INITIAL RECEPTION

From 1968 the era of Diabolik begins! The mysterious, audacious, cunning, invincible hero with his magnificent girlfriend. (Italian press ad)

On 4 May 1965, an article in the Rome newspaper Il giornale d’Italia announced that ‘Il momento dei fumetti’ (the moment of comics) had arrived (Patrizio 1965: 9). The arrival of a new filone (a cycle or trend) was discerned in the announcement of three productions – the producer Tonino Cervi was preparing Diabolik, while Dino De Laurentiis and Ducio Tessari respectively were set to make Barbarella and Mandrake the Magician. Tessari’s Mandrake would never come to fruition, and De Laurentiis would later attempt (unsuccessfully) to lure Federico Fellini to Hollywood to film it. The other two projects would be made back-to-back two years later, both arriving on screen in 1968, but it would be a very different version of Diabolik from the one Cervi was planning. 13

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As if to reinforce the impression that the masked thief and the intergalactic sex bomb were umbilically linked from the start, Diabolik and Barbarella were both created in 1962, both part of rather different emergent ‘adult’ comic book cultures. Jean-Claude Forest’s Barbarella, ‘a cross between Flash Gordon and a Brigitte Bardot movie’ (Sabin 1993: 189), was initially serialised in the French V-Magazine before being collected as a graphic album in 1964. It would later be translated into Italian in Linus magazine, a vehicle for auteurdriven comics, while its broader influence in Italy would be felt in a comic book filone devoted to sexually active heroines with increasingly lubricious names. Diabolik, a far tamer affair, was nevertheless the first Italian comic per adulti and the filone it generated – the fumetti neri (black comics), as the press dubbed them – provoked considerable controversy for its violence, cruelty and sexual titillation. Diabolik was created by the Milanese Angela Giussani (1922–1987), wife of publisher Gino Sansone; she was soon joined by her sister Luciana (1928–2001) as co-writer. ‘I wanted to make gialli for people who could barely read,’ Angela would explain (Curti 2016: 97). The (possibly apocryphal) story goes that she found a discarded Fantômas novel on a train, which gave her the idea of an Italian iteration of the French pulp villain created by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain; the cowled master criminal, the multiple disguises, the perpetually frustrated pursuing police Inspector (Fantômas’s nemesis Juve would become Diabolik’s Ginko). Early stories even borrowed the French setting because they wanted the threat of the guillotine hanging over il re del terrore (the King of Terror), later establishing the geographically non-specific Clerville as Diabolik’s nefarious playground. But inspiration also came from where she found the novel. Diabolik was published in a format that could easily be read on public transport (a 12x17cm pocket format that it still adheres to 14

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today) – crime, murder, mystery and thrills consumed during the commute to work. The name had two possible derivations. ‘Diabolic’ was the name of a character in a 1957 giallo novel Uccidevano di notte (They Killed By Night) by Italo Fasan, initially published under the pseudonym ‘Bill Skyline’ and then re-issued the following year under his own name as Diabolic. ‘Diabolich’ had also been the pseudonym used in a series of anonymous letters sent to the police regarding the murder of a Turin factory worker in 1958 (see Gaspa 2012: 32). The name was clearly in the air – the comic mystery thriller Totò Diabolicus was released a few months ahead of the first issue. But the chosen spelling in the comic would strike a chord – ‘il fattore K’ (the K factor) became one of the defining features of the cycle, with Diabolik followed by Kriminal, Satanik, Sadik, Zakimort and Demoniak. The artwork on the first issue was so amateurish that when it was re-issued the following year, new artwork (itself little more than competent) was commissioned. Moreover, the early stories were highly derivative, lifting episodes and storylines virtually intact from the Fantômas novels, such as sending a disguised and drugged substitute to the guillotine in Diabolik’s place in ‘L’arresto di Diabolik’ (First series no. 3 1963). However, that same issue introduced one of the ways in which Diabolik stood apart from his Parisian predecessor. It featured the first appearance of Eva Kant, initially as wicked as the titular master criminal (‘She’s diabolical like me’, muses a clearly smitten Diabolik).3 But Eva quickly became a softening influence, curbing his crueller instincts and, at the same time, gradually becoming as central to the storylines as he was. Diabolik himself evolved into a combination of Fantômas and James Bond – the cowl and disguises of the former, the virile looks and technological modernity of the latter.4 While 007 had his Aston Martin, Diabolik had his black E-type Jaguar, which performed increasingly audacious tricks 15

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while evading the police. The Bond films informed the Diabolik comics of the mid-to-late 1960s, particularly Thunderball, with its underwater action, Adolfo Celi villain and pre-credits jetpack escape – Diabolik would don a jetpack and helmet in ‘La morte di Ginko’ (Anno IV no. 16 1965).5 In 1964, the fumetti neri exploded into a full-blown cycle, with the first publication of Kriminal, Satanik, Fantax/Fantasm and Mr X, with Sadik, Zakimort, Spettras, Demoniak and Jnfernal (sic) debuting the following year. Several of these upped the stakes in terms of violence and titillation, such as the scantily clad and curvaceous women who populated the work of writer Max Bunker/Luciano Secchi and artist Magnus/ Roberto Raviola (Kriminal, Satanik). The Giussanis held back from such excesses, placing a growing emphasis on romance as a central component of the comic. A backlash against the fumetti neri began in the press in 1965, followed by a trial in Milan that led to the prosecution of several publishers in 1967. This is an important part of the context for il momento dei fumetti. Comics were big news because of their visible shift in Europe towards an adult readership, because pop art had given the medium a rather ambivalent cultural capital (simultaneously important and ephemeral) and because of the controversy aroused by the fumetti neri. A film of Diabolik must have seemed like a no-brainer for an ambitious producer like Tonino Cervi, the head of Italy Film, who bought the rights from the Giussanis’ publishing company Astorina for 20 million lire (Curti and Di Rocco 2014: 23). But the King of Terror was to face an even tougher challenge than that posed by his indefatigable nemesis, Inspector Ginko.

PRIMO COLPO: THE CERVI-HOLT DIABOLIK Cervi was no stranger to prestige, his productions including Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso (1964) and the multi-director epi16

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sode film Boccaccio ’70 (1962), but observed in interviews that he had enjoyed more critical than commercial success (Minuzzo 1965: 11). Diabolik was seemingly designed to rectify that, while also being more affordable than his preferred project, Flash Gordon. Cervi referred to Diabolik as ‘a modern Fantômas’ (ibid.), and the original Lord of Terror had returned to the screen the previous year in the first of a trio of comic adventures, Fantômas (1964). Cervi had a very particular conception of the character and, like De Laurentiis after him, wanted to tone down the violence and cruelty. Diabolik would be a sophisticate who read Freud and Nietzsche. A much-quoted line of dialogue would supposedly have him say, ‘I’m waiting for James Bond so that I can show him up’. Moreover, he would only kill other criminals and steal from the rich. ‘In a certain sense,’ claimed Cervi, ‘Diabolik is a social executioner’ (Dessy 1965: 13). This notion of Diabolik as an outsider-rebel would be picked up by the De LaurentiisBava Diabolik, albeit as less of a cultural sophisticate than a countercultural prankster. The film was an Italian/French/Spanish co-production with a budget of 500 million lire and a shooting schedule that included shooting in Italy, Spain, Mexico and the US. Dino De Laurentiis’ main involvement was as distributor, but he also provided a 70 million lire advance (Curti and Di Rocco 2014: 23). Cervi initially placed an ad in the comic (‘L’artiglio del demonio’, Anno IV no. 9, 1965) seeking an unknown to play the lead. The requirements for the part were entirely physical – ‘handsome and masculine face – clear eyes – minimum height 1.8 metres – athletic build’. Was this mainly a publicity stunt or did Cervi really think that the cowl might allow an unknown to play the role? In any case, he was soon aiming rather higher. Alain Delon was announced as the preferred choice: ‘Alain Diabolik’ was the headline of a story in Big magazine (Dessy 1965), accompanied by a still of the French 17

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heartthrob wearing a balaclava in Mélodie en sous-sol (1963). But Cervi settled instead for Jean Sorel – essentially a more affordable Delon – and he was announced as the lead in late July of 1965. For the part of Eva, Cervi had wanted Virna Lisi, seemingly perfect for the role of an elegant blonde originally modelled on Grace Kelly’s character in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955) . When she proved to be unavailable, he made a rather less obvious choice, Elsa Martinelli, who was dressed and made up to look even less like her comic book counterpart than she did already. The director assigned to the film was Seth Holt, a capable genre director whose filmography included two stylish thrillers for Hammer. A Taste of Fear (1960) was shaped by some of the same influences that would be found in many Italian gialli, most noticeably Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955), and he had just completed The Nanny (1965) with Bette Davis. The latter is worth bearing in mind, given some of the stories in the Italian press regarding his slow pace – one called him ‘the tortoise director’, claiming that he took a month and a half to shoot eight minutes of film (Anon. 1966a: 43) – and problems created by his drinking. Holt is known to have been an alcoholic, and Diabolik was not the last of his films to be abandoned – two years later, Monsieur Lecoq met a similar fate. But there is no evidence that his drinking had troubled the films he made for Hammer (although he died during his third film for them, Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971)). As the production ran aground, the press reported clashes between ‘the phlegmatic Englishman’ and the ‘Italian in trouble’ (Anon. 1966b: 42). Rumours abounded, from lack of money, Cervi trying to force Holt to quit in order to claim the insurance, and a drunk Holt refusing to speak to the actors (Sorel allegedly corroborated the latter). According to Curti and Di Rocco (2014: 25), it was De Laurentiis who intervened, shutting the production down on the grounds of 18

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the supposed poor quality of the footage he had seen. The French and Spanish distributors withdrew amidst recriminations, not least from Jean Sorel, who threatened legal action, feeling that it was he, not James Bond, who had been shown up. Like any lost or abandoned film, the Cervi-Holt Diabolik continues to fascinate, to assume a romantic aura that would almost certainly not exist if the film had been completed, or if it was possible to see the jettisoned footage. Judging by Curti and Di Rocco’s invaluable account (2014), the script promised little more than a paracinematic curio. Diabolik flies through the air with the aid of a jetpack-like device (2014: 27), while Inspector Ginko is entirely absent, and there seems to be little evidence of the sophistication Cervi and Sorel talked about. While some of the stills of Martinelli, wearing a black plastic raincoat and knee-length boots and holding a gun in a 007-style pose, suggests an action-oriented take on the character, this isn’t supported by Curti and Di Rocco’s account of the script.6 One aspect of the comic, however, that seems stronger in the Cervi-Holt Diabolik than the De Laurentiis-Bava one is the titular character’s penchant for disguises and the technology he uses to execute them – pull-on latex masks, rather than the wig, glasses and false beard that John Philip Law briefly uses, the latter more reminiscent of René Navarre’s easily-seen-through disguises in Louis Feuillade’s silent Fantômas serials. What the two versions seemingly have in common is a greater emphasis on eroticism than the comic ever exhibited, to the extent of actual nudity in the Cervi-Holt film. But if the script suggests that De Laurentiis performed a mercy killing, the surviving black and white stills (the actual film was being shot in colour) have taken on a cultish existence of their own. They have a dreamy quality that could be mistaken for a lost Feuillade serial or even a surrealist take on the character. While he 19

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looks less impressive in the mask than John Philip Law (who claims to have won over Bava with his ability to arch his eyebrows in the right manner), Sorel cuts a suave figure without it. If the script wasn’t quite selling the idea of a sophisticated gentleman-thief, photos of the actor without cowl and bodysuit indicate that Sorel certainly was. The Italian press were noticeably less interested in John Philip Law than they had been in Sorel, shifting their attention to Marisa Mell as Eva. Martinelli, on the other hand, seems miscast on every level, not helped by a bizarre and unflattering black fright wig seemingly designed to mirror the widow’s peak of her partner. However, Anna Battista (2012b) discerns a not inappropriate resemblance to Irma Vep, the catsuit-clad criminal played by Musidora in Louis Feuillade’s silent serial Les Vampires (1915), itself another iteration of the Fantômas narrative which Feuillade had already adapted. One might also detect a touch of Modesty Blaise in some of the stills.

SECONDO COLPO: THE DE LAURENTIIS-BAVA DIABOLIK Both the re-launched Diabolik and Barbarella were co-productions between Dino De Laurentiis Cinematografica (Rome) and Marianne Productions (Paris). The Franco-Italian cinematic relationship was a particularly strong one – between 1950 and 1965, there were 764 co-productions between the two countries (Wagstaff 1998: 76). French-Italian co-productions embody a ‘soft’ or what Mette Hjort calls affinitive transnationalism, ‘the tendency to communicate with those similar to us’ when choosing international partners (2010: 17). Diabolik’s comic book source might be seen as FrancoItalian in essence, while there are scenes in Barbarella that wouldn’t look out of place in a Bava film (the sinister biting dolls, the labyrinth). Paramount’s role as distributor was first announced in L’araldo dello spettacolo on February 7 1967 20

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as part of their programme for 1967–69, and they provided some of the funding for the film. But their publicity campaign suggests that this was slightly less familiar territory for them. Diabolik’s cult reputation is inextricable from that of Mario Bava. Peter Hutchings suggests that the elevation of Bava largely took place after his death, particularly when his films became available on home media, but also paralleling developments in ‘cult, paracinematic and trash-based’ approaches to film studies (2016: 80). But Bava by this point already had a reputation amongst French film critics, as we shall see when looking at the film’s reception. Hutchings rightly observes, however, that the ‘cult’ Bava (Bava the outsider auteur) tends to obscure the way he is ‘more obviously situated within a particular industrial context’ (2016: 81). Alberto Pezzotta (2013) is wary of a purely auteurist approach for similar reasons in his book on the director. The industrial context of Diabolik is harder to ignore than in some other Bava films because it is well known that the higher budget and a producer with his own vision of the film brought certain pressures to bear on a director who, while he probably held little expectation of final cut – more often, a variety of cuts – usually seemed to at least be accustomed to a degree of autonomy on set as long as he met certain commercial requirements. According to John Philip Law, Bava and De Laurentiis had rather different conceptions of the film. The producer wanted ‘a cosmopolitan super-production for family viewing, with an elegant, worldly thief, something like Raffles’, while the director envisioned ‘a dark, violent, very Italian film. In the end, after loads of controversy, they made a hybrid version’ (Aguilar and Haas 2008: 72). De Laurentiis is sometimes painted as the quintessential interfering producer blind to the vision of the maverick filmmaker, a view symptomatic of auteurism’s denigration of the film producer – the ‘auteur’s 21

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enemy’ (Kezich and Levantesi 2004: 236), the brash, vulgar Neapolitan, equal parts hyperbole and hubris, who failed to understand that art should be left to the artist. De Laurentiis, for better or worse, was a hands-on producer: if a film is deficient for any reason, ninety times out of a hundred the fault is that of the producer, who didn’t select the right collaborators, who didn’t organise the production, who doesn’t know how to practice his trade. And if, on the contrary, a film is released and becomes a big hit, the credit should go to – well, I’ll say no more. (Quoted by Kezich and Levantesi 2004: 352) There is evidence that De Laurentiis felt some affinity towards comics as a cinematic source (or at least was commercially savvy enough to recognise their cultural currency). Three of the anthology films he produced (in Italy they were known as ‘episode’ films) dealt with the scandal of the fumetti neri. Thrilling (1965) includes the episode ‘Sadik’ (directed by Gian Luigi Polidoro), a comic tale of a housewife obsessed with the comics; Vittorio De Sica’s episode ‘A Night Like Any Other’ in Le streghe/The Witches (1967) has Silvana Mangano castigate husband Clint Eastwood for allowing their son to read Diabolik and others, before a fantasy sequence shows her with Mandrake, Flash Gordon and Sadik; and Capriccio all’italiana (1968) includes both Steno’s ‘Il mostro della domenica’, in which Totò adopts a Diaboliklike persona in a vendetta against men with long hair, and Mario Monicelli’s ‘La bambinaia’, which casts Mangano as a babysitter trying to dissuade the children in her care from reading the ‘black comics’. De Laurentiis was the point of continuity between the two Diabolik films, and would later make another cult comic book movie, Flash Gordon (1980) that is very similar in tone to both Diabolik and Barbarella. 22

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Bava seemed to have two issues with De Laurentiis. The first concerned the amount of violence – like Cervi, the producer wanted less rather than more. But in fact, this was no emasculation of the character but rather entirely in step with how the comic itself was developing by the mid-60s – Angela Giussani was insisting to the press that Diabolik now only killed when necessary (Dessy 1965: 14). Secondly, Bava was daunted both by the scale of the production (modest by De Laurentiis’ standards, huge by the director’s) and the delays created by the need for the producer’s approval. Bava’s pride in working quickly and cheaply worked in the film’s favour in many ways, most notably in his ability to create Diabolik’s magnificent underground grotto using glass shots and forced perspective. But is it possible that a bit more patience might have made the film even better? Bava was not above cutting corners – this is more evident in his later, sometimes less carefully crafted, films that seemingly showed the inevitable fatigue that accompanies such a punishing work rate. In the fourth draft of the script, there are interesting ideas that didn’t find their way into the final film. Diabolik’s image was imprinted on the retina of a dead policeman in the opening scene – a conceit that had been used in the comic (‘L’uomo di fuoco’ Anno IV no. 18 1965) and would later feature memorably in Dario Argento’s 4 mosche di velluto grigio. Diabolik and Eva were introduced via title cards on their first appearance, and the Bond-like titles were to have the credits ricochet off a tunnel that transformed into a gun barrel. Why did these sequences, displaying the kind of visual ingenuity associated with Bava, not make it into the film? The reasons were clearly not budgetary, given that we know that Bava used nowhere near all the resources that De Laurentiis made available to the film. Did Bava sometimes opt for quicker, cheaper solutions rather than wait for the producer’s approval? 23

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The Italian and English-language prints have some differences in on-screen credits. Significantly, the Italian print places De Laurentiis’ name after Bava’s, giving priority to the producer by crediting him last. The script is credited solely to Bava and Dino Maiuri, whereas the English-language print also names the British writers Tudor Gates and Brian Degas. This was likely a measure prompted by the Corona Law,7 which was starting to create problems for De Laurentiis, the very essence of ‘Hollywood on the Tiber’, and would later prompt him to leave Italy for Hollywood. Gates and Degas had already worked with Bava (ultimately uncredited) on a project that would eventually be directed by Antonio Margheriti – the thriller Nude ... si muore/Naked ... You Die (1967) – and were also amongst the writers credited on Barbarella. Gates is perhaps now best known as writer of Hammer’s ‘Karnstein trilogy’ of softcore vampire films adapted from J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’.8 It seems that the second version of the script, dated December 1966, was credited to Gates and Degas and bore the working title Goldstrike (Lucas 2007: 735), but the fourth version also credits Maiuri and Bava and had reverted to the title Diabolik. The addition of the word Danger to international releases was clearly a middle ground between the blandly generic Goldstrike and the title of a comic that would be less familiar outside Italy. The storyline was credited to Adrianno Baracco, Maiuri and both Giussani sisters, but the latter seem to have had no direct involvement in developing the film (and were not enthusiastic about the finished product). Some accounts describe the film as having been adapted from specific storylines in the comic, but it is truer to say that it reproduces specific sequences or images from the fumetto. The film’s status as a comic book adaptation is something that I shall explore more fully in a later chapter. The film’s costumes – especially those worn by Marisa 24

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Mell as Eva – received quite a bit of publicity in the Italian press while the film was in production. Florence daily Nazione sera called them ‘14 of the craziest and most colourful ever seen’ (Anon. 1967a: 55). The onscreen credits name Luciana Marinucci as costume designer, with Bruno Piattelli credited for some of the men’s tailoring and Nino Lembo for the jewellery. Published credits also name Giulio Coltellacci, who had worked on another comics-inspired film – Elio Petri’s satirical science fiction film La decima vittima/The Tenth Victim (1965) – designing, amongst other things, Ursula Andress’ silver bikini that fired bullets from her nipples. But the name dropped in the film’s Italian press (including reviews) was Piero Gherardi, famous for his costume and production design for Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960), amongst other films. Gherardi was not officially credited, nor was he mentioned in the press prior to the casting of Mell. When the female lead was replaced early in shooting, so was her wardrobe. The script specifies, ‘As a rule, all DIABOLIK’s accoutrements are BLACK, while all EVA’s are WHITE’ (Maiuri et al 1967: 20). This can still be seen in their respective Jaguars, but Eva’s costumes originally seem to have followed this, too – extant stills of Catherine Deneuve show her wearing a white plastic mini-dress with matching knee-length boots. Marisa Mell’s more colourful and revealing outfits were attributed to Gherardi in the press, although he might have worked mainly in an advisory capacity. In any case, the association of Gherardi and Coltellaci with the project underlines one of its enduring points of cult appeal, its emphasis on what its characters wear. Paramount’s US Press Book (1968) didn’t mention Gherardi but pushed the fashion angle with a set of ‘Fashion Tie-In Stills’ showcasing seven of Eva’s outfits and promotional suggestions such as a ‘fashion of the future’ tie-in with local boutiques or a fashion show at theatres showing the film. A final name (again uncredited) cements this dimen25

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Figure 1: One of Piero Gherardi’s costumes for Marisa Mell as Eva

sion of the film – special effects expert Carlo Rambaldi, who designed Diabolik’s suit and mask out of a special kid leather that would allow John Philip Law full mobility. Besides De Laurentiis, Gates and Degas, John Philip Law is the other connecting point between Diabolik and Barbarella. It is little surprise that Law has a cult following of his own: ‘I was Barbarella’s angel and Sinbad the Sailor, a bounty killer in Westerns and I acted in many TV films,’ he later commented, ‘but when I come to Italy everyone calls me Diabolik’ (quoted by Pasini 2017: 7). Not all reviewers were convinced by Law – Film Mese thought he lacked grinta (grit) and physical presence (F.M. 1968: 10). Casting Eva would prove less straightforward once again. The film began shooting with Deneuve, arguably almost as perfect a choice for Lady Kant as Virna Lisi would have been. But on May 3 1967, Milan newspaper La notte’s headline proclaimed that ‘Diabolik has claimed another victim’ – ‘Deneuve disappeared mysteriously from the cast after Martinelli and the others’, the paper reported, announcing Marisa Mell as her replacement (1967: 53). Vita magazine characterised the Austrian actress 26

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as a ‘cinematographically naturalized Italian’ (Anon. 1967b: 63), which puts her in the company of such non-Italian female icons of Italian cult cinema as Edwige Fenech, Dagmar Lassander and Barbara Bouchet. Paramount’s publicity campaign, on the other hand, positioned her as an unknown, the ‘beautiful Austrian actress with the Dietrich-like face, dazzling legs’ (Danger: Diabolik Press Book 1968: 4). Diabolik’s other major contributor is its composer, Ennio Morricone, working with Bava for the only time in his career. Arguably the most versatile, and one of the most prolific, of all film composers, Morricone drew in particular on his background as an arranger of pop music (the title song ‘Deep Down’ was released as a single), with sitars and electric guitars prominent on the soundtrack. As we shall see in later chapters, Morricone’s music plays a central role in the film’s cult reputation.

