Lisa and the Devil

Elke Sommer

 Mario Bava's Lisa and the Devil is an above average exploitation film from the Italian master. The film was made and released in Spain in 1973 as The Devil Takes the Dead but failed to find an international distributor. Producer Alfredo Leone then shot footage with actor Robert Alda as a priest in order to ride the coattails of The Exorcist. The results were released internationally under the title The House of Exorcism. Happily, the cut streaming on Tubi is the Bava cut. The stream does justice to the lustrous colors of Cecillo Paniagua's cinematography. This is a fairly brain dead film, but there are interesting layers to be found in the gorgeously ghastly mise en scène. 

Lisa and the Devil is a variation on the sick house subgenre of horror which spans from The Fall of the House of Usher to Hotel California. Elke Sommer stars as Lisa, a tourist who gets led astray to this film's house of horrors by the film's playful devil, Telly Savalas. Other interlopers are subsequently bumped off in the mansion presided by a blind matriarch played by Alida Valli. The plot, concocted by a phalanx of scriptwriters is a garbled mishmash of soap opera and Dostoyevsky. The performances are all dubbed. This was the second film in a row that Bava had done with Ms. Sommer and Leone after the rather dire Baron Blood. The dialogue is largely rot delivered spasmodically. I have never cottoned to Elke Sommer. She looks lovely, but is robotic in her bare competence. She seemed much more at ease at farce rather than horror. Alida Valli had been in more masterpieces than I can shake a stick at, but I think she is a stone faced bore. However, a stone face is perfect for a blind matriarch and Bava milks the most of her green eyes.

Alida Valli

Savalas was riding high on the success of the TV show Kojak after playing numerous psychos and villains through his career. Bava lets him coast off and toy with his image with trademark Kojak lollipop in hand. The numerous lollipops, reflections in cigarettes cases, wine spills, and mirrors attest to the playful nature of this film. Lisa and the Devil is a horror film than knowingly verges on burlesque. Still, there is some erudition and feeling on display in the way Bava's camera prowls the interior of the ridiculously rococo and rotting villa; certainly the byproducts of past productions. The manse is a house of the dead in which all who enter succumb. The green of Lisa's outfit is a symbol of her fertility. This is developed in a dream sequence triggered by a Day of the Dead music box. Lisa is transported to a green pastorale idyll which is presided over by a statue of Dionysus. Time's winged chariot comes for all though and Lisa is fated to join the rest of the house of the dead. Lisa and the Devil is no great shakes, but it director manages to extract beauty out of humble material.

A House of Dynamite

Rebecca Ferguson

Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite left me with mixed feelings though I did think this film was a marked improvement over her last one, Detroit. Noah Oppenheim's script, in three parts, depicts the response by various components of the US government and military trying to thwart an incoming ICBM that is poised to strike Chicago. The missile was launched by an unknown adversary, nettling a military response. The separate parts of the film all roughly cover the same time span, but focus on different command posts, such as the White House, SAC Command in Nebraska, and a missile site in Alaska. The three part structure has its advantages. Chiefly, the film displays the lack of time and options faced by those in positions of power when a nuclear threat is imminent. A House of Dynamite is a procedural film about the futility of procedure in such a situation.

However, this approach also has its drawbacks. There is so much leaping about from location to location that it tends to flatten out the efforts of the ensemble cast. There are memorable performances in the film, I admired the efforts of Greta Lee, Jared Harris,Tracy Letts, and Gabriel Basso, but too many of the characters come out under drawn and colorless, particularly Rebecca Ferguson's Captain and Idris Elba's President. Zero Dark Thirty did a much better job portraying military and government functionaries. Greta Lee's character, an expert on Korea, is attending a Civil War reenactment at Gettysburg with her young son and this gives Bigelow an opportunity to skewer the American tendency to look back nostalgically on war as spectacle. She makes it clear that America will have no opportunity to look back nostalgically on a nuclear confrontation.

Like Fail Safe and The Bedford Incident, A House of Dynamite bogs down in endless shots of officials intoning portents of doom while standing before video and radar screens. Bigelow and Oppenheim want to be Cassandras here, but this largely inert film will tend to lull viewers rather than spark righteous indignation. 

La Collectionneuse

Haydée Politoff and Patrick Bauchau

Éric Rohmer's La Collectionneuse, his first color film, is his first feature to truly bear his stamp. This 1967 release features his trademark mild sexual intrigue and lengthy verbal discourses. If you find, like Gene Hackman's detective in Arthur Penn's Night Moves, that watching a Rohmer picture is like watching paint dry, then this is skippable. However, you would miss the gorgeous summer colors summoned by Néstor Almendros who had previously collaborated with Rohmer on a number of projects. The writer and director claimed that the film's commercial success, it played over nine months in one Parisian theater, was due to the cast's long hair and mod glad rags. However, except for a sequence of girls in their summer clothes, a sequence essentially repeated in La Collectionneuse's twin, 1972's L'Amour l'après-midi, and a copy of Aftermath on a couch, there is little of pop culture. The film's success was also due to the bared bronze skin on display in one of Rohmer's most sensual works.

The film begins with a trio of vignettes, introducing us to the three main characters: Haydée (Haydée Politoff), Daniel (Daniel Pommereulle), and Adrian (Patrick Bauchau). The trio come together as guests or fellow layabouts at the French Riviera estate of a mutual friend. Haydée is presented, at first, as an object, wearing a bikini on a beach, glowing in Almendros' warm tones. She racks up an impressive number of bedmates, she "collects" them according to the jealous boys. Daniel is first portrayed polemicizing with a companion. This is his default mode. He is often a foil for Adrien in this way. When Daniel criticizes an older art collector, Sam, who is negotiating a deal with Adrien for a priceless vase, I feel Rohmer is illustrating the class conflicts in French society that would erupt in 1968 as they did during the 1789 revolution. The collector is played by "Seymour Hertzberg", a pseudonym for American critic and auteurist ally Eugene Archer whose premature death terminated a promising career. His performance is an acid etched one of a hustler and brute. Politoff and Pommereulle were given leeway by Rohmer to improvise their dialogue and that is why their own first names are used for their characters.

La Collectionneuse, like all of Rohmer's Moral Tales, was, at first, a novel. In both forms, Adrien is the main character and as an undependable narrator. Mr. Bauchau's character's did not