‘ASK EVA’: PROMOTION, PUBLICITY, INITIAL RECEPTION Unsurprisingly, Italian and American publicity for Diabolik made rather different assumptions about the audience’s likely familiarity with the character. ‘It isn’t necessary to introduce Diabolik to comic readers,’ claimed Leo Pestelli in his La stampa review, ‘he’s nearly as important as (Flash) Gordon and Superman’ (1968: 8). But this certainly wasn’t the case for American comic readers – Diabolik’s creation had roughly coincided with that of Spider-man, The Fantastic Four, and The Incredible Hulk, but shared little with them even if his costume bore some resemblance to that of a superhero. Paramount’s publicity campaign prepared pieces that contextualised the comic amongst ‘some of the bloodiest and goriest pulp magazines making the rounds of Europe’ (Danger: Diabolik Pressbook 1968: 4) or attempting to collapse the difference between the two – ‘a superhero who rambles 27

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around in a fleet of black and white Jaguars and who can scale impossible cliffs and defy a shower of bullets’ (Painter 1967). Describing the film as a ‘wild and kooky cape-opera’, Paramount’s publicity department also emphasised the currency of comic books, having ‘permeated every facet of our everyday lives, from TV’s “Batman” through advertising and the pop art of Andy Warhol, to the movies with Paramount’s Diabolik’ (ibid.). The US pressbook called it a ‘camp attraction, an “IN” motion picture’, advising exhibitors that stressing this angle ‘will attract the younger generation in droves’ (1968: 3). One thing American and Italian publicity shared was a preoccupation with Marisa Mell. The Cervi-Holt Diabolik had prompted greater interest in Sorel than Martinelli, but Mell would overshadow John Philip Law in the Italian press (some newspapers didn’t even get his name right). Photos appeared of her in a bikini made of dollar bills, inspired by the money bed scene but probably not the outfit she actually wore on the set – it seems to have been designed solely for publicity shots, accompanied by headlines such as ‘Il $ogno di Eva’ (Eva’s dream). Bava found himself more the centre of attention than he was probably accustomed to (or particularly welcomed), and a number of interviews appeared in Italian papers and magazines. In an interview with L’europeo entitled ‘Diabolik protests’, Bava played along with the journalist’s claim that his Diabolik was a rebellious figure, ‘an enemy of the state, an anarchic millionaire who fights against the levelling of the masses’ (Tornabuoni 1967: 57). Bava suggested that a better name for the character would be Protestik. It is hard to tell how serious he was being, especially when he reverted to his habitual cynicism about his profession in the same interview – ‘all cinema is made for infantile brains’ (ibid.: 60). Diabolik, he stressed, was only work to him – ‘horror is my entertainment’. 28

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‘Against the police! Against poverty! Against constitutional power! Diabolik!’ shouts one of the newspaper ads for the film, incorporating these subversive claims more explicitly into the Italian publicity campaign. But a list of words suggested for use in the promotional campaign suggests other priorities: Police, sex, millions of dollars, supercars, diamonds, submarines, river of gold ... drugs ... white jaguar, black jaguar, Eva, Eva, Eva ... Above all, Diabolik was promoted in Italy as an ‘exceptional cinematic event’, even though it was a considerably smaller production than Barbarella, with half the budget of its sister film. Nineteen sixty-eight, press ads claimed, was the start of ‘the era of Diabolik’. The most widely seen American poster, on the other hand, invites us to ‘Meet Diabolik. Slick. Suave. Gentle. Brutal. Wild. Out for all he can take, caress or get away with’. The beautiful US poster painted by Frank McCarthy shows an unmasked Diabolik in a Bond-like collage that includes a naked Eva covered in dollars, shooting, underwater action, liquid gold. The Italian posters by Renato Casaro place greater emphasis on the iconic mask and signature arched eyebrows, with a smaller inset showing Diabolik with Eva. Both the American and Italian posters show Diabolik with a machine gun (confined to an inset in the Italian ones), as does a photographic one that has Diabolik and Eva (in her peach-coloured mini-dress) posing in front of her white Jaguar.9 The machine gun is one of the more contentious aspects of the film for fans of the comic, in which a dagger is his weapon of choice. He only uses the machine gun briefly in the film, but McCarthy’s poster arms Diabolik at every available opportunity in the action-packed montage. In addition to the machine gun in the top image, he is also 29

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Figures 2 and 3: Frank McCarthy’s Bond-like US poster, and Renato Casaro’s Italian locandina, which emphasis Diabolik’s iconic eyes and mask

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seen pointing a revolver at the viewer, wielding a harpoon underwater and a machine gun as he descends under a parachute. Even the pump used to store the molten gold in the film becomes a gun in the poster, firing gold at the police. The Italian trailer for Diabolik seems to have disappeared from circulation; even a retrospective exhibition in Milan in 2016 screened the American one. Shot in a style recognisable from many trailers for Italian genre films, it’s likely that the actual footage was the same, with Telly Savalas’ narration added to the American version. The trailer describes him as a ‘bank robbing hood who battles the cops’ and ‘steals from the rich to give to the girls’. At the same time, it presents Eva as a panting Bond girl, perpetually satisfied by her ‘Master lover’: ‘Just ask Eva – she can’t even get a good night’s sleep unless she’s covered in (pause) money’. Diabolik opened in Italy on 24 January 1968. Alberto Pezzotta (2013) gives its domestic box office as 265 million lire while Lucas (2007: 742) goes with the higher figure of 285 million provided on IMDb. The film performed best in the prima visione cinemas of Rome and Milan and generally better in northern and central Italy than in the south (Altariva 2008: 114), but it was considerably less successful in Italy than Barbarella would be; the erotic sci-fi romp would travel better, too, if not quite the huge success (relative to its budget) that was probably anticipated. Why did Diabolik underperform at the Italian box office? It is easier to understand why it failed to catch on in markets where the character was virtually unknown. Readers of the comic might not have liked the revisionist take on the character, but comic book readers arguably only ever account for part of the audience for a comic book movie. The Cervi-Holt Diabolik had been announced in 1965 but the filone it inspired had been running for three years by the time the Bava-De Laurentiis version was released – a sense of filone-fatigue might well have set in for 31

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audiences. But this, too, is speculation. Nor do the reviews provide any clues. While they are best described as mixed, that is more indicative of different attitudes towards cinema d’evasione (escapist cinema) than any intrinsic problem with the film. For example, a number of critics compared the film with the James Bond series, but it was rarely seen as inferior to them – indeed, Bava and De Laurentiis were seen to have held their own on a technical and spectacular level against their more expensive Anglo-American rivals; a generous estimation, perhaps, but a notable one. Even a negative review like that in Domenica del corriere judged that it was ‘no better and no worse’ than the Bond films and that Marisa Mell had no reason to envy Ursula Andress (Cavicchioli 1968: 88) – it was international audiences’ relative familiarity with the characters that would make the difference, the reviewer concluded. Meanwhile, Leo Pestelli’s more positive La stampa review found Diabolik to be ‘more dynamic than his English colleague’ (1968: 8). There were some unequivocally negative reviews. ‘Two hours of boredom’ was Vie nuove’s judgement, clearly so bored that they imagined the film to be nearly twenty minutes longer than it actually was (Anon. 1968a: 110), but the film had its admirers, too. The humourist Franco Bergamasco, invited to review Diabolik for La tribuna illustrata (1968), recommended the film as enjoyable escapism. Meanwhile, Michele Mancini’s review in Film Critica took it more seriously than most, praising its sense of irony, its fidelity to its ‘plastic inheritance’ and the modernity of its ‘technocraticromanticism’ (1968: 115). Mancini’s appraisal stands out as being closer in style to the way certain French critics were approaching popular cinema (and fantasy and horror, in particular) during this period, a French tendency that had not escaped the attention of other Italian film critics. It is a part of the Bava cult narrative that he was criti32

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cally marginalised in Italy, enjoying (if that’s the word – he appeared not to) a small critical following in France that anticipated his later rediscovery in the era of video and digital media. There is some truth in this. He was certainly not regarded as an auteur by Italian critics and his films largely made little impression at the Italian box office. But a number of Diabolik’s reviewers were starting to engage with the discrepancy between their own view of Bava (at best, a capable artisan) and that of certain French critics. Jean Narboni’s review in Cahiers du cinema was symptomatic of the French Bava cult. Diabolik’s comic book origins were seen as a virtue, the film capturing the ‘mysterious, elusive spirit’ of the medium while demonstrating Bava’s ‘peremptory, naive and cynical poetry’ (1968: 73). Even the film’s technical flaws – the awkward travelling mattes – were seen as aesthetic virtues (just as auteurists defended Hitchcock’s use of back projection during the same period), a ‘defective realistic process’ that represented the characters breaking from the world they inhabited and challenged (ibid.)10 Tommaso Chiaretti (1968: 111) in Noi donne magazine, is one of several critics to note Bava’s reputation in ‘foreign intellectual circles, the French for example’. He likens this to the French surrealists’ enthusiasm for the Fantômas novels, but Chiaretti has little patience with what he clearly sees as cultural slumming – ‘we are in a world of explicit infantile fantasies’, he warns (ibid.). Bava lacks impegno (commitment), ‘an element not to undervalue’ in what the critic perceives to be ‘a moment of cruel crisis of value’. For all this, Chiaretti isn’t entirely immune to Marisa Mell – ‘what a sensational fashion show’, he marvels. The title of Franco Valabra’s review in Men magazine – ‘Mario Bava is better than Diabolik’ (1968: 113) – might lead one to expect a more sympathetic appraisal of the director, if not the film. But Valabra ultimately patronises Bava, credited with technical skill but, more im33

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portantly, being smart enough to not take himself seriously: a man ‘who knows, finally, to make a film called Diabolik and not (for his and our luck) The Divine Comedy’. (ibid.). There is a sense in some of these reviews that if Bava himself knew his place, his critical admirers across the alps still needed to be put in theirs. Diabolik opened in the US as Danger: Diabolik in December 1968, going onto the circuits with the British film The Bliss of Mrs Blossom (1968). Barbarella had been released several months earlier. Variety had already given their view in May, and it was not a sympathetic one. ‘Dull crime meller for grindhouse multiple bills’ was how their reviewer summed it up (Murf 1968: 28): At the tail end, and the lame end, of the recent super-spy-super-criminal cycle comes ‘Danger Diabolik’ ... Bizarre sets, poor process work, static writing and limp direction spell pure formula for lowercase grind bookings. (ibid.) Diabolik had been promoted as an event of sorts in Italy, but now it was being critically consigned to the grindhouse, not even technically good enough for a more prestigious release. Even Morricone’s score, now one of the film’s most beloved components, received short shrift, dismissed as ‘the lush sound of an FM radio station selected at random’ (ibid.). When Howard Thompson reviewed the film in December for New York Times, he positively trampled over it on his way to what he regarded as the superior film on Paramount’s double-bill – ‘skip a serving of infantile junk called “Danger Diabolik”’ was his advice to readers (1968: 62). Thompson discerned ‘stale leftovers from the James Bond series, along with some psychedelic color effects from “Barbarella”’ (ibid.). Vadim’s film hadn’t been reviewed positively in the pa34

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per either, but had at least been deemed worthy of a longer critique. If Diabolik’s Italian performance remains an enigma, there is no such mystery surrounding its failure to register in the US. The film didn’t open in the UK until January 1969, in a version shortened to eighty eight minutes. The trade press were only slightly more enamoured of the film than Variety had been. Kine Weekly called it ‘strip-cartoon nonsense’ but conceded that it might prove a ‘reliable double-programmer’ (Anon. 1968b: 13). Marjorie Bilbow, usually a more sympathetic critic of popular cinema, was even less impressed in The Daily Cinema: ‘Yet another screen version of yet another strip cartoon and bearing a familiar resemblance to Fantômas ... Acceptable fare for the undemanding’ (1968: 5). The sense of a cycle being played out is also evident in Dave Hutchinson’s Films and Filming review, which speculated that the delay in the film’s release had made it seem already outmoded (1969: 45). Not only had there been a cycle of comic book movies but the first of the 60s Fantômas movies arrived in the UK (having experienced an even longer delay than Diabolik) the same year. But if Hutchinson found it ‘a weary concoction’ overall, he nevertheless admired Bava’s ‘ability to inject some imagination into a story we have already seen a hundred times before’ (ibid.). The film was met with less equivocal praise in Monthly Film Bulletin, whose anonymous reviewer (most likely Tom Milne) called it ‘a brilliant pastiche of the best of everything in everything from James Bond to Matt Helm’ (1969: 32), but invoked some more prestigious referents, too . The final scene of Diabolik encased in molten gold was likened to Cocteau, but ‘what it really recalls is Feuillade. Not simply because of Diabolik’s penchant for black leotards or for scaling vertiginous walls with hand-operated suction-pads, but because he restores to villainy that long-lost and inimitable touch of good-hu35

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moured chivalry’ (ibid.). The following year, John Baxter published Science Fiction in the Cinema, in which he positioned the film as superior to Barbarella, praising it for possessing ‘the visual pace of a streamlined juggernaut’, and producing one of the most quotable English language summations of the film: ‘Judex is alive and living at Cinecittà’ (1970: 202).11 If Diabolik’s climactic wink suggested that he would find a way to escape his prison of gold, there were already signs that the film was a strong candidate for rediscovery and reevaluation. But as we shall see, that rediscovery would take rather different forms.

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2 ‘UH-OH – IT’S GETTING GROOVY!’: THE CULT AFTERLIFE OF DANGER: DIABOLIK According to Bava expert Tim Lucas, Diabolik went from being seen as ‘quaintly campy in the 1970s’ to ‘interesting’ in the 1980s, and then fashionable in the 1990s (2007: 754). He attributes this rediscovery to ‘new trends in lounge music, style and fashion’ (ibid.), an idea supported by the title of a short piece on the film by Roman Coppola, ‘Lounge Cinema’ (2007). Certainly, the nineties and early noughties consolidated the cult reputation of the film, even if, as we have seen, it had its critical admirers from early on. Paramount had evidently taken some persuading to release the film on VHS in 1993, in a budget Extended Play edition (followed subsequently by a limited edition Laserdisc), but when they released it on DVD in 2005, it was packaged very much as a cult film. While the extras are modest compared to those it might have had on a cult specialist label, the DVD nevertheless contrasts dramatically with Paramount’s bare bones release of Barbarella, arguably the more established cult film. The animated menu begins with Diabolik’s eyes in the middle of a black screen, accompanied by his demonic laughter, before transitioning to a still image of Eva in her bikini against a background of alter37

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nating orange and black lines that recede to a point – so far, so pop-psychedelic. The DVD extras include a commentary by Lucas and John Philip Law, a short film ‘From Fumetti to Film’, in which comic book artist Stephen Bissette compares it with the comic and calls it ‘bar none the best film adaptation of any comic book source material’, and the Beastie Boys’ 1998 ‘Body Movin’’ video, which both uses footage and re-stages sequences from the film. Something had clearly changed in the space of twelve years to convince Paramount that the film was now worth this kind of treatment. In between the VHS and DVD releases, the film had been used in the Beastie Boys video, featured in the final episode of the original series of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1988–99), something the DVD tactfully chooses not to mention, and referenced in Roman Coppola’s CQ (2001). As this suggests, Paramount were primarily framing the film within its American following – the Italian contributors to ‘From Fumetti to Film’ (De Laurentiis and Morricone) are included via archive footage, while fresh interviews were conducted with Bissette, Adam Yauch of the Beasties (director of the ‘Body Movin’’ video) and Roman Coppola.

Figure 4: Menu screen for the DVD of Danger: Diabolik 38

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In this chapter, I shall place the film in four overlapping cult formations. Firstly there is the cult of Bava, in particular the preoccupation with different versions of his films. Secondly, there is the cult of Italian film soundtracks, especially those of the genre cinema of the 60s and 70s, which would overlap with the Lounge/Easy Listening hipster culture of the 1990s. One of Paramount’s synopses for the film described Diabolik’s hideout as a ‘wild, futuristic bachelor pad’; by the mid-90s, a certain type of 60s/70s light music was being retrospectively labelled ‘Space Age Bachelor Pad Music’. Thirdly, there is the cult surrounding the comic – it is sometimes claimed that the comic’s fans are less enamoured of the film than are Bava cultists (Alino 2012), but as we shall see, there is some overlap between these two groups. Finally – the elephant in the room, one might say – there is the cult of the series Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K). Where Bava-centred accounts of the film locate it as part of an authorial canon or celebrate his ingenuity with visual effects, MST3K positions it in a manner closer to what Jeffrey Sconce called paracinema (1995), an ironic subcultural appreciation of ‘trash’ – one article on the series goes so far as to describes Diabolik as a ‘60s stinker’ (Raftery 2014). Rather than being celebrated on the basis of Bava’s visual style and ingenious effects, the film is appreciated more for its ‘tobe-laughed-at-ness’ (Church 2015: 16). But again, cults overlap, and we shall see that Bava’s admirers and fans of the snarky TV show are not mutually exclusive categories.

DANGER: DEFINITIVE? The Bava cult was consolidated on DVD and Blu-ray, where not only did it become easier to see more of his films, but where there was a growing emphasis not only on seeing the most complete version but on being able to compare different versions of certain key films. Bava belongs very 39

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much to what Brad Stevens calls the ‘Alternative Versions Zone’ (quoted by Kannas 2017: 30). Given that some of the reconfigurations are so different that they are effectively different films, the optimum package for the cult connoisseur has increasingly been that of releasing them as double-bills: La ragazza che sapeva troppo/The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1962) with The Evil Eye (1964), I tre volti della paura/The Three Faces of Fear (1963) with Black Sabbath (1964), Lisa e il diavolo/Lisa and the Devil (1972) with La casa dell’esorcismo/House of Exorcism (1975) and Cani arrabbiati/ Rabid Dogs (1974) with Kidnapped (2002). Diabolik stands apart from this phenomenon in two ways. Firstly, it is often seen as his most ‘mainstream’ film, the involvement of a Hollywood major keeping the film out of the reach of cult specialist labels such as Arrow, Blue Underground or Synapse, even if Paramount would themselves package it as a cult film on DVD. Secondly, while there were some variations in release versions, it wasn’t reconfigured in quite the same way as some of his other films. Furthermore, some of those differences are hard to confirm now, so there is a degree of speculation in some of what follows. The film arrived on VHS, Laserdisc and DVD ‘complete’, at least from a visual standpoint. The most substantial differences between the VHS/Laserdisc and DVD versions can be found on the soundtrack, with one exception – the VHS/Laserdisc version (the same one used by MST3K) uses an Italian print with an English dub, and thus features the Italian credits. But given the prominence of the music in the film’s following, the differences on the soundtrack carry some weight. The music is mixed quite low on the VHS version, selling short one of the film’s greatest strengths, and there are differences in some of the cues. For example, on the VHS version, the film ends with a reprise of ‘Deep Down’, with Diabolik’s laughter over the top. On the DVD (as in the original US release), the music 40

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reprised is the Batman-like guitar theme associated with the black Jaguar. The film was screened uncut in Italy for the first time in 2008 (one year after the DVD was released there) at the Visionario Cinema in Udine in 2008 as part of a ‘Cinema & Fumetto’ event. The print from the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome included five restored scenes, three from Diabolik and Eva’s kissing in the car, one from the money bed (a high angle pull back that is slightly more revealing of Eva’s near-nudity), and the threatened cigarette torture of Eva (Anon. 2008). It is harder to establish what was removed from the US release version – its length is given as 100 minutes, as opposed to the 101 minute Italian cut. Lucas reports that several sequences might have been missing, such as the shower sequence that precedes the money bed scene, the drug party at Valmont’s nightclub, the cigarette torture (also a problem in Italy and the UK) and the same high angle shot of the money bed removed from the Italian release (2007: 755). However, this would have brought the length of the film below 100 minutes, and Glenn Erickson (1999) recalls seeing the drug party scene in a Midnight Movie screening in Santa Monica in the 1970s. He also reports that it was present in several 16mm prints that he saw or owned. Erickson’s is one of the few accounts of the film’s circulation in the US after its initial release but before its arrival on home video – at the Midnight Movie screening, a taped sign on the box office apparently warned that the film was not to be confused with Les Diaboliques. Stephen Bissette (on the ‘From Fumetti to Film’ DVD extra) also saw it first on 16mm and subsequently introduced the film to others in that format. The shortest theatrical version was released in the UK, the length recorded in both reviews and publicity materials being 88 minutes. The version submitted to the British Board of Film Censors was 99 minutes 13 seconds, and on May 2 41

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Figure 5: Eva threatened with cigarette torture – a scene cut in Italy and the UK

1968, the following required cut was recorded – ‘Double Reel 3 – Remove the whole incident in which a man tortures Eva with a burning cigarette’. Given that Eva and the cigarette do not amount to 11 minutes, where did the rest of that footage go? Assuming the 88 minute running time is correct, the remaining cuts must have been made by Paramount UK, who, after all, didn’t release the film into UK cinemas for another eight months after the BBFC had passed the film. It is possible that after the film’s poor performance in the US, it was shortened to better accommodate double-bills or just to up the pace of the film. The episodic nature of the film probably made it easier to remove scenes without it looking as though something important was missing. When Paramount released the first official home video version,12 the dubbing of the non-English speaking actors, including Michele Piccoli and Adolfo Celi, was different from that used in the original English language release. Glenn Erickson explained to Tim Lucas: I believe ... that the 35mm English-language masters 42

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were lost, and that the picture had to be reconstituted using an Italian film master audio elements, which accounts for only the principle actors’ lines being recovered. (Lucas 2007: 754) Erickson had tried to obtain a print for a screening in 1985 and learned that Paramount had returned all prints to De Laurentiis in 1980; they in turn informed him that they had been recycled for sound fill (see Erickson 1999). Erickson later told Lucas that, with the exception of Law, Mell and Thomas, all of the actors were re-dubbed for the VHS and subsequent Laserdisc release (Lucas 2007: 754). There is, however, another possible explanation for where this second dub came from. According to Howard Hughes (2011: 114) two English dubs were prepared for the film’s English-language release – perhaps the initial one had not been considered satisfactory by Paramount and they had ordered a second. Rather than re-dub the film for the VHS release, Paramount may well have used this alternative dub when reconstituting the film from Italian and English sources. This would explain why the ‘original’ English dub (as Lucas sees it) was available again by the time the DVD was being put together; it had never been lost, they had simply used the ‘wrong’ English track or the one that was more readily available at the time. It would also explain why some of the music cues and mixes were different. As with every Italian film of that period aimed at an international market, there is no ‘authentic’ version of the dubbing; multi-national casts and prints for different markets meant that dubbing of some sort would feature in every version. The English version of Diabolik has some claim to priority by featuring the actual voices of three of its five top-billed stars (Law, Mell, Thomas). But these aren’t the voices that were missing from the VHS version; rather, it was the uncredited voice cast, including, according to Lucas, Richard Johnson 43

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as Ginko (2007: 754). This sometimes meant a change of accent (Ginko is American rather than English on the VHS version), and also a preference for the Italian pronunciation of Diabolik (Dee-abolik), rather than the English pronunciation (as in diabolical). In fact, Terry-Thomas (the only English speaking actor in the film to say Diabolik’s name) had always used the Italian pronunciation, while the voice actors used the English one on the version featured on the DVD. Some of the lines are slightly different in the VHS version, producing one that would be much cherished by MST3K fans – ‘Is that Stud coming?’.13 And prior to the first close-up of Diabolik in the opening scene, a chorus of voices (it isn’t clear who they belong to) calls his name. The ‘original’ is often nostalgically constructed by the cultist – that version of the film which they first fell in love with (which doesn’t prevent them from also wanting to see more complete or alternative versions). Lucas describes the DVD version as a ‘unique, definitive version’ because it restores the version first released in the US (2007: 755). But when the Region 2 version was released in 2007, adding Italian and Spanish tracks, a similar issue would arise; the Italian dub had been re-recorded.14 Of the main cast, the ‘original’ might only have featured the voice of Celi (assuming he dubbed his own dialogue), but some fans on the Diabolik Forum were disappointed that it was not the same dub that they were familiar with from TV screenings in Italy. These ostensibly unimportant, and for many imperceptible, differences tell us something about the passionate attachments formed around particular versions of cult films. On the one hand, Lucas, Erickson and others positioned the US release dub on the DVD as the ‘original’, while a few Italian fans felt the loss of their ‘original’. But for those who discovered the film through MST3K and went on to watch the film on DVD, some were surprised to find that Stud was no longer coming. 44

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SPACE AGE BACHELOR PADS – THE CULT OF ITALIAN SOUNDTRACKS If the ‘original’ English dub of the film was lost and then found, another important aspect of the film’s soundtrack remains lost – the original tapes of Ennio Morricone’s score, supposedly destroyed in a fire. Now seen as a ‘masterpiece of lounge’ (Alino 2012: 185),15 the soundtrack was an important part of the film’s rediscovery. The VHS and Laserdisc releases would anticipate fortuitously the ‘lounge’ scene of the mid-90s, which hovered between irony (para-pop?) and genuine appreciation of certain forms of ‘light’ music. One of the characteristics of retro (as opposed to nostalgia), according to Simon Reynolds, is that it seeks not to idealise the past but to be ‘amused and charmed by it’ (2011: xxx). At the same time, the oft-used retro label ‘Space Age Bachelor Pad Music’ was suggestive of a nostalgia for past imaginings of the future, or what has become known as retro-futurism – ‘dated’ futures found in old science fiction movies, fifties and sixties World Fairs, and the pop-futurism of 60s comic book and spy movies (2011: 370). The latter were keen to ‘amuse’ and ‘charm’ first time around, making them doubly suited to retro appreciation. Soundtracks form an important part, too, of the cultification of Italian genre cinema, whether it be the ‘lounge’ music of Piero Piccioni, Stelvio Cipriani, Piero Umiliani and others or the prog-rock of Goblin and Fabio Frizzi. Italian film music would figure prominently in the Lounge scene, in compilations such as the Beat at Cinecittà series. In Italy, retro-cult magazine Il giaguaro (1999–2001) gave away 7” singles with each issue featuring Piccioni, Umiliani and others, while Lounge formed the aesthetic agenda for its celebration of 60s and 70s culture (including Danger: Diabolik in one issue; Moorehead 2001). Some of Morricone’s output has a more canonical reputation, including Hollywood scores and his work for auteur directors, as well as his famous scores for Sergio Leone. But Morricone 45

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compilations such as the Mondo Morricone series, Morricone Giallo and Morricone in the Brain place greater emphasis on his contributions to more obscure and/or less reputable cycles. Moreover – and this suited the Lounge scene, too – cult Italian film scores are easily disembedded from the films and enjoyed in their own right, often having a less literal relationship to the image than their Hollywood counterparts. As Kay Dickinson puts it, ‘It is almost as if the soundtrack did not care about what it was watching and just wanted to keep having a good time’ (2007: 177). Morricone’s soundtrack has circulated independently of the film in the form of bootleg releases, a recent re-recording of the complete score by Solisti e Orchestra del Cinema Italiano (2014), and cover versions of the song ‘Deep Down’, the only part of the score to get an official release (as a 7” single) in 1968. The most widely circulated bootleg, on the Pallotola Foro label, is a numbered limited edition. The packaging seeks to accentuate its cult appeal by attempting to pass for an Italian import – ‘Musiche di Ennio Morricone’ boasts the cover, while the copyright notice claims that it is ‘Made in Italy’ – whereas it actually seems to have been produced in the US. The album lifts music cues and dialogue from the same version of the film that appeared on VHS and Laserdisc, but with mixes that do greater justice to Morricone’s score. In addition, it adds the 7” single (Italian language) version of ‘Deep Down’ sung by Christy and the title song for the 007 knock-off Ok Connery (1967).16 Never having been officially released, the cues (apart from ‘Deep Down’) were never given titles, so the bootleg rectifies this. I now find it hard to think of the jaunty cue accompanying Diabolik and Eva’s underwater retrieval of the gold ingot as anything but ‘Under Wah-Wah’, a title that neatly conflates location and vocals.17 The 2014 re-recording (appropriately enough, on the Retro label) was made available both separately as a download and 46

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as a double CD paired with a re-recording of the complete score for Leone’s Per qualche dollaro in più/For a Few Dollars More (1965). ‘World Cult Movie Premiere’, boasts a banner on the cover. This actually was an Italian release, but that didn’t prevent it from adopting the English title of the film, as do a number of recent Italian sources.18 In addition to the full score of the film, including one or two cues not on the bootleg, it also adds both instrumental and vocal versions of the song ‘Thrilling’, originally sung by Rita Monico and arranged by Morricone for the episode film of the same name, but heard fleetingly on the radio during a scene around Valmont’s swimming pool. In that respect, it trumps the bootlegs for completeness, as well as not having to feature dialogue from the film. It is a fair recreation of the score, too, if inevitably no match for the version conducted by Bruno Nicolai for the film. While neither the bootleg or re-recorded versions are perfect releases of the soundtrack, that they exist at all tells us much about its desirability as a cult artefact in its own right. The song ‘Deep Down’ has also travelled solo, not only on the original single but in the form of at least two cover versions. The most famous is by Faith No More vocalist Mike Patton, who performed the Italian version on the album Mondo Cane (2010). Patton had ventured into cult film territory before with another of his bands, the appropriately named Fantômas, who released an album of cover versions of horror and thriller film themes on the album ‘Director’s Cut’ (2001). He had also overseen the Morricone anthology Crime and Dissonance in 2001. The second cover version arrived in 2016, when Panini produced the album Diabolik Genius of Crime, aimed at readers of the fumetto and packaged with an exclusive edition of the comic. The bulk of the album consists of Diabolik-themed rock songs by gravel-voiced rocker Graziano Romani, who had already recorded a concept album devoted to the comic Zagor. But the album also includes covers of 47

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both the English and Italian versions of ‘Deep Down’ and the music cue accompanying the drugs party. The latter adopts the title from the Pallotola Foro bootleg, ‘Valmont’s Go-Go Pad’. The inclusion of ‘3 classici di Ennio Morricone’ brings the world of the comic and the film back together – significantly through the latter’s music. Next, we turn to how the film is seen by readers of the comic.

‘IT’S A DIFFERENT DK, OF COURSE’: DIABOLIK READERS AND DANGER: DIABOLIK The Diabolik Forum is connected to the Diabolik Club, first formed in 1996 and granted official status by the comic’s publisher Astorina. Its main forums are devoted to the comic, but a subforum dealing with ‘Homages’ to the character includes a discussion thread on the film. This discussion began in 2005, prompted in part by news of the DVD’s impending release in the US, and continued intermittently until 2012. Some of the contributors knew the film already, mainly from TV screenings, although one had a VHS copy and an original locandina (film poster). Others had never seen it. This was relatively small group of fans, but they had chosen to discuss the film on a forum mainly focused on the comic, and their discussion provides an interesting range of perspectives. Fidelity was consistently, and unsurprisingly, the bone of contention for those less convinced by the film – Diabolik’s use of a machine gun, the underground hideout seen by some as veering too far into science fiction, and Eva’s oversexualisation (even one of the film’s advocates still felt that the film reduced her to being ‘a sexy doll’). Admirers of the film, on the other hand, were more likely to cite Bava or Morricone, and to display their own knowledge of Italian genre cinema. User Grand Admiral Thawn, for example, praised the film in these terms: 48

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Jewel of the 1960s, poliziottesco before the letter, James Bond italiano, soundtrack as hard to find as it is great, world cult that could please anyone except, perhaps, aficionados of the comic ... Danger: Diabolik is a GREAT film, a beautiful work with which Mario Bava and Ennio Morricone showed that Italian cinema can be at the same level as American and English (cinema) in matters of special effects and chases ... and logical and exciting action sequences. These Diabolik fans exhibit what Barker and Brooks (1998: 268) call committed responses, manifesting a sense that ‘this piece of culture is “theirs”’. But there are also signs of a more bargained response (ibid.), which accepts that other demands may intervene and prevent them from getting exactly the movie they want. On the one hand, DKroberto expressed his lack of enthusiasm for the film precisely in terms of ownership; ‘a DVD to keep but not to love, instead I love my 1000+ issues’. He also recalled his mother coming home from seeing the film on its original release and reporting that only Michele Piccoli’s Ginko was true to the comic. Others might express reservations about the machine gun or scantily clad Eva, but accepted that there were bound to be differences between comic and film: ‘It’s a different DK,’ MikiMozgus conceded, ‘but he has a fascination that works even for those who love the comic.’ There was some acknowledgement that Eva at the time was not yet the ‘emancipated’ character of more recent stories even in the comic, although some still felt that the film pushed her too far towards mere eye candy. There were two types of ‘ownership’ being displayed across some of these responses. One was to the comic, the other to Bava and/or Italian cult cinema. Neogrigio acknowledged the differences from the comic, but ‘as a passionate lover of Italian genre cinema, I find Bava’s film excelled from many 49

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points of view’. In Grand Admiral Thawn’s comments above, ‘ownership’ of cult knowledge of Bava was accorded greater importance than fidelity; by claiming that ‘aficionados’ might not like the film, s/he was making a bid for distinction from those fans solely or mainly preoccupied with fidelity. But this contributor also expressed a preference for the ruthless Diabolik of the film to the more ‘politically correct’ one of recent stories, which seems to bring fidelity brought back into the equation. Grand Admiral Thawn ended with a dig at ‘that abortion’ Diabolik: Track of the Panther, the animated series made in 1998 that closely followed the look of the comic, but otherwise changed it beyond recognition in order to accommodate TV networks like Fox Kids: Diabolik was no longer a criminal, Eva was no longer his lover and the Jaguar was replaced by a car less likely to provoke accusations of product placement. This later adaptation might explain why some on the Diabolik Forum were even willing to make claims for the fidelity of Bava’s film, Ned calling it ‘really similar to the fumetto ... for Diabolik fans it’s a pearl!’ There is no reliable evidence that I am aware of to tell us what Diabolik readers thought of the film in 1968, but two things seem safe to assume. Firstly, given that fidelity was still an issue for a group of readers discussing the film between 2005 and 2012, it would certainly also have been a factor at the time, perhaps even more so. Secondly, Bava’s name was much less likely to have been a factor in fan reactions (even if critics were reflecting on his standing as a filmmaker at the time). It is tempting to see the Bava cult as one that developed outside Italy and was then imported back into his country of origin. But that is only part of the story. Paolo Noto (2016: 209) points to the publication of Fant’Italia, the catalogue of the 1976 Festival Internazionale del Film di Fantascienza in Trieste as an important turning point in the critical re-evaluation of homegrown fantasy and horror cin50

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ema in Italy. There were Italian-language books on Bava as early as 1984 and there have been several since. The work of critic and programmer Stefano Della Casa, magazines such as Nocturno and the volumes produced by Luigi Cozzi for Profondo Rosso have played important roles in the Italian cultification of cinema di genere, within which Bava has been a pre-eminent figure. But still, Bava’s cult status would require more time and effort to establish than, say, Dario Argento’s. By the time of Diabolik’s release on VHS, Laserdisc and DVD, he was a much more familiar point of reference for cinephiles and cult film fans, and therefore a more important factor in evaluations of the film. But what happens when a film gets drawn into a very different kind of cult appreciation, where irony and mockery of ‘trash’ are the main currency?

‘STARRING A BUNCH OF VOWELS AND TERRY-THOMAS’: DANGER: DIABOLIK VERSUS MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 The premise of MST3K is simple. Our heroes (one human, two robots) are marooned in space, forced to watch (as the title song puts it) ‘cheesy movies, the worst that I could find’. As they sit down to watch the selected film for that week, they ‘riff’ on its shortcomings, their moving outlines visible in front of the screen. The ideal MST3K movie is something like The Crawling Eye (1958) or Robot Monster (1953), films that have long been enjoyed for their Ed Wood-like ineptitude. However, some of the series’ movie choices (This Island Earth (1955), Squirm (1976)) have raised the eyebrows, if not the blood pressure, of cult film aficionados who feel that these genre classics deserve better. This is where Diabolik comes in, the chosen victim for what at the time looked like it was going to be the final episode of the series (it eventually returned on Netflix in 2017). Both Tim Lucas and Glenn Erickson register some dismay at the film’s selection: ‘The agony! Hu51

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miliation!’ was Erickson’s response to the news, before conceding that the episode would probably still be funny (1999). Some fans of the show would display similarly mixed feelings. On the Satellite News fan site, user Fart Bargo called the episode ‘hard for me. Great movie, love Bava films’, but nevertheless concluded by calling the episode ‘a fun, upbeat, end of an era effort’ (15 July 2010). On the other hand, some viewers clearly discovered the movie through MST3K, as is evidenced on the Internet Movie Database’s User Reviews for the film. IMDb comments for the film date from 1999, the same year that the final episode of MST3K was first shown, and as early as the third review we can see the series informing reviews of the film: This one is perfect as the final MST3K to be produced. It’s even funnier with Mike and the robots bagging on it. It is like a bad version of those In Like Flynt (sic) films. That is saying a lot. Watch the MST3K version and you’ll save yourself from brain damage. (Big Jon-2, 3 August 1999) This would be a recurring theme amongst reviewers who had first encountered the film on the show – that it was only watchable in that context: I enjoyed it, but only because I saw it on Mystery Science Theater 3000. The movie by itself is incredibly lame. Lousy effects, even for the 60’s. Very disjointed plot. Almost unbelievably stupid characters (particularly, of course, the cops). And the music, so highly praised in the other reviews, is inane. (Sean Martin, 10 August 1999) Inevitably, Bava aficionados and other cult fans joined the fray on IMDb to defend the film – in upper case, if necessary – 52

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while the makers and fans of the show were characterised as ‘misguided’. ‘How can you make fun of a movie that’s making fun of itself?’ asked bymarkclark.com (27 April 2001), arguing that the episode entirely missed the point of the film. But I’m more interested here in those people who liked both Diabolik and/or Bava and MST3K and had to negotiate between seemingly opposed cult attachments. This includes some who first saw the film on the show. ‘Even without MST3K I still think it would be pretty good,’ said Hinopio (9 August 1999). ‘This was one of those rare “cheer for the bad guy” movies, and I like those movies!’ The same reviewer was also excited to have found the film that had featured in the Beastie Boys’ ‘Body Movin’’ video. While some had to reconcile what seemed like divided loyalties and diametrically opposed sources of pleasure, for others it simply wasn’t an issue. ‘I’m actually kind of fond of DANGER: DIABOLIK, though I’m not one of the “How DARE they riff on it!” crowd,’ wrote Flying Saucers Over on the Satellite News Site (17 July 2010). On IMDb, lemon magic (15 October 2005) took the episode as a sign of affection for the film – ‘anyone who paid attention to the way Mike and the ‘Bots riffed through the movie would know that most of their comments were pretty good-natured, and mostly about the sheer silliness of the proceedings’. Another IMDb reviewer self-identified as a ‘MiSTie’ (MST3K fan) but still declared that ‘Diabolik is a good film, whether it has riffing potential or not’ (possum-3, 18 January 2000). What is interesting here is the implication that a film being ‘riffable’ doesn’t necessarily require one to see it as ‘bad’, even though that is the premise for a film’s inclusion in the series. For a film to be riffable, it was enough for it to be dated (as Diabolik certainly is) or to have some bizarre quality that the hosts could have fun with. This is by no means a unique example of having one’s cake and riffing on it. David Church gives the example Touch of Sa53

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Figure 6: ‘Riffing’ on Diabolik – Mystery Science Theater 3000

tan (1971), which unlike Diabolik owes its cult following almost entirely to having been shown on MST3K (2015: 1). Church found that not all fans of the film saw it solely as something to ridicule, even if they were also fans of the show. One such fan owned a copy of the film on VHS and appreciated it on its own terms as well as enjoying it in the context of MST3K. Diabolik has two things that Touch of Satan doesn’t – an auteur figure and higher production values than one would usually find in a MST3K movie. A good deal of the episode’s riffing is based on Diabolik’s dated ‘grooviness’, including its music (they add lyrics to the Jaguar guitar theme – ‘Drivin’ off to the store/Gonna pick up some bread’), or its perceived ‘Eurotrash’ qualities (‘a bunch of vowels and Terry-Thomas’). But given the homosocial set-up of the show, reminiscent of mocking a film from the sofa with some friends over a few beers, they also make laddish comments about the film’s sexier elements (‘If you’d stolen just a little less, I could see her ass right now’). One of the few occasions they openly ridicule the film’s perceived shortcomings is when they laugh at the process work as Diabolik and Valmont fight over a parachute in mid-air. Whatever one thinks of MST3K’s use of the film – and I confess that my initial reaction was similar to that of Lucas 54

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and Erickson – it is part of the cult afterlife of the film and even seemed to increase its fan base, not all of them ironic ones. And while MST3K is unacknowledged on Paramount’s DVD, its riffing isn’t so very different from the Beastie Boys’ positioning of the film as something both cheesy and cool. ‘I do think it’s campy, in a way’, says Adam Yauch in ‘From Fumetti to Film’, ‘not in a bad way ... The acting is ridiculous, the direction a lot of the times is ridiculous, but the set design is so over the top, the acting is almost appropriate within what the set design is.’ As Brigid Cherry observes, the ‘Body Movin’’ video plays on a ‘trash aesthetic’ version of cult appreciation (2009: 128). But the Beasties bring further subcultural value to the film, too, which is probably why Yauch was invited to participate on the DVD and the Mystery Science Theater gang weren’t. As David Church suggests, the overlapping or conflicting pleasures of certain cult films often come down to find different ways of enjoying their ‘historical pastness’ (2015: 2) – aesthetically, nostalgically, ironically, sometimes more than one at the same time. Perhaps Diabolik’s wink at the end of the film was the first hint that one of the ways for the film to achieve longevity was for people to find different ways to have fun with it, whether poring over the costumes, design and music, enjoying Bava’s ingenuity, or riffing on its infectious silliness.

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3 FANTÔMAS ALL’ITALIANA: ANALYSIS ... every comic book and, above all, every comic book styled movie, can afford any luxury except the one of taking itself too seriously ... it should, on the contrary, wink at the reader or the audience. – Corrado Farina, writing in 1969 (quoted by Piselli et al 2008: 7) While adaptations of comics can be traced back to early cinema, the 1960s was arguably the first time that comic book feature films constituted a cycle, one that encompassed prestigious films by auteur directors (Modesty Blaise), a prolific Italian filone centring on masked criminals and crime fighters (not all of which had comic book sources), films featuring sexualised comic book heroines (Barbarella, Satanik (1968), Isabella duchessa del diavolo (1969)) and films that established their ‘pop’ credentials by incorporating comic book aesthetics and designs, such as Elio Petri’s La decima vittima and Tinto Brass’ Col cuore in gola/Deadly Sweet (1967). There were two driving aesthetic forces behind this cycle – the emergence of pop art and the recognition of a new kind of adult-oriented, primarily European, comic book. In addition to its aesthetic 56

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influence, more evident in some films than others, pop art gave these films their dominant tone; regardless of the violence often on display, they seek primarily to be amusing rather than exciting. Lawrence Alloway (1971: 22) discerned a ‘recent taste for relaxed structure and an offhand mise-enscène’, particularly evident in the Bond films, which arguably sought to balance excitement with amusement with different degrees of emphasis. By the time of Modesty Blaise, Alloway felt, this sensibility had become ‘facetious and predictable ... where the jokes arise from a basic lack of confidence in the story line’ (ibid.). What Alloway sees as a lack of confidence in the story might be seen rather as a de-emphasising of narrative drive, the most extreme example of which is the chaotic Bond parody Casino Royale (1967), whose multiple directors, multiple episodes and even multiple Bonds refuse to cohere. But Modesty Blaise’s ‘facetiousness’ derives from pop’s ambivalent attitude towards comics: simultaneously accorded aesthetic merit and positioned as ephemeral, devoid of depth, best viewed through a layer of irony. These attitudes perhaps sit uneasily with more contemporary attitudes towards comics that seek to invest them with more conventional forms of (literary or cinematic) cultural capital, but this was a decade in which the meaning and value of comics was being re-negotiated. Even then, pop’s irony was in tension with a more sober attempt to position comics as ‘the ninth art’ (Sabin 1993: 190) as auteur-driven comics emerged in Europe. In 1967, comic book art was the subject of a Louvre exhibition, and filmmakers deriving inspiration from comics included Federico Fellini, Jess Franco, Jean Rollin, Vittorio De Sica, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Corrado Farina. A good number of these films are highly self-conscious about their status as comic book movies, displaying a ‘comic book aesthetic’ (Burke 2005: 182), whether through the onscreen sound effects of Batman or the comic panel transi57

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tions, captions and even speech bubbles of Kriminal (1966) and its sequel Il marchio di Kriminal (1967), or the attempts to reproduce Guido Crepax’s innovative comic book storytelling in Col cuore in gola and Baba Yaga (1973). Diabolik is less obvious in its attempts to remediate comic book visuals and largely resists the kinds of effects listed above. Liam Burke discerns sequences composed within ‘diegetic frames creating a grid-like structure comparable in look, if not function, to a comic book page’ (2015: 185). The use of the car mirror in the Jaguar to place Diabolik and/or Eva in a frame-within-aframe certainly resembles a comic book panel, but some of the other grids are as suggestive as anything of the claustrophobic framing of the movie thriller, such as the metal-gridded bedhead that frames Eva as Valmont closes in on her. In other scenes, these ‘frames’ seem to be a strategy for keeping scenes visually interesting or disguising the film’s modest budget. According to Dave Hutchinson (1969: 45), Bava deploys a ‘comic book shorthand’ in his editing of certain sequences. Diabolik’s post-title sequence escape opens with him steering his getaway speedboat through the water, then cutting (after a brief cutaway to the churning ocean) to him

Figure 7: Comic book framing? Diabolik and Eva in the mirror of the Jaguar 58

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Figures 8 and 9: Comic book storytelling: Diabolik in the speedboat and then in his Jaguar

driving the black Jaguar – a temporal elision and economy of storytelling closer to panel transitions than classical editing. But while Stephen Bissette, too, in the ‘From Fumetti to Film’ DVD extra, praises the film for its understanding of comic book storytelling, it never looks as though it is trying too hard to resemble the medium it is adapting. Considering Diabolik as a comic book movie also involves examining its status as an adaptation. Studies of adaptation can never quite escape the question of fidelity (see, for ex59

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ample: Andrew 1984; McFarlane 1996; Stam 2005; Hutcheon 2006; Leitch 2007), which in the case of comic book movies might have less to do with narrative than with the conception of iconic figures in the original: ‘this is not the “real” Diabolik’, says Andrea Carlo Cappi (2016a: 52), echoing the feelings of some of the fans on the Diabolik Forum. We might identify two types of comic book adaptation here. The first adapts an actual narrative – a ‘graphic novel’ or a specific storyline from an ongoing series. The second adapts a cultural property or character into a narrative which may draw on episodes or scenes from the source but integrates them into a narrative structure that is to a certain extent specific to the film (or TV series). Barbarella largely belongs to the first type of adaptation, incorporating actual storylines as well as characters from Forest’s bande dessinée – the Black Queen’s tyrannical rule of the planet Sogo, the metal-toothed doll attack, Barbarella’s relationship with the angel Pygar, and her encounter with the ‘Excessive Machine’ that nearly pleasures her to death. But while still comparatively episodic, the film quickly gives Barbarella a more clearly defined mission (locating Durand Durand and his Positronic Ray) whereas in the original she drifts rather more arbitrarily from one adventure to another, remaining just long enough to encounter danger and lose some or all of her clothes. The film modifies her character by placing her in a future where physical sex has been replaced by pharmaceutically-delivered orgasms, thus allowing her to be sexually liberated but corporeally virginal before her encounter with Ugo Tognazzi’s hirsute Mark Hand. The film also tones down the comic’s nudity, confining it to the zero gravity striptease of the title sequence and then substituting kink for skin through its fetishistic costume design. Diabolik, on the other hand, belongs to the second type of adaptation. It takes the comic’s three central characters – Diabolik, Eva and Ginko – and builds an episodic narrative that feels rather like three issues of the 60

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comic stuck together. Most issues of the comic focus on il colpo, the heist or theft that Diabolik seeks to execute. There are three such colpi in the film. The first comprises the pre-credits sequence, the appropriation of ten million dollars on its way to be shipped abroad. Ginko attempts to trick Diabolik with a heavily guarded decoy, the money stashed in a Rolls Royce populated by policemen disguised as foreign dignitaries. But Diabolik sees through the ploy, releasing multicoloured gases that disorient the police while he lifts the Rolls with the aid of a crane. The second is the theft of the diamond necklace from the British Finance Minister’s wife at Castle Saint Just. Finally, the 20 ton gold ingot brings the film to its climax by allowing Inspector Ginko to track Diabolik to his lair as he is melting down the gold; the police raid culminates in Diabolik being drenched by and then trapped in molten gold. The second colpo also brings the gangster Valmont into the storyline. Not only does he collaborate with Ginko in setting a trap for Diabolik, but he also kidnaps Eva in order to appropriate the Acksand necklace (comprised of eleven emeralds) and the stolen ten million dollars. But Valmont, seemingly the main villain of the film, is disposed of some two thirds of the way in, after which the emphasis shifts to the longstanding battle between Diabolik and Ginko. This episodic structure, one that in some ways seems to peak too early, gives the film a quality that Umberto Eco sees as one of the prerequisites of a cult object – it must be ‘ramshackle, rickety’ in order that one might ‘break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it’ (2008: 68). Eco is admittedly generalising here (there are probably a good many cult texts that don’t work like this) and it might be more the case that such a ‘ramshackle’ quality is less of an obstacle to cult status than it would be for access to a more elevated canon. Either way, Diabolik is very much a film designed to be remembered in parts, given the prolonged scene in the grotto and the money bed, the climb 61

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up the tower of Castle Saint Just, the destruction of the tax offices, and Diabolik melting the gold while wearing a protective suit with which, he boasts, he could ‘swim through the centre of the sun’. Diabolik’s approach to adaptation is in some ways closest to a mode described by Dudley Andrew, where ‘the main concern is the generality of the original, its potential for wide and varied appeal; in short, its existence as a continuing form or archetype’ (1984: 98). Talk of archetypes is a reminder that the comic itself was already an adaptation of Fantômas, whose latest cinematic incarnation had also nodded in the direction of the Bond films, incorporating flying cars and underground hideouts.19 Fantômas underwent a series of reiterations and re-inventions in the 1960s in addition to the new films starring Jean Marais. In 1963, the novels were reissued as gialli by the Mondadori publishing house in re-titled versions modified by the Turin crime writers Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini, while in 1969 a Mexican comic transformed him into a heroic combination of 007, Diabolik (he drives a Jaguar) and the wrestler Santo (he wears a silver mask) (Castelli 2011: 108–32). One of its issues would later inspire Julio Cortàzar’s satirical novella Fantômas versus the Multinational Vampires (1975), in which the titular character joins forces with Susan Sontag, Alberto Moravia and Cortàzar himself to fight a global political conspiracy.20 The ‘potential for wide and varied appeal’ arguably lay less in De Laurentiis’ idea of Diabolik as a Raffles-like gentleman thief than in stressing the more Bondian aspects of the character. This included an aspect of Bond less evident in the comic book Diabolik – his virility – even though the film adheres to Diabolik’s unbreakable monogamy. In most respects, the Bava-De Laurentiis Diabolik is more concerned with fidelity than the Cervi-Holt version appears to have been. Ginko and the black Jaguar were both absent from the earlier script, but are present and correct here; Eva 62

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is blonde and looking much more like her comic book incarnation and Diabolik is devoted solely to her, whereas Cervi seems to have seen him as more of a Bond-like casual seducer. Moreover, while the film doesn’t adapt narrative episodes in quite the same way that Barbarella does, it does reproduce several sequences from the comic. Diabolik’s theft of the emerald necklace from Lady Clarke at Castle Saint Just draws together images and details from three different issues. It is mainly based on a sequence in ‘L’ombra nella notte’ (no.35 1965) in which he scales the wall of a castle. In the original, he pulls on gloves and boots with suckers on the end of them, but the film equips him clamp-like contraptions that look rather more convincing (relatively speaking, at least). While Bava reproduces some of the angles from the comic (including a high angle shot that shows the huge drop below him), matte paintings and dramatic framing easily improve on Edgardo Dell’Acqua’s rather functional artwork in the original comic. The white bodysuit, however, comes from another issue of the comic, ‘Terrore sul mare’ (no. 7 1963). When he is cornered by the police at Castle Saint Just, Diabolik uses a huge catapult to propel the empty bodysuit from the battlements, tricking Ginko’s men into thinking that he is the one hurtling towards the rocks (he emerges naked from his hiding place after they leave). This derives from a sequence in ‘Il segreto del tatuato’ (Anno V no. 2 1966). When Diabolik is cornered again later in the film, after using the emeralds as bullets to kill Valmont, he uses the drug Krusion to stop his heart and simulate death, a strategy adapted from ‘Sepolto vivo’ (no. 6 1963). That issue places greater dramatic emphasis on Eva’s desperate efforts to reach him in time; in the film, she is disguised as a nurse, unrecognised by the surgeon who is about to perform the autopsy. Bava films the sequence as though it was from one of his gothic films; many have noticed the similarities between Di63

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abolik’s hand reaching towards the camera and a similar shot of Christopher Lee’s ghostly hand in La frusta e il corpo/The Whip and the Body (1963). As a result, apart from his maniacal laughter at various points in the film, this is the only scene where Diabolik lives up to his sobriquet of il re del terrore. Finally, ‘Lotta disperata’ (no. 15 1964) includes the gold ingot robbery from the film’s final stages, although that issue is probably remembered more by Diabolik readers as a major turning point in his relationship with Eva.21 The script included a further incident from the comic not used in the final film, the image of Diabolik left imprinted on the retina of one of his victims (the driver of the car containing the money he steals in the pre-credits scene): RAPID ZOOM-IN to frame the pupil, in which we see the image of DIABOLIK. With musical effect, in sync, this image transforms into the title ‘DIABOLIK’. This title in turn shatters and changes to Diabolik himself. He is driving along in the black Jaguar. (Maiuri et al 1967: 13–14)

Figure 10: Diabolik climbing Castle Saint Just in a scene adapted from the original comic 64

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Figure 11: Diabolik revives at the mortuary in another sequence adapted from the comic

If the above sequences were to appear in a more recent comic book movie, we might think of them as fan-pleasing moments designed both to signal a commitment to fidelity and to make the invested fan feel part of a privileged section of the audience that ‘gets’ these references. Keeping comic book fans onboard and recognising the cultural and economic importance of fandom is largely seen as a more recent phenomenon, one connected both to the heightened visibility and perceived influence of fan cultures and to the growing media convergence of comic books and movies. Nevertheless, on the film’s DVD commentary, John Philip Law refers to an iconic scene in which Diabolik kills two policemen by throwing daggers at them as being ‘for the fans’, so it is possible that some conscious effort went into keeping readers on board while simultaneously trying to broaden the film’s appeal in other ways. On at least two occasions, the comic returned the favour. The 100th issue ‘La morte di Eva’ (Anno VI no. 24 1967), published not long before the release of the film, features a Valmont-like gangster called Rocki drawn to look exactly like Adolfo Celi. Like Valmont, he kidnaps Eva in a plan to appro65

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priate stolen bounty from Diabolik. Meanwhile, the cover of ‘Colpo alla zecca’ ( Anno VII no. 11 1968) provides a rather more chaste version of the money bed scene with both characters fully dressed and only Eva actually on the bed as Diabolik pours the bills onto her. There is no better illustration of the different sensibilities at work in the two incarnations of the character. While it is hard to imagine the steamy sensuality of the movie version in the comic, it is very much in tune with the fumetti neri that copied the Giussanis’ formula but pushed it in a more sexualised direction. Having sex on a bed of money is more the province of Kriminal (and his Eva counterpart, Lola), a more rebellious and permissive figure than the ‘King of Terror’. It is even more difficult to imagine the comic having Eva threatened with a lit cigarette, but such sexualised sadism was again the stock-in-trade of other Italian comics from the period. The most obvious inspiration for this scene was Thunderball, where Domino is tortured with a cigarette and ice cubes by none other than Adolfo Celi, playing SPECTRE agent Emilo Largo. Ironically, the scene in Thunderball did not encounter the same censorship problems, even though Domino actually is tortured (albeit offscreen), whereas Eva is rescued before the threat can be carried out. In spite of these concessions to comic book fidelity, Cappi attributes his claim that the film is ‘long forgotten’ in Italy to its unfaithfulness to the ‘real’ Diabolik (2016b: 80). The use of the gun might have been given more emphasis than it merited in the film’s publicity. The shooting of Valmont after the rescue of Eva, and as Ginko closes in, is as much as anything one of Diabolik’s ingenious tricks – concealing the emeralds in the gangster’s body by using them as bullets so that he can retrieve them from the crematorium. His more familiar weapon of choice – the thrown dagger (which has its own sound effect – ‘Swiisss!’) – is only used in one scene as he emerges from the sea at Castle Saint Just. But significantly, 66

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given De Laurentiis’ alleged desire to tone down the violence and Cervi’s promise that his Diabolik would never kill police officers, that is exactly the purpose to which two daggers are put, eliminating two officers. While the majority of Diabolik’s victims in the film are Valmont’s men (and Valmont himself), as he drives away from Castle Saint Just with Eva, two more unfortunate policemen will meet their end when a roll of sheets metal is stretched across the road, the police car’s reflected headlights forcing it over a cliff. This ruthlessness gives rise to one of MST3K’s more memorable quips: ‘Hey, I’m sorry if you’re offended by my random murders!’ The one aspect of Diabolik’s modus operandi where the Cervi-Holt version seems to have been more faithful is in the use of Diabolik’s plastic masks to disguise himself as assorted characters. Part of the fun of most issues is trying to secondguess which character might be the King of Terror in disguise – Ginko will sometimes pinch someone’s face just to check. Disguises were put to dizzying effect in the Fantômas novels, where identities are in a constant state of flux (see Walz 2000, Gunning 2008), while in the 60s films he stores a collection of plastic masks not unlike Diabolik’s in his underground hideout (although they all look like Jean Marais when he actually puts them on). The year before Diabolik went into production, a US TV show would add a ‘Man of 1000 Faces’ to a team of secret agents; the cast of Mission: Impossible (1966–1973) included Martin Landau’s Rollin Hand, a master of disguise.22 The ability to not just impersonate but actually become someone else was now a weapon in the Cold War, rather than the province of evil geniuses such as Fantômas or Dr Mabuse. This was not in 007’s skill set, as an embarrassing attempt to pass as Japanese in You Only Live Twice (1967) makes painfully clear, but Rollin Hand was the connecting point between Bond and Diabolik/Fantômas. Cappi (2016b: 82) speculates that De Laurentiis might have been eager to avoid comparison with the 67

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Figure 12: Diabolik in disguise, but not in one of his trademark latex masks

US spy show as well as the newer Fantômas films.23 Diabolik’s sole disguise in the film is a generic one, rather than an impersonation of another character. Ironically, though, it would be the later Mission: Impossible films starring Tom Cruise that featured Diabolik-like pull-on masks to constantly wrongfoot the audience about who was who. These, then, are matters of emphasis. More significant changes are made in terms of tone and the motivation of the central character. Artist Giuseppe Palumbo has observed that the comic book Diabolik is ‘totally devoid of humour or irony’ (quoted by Gravett 2012: 57). This isn’t much of an exaggeration – Ginko’s mask-detecting face-pinch is the closest there is to a running joke. This runs counter to the wink at the audience or reader that Corrado Farina refers to, which becomes a literal wink at the end of Diabolik as our hero contemplates his seemingly impossible escape after being encased in molten gold. This is not the broad, sometimes slapstick, comedy that characterised the 60s Fantômas films, turning Inspector Juve into a Clouseau-like buffoon, or the ‘screwball comedyas-hallucination’ (Dassanowsky 2015: 91) of the 1967 Casino Royale. Its most conspicuous nod to out-and-out comedy is 68

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the casting of Terry-Thomas as the Minister for the Interior (and subsequently Finance), an actor who, in addition to his rich comic career in the UK, had already appeared in a Diabolik parody, Arriva Dorellik! (1967). The film doesn’t go in for the self-conscious and occasionally exhausting zaniness of Modesty Blaise, where costumes and hairstyles can change literally in the blink of an eye or characters break into (tuneless) song. Nor does it mock the central characters in the way that Batman does – Diabolik and Eva are in on the joke, which is not generally (with the exception of the laughing gas scene) at Ginko’s expense either. And yet, there is very definitely a joke to be in on. As in Barbarella, this doesn’t preclude darker elements, but in both films, the music alone is constantly reminding us that this is all a bit of fun and that our heroes and heroines are in no real danger. Whenever Eva thinks Diabolik is injured or dead in the comic, she is distraught, and the reverse also applies. But when she visits what she initially believes to be Diabolik’s gold-encased corpse, it feels more like an opportunity to show off another fabulous outfit; a black mourning suit with a fur-trimmed hood and veil, set off nicely against the gold background. ‘We started with the Diabolik of the comics but it was necessary to reinvent him for the screen,’ Bava claimed in an interview with Nazione sera (Amadei 1968: 84), ‘we have given him a body, a brain, a will emotions.’ He is no more rounded a character than in the comic (nor should he be – psychological baggage isn’t necessarily what archetypal characters need), but perhaps the earliest sign of his difference is the disruption of the press conference with the Exhilaration Gas. While his technological ingenuity is always turned either to il colpo or the matter of escape in the comic – Diabolik is nothing if not a professional – it serves no such purpose here. The Minister for the Interior is announcing the reintroduction of the death penalty to combat Diabolik. Reducing the room to hysterics 69

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serves the purpose of subverting state authority and emphasising Diabolik’s rebellious streak. It’s the sort of thing The Joker might do to Commissioner Gordon, although even he might link it to some larger crime. Diabolik and Eva’s use of Anti-Exhilarating Gas Capsules (helpfully labelled on the container) might also remind us of the Caped Crusader’s endless supply of Bat-prefixed antidotes and gadgets, usually retrieved from a bottomless utility belt. The later destruction of the tax offices is in response to the government’s $1,000,000 reward for his capture, but again he is motivated by subversion rather than his own financial gain: ‘In view of the bad use to which the government has put the public money, I shall take steps to remove it from circulation.’ On the DVD commentary for the film, both John Philip Law and Tim Lucas refer to Diabolik as a terrorist. What makes this description jarring, perhaps, is knowing what was just around the corner for Italy. The film was released more than a year before the Piazza Fontana bomb in Milan killed sixteen people and injured eighty-eight, part of the strategia della tensione orchestrated by neo-fascists in order to implicate anarchist

Figure 13:The effects of the exhilaration gas at a government press conference 70

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groups and create an atmosphere of panic designed to facilitate a power move from the extreme right. So began the anni di piombo (the years of lead), where acts of terror were also committed by left-wing factions such as the Brigate Rosse. Law is not, of course, connecting Diabolik to any of the actual terrorism Italy was about to face, but why does he use the word to describe him? The blowing up of the tax offices – the closest he comes to a political act – seems as much as anything a prank, not unlike the exhilaration gas, albeit one with populist reverberations (he is no re-distributor of wealth, but he can at least eliminate everyone’s tax bills). It is also targeted specifically at the government offering a huge reward for his capture. Moreover, there is little sense of him spreading ‘terror’, even in the sense that the comic associated the word with him. The original Fantômas novel opens with a dialogue exchange between two unnamed people. When one of them asks what Fantômas does, ‘Spreads terror’ is the reply (Allain and Souvestre 1911: 1). This is a terror closer to that of the gothic, aroused by the mutable, faceless killer who might be anywhere at any time without anyone being aware of his presence, and this is the aura that Diabolik inherited in his earliest dark incarnation. By the 1960s, even the original ‘Lord of Terror’ Fantômas was starting to seem more mischievously subversive than diabolically evil, and some iterations were even bringing him over to the side of justice, if not necessarily the right side of the law. Nevertheless, Law was by no means the first person to use the word ‘terrorist’ in relation to the film. In L’europeo, Lietta Tornabuoni had dubbed the cinematic Diabolik ‘an enemy of the state’, motivated by ‘the subversion of the consumer society, terrorism as political intervention’ (1967: 57). This is more than a little overstated, and given that the film hadn’t yet been released, probably not based on an actual viewing of it. One would never guess from this that Diabolik spent 71

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much of the film stealing money, emeralds and gold, much as he did in the comic. Bava made rather different claims for the character, who displayed no ‘moralistic commitment ... Diabolik is to a small degree a symbol of youth fighting against the absurdity of life. He loves life, he loves love, he loves the man in the street and he opposes those who are slaves to money, gold, pleasure without love’ (Amadei 1968: 84). Some of this is questionable, too, even if it provides a rationale for casting a younger actor in the lead. Diabolik has no contact with, and displays no particular interest in, ‘the man in the street’. Pezzotta observes that the film presents only two types of people who aren’t either cops, politicians or career criminals – the drugged hippies at Valmont’s nightclub and the TV viewers who jeer the Minister for Finance for suggesting that they will still willingly pay the tax they owe even when there is no longer any record of it. Where Italian reviewers engaged with this aspect of the film, there was largely a consensus that Diabolik was motivated by nothing more than the desire to gratify Eva. One critic even characterised this behaviour as typical of a kind of petit-bourgeois Italian (F.M. 1968: 9). More recently, John Berra (2012) has read the film as a social satire, and certainly the film seems to invite us to see it as such. But who is the target of its satire? Berra characterises Diabolik as both ‘symbol of reckless consumerism’ (2012: 51) and ‘an example of a political movement that was intent on embarrassing the state’ (2012: 45), even going so far as to argue that it ‘reflects the spirit of the time and the sentiments of the mass audience’ (2012: 47). The rise in 1967–68 of the student protest movement across campuses in Italy was, according to Paul Ginsborg, initially characterised by ‘an irreverent anti-authoritarianism’, with no one safe from ridicule (1990: 304). It is particularly tempting, then, to map this onto the laughing gas and tax office incidents, particularly when Alessandro Alessandroni’s sitar on the soundtrack 72

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seems to be offering Diabolik as some sort of countercultural figure. However, we need to exercise some caution before finding the ‘spirit of the time’ in the film. Firstly, there is a question of timing – the real period of student unrest in Italy began in the autumn of 1967, at universities in Trento, Milan and then Turin (Ginsborg 1990: 302–3), by which time the film’s shooting schedule was over. It was not, however, too late for the two to be connected in press for the film, even if it isn’t something reviewers took very seriously. At the same time, the fact that Bava was talking to journalists about his Diabolik symbolising a climate of rebellion and protest (hardly solely an Italian phenomenon) suggests that we can’t dismiss it altogether. However, the psychedelic drug party gives us a different sense of what Bava, De Laurentiis and/or the credited writers thought of the counterculture – ludicrous, stoned buffoons, a distinctly middle-aged view of rebellious youth. If the film attempts to ‘reflect’ the ‘sentiments of the mass audience’, those sentiments might be sought instead in the desire to not pay any taxes. A sequence in the script not included in the film shows two people, a street cleaner and a ‘rich gentleman’ in a Rolls Royce, reacting to the destruction of the tax offices. They ‘throw their arms around each other and dance’, and soon others are joining in (Maiuri et al 1967: 129). This is a populist celebration of the private over the public, and one that had been given a fashionable veneer before. The Beatles’ Revolver (1966) had opened with George Harrison’s ‘Taxman’, a lament for not being able to keep most or all of one’s wealth for oneself (and he was fond of sitars too). In Elio Petri’s La proprietà non è più un furto/Property is No Longer Theft (1973), a man in a Diabolik suit demonstrates the effectiveness of anti-theft technology to the wealthy (one item is even referred to as an ‘anti-Diabolik door’). The film’s hero is a bank accountant called Total, who quits his job when he is refused a loan at the bank where he works and plans an elabo73

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rate revenge on its wealthiest customer through a series of thefts. He wants to ruin him, but a professional thief warns him that no one was ever bankrupted by theft; rather, the only point in stealing is to get rich oneself, and the film demonstrates that all wealth depends on theft of some sort, thus nullifying it as a political weapon. Total’s revenge is doomed to failure. Here, we see the cinema d’impegno (cinema of engagement) and the cinema d’evasione coming at the subject of theft as political subversion from different positions (and with very different degrees of emphasis). Petri’s title plays on French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s assertion that ‘property is theft’, and while the film is blackly comic, it explores this idea in more depth that one might reasonably expect of an escapist movie based on a bestselling comic. Total has a physical allergy to money – he is unable to handle it, let alone put it to the kind of erotic purpose that Diabolik and Eva do. He must instead steal objects and even people (the mistress of his nemesis). Diabolik’s politics are glib and opportunistic, probably an attempt to extend the audience of the film by giving it some vaguely countercultural feel (which is rather betrayed by its drug party scene). Its view of crime is romantic; it does destabilise political and economic power, but only to individualistic ends (whether making out in a pile of money or just not paying your taxes). But if Diabolik doesn’t ultimately give us ‘Protestik’, it at least does enough to allow us to imagine him, just as Fantômas could be re-imagined as fighting the ‘multinational vampires’. I once introduced the film to my University’s Cult Film Society at around the time that the banking industry’s role in the ever-worsening economic crisis was becoming increasingly clear. A masked outlaw obliterating financial institutions seemed particularly prescient and appealing, even if the film framed this as an apolitical and cynically populist manoeuvre. The Occupy movement would appropriate the Guy Fawkes mask from Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta during protests, but 74

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perhaps under different circumstances, they or some other movement might have adopted the cowl of Diabolik. Where does Diabolik take place? The comic shifted its setting from France to the fictional and geographically nonspecific Clerville, seemingly Western European (characters generally have Italian-sounding first names and French or German sounding surnames) and relatively naturalistic. The film gives us a different kind of non-place.24 The currency is US dollars; a montage of newspaper headlines is comprised entirely of English newspapers; the British Finance Minister Lord Clarke is a visiting foreign dignitary. When Ginko organises a police shutdown of the city, targeting Valmont’s activities, an onscreen map turning red illustrates the operation. The place names on the map offer distinctly conflicting clues to where we might be – El Segundo, Lynwood, Huntington Park, and, most enigmatic of all, Boulevard. It sometimes resembles a police state, not only when introducing ‘special powers’ (and the death penalty) to combat Diabolik but in the vaguely fascist-looking military uniforms seen at various points in the film. This again reinforces the film’s conception of Diabolik as a subversive figure, but Ginko remains uncompromised by the rather shady state that he serves. As in the comic, there is a degree of grudging respect between the two – they are more similar in appearance and age in the original, which does not translate into the casting of the younger Law and the older Michel Piccoli, twelve years apart in age. When it looks as though Diabolik has taken his own life to evade capture, Ginko is downcast: ‘It’s as though he’s become part of my life ... I can’t believe he’s really dead.’ Moreover, Ginko is evidently mistrustful of those above him. In a line from the script not used in the film, he refers to the current Minister of State as ‘even worse than the last one, or the one before that’ (Maiuri et al 1967: 166). The other characteristic of the film’s setting is its economic precarious75

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ness, exacerbated by Diabolik’s thefts. Lord Clarke, the British Finance Minister, is in the country to negotiate a loan (although this is more explicit in the script than in the film). Further chaos ensues after Diabolik blows up the tax offices – the 20-ton gold ingot must be sold for hard currency because, as Ginko observes, no one pays taxes anymore. It is tempting to see this non-place as a fantasised version of an Italy in which il boom, the economic miracle (1958–1963) that transformed the country, was starting to give way to more turbulent economic conditions.25 One of the film’s locations was FIAT’s Lingotto factory in Turin, one of the engines of both the economic boom and a site for the industrial unrest that would soon ignite again. Diabolik and Eva were very much creations of il boom, in a number of ways. Firstly, the fumetti neri were the product of both a boom in publishing and some tentative shifts in moral values. As Simone Castaldi puts it, ‘the relaxation of censorship brought to the surface a large section of the collective imagination that had been deeply repressed’ (2010: location 287). Secondly, as Italy was already embracing an American-style liberal individualism in the 1950s, the ruling Christian Democrats experienced a tension between its traditional ideology and the values of consumer capitalism. As Paul Ginsborg explains, they paid lip service to such values as the sanctity of family life, while ‘in practice the majority of the party fully espoused the cause of “modernization”’ (1990: 153) – the values of individualism and ‘the unfettered development of technology and consumer capitalism’ (1990: 154). These tensions can be seen to play out in film and comic book cycles that offer titillating thrills within punitive and moralistic narratives (and Bava made a number of such films), or in the ‘managing’ of Diabolik and Eva’s criminality, initially by portraying him as evil, then having Eva soften him into a more acceptable model of individualism that is ruthless but principled, modern and 76

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technocratic. Finally, the economic miracle produced what Paul Ginsborg calls a ‘distortion of consumption’ (1990: 216), placing an emphasis on private over public consumption; ‘the pattern which the boom assumed ... emphasized individual and familial roads to prosperity while ignoring collective and public responses to everyday needs’ (ibid.). Diabolik embodies this ‘distortion’, where individualistic consumption extends to grand theft. Unlike the comic, the film stresses the economic consequences of Diabolik’s crimes (at the same time that it encourages us to be amused by the crisis this creates for those in power). This is as throwaway as the film’s intermittent countercultural posturing (and equally enjoyable nonetheless), but the emphasis on instability and individualism is notable, given that Italy was already itself starting to see some of the longer term consequences of il boom. Cynicism had become Italian cinema’s default mode when representing the effects of the economic miracle. But even if we take the film as a critique of consumerism, its climax is ambiguous. At one level Diabolik appears to have been punished for his individualism, looking particularly deranged as he laughs while melting the gold, before being turned into a ‘pillar of greed’ (Erickson 1999). But his wink and laughter suggest that his confinement will be temporary at best.

THE AESTHETICS OF PLENTY (ON A BUDGET), OR JUST WHAT IS IT THAT MAKES TODAY’S HOMES SO DIFFERENT, SO ... DIABOLIKAL? Diabolik is actually a perfect Pop Art icon. I think that if Roy Lichtenstein were alive he would definitely do a series of paintings that featured Diabolik. – Vincenzo Mollica (interviewed by Battista 2009) The opening credits dissolve to a sequence of Diabolik escaping the police after stealing the ten million dollars, first 77

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in a motor launch and then in the black Jaguar. The Jaguar has appeared in the film already, first seen driving into the empty frame of an overhead shot after the cars containing the money have driven from bottom right to exit top left. A zoom into Diabolik’s car (the first sign of his presence in the film) is accompanied by a guitar ‘sting’ over a repetitive guitar-driven cue not dissimilar to the Batman theme, overlaid with a discordant trumpet. That music cue will become the theme of the black Jaguar (although it is reprised in the final moments of the film, as if to confirm that Diabolik will not remain a human statue for long). As he is pursued by police helicopters, the Jaguar swerves wildly (the camera undercranked to speed up the action) to avoid machine gun fire from the air. He drives into a tunnel, where Eva awaits him in her white Jaguar. They both jump out of their cars, Diabolik striking a dramatic pose (Law knows how to perform a comic book character) before kissing Eva. When the (remote-controlled) black Jaguar emerges from the other end of the tunnel, further machine gun fire sends it crashing from the cliff. We cut back to the tunnel – a close two-shot shows Eva peeling off Diabolik’s mask for some more passionate kissing as they drive off. We are roughly eleven minutes into the film, and what follows is one of its greatest triumphs, so much so that the film almost never recovers from it. They drive to the entrance of their hideout, where a hidden ground level door rises automatically via a forced perspective shot. What we initially find is a cavern, at least some of which appears to be an actual physical set, as opposed to the reliance on glass shots as we are taken deeper into the hideout. The car’s headlights trigger another entrance, the walls of the cavern parting like Aladdin’s cave to give them access. They drive through a translucent tunnel only seen through the cavern entrance, and emerge in a circular chamber with a moon-like globe above them. The 78

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floor revolves in what is revealed to be a futuristic elevator taking them into the depths of the grotto. There is an exchange of looks between the couple – one point of view shot travels from Eva’s cleavage down to her fishnet tights. More passionate kissing follows, evidently too passionate for the Italian censors in 1968. From the kiss in the tunnel onwards, Morricone’s score has reiterated elements from the title song ‘Deep Down’, including its sitar break – both the descent and the sexual play are answering any lingering questions we might have about what the phrase ‘deep down’ has to do with the world of Diabolik. At the lowest level is a vast grotto with arching structures, pods and walkways with stalactites above them. During the climax of the film, we will discover that the grotto is also accessible from the sea, as Ginko and his men track Diabolik and Eva to their lair – there is an appropriately fantastic and unfathomable geography at work here. A fleet of both black and white Jaguars can be seen to the rear. Eva makes her way to the bedroom, one of the film’s greatest physical sets. The production design is credited to

Figure 14: The fantastical grotto hideout, created almost entirely through glass shots 79

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Flavio Mogherini, but Lucas (2017: 734) speculates that Piero Gherardi might have had some uncredited input, too, given that he was also a production designer, having famously overseen the recreation of Rome’s via Veneto in La dolce vita. The mere act of Eva unzipping her dress sets the famous revolving circular bed in motion. At its centre is a tower of rectangular light boxes, control panels and screens (one of which turns out to be a TV). To its right is a pyramid of geometricallyshaped white lamps. Further to the right is a shower cabin, see-through but for a teasingly suspended frosted circle (which will also conceal the fact that Marisa Mell is wearing a flesh-coloured bodystocking when she showers). Everything is white apart from the black walls of the shower cabin. This is the kind of futuristic ideal home that was being imagined at World Fairs such as Expo 67, the Montreal World Fair themed around ‘Man and His World’, or La cupola, the domed modernistic summer house that architect Dante Bini built for Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Vitti at Costa Paradiso in 1969. But what it resembles most of all is the work of radical Italian industrial designer Cesare ‘Joe’ Colombo, such as his futuristic living room designed for the Visiona exhibition at Bayer in 1969, which also bears a striking resemblance to some of Barbarella’s interiors (the furry walls of her space ship, for example). Colombo progressed from ‘dynamic pieces of furniture’ to integrated environments, ‘autonomous, independent of (their) architectural container, and that can be coordinated and programmed to adapt in any spatial situation, in the present or future’ (quoted by Lucarelli 2013). Adaptable to a subterranean grotto perhaps? Both Diabolik and Barbarella were made before the Colombo interiors that most resemble their production design, but more importantly pop cinema and designers like Colombo were very much on the same page in their imagining of futuristic luxury, an aesthetic that is now a retro-futurist one. Several of his interior designs – intended 80

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Figure 15: Space age bachelor pad? The bedroom in Diabolik’s hideout

for living in, but more often exhibited – now resemble film sets from 60s ‘pop’ movies. Diabolik is about to put his haul in the safe, but pauses – he’s had a better idea. We return to Eva in the shower – as she gets out, the camera follows her to an identical shower cabin with Diabolik in it. As she gets out of the shower, she speaks for the first time: ‘Be quick!’ The sequence is interrupted by a brief scene between Ginko and the Minister for the Interior. The main function of this scene is a comic introduction to Terry-Thomas’ Minister, but it also covers an ellipsis in the bedroom scene before setting up its climax. ‘Diabolik will handle the 10 million dollars, but in some quite different way,’ Ginko explains, ‘a way no mind but his could imagine.’ Cut to fluttering dollar bills settling on the pyramid of lamps and on the floor before panning to the revolving bed, the camera closing in. The bed, too, is covered in bills and we also see Eva’s discarded jacket (a black grommet one that we haven’t actually seen her wear yet). The bed comes to a halt, placing two human-shaped mounds of money right in front of the camera. Eva emits a moan of ecstasy, and her naked leg emerges from the pile of bills. The music has ini81

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tially been ominous, playing on Ginko’s seemingly dire warning about Diabolik’s imagination, but is immediately replaced by another (faster) variation on the ‘Deep Down’ theme. More naked limbs emerge until we can see the couple clearly, their nudity partly covered by the framing but also by the dollar bills. When the camera cuts to an overhead shot, craning up as the bed starts to revolve again, the money is strategically placed across Eva’s rear (much to the disappointment of one of the MST3K robots). As if to confirm the fantastical nature of this space, the bed seems to have grown since we first saw Eva walk past it.26 It is worth recounting this sequence in some descriptive detail because it invites us to luxuriate in it. It takes up nearly ten minutes of screen time from the point where the car enters the fantastical spaces of Diabolik’s hideout, including the brief scene with Ginko and the Minister, and yet it provides no narrative progress. The scene is entirely focused on sensual and material spectacle – luxury, hedonism, fashion, interior design, sex. Money isn’t a means to an end, a way of acquiring other things (which can, after all, be stolen), but an end in itself – its only use value here is an erotic one. Wealth

Figure 16: The money bed 82

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is tactile, it adorns the body, something that proves almost fatal to Diabolik when he is bathed in liquid gold in the finale. One of the most debated phrases in Umberto Eco’s seminal 1984 essay on cult film is the ‘completely furnished world’ that he identifies as one of its prerequisites (2008: 68). Diabolik is overall what we might call an incoherently furnished film, refusing to provide us with reliable or consistent cues to where this world might be. But for this section of the film, we could not ask for furnishing to be more complete (admittedly in a more literal sense) as it arrests the narrative and immerses us deep down. There is another way in which it stands apart from much of the rest of the film. The film as a whole visibly does not possess (and arguably doesn’t need) the resources that were made available to Barbarella so that it could create a number of futuristic or alien environments. Some scenes have the look of the budgets Bava was more accustomed to (and we know anecdotally that this scene wasn’t as expensive as it looks, or as De Laurentiis allegedly claimed to Paramount that it was), so it is also an unevenly furnished film. But here is the film’s most spectacular encounter with what Lawrence Alloway called ‘the aesthetics of plenty’ (1969: 41). Charles and Mirella Jona Affron (1995) use the phrase ‘design intensity’ to account for the different degrees to which production design draws attention to itself, sometimes overwhelming everything else. Nineteensixties comic book movies such as Barbarella and Modesty Blaise are particularly design intensive. Along with Diabolik, they belong to the Affrons’ fourth level of design intensity, artifice, ‘where the set is a fantastic theatrical image that commands the centre of narrative attention’ (1995: 36–37) and ‘the viewer exits the theatre whistling the sets’ (1995: 39). There is little need to whistle the sets here because Morricone’s score sometimes feels like it’s about to do it for us. 83

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Citing Alloway above, the English critic who originally coined ‘pop’ as an art term, brings us to a dimension of the film that connects to both its comic book source material and its emphasis on glamorous surfaces – its subsequent reputation as in some way a ‘pop art’ movie. What does it mean to describe the film in this way? When Alberto Pezzotta calls it ‘truly Warholian’, it seems as much as anything a critical strategy for transforming his evident antipathy towards its ‘mediocre imaginary’ into a positive in the same way that he sees Warhol as exposing the poverty of mass culture (2013: 92). He characterises it as a ‘perversely antispectacular film that tries to seduce with images of modernity, transgression, luxury, eroticism and spending’ (ibid.). Tim Lucas, on the other hand, creates his own label, ‘Continental Op’, to account for those 1960s European films that ‘look like parties ... continually stimulate our sense of surprise, our sense of mystery, and our eyes’ (2012: 17). This is very much a design intensive cinema, in which the dial is turned up to ‘artifice’ and then keeps on going: Films made in this style are characterized, first and foremost, by dominant design. They place their characters within abstract worlds where art screams from every frame in which all the traditional elements of nature are denied, replaced by chic, eye-boggling colours, gels and mouè patterns. Such movies belong to the past yet look forward to a future that never really happened. (2012: 18) Diabolik ticks virtually all of these boxes. It doesn’t just look like a party, it actually includes one – the psychedelic nightclub raided by the police during Ginko’s crackdown on Valmont’s drugs ring.27 The script has a different scene to the drugs party; a casino, where ‘The Royal Game of the Goose’ in played on a giant game board using scantily-clad women 84

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as chess pieces. The film replaces this with something less sexually titillating and more parodically groovy, making opportunistic use of some of the sets being built for Barbarella and filtering its pseudo-psychedelia through Bava’s trademarked coloured gels and Morricone’s rough approximation of acidrock. Its narrative function is minimal – the police need to be seen raiding somewhere, but they take long enough to arrive to allow for a prolonged spectacle of stoned, face-painted hippies, gigantic spliffs being passed around, and ludicrous dancing. If the underground grotto sequence ultimately feels more like the kind of ‘party’ Lucas has in mind, it’s perhaps because the nightclub scene is more concerned with ridiculing its hippy participants (so much for ‘Protestik’) than making us feel like we have been invited to the coolest place in town. Lucas is probably right to suggest that this type of cinema extends beyond ‘pop’, and yet pop is undoubtedly the aesthetic centre of gravity for the more style-conscious 60s comic book movies – not just bright, artificial and conspicuously designed, but ironic and knowingly superficial. According to David Buxton, the ‘pop gaze established a new regime of truth ... no longer based ... on the “outside world” but on the higher reality of design’, which involved ‘learning to concentrate one’s gaze on surfaces in a world in which fetishism had been extended to almost all objects (and to people themselves)’ (1990: 99). Moreover, there was, as Will Brooker puts it, something ‘inherently pop’ about comics; they attracted the likes of Roy Lichtenstein because of their ‘flatness, crude execution and mass reproduction’ (2000: 218). If Diabolik was, as Vincenzo Mollica claims above, ‘a perfect Pop Art icon’, it was precisely because of those qualities. If Lichtenstein had been Italian or Diabolik’s popularity had travelled to the US, maybe he really would have painted him. But instead, it would be the rather less fashionable figures of Dino De Lau85

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rentiis and Mario Bava, the mogul and the artisan, who would transform him into something approaching il re del ‘pop’. Alloway divided the development of pop art into three phases. The first was more critical discourse than art practice, arguing for a more inclusive understanding of art that extended its borders to include the industrial and the ephemeral. In its second phase, artists such as Lichtenstein and Warhol produced work that incorporated mass media into exhibited art. In the final phase, these notions of pop fed back into mass culture, including cinema and comics (1975: 121). Alloway uses the figure of Batman to illustrate these three phases. Initially ‘a comic strip and nothing else’ in its first phase, the character became a subject for pop art paintings (such as those of Mel Ramos) in the second, and finally the star of a TV show fashioned very knowingly around the ‘pop’ aesthetics that passed into wider circulation and the subject of a series of ‘pop art’ paintings by Batman’s original creator, Bob Kane (ibid.). Diabolik arguably skipped straight from the first to the third stage; some of the comic’s covers occasionally displayed garish pop-like characteristics (and the interior art often resembled the kind of romance comics Lichtenstein appropriated for his panel blow-ups), while the film fully embraces the characteristics of third stage ‘pop’. This is often seen as a debased form of pop, ‘thoroughly devalued by overusage’ (Hebdige 1988: 121), but it undoubtedly provided the visual language and tone of comic book and a fair few spy and secret agent movies of the 1960s. When Alloway initially identified pop as both an aesthetic and a mode of appreciation, he set out some of what Buxton (1990) later called the ‘pop gaze’. In popular cinema, ‘the drama of possessions’ took priority over actions and psychology in defining characters (Alloway 1969: 42). Films were ‘lessons in the acquisition of objects, models for luxury, diagrams of bedroom arrangement’, above all, ‘lessons in style (of clothes, of bear86

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ing)’ (ibid.). Alloway directs our gaze away from narrative and characterisation and towards design – what kind of environment the characters inhabit and, equally importantly, how they inhabit it. Diabolik seems to be asking precisely the question in the title of Richard Hamilton’s famous 1956 collage, ‘Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?’ As a product of il boom, Diabolik was always a ‘drama of possessions’, and very much about the acquisition of objects. In the comic, we see more of Diabolik and Eva’s actual home (a large house on the outskirts of Clerville) than their underground lair, which is a rather more functional space – essentially a basement full of masks and gadgets. The representation of luxury and affluence places greater emphasis on a tasteful bourgeois home filled with invaluable stolen objects. As Carlo Dumontet suggests, the lifestyle on display was that of a ‘wealthy, intelligent, middle class Italian who, after work, liked the comfort of his own home and the company of his partner’ (1998: 7). Both versions of the characters like to watch TV in the film, amidst a retro-futuristic tower of monitors and control panels at the centre of the bed. They even seem to get their ideas for thefts from television, as though the news programme featuring the Acksland emeralds was an episode of Carosello, the daily half-hour of commercials that was one of the most watched programmes on Italian TV in the 1960s. The film’s script marks a transitional point in starting to imagine a more elaborately designed, and aggressively modern, environment. In some respects, it resembles what finally ended up on screen: ‘Chromium-plated girders bear the weight of the mass of rock and earth above’ (Maiuri et al 1967: 21), a cavern with trickling streams not dissimilar to the underground pool in which Eva swims in her grommet bikini. But there are some differences, too. One of these is the combination of the old and the new, ‘a tasteful blend of superb modern pieces and beautiful antiques, the unifying theme be87

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ing the rich perfection of everything’ (ibid.). Buxton observes this combination of classic and modern in what he calls the ‘pop series’; the pairing, for example, of John Steed (bowler-hatted English gent) and Emma Peel (modishly dressed action woman) in The Avengers (1990: 92). One might also point to English psychedelia’s fondness for Victoriana, such as The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper attire. By the time the underground grotto had made it to the screen, however, there was no place for the old; instead, the modern points towards the futuristic. The fact that the film, which was after all adapted from a crime-mystery comic, sometimes turns up in books about science fiction cinema is entirely down to what goes on underground in the film, from the space age elevator to Diabolik’s protective silver suit, which looks as though it was designed for space travel. The script makes some topical allusions through glimpses of stolen items in a huge vault: ‘for the penetrating observer – the thick gray Royal Mail bags which DIABOLIK took in the Great Train Robbery’ (Maiuri et al: 23), and in a nod to the stolen Goya painting 007 spots in the villain’s lair in Dr No (1962), ‘Picassos and Rembrandts huddle together like junk frames in an old attic’. But none of this found its way into the film, either because Bava wanted the temporal setting to be as vague as the geographical one (are we in the near future?) or because more interesting and/or expedient options presented themselves on the set. The money bed seems not to have been in the Goldstrike version of the script Lucas (2007: 735) refers to. However, it is definitely in the fourth version of the script, albeit not quite yet the hyper-modern version seen onscreen. It is described in the script as ‘a bed consisting of layers of ten-thousand dollar bills’ (Maiuri et al 1967: 28), rather than the circular revolving bed of the film. In the script, the bed (literally made of money) is in front of a large fireplace. Eva tells Diabolik that ‘the fire affects me the way the sun affects other people ... I feel more alive ... more 88

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conscious of my skin’ and he responds by throwing a handful of bills onto the fire to enflame her passions further (ibid.). This is entirely consistent with the transformation of money’s use value, but again we are in a rather different designed world in the finished film – not a ‘warm’ environment but a modishly white one, with a pyramid of stylish lamps in place of an old-fashioned fireplace. The underground hideout is a popular location in 1960s cinema, from the Batcave to Fantômas’ lair to Blofeld’s volcano launch centre in You Only Live Twice (the most recent Bond film to have been released). Ken Adam’s volcano set built at Pinewood Studios is certainly the grandest of these, but the film’s narrative (and the fact that it is a physical set) also requires it to balance the functional with the fantastical. Much of Diabolik’s lair anticipates the kind of ‘virtual set design’ that has come to be associated with more recent developments in film technology; part of the film’s continuing fascination lies in trying to determine where the physical set gives way to the matte shot. The ‘new world of total design’ (Buxton 1990: 72) extends to the human body – in the pop text, characters are as much fashion models, style ‘(e)xternalised on the body’ (1990: 99), as human personalities. Comic book characters, by their very nature, are designed personalities; we see their definitive ‘look’ taking shape, and a re-booting of the character often also involves a re-design. In his first few years, Diabolik’s mask gradually changed from a Fantômas-like hood to a face-hugging cowl designed by artist Enzo Facciolo that covered all but his eyes while simultaneously allowing the outline of his facial features to be seen. Carlo Rambaldi’s leather mask translates this effect onto live action – the rest of his outfit suggests something between a biker outfit and a frogman suit – while adding a touch of the ‘kink’ that is more pronounced in the costume designs of Barbarella or the leather catsuits of The Avengers and Catwoman. But the Ital89

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ian press was alerting readers to the fact that it was Eva’s ‘fashion show’ that they really needed to pay attention to. The promise of ‘14 of the craziest and most colourful outfits ever seen’ is only partly an exaggeration.28 Eva does indeed have fourteen different outfits in the film (that’s several more than Barbarella), although that number would include her disguise as a nurse when Diabolik wakes on the mortuary slab and the diving suit worn during the retrieval of the gold ingot. But such claims might also have had in mind some of the outfits worn by Valmont’s girlfriend, such as a top made out of red plastic triangles. A key precedent for combining pulp adventure with a kinetic catwalk show was the British TV series The Avengers, where fashion assumed sufficient prominence to pass into a retail collection. The outfits Honor Blackman wore as Cathy Gale had been designed by Michael Whitaker, but when she was replaced by the series’ most iconic female lead, Diana Rigg’s Emma Peel, John Bates designed a series of outfits for her that were also launched as ‘The Avengers Collection’ at Courtaulds Fashion Theatre in August 1965 (Rogers 1992: 89–90). Designed specifically so as not to cause strobing on black and white televisions, the collection was available for retail distribution through the Jean Varon fashion house. The pop heroine – Emma Peel, Modesty Blaise, Barbarella, Eva Kant – mediates between action and high fashion, and is often one of the most conspicuously designed figures on screen. Over the years, Eva has acquired a definitive appearance in the comic – a black bodysuit not unlike Diabolik’s, blonde hair raised into a chignon (the same hairstyle as the brunette Modesty Blaise). This outfit first appeared in the fourth issue ‘Atroce vendetta’ (1963), the same issue in which Diabolik was seen driving the black Jaguar for the first time. But the black bodysuit assumed greater prominence when Eva became a more consistently active character. It 90

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stands in contrast with the film’s wardrobe both because of its functionality and because it displays less of her body than the movie is keen to do. Several outfits in the film leave her midriff bare, including the peach mini-dress which ties at her neck but then is slit down to her stomach, barely covering her breasts, and a hitchhiking outfit consisting of cropped top and hipster shorts. Barbarella gives a prominent credit to Paco Rabanne, even though he only ‘inspired’ one outfit for the film (but is a clear reference point for several others), and Anna Battista discerns his influence on Eva’s two grommet outfits, a jacket and a bikini (2012b) as well as the plastic top worn by Valmont’s girlfriend. As Christopher Laverty puts it, ‘You do not wear Rabanne; you display it’ (2016: 154). The use of Rabanne’s name to brand Barbarella’s costume design (even though his active role was minimal) is similar to the dropping of Gherardi’s name in advance press for Diabolik; it signals a heightened prominence for what the female lead is wearing onscreen. From the moment Mell was cast, her outfits were the main focus of attention and Gherardi’s name was associated specifically with her. It might now seem like a missed opportunity that there was never a ‘Barbarella Collection’ or an ‘Eva Kant Collection’ (granted, there might be limited opportunities to wear the former), although Rabanne would refer back to Barbarella’s costumes in some of his subsequent work (Laverty 2016: 154), while shoe designer Ruthie Davis later drew inspiration from Eva’s wardrobe in the film (Battista 2009b), including a grommet pump with a titanium wedge based partly on Lady Kant’s bikini and jacket. In an interview with Anna Battista, she describes Bava’s film as ‘beyond fashionable, it is in every way gorgeous, sexy, tasteful, innovative and appealing’, but when she characterises Eva as ‘a totally Mod, chic and hip 60s chick’ (ibid.), we are reminded that Eva had undergone a more dramatic redesign than her partner. 91

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ALL ABOUT EVA As Valmont prepares to kidnap Eva, her description is fed into an identikit device, leading to a brief but arresting animation sequence as Eva’s face takes shape on the device. A selection of mouths, eyes and hairstyles materialise and mutate, some of them growing into fully formed faces, with added colours that themselves shift and transform into Warhol-style screenprints. One face looks initially like a Lichtenstein rendition of Barbarella before the face collapses in on itself, her blonde hair transforming into one of his abstract ‘comic book’ paint swirls. The same face appears again soon afterwards, only to have its features erased. Another looks exactly like Twiggy, its natural colours giving way to deepest crimson, then a monochrome outline, then disappearing like the Cheshire Cat. Finally, a recognisable face materialises: a comic book drawing of Eva (hair shorter to mirror the style she adopted for the streetwalker disguise) that is pitched somewhere between her appearance in the comic and Marisa Mell’s facial features.29 Accompanying this is a particularly unusual organ cue by Morricone, one that was also used earlier in the film during the newspaper montage depicting Ginko’s clampdown on Valmont’s operations. If we hadn’t been thinking about pop art already, this sequence is rather insistent that now would be a good time to start, mimicking the translation of comic book faces into ‘art’ and appearing to reference the techniques and signature style of known pop practitioners. It is also, along with the references to scenes from the original, the strongest reminder of the film’s comic book origins. At the same time, it works rather differently from the comic book panels shown in Losey’s Modesty Blaise, which draw attention to the difference between the original newspaper strip (brunette) Modesty and Monica Vitti’s (mostly) blonde incarnation of her (only once in the film is she briefly seen 92

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Figures 17 and 18: Eva ‘takes shape’: the identikit sequence

with the familiar hairstyle and the black catsuit). The final image of Eva, on the other hand, seems designed to blur the distinction between Mell’s Eva and her fumetto incarnation. But the sequence can’t be reduced either to that or to its more obvious narrative function of allowing Valmont’s men to track and capture her. It might remind us, for example (and, doubtless, unintentionally), of how long it took to arrive at the final casting of the role. Four people were linked with, or actually started playing, the part of Eva before Mell was cast (and certain aspects of the film were then re-designed 93

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around her). In addition to Virna Lisi, Elsa Martinelli and Catherine Deneuve, there was another nearly-Eva, the girlfriend of someone at Paramount who no-one (including John Philip Law) seemed to remember the name of. But this ongoing casting conundrum is also part of a bigger picture of Eva as, at that point, a mutable figure both on paper and on film. The mutating faces suggest a casting session or a comic book artist brainstorming exercise aimed at constructing the character out of appealing selling points and star referents, just as Emma Peel’s name allegedly arose from the attempt to build a character with ‘M(an) Appeal’. Eva Kant is arguably the most iconic female character in Italian comics.30 Her image has been used in a number of social campaigns (most recently, one about violence against women), in advertising, and parodied on TV. She enjoyed a series of solo and semi-solo adventures in the Italian Cosmopolitan in 1976, which paved the way for later adventures such as ‘Eva Kant “Quando Diabolik non c’era”’ (Eva Kant ‘Before there was Diabolik’, Il grande Diabolik no. 7 2003). There has even been an Eva self-defence book, Eva Kant: Senza Paura (Eva Kant: Fearless 2008). Her predecessor was Irma Vep, the lithe thief in Feuillade’s Les Vampires, her contemporaries Modesty Blaise (created the same year) and the Avengers women. Her first appearance might have suggested that she was always destined to be a Modesty Blaise/ Emma Peel-type figure, with a past as an industrial spy and a streak of ruthlessness; she has disposed of her husband and will help Diabolik escape the guillotine by substituting another victim (drugged and disguised) in his place. But her role quickly became a primarily romantic one, and that of ‘softening’ Diabolik into a more attractive anti-hero. As late as 1972, female readers wrote in to complain when Diabolik called her ‘adorably clumsy’ after rescuing her in ‘Delitto dietro la maschera’ (Anno XI no. 3) – there was evidently a growing 94

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feeling that she deserved better (Spiritelli 1996: 98). It would be unfair, then, to chide the film for not representing a version of Eva that wasn’t really taking shape until the 1970s. Rather, Marisa Mell’s Eva (the film, unlike the script, never mentions the name ‘Kant’) is part of the flux of the character. In addition to the likes of Modesty Blaise, for Marisa Mell’s Eva we can add another point of reference – the figure of the Bond ‘girl’ (publicity for the film often shows her draped over Diabolik in a pose reminiscent of such). Eva would over time become more like Mrs Peel and Modesty but without ever shedding her romantic commitment to Diabolik. Like Modesty Blaise, Eva balances criminality with virtue (Modesty is a professional criminal recruited to fight crime) but without renouncing the former, which is instead tempered by the latter. She changes Diabolik in the comic, and unlike Tracy Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), she doesn’t then conveniently die in order to allow our hero to go back to being the man he was before he fell for her. Women figured prominently in the new cycle of Italian comics in the 1960s. Simone Castaldi characterises them as ‘(h)ighly independent, sexually uninhibited, and substantially evil ... (they) represented for the male readership, a way to exorcise the fear of women’s emancipation the economic boom gradually put in motion’ (2010: location 305). Eva might have inspired some of this – every masked anti-hero was given a sexy female partner – but also stood apart from it. She wasn’t a curvaceous sex bomb like other women in the fumetti neri; she wasn’t Satanik, the ‘devil’s redhead’, or Lola, Kriminal’s pigtailed girlfriend who seemed to feel overdressed in anything more than underwear or a babydoll nightie. Eva embodied elegance, above all – she was, after all, modelled on Grace Kelly. Stephen Gundle has noted a shift in conceptions of Italian female beauty during il boom, away from dark, voluptuous figures such as Sophia Loren. 95

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Instead, the emphasis shifted to blonde women, associated with American consumerism, a ‘slim, urban woman who was the symbol of economic prosperity’ (2007: 170). Blondeness was prominent in advertising – Virna Lisi, who was offered the roles of both Eva and Barbarella, advertised talcum powder and toothpaste (2007: 171).31 We probably need to be careful in mapping this trend onto a comic book character in the same way one would with living people, especially as Eva is never represented as being literally Italian, but she undoubtedly embodied luxury, modernity and prosperity. It is hard to separate her distinctiveness, too, from the fact of her female authorship. This is not to position the Giussani sisters as feminists exactly; as we have seen, the early representation of Eva was often less than progressive. But there is a telling difference between the objectification that was a fundamental part of the appeal of the fumetti neri – male fantasies about ‘bad girls’ – and Eva as a figure of luxurious consumption and romance. Diabolik is increasingly defined though her, rather than the other way round. The Giussanis were certainly modern in their outlook; in 1974, during a referendum on whether to repeal the legalization of divorce, they devoted the inside cover of Diabolik to exhorting readers to vote against the change. They were exceptional as writers and publishers in a male-dominated industry, even if it took later writers to realise the fuller potential of their iconic female character.32 The film, on the other hand, takes us back to a male fantasy of Eva; the outfits are skimpier, the poses more provocative, and Mell’s performance markedly more sensual. Carlos Aguilar and Anita Haas suggest that Mell would have made a better Barbarella than Jane Fonda (2008: 57), while both the reviewer in Film mese (F.M. 1968: 10) and Cappi (2016a: 53) suggests that she would be better suited to one of the comic book characters drawn by the artist Magnus than the ‘icy lady’ Eva Kant.33 96

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Cappi’s description of Eva as ‘icy’34 – a quality sometimes associated with Hitchcockian blondes like Grace Kelly – brings us to one of the nearly-Evas, Catherine Deneuve. ‘La Deneuve was not Eva Kant’, according to John Philip Law (Averbo and Pisoni 2007: 175), although his well-known onset romance with Mell might raise the suspicion that this was probably not an entirely unbiased judgement. One’s evaluation of Deneuve in the role (and Martinelli before her) can only be based on surviving stills. Tim Lucas, too, believes that she was miscast, mainly on the basis that she outshines Law (as some Italian critics felt Mell did, too); he describes her as ‘an Ice Princess to be worshipped ... it is obviously she who is to be adored’ (2007: 728). He feels that Deneuve ‘would have badly weakened Diabolik’s all-important authority and thrown the film completely off-balance’ (2007: 729), while Mell, on the other hand, ‘was nothing less than Eva Kant come to life’ (2007: 730). The latter is certainly what the identikit sequence seems to be partly trying to convince us of, even if it also suggests that it is building its own version of the character. But Lucas’ description of Deneuve is interesting; Eva is an ‘Ice Princess’ of sorts, and a figure who has attracted a fair amount of worship over the years, both from Diabolik and the comic’s readers. If Lucas is right in thinking that she would compromise Diabolik in some ways, that might well have been interesting in its own right, as well as anticipating her growing prominence through the decades. By way of comparison: did the casting of the charismatic Diana Rigg (with all her Avengers associations) detract from the authority of the inexperienced George Lazenby playing 007 in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service? The answer is, probably, yes; but there has been a growing tendency in reevaluations of the film to see that as one of its strengths (Santos 2015, for example). On the other hand, if Lucas is questioning Deneuve’s suitability for Bava’s take on the char97

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acter, that is another matter. It is perhaps harder to imagine her playing the version of Eva that Mell does, precisely because Mell’s Eva is designed primarily to be looked at – the camera is sometimes placed at a low angle not because it is inviting us to worship her, but because it seeks to get a better view of her legs (at other points, scenes are filmed through her legs). The story goes that the money bed scene was the final straw between Deneuve and Bava, and that she effectively refused to do it. Given that Bava had apparently initially wanted Marilù Tolo, he had probably always conceived of Eva as a physical presence more like the sensual figures in other Italian comics of the period. Mell’s first significant dialogue concerns what Diabolik will get her for her birthday (the Acksland necklace is on TV at the time). The script paints her as a shallow and rather spoiled (she calls Lady Clarke an ‘old cow’ and an ‘ugly bitch’). When she gets her way, ‘DIABOLIK looks at her in a resigned fashion and then wearily reaches out to turn off the TV’ (Maiuri et al 1967: 51). This is softened in the completed film, which removes the insults to the diplomat’s wife, but the script underlines a more sexist conception of the character than the Giussanis’ devoted partner. Eva wants things, expects them, even – and it is Diabolik’s job to get them for her. As Diabolik projects molten gold through a grill in the floor, looking as though he is literally pissing wealth, cutaways show Eva biting her nails in excitement, aroused both by the hysterically phallic imagery and the spectacle of luxury. Eva is threatened with torture like a Bond girl, draped over the hero in publicity like a Bond girl, there to be enjoyed as a spectacle by the viewer and enjoyed in bed by the hero like a Bond girl – but there are differences, too. According to Bennett and Woollacott, the Bond girl is offered a sexual freedom within limits. She is ‘put in her place’, but that ‘place’ has been refashioned in a very particular way: 98

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They do not simply confirm established ideologies and fictional representations of femininity but reform them, fashioning a new construction of femininity tailored to the requirements of a promiscuous male sexuality in being set free from the restraints of marriage and fidelity ...the only (!) restriction placed on the Bond girl – the model, once finely tuned, of a free and independent sexuality – is that she should submit to the regime of the phallus in the ordering of her desires. (Bennett and Woollacott 1987: 118) As noted earlier, one of the most significant differences from Bond lies in the desires of the hero, which are monogamous and devoted rather than promiscuous. Moreover, unlike Bond, Diabolik is on the ‘wrong’ side of the law and thus never seeks to reform her (the Bond girl often belongs initially to the villain in some way). The Eva of the comics undoubtedly marked a break from the dominant ideology of the Christian Democrat government; an unmarried childless woman living and collaborating with a professional criminal. But this was tempered in two ways. Firstly, their relationship increasingly resembled a marriage, even if it wasn’t literally one. Secondly, the emphasis was placed on romance rather than sex. The film’s version of the couple in no way resembles a marriage – they are still in the throes of intense sexual passion and play. At one level, this equips Mell’s Eva with a sexuality more like that of a Bond girl, a ‘free’ sexuality that is nevertheless tuned to the desires of a virile and idealised male. At the same time, however, Eva’s attraction to emeralds, gold and money and Diabolik’s commitment to giving it to her, suggests that the balance of power isn’t so clearcut and if the script hints that this is a negative, the film is less judgemental. Robert von Dassanowsky (2015: 91) has suggested that the figure of the female spy ‘ruptured the polarized good/bad images of 99

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women’ in the popular cinema of the 60s. As the figure of Modesty Blaise suggests, there is some crossover between this figure and that of the professional female thief. Eva may be objectified in the film, have little to say and be stripped of her iconic surname, but at the end she is neither ‘saved’ or punished. And while she has been adorned with wealth at various points in the film, she isn’t the one literally trapped by it (however temporarily) in the final scene. But there is another way of thinking about the finale of the film. Ross Karlan likens the early Bond girls to magician’s assistants, there to be looked at while simultaneously distracting the audience from seeing how the trick is done (2015: 198). But her objectification also disguises her own skills; she must know all of the magician’s secrets (2015: 201). If the Bond girl and the traditional assistant must appear ‘unknowing’, we are always aware that Eva knows all the tricks (she pulls off a good number of her own in the comic). Like Diabolik, the Eva of the film doesn’t go in for the latex masks of the comic, adopting simpler disguises (the streetwalker, the nurse assisting the aborted autopsy). In the final scene – the prelude to an escapology trip that we assume will happen

Figure 19: The art of distraction: Eva and Ginko in the final scene 100

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Figure 20: The final wink at the audience

offscreen (or in an unmade sequel) – she must distract Ginko from the trick to come. At one level, the magician and his assistant seem to have exchanged places; he is the one in the ‘box’. But while the trick itself will retain its secret, what this confirms is that Diabolik has always been a tale of two magicians, not one. Both of them have escape tricks to pull off at the end of the film – Diabolik from his prison of gold, Eva from Ginko, who is presumably about to arrest her. The exchange of winks – Diabolik to Eva and then Diabolik to us, the audience – leaves us in little doubt that their most audacious trick is still to come.

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4 GENIUS OF CRIME: THE PLACE OF THE FILM A glamorous secret agent lives in a secret hideout/space capsule at the top of the Eiffel Tower, her white circular bedroom not dissimilar to the elevator in Diabolik’s underground hideout. She is woken by the voice of her computer, which speaks with a French accent. She takes a shower in a cubicle that is again very familiar in design (a frosted circle partially concealing her nudity). Later, we see her accept her mission from the World Council, whose president is even more famil-

Figure 21: The money bed scene recreated in Codename: Dragonfly, the fictitious 60s Sci-Fi film in CQ 102

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iar because he is played by John Philip Law. Her mission is to seek the revolutionary outlaw, Mr E, who dresses like Che Guevara and possesses a specially designed gun (shades of the positronic ray in Barbarella). Agent Dragonfly demands to be paid upfront, and thousand dollar bills are propelled directly into her bedroom and onto her bed – she romps ecstatically under the shower of money. When she goes into action, she wears an off-white leather jumpsuit and drives a white DS not dissimilar to a certain white Jaguar. These scenes are amongst those we see of Codename: Dragonfly, the fictitious Franco-Italian sci-fi film that is the centre of Roman Coppola’s CQ, if not a film with a cult following then certainly a film that displays its cultishness through its spot-on emulation of Diabolik and Barbarella, and an Italian producer figure (Giancarlo Giannini’s Enzo De Martini) clearly modelled on Dino De Laurentiis. Its hero Paul progresses from editing and second unit work to the trailer to actually directing the film after the original director is fired and another is injured in a car crash. But he would rather be making his low-key monochrome art film, shooting footage of his fridge, his soap and his Parisian girlfriend – ‘pieces of me’, as he puts it in voice-over: ‘I’m trying to find what’s real, what’s honest, the total opposite of the film I’m editing.’ But the film seems to side with his girlfriend’s view; ‘what if (reality is) boring?’ The film most comes to life in its recreation of the volatile world of what now circulates as Eurocult cinema and the textures of 60s pop/comic book cinema. It is entirely appropriate that Codename: Dragonfly even exists in different versions as extras on the DVD, the more political version its initial director is trying to make against producer resistance and the version Paul completes with a different ending. While references to Diabolik have been discerned in films such as Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman (Burton is a known Bava admirer), CQ is the most sustained homage to Diabolik 103

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and rather more respectful of the film than the Beastie Boys had been (let alone MST3K). It is often cited in recent accounts of Bava’s film as an indicator of its newly enhanced status; while Roman is by no means the most celebrated of the Coppola clan, he’s a Coppola nevertheless. CQ is notable here for two other reasons. Firstly, it effectively gives us a Diabolik in which Eva is the main protagonist – a hybrid of Eva, Barbarella and Modesty Blaise – and a Diabolik who is the radical figure some tried to find in Bava’s film. Secondly, it confirms that the connection between Diabolik and Barbarella also extends to their respective reputations. Agent Dragonfly’s excursions into space, her talking computer, her quest for a secret weapon and the fur-lined interiors of her space capsule recall the heroine of Vadim’s film. But tellingly, Coppola only names Diabolik as influence on the ‘Making of’ film on the DVD, and elsewhere has declared his loyalties: ‘Many directors have Barbarella as their cult film of the period, for me there is no comparison: Diabolik is unique’ (Coppola 2007: 179). Diabolik’s superiority to Barbarella isn’t necessarily a recent critical view, even if it’s become a more common one. ‘Although it’s too long and eventually loses track of itself,’ wrote Roger Ebert in 1968, ‘Danger: Diabolik is very nearly the film Barbarella should have been.’ Dave Hutchinson in Films and Filming (1969: 45) had similar misgivings but also thought it the superior film. Neither were making major claims for Diabolik; merely saying that for all its faults, at least it wasn’t as bad as Barbarella. But as the film’s reputation has grown, praising Diabolik still often seems to come at the expense of Barbarella. Stephen Bissette in ‘From Fumetti to Film’ uses them as good and bad examples of how to put comics on screen, Vadim’s film too static and missing the dynamic storytelling of comics. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to imagine Barbarella getting the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment: it looks 104

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too expensive, it has bigger stars and while it has never been a critics’ favourite, it has remained in fairly consistent circulation since at least the 1970s where Diabolik is often seen to have risen from the ashes of relative obscurity. Barbarella is featured in the second volume of Danny Peary’s seminal Cult Movies series (1983), although significantly he doesn’t like it either.35 And long before the Beastie Boys discovered Diabolik, a certain New Romantic band from the West Midlands had named themselves after Duran(d) Duran(d). It is not my intention to join in with playing the two films off against each other. While Diabolik is my favourite of the two, I like them both and wouldn’t want to argue that either film was intrinsically the better of the two. Some of these digs at Barbarella can be attributed to cult’s need for an ‘other’ as point of comparison, as is evident in Coppola’s reference to those unnamed other directors who prefer the better known film. Barbarella will probably always be the more popular film, Diabolik the more cultish, and so its admirers are able to make claims for it on the basis of its supposed superiority to a more established film that is in a similar style: ‘You like Barbarella? You should watch Danger: Diabolik – it’s much better!’ But at the same time, there has certainly been a dramatic shift in the critical reputation of their respective directors. In their book on John Philip Law, Aguilar and Haas dismiss Vadim as ‘a snob who doesn’t know how to make movies’, while Bava is ‘a genius yet ignorant of the fact’ (2008: 56). There is some undoubted iconoclasm here – they are, after all, writing a book about a cult actor, although the title of the book Diabolik Angel conflates his two De Laurentiis roles. But in his more sober history of the nouvelle vague, Richard Neupert characterises the popular critical view of Vadim as ‘a poser with great potential who only disappoints’ (2007: 74), never living up to a debut that had helped inspire the New Wave and was sometimes even seen as being part 105

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of it. Bava, on the other hand, is now more often seen as cult auteur than unpretentious artisan. While Vadim may well be re-evaluated in the future, there is little doubt about which of the two filmmakers has enjoyed a higher critical profile in recent years. At the same time, however, there is a glass ceiling for Bava’s reputation that makes him the perfect cult filmmaker.

UNSTABLE REPUTATIONS – BAVA AND DANGER: DIABOLIK Valentina Vitali designates certain genres – horror, sexploitation, the giallo and the like – as occupying an ‘unstable position within the canon’ (2016: 4). When a director comes to be associated with such genres, one might argue that their auteur reputation is similarly unstable: Dario Argento, John Carpenter, Lucio Fulci, George Romero and of course Bava would all be examples of this. Bava will never threaten Hitchcock or Antonioni in the larger canon; the ‘instability’ of his films lies in the way they simultaneously display high levels of craft and the material conditions of their production (hasty schedules, low budgets, multiple versions, an ‘international’ address). But the cult canon is the perfect home for the unstable auteur, where strengths and constraints are allowed to sit in permanent tension, while the growing critical and academic emphasis on cult, on popular cinemas previously marginalised in national film histories, on disreputable genres and cycles and genres, has facilitated Bava’s critical ascent. This is best illustrated by Tim Lucas’ exhaustively researched and lavishly illustrated book on the director, one of the most impressive volumes ever devoted to a single filmmaker. But we have yet to see a sustained academic study of Bava, which would denote another kind of canonicity, let alone the veritable publishing industry devoted to someone like Hitchcock. There is a difference between a cult auteur 106

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and an established one (even though battles had to be fought over Hitchcock’s reputation, too). Moreover, Argento continues to command more attention than Bava, even though he has spent most of the last twenty years tarnishing his own filmmaking legacy. There were essentially two supportive critical positions on Bava during the period in which he was still actually making films. Vitali characterises the French view of Bava thus: ‘master of a popular form of surrealism, modernism or, at any rate, aestheticism’ (2016: 4), a position that arguably shaped the cultification of Bava as a stylist whose films are best appreciated by de-emphasising narrative logic and character psychology. But a more qualified, mainly Anglophone, critical position co-existed with this; that of Bava the talented filmmaker who deserved better scripts. This was a view to be found amongst critics such as Raymond Durgnat, but it is also clearly articulated in the Films and Filming review of Diabolik: ‘One wonders what heights Bava would reach with a story equal to his imagination’ (Hutchinson 1969: 45). This is no longer a fashionable view of Bava because it risks willing him to be a more conventional filmmaker, whereas cult cinephilia is willing to sacrifice certain markers of ‘quality’ for passages of cinematic magic. However, this second position is more sensitive to the genuine constraints facing a filmmaker like Bava, whose relative freedom hinged on meeting what Vitali calls ‘generic sales points’ (2016: 46) – violence, gore, sexual titillation – but who faced greater commercial pressures when employed by De Laurentiis, whose films were geared more towards prima visione cinemas. Bava has largely been cultified as a horror director, and seems to have most enjoyed making those films – ‘il maestro dell’orrore’ is how the Diabolik exhibition at Milan’s Museo Wow Spazio Fumetto described him. At the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin, it’s his La maschera del de107

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monio alongside Argento’s Suspiria that represent Italy in the compilation of horror clips. And La maschera is the Bava film most frequently positioned as a horror ‘classic’, even by those not otherwise invested in Italian horror; it’s arguably the most celebrated Italian horror film made by someone other than Argento. Given that Bava worked in so many filoni, there has been a visible prioritising of his films according to genre. Mary Wood observes the lack of fan interest in his Westerns (2014: 306), in spite of the Spaghetti Western (or Western all’italiana as it is known in Italy) being perhaps the quintessential cult filone. And while Le spie vengono dal semifreddo was his most commercially successful film in Italy, there is no evident appetite for it to be packaged on Bluray with its American variant Dr Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (although I would buy it if it was). Shock and transgression form a large part of the cult currency surrounding Bava, which largely emphasises his horror films and gialli (several of which are also seen as horror films) – the road that leads to Argento, Fulci and others. The posthumously released crime thriller Cani arrabbiati also maps onto this aesthetic of shock and transgression. Diabolik is never seen as one of Bava’s gialli, even though the comic has long described itself as ‘il giallo a fumetti’ (the comic book giallo), and Cappi (2016b: 33) claims it as the first modern giallo italiano. This has some significance, given that another part of Bava’s cult reputation is as the progenitor of the cinematic giallo that Argento later popularised, a genre (or filone) that, as Vitali neatly puts it, ‘is given, contradictorily as simultaneously new and preexisting’ (2016: 35). It is often acknowledged that the giallo has a rather different (and more inclusive) set of associations in Italy to its cult usage to designate a very particular cycle of films made during a very particular period, but that semantic discrepancy is rarely unpacked. It originated, after all, as a form of branding for the crime novels published in yel108

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low covers by Mondadori, and in many ways it has come to function outside Italy as a cult branding of a certain group of films – lurid thrillers made between the early 60s and early 80s that veer into horror and/or sexploitation. Pezzotta credits Bava with creating a new kind of Italian thriller – ‘il thriller italiano’ (2013: 54) – but sees their designation as gialli as a strictly foreign phenomenon.36 Diabolik occupies a very particular position, then, in the Bava canon. It is neither shocking or particularly transgressive (which in cult discourse usually means extreme sex or violence). It doesn’t fit neatly into either of the two genres he is most associated with (unless one challenges the definition of one of them). It is usually seen as a more mainstream film because of De Laurentiis’ and Paramount’s involvement. And yet it clearly sits above the Westerns, the historical films and the comedies, as well as being a film that, as we have seen, also enjoys a cult following independently of that of Bava.

CULT AND ‘EXPENDABLE ART’: DANGER: DIABOLIK AND DE LAURENTIIS On the Blu-ray commentary for Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Jonathan Rigby recounts a conversation with scriptwriter Jimmy Sangster, who he questioned on an apparent inconsistency in the script. Sangster responded by asking him how many times he had seen the film – as one might expect, Rigby had seen it a good few times. There was the problem, Sangster explained (maybe with a touch of impatience); The Curse of Frankenstein was only designed to be seen once. Here we see that the cult critic and the hardnosed industry professional are not singing from the same hymn sheet, and one can imagine similar exchanges about a great many films now seen as cult. Indeed, one can easily imagine such an exchange with Bava, who was dis109

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missive of all of his output as ‘grande stronzate’ (roughly, ‘a load of bullshit’; quoted by Pezzotta 2013: 9) and probably never expected anyone to watch his films more than once. A certain version of cult cinephilia operates as a disavowal of ephemerality; it is attracted to the cyclical and the formulaic, the exotically dated, the film or cycle designed to respond to short-term trends and interests. It is attracted to Hammer horror films, Italian filone cinema, Shaw Brothers martial arts films and Japanese kaiju eiga. I don’t want to paint such cult fandom as monolithic here, blind to the industrial dynamics driving these cycles or the peculiar mix of formula and creativity that makes individual films stand out in their cinematic production line. But cult cinephilia also (rather as this volume has done) likes to pull the individual film out of the production line, to emphasise the artistry of the director or some other creative talent, to establish hierarchies and canons. The fact that these are often films that outlived their natural life cycle is a point of tension in the way they are celebrated now, just as their expendability is complicated by the sheer craft that someone like Bava brought to them. Writing at the same time that auteurism was tightening its grip on film criticism, Lawrence Alloway provided a different way of approaching popular cinema, by treating ‘expendable art as a historical category’: Movies, in their high topicality, intense participatory appeal, playful expertise, and freedom from a desire to encumber the future with monuments, can be regarded as continuing the tradition of expendable art. (1971: 34) Alloway likened popular filmmakers to car stylists in their need to ‘work for the satisfaction of a half-known future audience’, and to ‘extrapolate present successes into probable 110

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future trends’ while protecting the film from obsolescence (1971: 15). To think of Diabolik in this way is to de-emphasise Bava for a while and to think more about De Laurentiis (as Alloway encouraged us to think more about producers and ‘changing alliances of talent’ rather than ‘simple pyramids of personal authority’; 1971: 36). While his involvement in the Cervi-Holt Diabolik was as a distributor and part-funder, De Laurentiis was already thinking ahead to Barbarella, and fuelling the topicality of comic books in several of his episode films. The publicity surrounding the aborted Diabolik helped fuel a cycle of comic book movies, and De Laurentiis had to protect the Bava Diabolik from obsolescence – partly through legal means (threatened lawsuits against perceived imitators) but probably some of the film’s modifications were designed to keep it fresh and in line with popular tastes. By employing Bava, De Laurentiis was the only mainstream producer to recognise what he could bring to a slightly more prestigious film because of his skill with cinematography, staging of action and ingenuity with special effects. And it was modestly budgeted by De Laurentiis’ standards probably because of the potential for the comic book bubble to burst and for the fumetto version of the character, already five years old by the time the film went into production, to run out of steam. Who could have possibly known that Diabolik and Eva would carry on for over fifty years with no sign of stopping? None of this is antithetical to cult – De Laurentiis produced a number of cult films (even if credit for them tends to go to the director) – except for the idea of expendability. Nothing is intrinsically expendable in the cult configuration, from children’s TV to comics to video games on obsolete platforms. But we can’t afford to discount that expendability, otherwise we lose sight of the contexts and interests that produced those films in our quest to make them mean 111

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something again – the best Italian filone directors (Bava arguably the best of them all) were masters of expendable art. At the same time, however, when cult renews the lifecycle of films designed to be ephemeral, it also opens them up to different modes of existence – as auteur films, as ‘cheesy’ camp or as ‘lessons in the acquisition of objects’. It has become commonplace to see one of the factors leading to the decline of ‘exploitation cinema’ as mainstream Hollywood’s co-opting of high concept genre movies by making them as blockbuster events. De Laurentiis, who was part of Hollywood by the time this was taking place, anticipated this in some ways. If Diabolik was Bava’s brief flirtation with the mainstream, it also brought De Laurentiis closer to low budget filone cinema, whereas his productions generally ranged from medium productions to super-productions such as biblical or literary epics. De Laurentiis’ later Hollywood productions would include King Kong (1976), Conan the Barbarian (1981) and Dune (1984), but Flash Gordon (1980) is the most obvious point of continuity with Diabolik and Barbarella. It stands apart from what would become the dominant approach to comic book movies. Superman: The Movie (1978) became the ur-text for the Hollywood superhero blockbuster – top flight cast, franchise-friendly, reverential to the point of portentous (its sequels were lighter in tone). Flash Gordon was singing a different song (specifically, one by Queen) – tongue-in-cheek, sexy (Ornella Muti’s Princess Aura would capsize any Marvel or DC movie) and unapologetically camp. Like Diabolik’s encounter with MST3K, the film’s cult audience has sometimes seemed undecided whether it is laughing with or at Flash Gordon – at one point, London’s Prince Charles Cinema was screening it as part of its Bad Movie Club. As with its predecessors, one of its pleasures was as a moving fashion show; Fellini’s longtime collaborator Danilo Donati designed the often stunning costumes as 112

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well as its sets. It was nearly even shot at the same studio as the two earlier films; De Laurentiis seriously considered re-opening Dinocittà to make the film, eventually settling for Shepperton Studios in the UK (Kezich and Levantesi 2004: 248). De Laurentiis had loved Flash Gordon since reading it in L’avventuroso magazine in 1934 (Kezich and Levantesi 2004: 247) and it closed his trio (trilogy?) of comic book movies.

THE ‘COMIC THAT NEVER CHANGES’: DANGER: DIABOLIK AND DIABOLIK The Beastie Boys’ ‘Body Movin’’ isn’t the only music video to reference Diabolik. In 2004, the Rome-based rock group Tiromancino hired Lamberto Bava – Mario’s son, and a cult director in his own right (as well as assistant director on Diabolik) – to direct the video for their single ‘Amore Impossibile’. It opens with Diabolik and Eva in their beautiful home, reading a newspaper story about the acquisition of Durer’s ‘Adam and Eve’ (Eva in Italian!). They set off in the Jaguar to steal the painting. Diabolik takes out the gallery security guard (played by John Philip Law) with chloroform. The alarm is triggered and the police give chase, but they escape with the painting. We briefly see them celebrate in bed, dollar bills fluttering down. Cut to another newspaper story concerning priceless emeralds (shades of the Acksland necklace) and they’re off to execute another colpo. Diabolik struggles with the safe, while Eva looks a little impatient, but finally they get it open, only to be interrupted by the Baroness. Diabolik removes his mask and starts to seduce her, while Eva removes more of her jewellery. As they escape, Eva is first to the Jaguar with the jewellery and drives off without her partner. She shakes her hair out of the chignon, then picks up a hitchhiker (Federico Zampaglione, lead singer of Tiromancino) and the two drive off together. There is a directorial credit for Bava 113

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over the departing Jaguar before a final shot of an angry, humiliated Diabolik throwing one of his gloves to the ground and kicking it. This video works rather differently to ‘Body Movin’’, where it barely matters if we don’t recognise the film being referenced; we only need to register its campy datedness. ‘Amore impossibile’ assumes familiarity with the characters – the twist of Eva dumping Diabolik has featured in TV commercials, too – and if we are familiar with the film, even better. Zampaglione knows his cult Italian cinema and went on to direct films that sought to revive the Italian horror film such as Shadow (2009) and Tulpa – perdizione mortale (2013). Having Lamberto Bava as director (and broadcasting the fact), John Philip Law as the guard, and yet another restaging of the money bed scene are the most obvious references to the film. But there is no attempt to reproduce the pop aesthetics of the movie in the way that Codename: Dragonfly does. Rather, when Bava quotes the film, he situates it within a mise-en-scène more typical of the comic. Diabolik reading the newspaper in his dressing gown in a tastefully designed sitting room is very much the comic book version of their habitat, and Claudia Gerini looks exactly as Eva does on paper, with her chignon and black bodysuit. We’re only missing Ginko – it’s left to two incompetent poliziotti to give chase (it’s hinted that they drive off a cliff like two unfortunate cops in the film). What this suggests is that while the privileged ‘insider’ will spot the references to the film, and the significance of the director, for Diabolik and Eva to be more widely recognisable to an Italian audience, they need to more closely resemble their comic book incarnations. One of the threads on the Diabolik Forum bears the title ‘The comic that never changes’ (this isn’t phrased as a criticism because clearly there has been no desire for radical change or innovation). Tracing the evolution of Batman, Will 114

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Brooker suggests that when the brand was at its commercially strongest, the publishers were less likely to tinker with a working formula (2000: 79). While the Caped Crusader (or Dark Knight, if you prefer) has had his commercial ups and downs (the TV series rescued it from near cancellation), Diabolik seems to have remained in a state of commercial stability that makes dramatic change a potential risk – the deaths of each Giussani sister (Angela in 1987, Luciana in 2001) were the most significant obstacles to overcome for the comic’s continuation. There has been some cautious filling in of backstory in the Il grande Diabolik albums, but the fundamental mystery of Diabolik himself has to remain in place. Anything more radical must be confined to side projects that are signalled to stand apart from the monthly series. One such project was the collection Diabolik visto da lontano (Diabolik seen from a distance, 2002), which allowed a selection of distinguished writers and artists to interpret the character more freely. In ‘La regola’ by Tito Faraci (now a regular Diabolik writer) and artist Claudio Villa, he takes a leaf out of John Philip Law’s book and uses that most heretical of weapons, a machine gun. The police are as surprised as his victims, with the exception of Ginko. When an officer claims that Diabolik has a ‘rule’ about not using guns, the Inspector replies that above all, Diabolik is unpredictable and will do what he must with whatever helps him to do it. ‘Above all,’ he adds, ‘he has no rules.’ It is tempting to see this as Faraci providing a belated rationale for something that seems to have bothered a few Diabolik fans about the film. More recently, Faraci also worked on the spin-off mini-series DK, an alternative-universe Diabolik now at the end of its second ‘season’. Here, unnamed characters resemble Diabolik, Eva and Ginko, but are not meant to be literally taken as the same, even though only ‘Eva’ is radically different (a judge involved in a secret conspiracy). The main difference between 115

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Diabolik and DK, apart from a few more scars and a return to more killing, seems to be the ‘What if?’ of him never finding an Eva to add a few principles and some humanity to his criminal activities. Each issue has reiterated that DK is someone ‘other than’ Diabolik, and the final issue of the second season includes an article on ‘“Other” DKs’, some of them parodies or characters seemingly inspired by Diabolik and/or Fantômas – and one of these ‘others’ is Bava’s film. This perhaps is Danger: Diabolik’s place in the larger cult of Diabolik – an alternative take on the character, like DK or the stories in Visto da lontano.37 In 2013, DC Comics began publishing Batman ’66, a comic in the style of the 60s TV series, for so long supposedly the bête noire of Bat-fans who preferred the character’s darker incarnations. But comic book publishers are fond of alternative universes (for obvious commercial reasons) and now the Caped Crusader and Boy Wonder could continue their campy adventures without encroaching on the gloomy figure featuring in other Batman publications. Given Astorina’s experiment with DK, might we one day see a Diabolik ’68 (it could even revive the Danger from the English title) that brings back this ‘other’ Diabolik? To conclude, like a lot of cult films, the cult of Danger: Diabolik is an aggregate one formed out of different investments and sensibilities. The film’s standing is strongest when viewed through the figure of Bava – it has always been well-regarded by Bava aficionados and scholars, even if he is better known as a director of horror films and giallo thrillers. On the other hand, it occupies a relatively marginal position in the larger Diabolik cult (which is a mainstream cult in Italy). While Cappi (2016b: 80) exaggerates a little when he calls it ‘long forgotten’ in Italy, it continues to be valued more by those unfamiliar with or less invested in the comic, or readers with other cult investments that compensate for the film’s lack of fidelity. It has been cultified ironically and 116

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knowingly, whether through the retro lens of ‘lounge’ or the good-natured ‘riffing’ of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and its audience. This again suggests a degree of instability in its standing, but in the cult formation, the unstable might paradoxically constitute a kind of stability – when a film is invited into the cult canon, it is rarely asked to leave. Ultimately, cult allows Diabolik and Eva to operate in the shadows, adopting different guises and disguises, and that has always been where they are most at home.

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2

3 4

5

6 7

In context, this is probably intended to have a more specific referent. In Italy, Lee Falk’s comic book character The Phantom (another likely influence on Diabolik) was known as L’uomo mascherato (The Masked Man). This is how the Scala’s monthly programme described it: ‘John Philip Law stars as international supercriminal Diabolik dressed headto-toe in skintight, black leather from which he emerges to make love to his beautiful assistant under a blanket of stolen money. An over the top stylishly futuristic adventure.’ Fantômas enjoys the attentions and intermittent collaboration of Lady Beltham, but her infatuation is not reciprocated. The unmasked Diabolik was initially modelled on the Hollywood actor Robert Taylor, but mutated into a cross between Sean Connery and Alain Delon. James Bond has been the most consistent reference point for his appearance – during the late 1960s he acquired a black ‘comma’ of hair similar to Ian Fleming’s description of 007. Thunderball wasn’t released in Italy until December of 1965, some four months after this issue, but it’s likely that publicity shots of Connery with the jetpack would have been seen before that. Martinelli claimed in interviews that her Eva would be ‘quite acrobatic and lively’ (quoted by Lucas 2007: 723). Article 1213, overseen by Achille Corona, head of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment, was enacted from 4 November 1965. It had serious implications for an internationally-minded filmmaker like De Laurentiis by tightening the definition of what qualified as 118

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8 9 10

11

12

13 14 15 16

17 18

19 20

21

an ‘Italian film’, setting quotas for technical and creative personnel (see Kezich and Levantesi 2004: 186–7). The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust for a Vampire (1971) and Twins of Evil (1971). The French poster places this image against a ‘pop art’ background. French trade paper Le Film Francais was less extravagant in its claims but seemed to like the film almost as much as Narboni – improbability was part of the film’s charm and Diabolik ‘seems assured of a great career, like the “supermen” heroes of the famous comics’ (J. G. 1968: 18). To be fair, it’s more quotable than accurate – the film was made at Dinocittà studio and Diabolik has more in common with Fantômas than Feuillade’s vigilante Judex. The film had an unauthorised release on VHS in France in 1988, under the title Fatal Mission and with a cover featuring a Bond-like figure in a giro-copter in the style of You Only Live Twice. There is, of course, no such scene in the film. ‘Who’s that? Must be Stud?’ is the other version of the line, as Valmont sees a boat approaching. According to one of the contributors to the Diabolik Forum, Paramount didn’t own the rights to the original Italian dub. In 2002, GQ magazine placed it in third position in their list of the Top Ten movie soundtracks (see Lucas 2007: 749). The English and Italian versions of ‘Deep Down’ have different lyrics, designed to scan, rather than the one being a translation of the other. The 2014 re-recording goes for the rather more literal ‘Subacquei’ (Underwater). This might be a convenient way of distinguishing between Diabolik the comic and Danger: Diabolik the film, but I suspect that it is also an acknowledgement that the cult of the film largely grew outside Italy. And Fantômas was not the first of his kind either, but an adaptation of earlier figures such as Rocambole and Zigomar. Rather surprisingly, this same team-up of renowned intellectuals and masked vigilante features in the issue of the comic that the novel takes as its starting point (and incorporates actual panels from). When Diabolik plans to cover his tracks by killing his henchmen 119

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22

23

24 25 26

27 28

29 30 31 32 33

34

after a theft, Eva intervenes to release them. He is furious, and has warned her several times in previous issues that, as much as he loves her, he will kill her if she ever stands in his way. When he starts to throttle her, he realises that his love is greater than his avarice and from that point on, their relationship is cemented. The fan video series Comics Casting Call (2013) imagines a 1964 Diabolik directed by Hitchcock with Martin Landau in the lead role with his Mission: Impossible co-star Barbara Bain as Eva and Rock Hudson as Ginko. It can be found at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=33Pnm0fmFts&t=4s (accessed 20 July 2017). One might similarly wonder if downplaying Diabolik’s dagger-throwing was partly a matter of setting him apart from Modesty Blaise’s partner Willie Garvin. A partially glimpsed sign at a railway reads ‘...LEIVILLE’, as if the name Clerville might have been lurking as a named location. Il boom, after all, had also been partly propelled by a ‘bed’ of American money. There is doubtless a practical reason for this. The first bed needs to fit into the bedroom set, the second needs to sell the spectacle of enormous stolen wealth. Barbarella often manages to feel like a series of elaborately themed and designed parties that our heroine stumbles into. The hype around the 14 ‘crazy’ outfits recalls the title of Paco Rabanne’s 1966 debut show – ’12 Unwearable Dresses’ (Laverty 2016: 153). It looks as though it was drawn by one of the regular Diabolik artists – it is certainly in the house style. Her nearest rivals would probably be Valentina, the heroine of Guido Crepax’s erotic fumetti, or Satanik. Angela Giussani had advertised Colgate toothpaste herself while working as a model before turning to comics. Credited as ‘A. e L. Giussani’ in the comic, their gender was not initially made clear. The Film mese reviewer specifically names Satanik, which would have been the perfect role for Mell, and a distinct improvement on Magda Konopka, who actually did play her. Alternatively, what if Marisa Mell had played Barbarella, Jane Fonda played Modesty Blaise, and Monica Vitti played Eva? Even Marisa Mell referred to Eva being ‘a very cold and very orga120

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nized woman’ (Anon. 1967c: 56), even though that isn’t at all how she plays her. 35 The first volume had featured Bava’s La maschera del demonio under its best known English title Black Sunday. 36 Although to complicate matters, the cult version of the giallo has also been taken up in certain forms of Italian cinephilia. 37 A Diabolik TV series by Sky Italia has been in pre-production for over five years, but so little progress seems to have been made that it’s starting to look as though Diabolik has a better chance of escaping his prison of molten gold than getting out of pre-production.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acerbo, Gabriele and Roberto Pisoni (2007) ‘Chi ha paura di Eva Kant? Intervista a John Philip Law’, in Gabriele Acerbo and Roberto Pisone (eds) Kill Baby Kill! Il Cinema di Mario Bava. Rome: Un Mondo a Parte, 169–72. Affron, Charles and Mirella Jona Affron (1995) Sets in Motion: Art Direction and Film Narrative. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutger University Press. Aguilar, Carlos and Anita Haas (2008) John Philip Law: Diabolik Angel. Villagarcia de Arousa and Bilbao: Scifiworld/Quatermass. Alino (2012) ‘La Risata Camp del Diabolik “Live Action”’, in Mario Gomboli (ed.) La Diabolika Astorina: 50 Anni con Il Re del Terrore. Milan: Cartoomics, 180–6. Allain, Marcel and Pierre Souvestre ([1911] 2006) Fantômas. London: Penguin. Alloway, Lawrence (1969) ‘The Long Front of Culture’ in John Russell and Suzi Gablik (eds) Pop Art Redefined. New York: Praegers, 41–3. ____ (1970) ‘The Development of British Pop’, in Lucy R. Lippard (ed.) Pop Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 27–67. ____ (1971) Violent America: The Movies 1946–1964. New York: Museum of Modern Art. ____ (1975) Topics in American Art Since 1945. New York: W.W. Norton. Altariva, Roberto (ed.) (2008) Diabolik: Cronistoria di un Film. Sassuolo: Diabolik Club. Amadei, Gherardo (1968) ‘Le diaboliche imprese del romantico 122

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INDEX

4 mosche di velluto grigio 4, 23 5 Bambole per la luna d’agosto 8

83, 85–6, 88, 91, 97–8, 103–14, 116, 121 Beastie Boys, The 38, 53, 55, 104–5, 113 Beatles, The 73, 88 Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The – see L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo Bissette, Stephen 38, 41 Black Sabbath – see I tre volti della paura Black Sunday – see La maschera del demonio Blood and Black Lace – see Sei donne per l’assassino Bond, James 49, 57, 62–3, 67, 89, 99, 118–19 ‘Bond girl’ 95, 98–100 Bunker, Max 16

Adam, Ken 5, 89 adaptation 11, 24, 38, 50, 56, 59–60, 62, 119 Alessandroni, Alessandro 72 Alloway, Lawrence 57, 83–4, 86–7, 110–11 Argento, Dario 4, 23, 51, 106–8 Arriva Dorellik! 69 Astorina 10, 16, 48, 116 Avengers, The (TV series) 88–90, 94, 97 Barbarella 3–6, 9, 13–14, 20, 22, 24, 26, 29, 31, 34, 36, 37, 56, 60, 63, 69, 80, 83, 85, 89–92, 96, 103–5, 111–12, 120 Batman (character) 5, 28, 114, 116 Batman (1966) 4–6, 28, 41, 57, 69, 78, 86 Batman (1989) 103 Bava, Lamberto 113–14 Bava, Mario 2–4, 6–9, 11–12, 17, 19–21, 23–4, 27–8, 31–5, 37, 39, 48–53, 55, 58, 62–3, 69, 72–3, 76,

Cani arrabbiati 40, 108 Capriccio all’italiana 22 casa dell’esorcismo, La 40 Casaro, Renato 29–30 Casino Royale 57, 68 Castle, William 4 Catwoman 5–6, 89 132

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Celi, Adolfo 3, 16, 42, 44, 65–6 celluloid cinephilia 6–7 censorship 66, 76 Cervi, Tonino 13, 16–19, 23, 28, 31, 62–3, 67, 111 Church, David 8, 39, 53–5 Col cuore in gola 56, 58 Colombo, Joe 80 Coltellacci, Giulio 25 comic book movies 35, 57, 60, 83, 85, 111–13 Coppola, Roman 37–8, 103–5 corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale, I 2 Cortàzar, Julio 62 costume design 25, 60, 89, 91 CQ 38, 103 Curse of Frankenstein, The 109

Don’t Look Now 2 dubbing 42–3 Eco, Umberto 61, 83 economic miracle (Italian) 10–11, 76–7 Erickson, Glenn 41–4, 51–2, 55, 77 Fantômas (character) 12, 15, 19–20, 35, 62, 67–8, 71, 74, 116, 118, 119 Fantômas (1960s film series) 17, 35, Fantômas versus the Multinational Vampires 62 Faraci, Tito 115 Farina, Corrado 68 fashion – see costume design Fellini, Federico 13, 25, 57, 112, 119 Feuillade, Louis 19–20, 35, 94 Fidelity 32, 50, 59, 62, 65–6, 99, 116 Five Dolls for an August Moon – see 5 bambole per la luna d’agosto Flash Gordon 17, 22, 112–13 Flesh Gordon 3 Forest, Jean-Claude 14 Four Flies on Grey Velvet – see 4 mosche di velluto grigio frusta e il corpo, La 64 fumetti neri 9, 14, 16, 22, 66, 76, 95–6

De Laurentiis, Dino 12, 13, 17–23, 26, 31–2, 38, 43, 62, 67, 73, 83, 85, 103, 105, 107, 109, 111–13, 118 Deadly Sweet – see Col cuore in gola decima vittima, La 25, 56 Degas, Brian 24, 26 Deneuve, Catherine 25–6, 94, 97–98 Diabolik (original comic) 10–11, 14, 16, 22 Diabolik Forum 44, 48, 50, 60, 114, 119 Diaboliques, Les 18, 41 Dr Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs - see Le spie vengono dal semifreddo Dr No 88 dolce vita, La 25, 80

Gates, Tudor 24, 26 Gherardi, Piero 25–6, 80, 91 giallo 2, 15, 106, 108, 116, 121 Ginsborg, Paul 72, 73, 76–7 Girl Who Knew Too Much, The – see La ragazza che sapeva troppo Giussani, Angela and Luciana 14, 16, 23–4, 66, 96, 98, 115, 120 Grindhouse 7 133

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Hitchcock, Alfred 18, 33, 97, 106–7, 120 Holt, Seth 16, 18, 19, 28, 31, 62, 67, 111 House of Exorcism – see La casa dell’esorcismo 40 House on Haunted Hill, The 4 Hutchings, Peter 21

56, 62, 67–8, 74, 78, 87, 89, 95, 100, 113, 118–19 McCarthy, Frank 29–30 Mell, Marisa 20, 25–6, 28, 32–3, 43, 80, 91–3, 95–9, 120 Mission: Impossible 67–8, 120 Modesty Blaise 5, 20, 56–7, 69, 83, 90, 92, 94–5, 100, 104, 120 Mogherini, Flavio 80 Morricone, Ennio 3, 9, 12, 27, 34, 38, 45–9, 79, 83, 85, 92 Mystery Science Theater 3000 5, 38–9, 51–2, 54–5, 104, 117

Kelly, Grace 18, 95, 97 Kriminal (comic) 9 Kriminal (film) 58 Laserdisc 8, 40, 43, 45–6, 51 Law, John Philip 3, 5, 19–21, 26, 28, 38, 43, 65, 70–1, 75, 78, 94, 97, 103, 105, 113–15, 118 Lembo, Nino 25 Lichtenstein, Roy 77, 85–6, 92 Lisa and the Devil – see Lisa e il diavolo Lisa e il diavolo 40 Lisi, Virna 18, 26, 94, 96 Lucas, Tim 8, 24, 31, 37–8, 41–4, 51, 54, 70, 80, 84–5, 88, 97, 106, 118–19

Nanny, The 18 Nicolai, Bruno 47 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service 95, 97 Patton, Mike 47 Petri, Elio 25, 56, 73–4 Pezzotta, Alberto 21, 31, 72, 84, 109–10 Piattelli, Bruno 25 Palumbo, Giuseppe 10, 68 Paramount 8, 20, 25, 27–8, 34, 37–40, 42–3, 55, 83, 94, 109, 119 Piccoli, Michele 42, 49, 75 Pop Art 77, 85 production design 25, 79–80, 83 Property is no longer theft – see La proprietà non è più un furto proprietà non è più un furto, La 73

Magnus 96 Maiuri, Dino 2, 24–5, 64, 73, 75, 87–8, 98 Mangano, Silvana 22 marchio di Kriminal, Il 58 Marianne Productions 20 Marinucci, Luciana 25 Martinelli, Elsa 18–20, 26, 28, 94, 97, 118 maschera del demonio, La 4, 7, 107, 121 masks 1, 3, 14, 19–20, 26, 29–30,

Rabanne, Paco 91, 120 Rabid Dogs – see Cani arrabbiatti ragazza che sapeva troppo, La 40 Rambaldi, Carlo 26, 89 134

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Raviola, Roberto – see Magnus retro-futurism 45 Rigg, Diana 90, 97 Romani, Graziano 47

Tiromancino 113 To Catch a Thief 18 Torso – see I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale tre volti della paura, I 40 Totò 10, 22 Totò Diabolicus 15 Touch of Satan 53–4

Sangster, Jimmy 109 Satanik 9, 15–16, 56, 95, 120 Scala cinema (London) 3–4, 7, 129 Secchi, Luciano – see Max Bunker Sei donne per l’assassino 7 Sorel, Jean 18–20, 28 soundtrack (of the film) 40, 45–6, 49, 72 spie vengono dal semifreddo, Le 8, 108 streghe, Le 22 Suspiria 1–2, 108

uccello dalle piume di cristallo, L’ 4 Vadim, Roger 34, 104–6 Vampires, Les 20, 94 VHS 8–9, 12, 37–8, 40, 43–6, 48, 51, 54, 119 Vitali, Valentina 106–8 Vitti, Monica 80, 92, 120

Taste of Fear, A 18 Tenth Victim, The – see La decima vittima terrorism 71 Tessari, Ducio 13 Thomas, Terry 3, 43–4, 51, 54, 69, 81 Thrilling 22 Thunderball 3, 16, 66, 118 Thundercrack! 4 Tingler, The 4

Warhol, Andy 28, 84, 86, 92 Whip and the Body, The – see La frusta e il corpo Wicker Man, The 2 The Witches – see Le streghe Yauch, Adam 38, 55 You Only Live Twice 67, 89, 119 Zampaglione, Federico 113–14

135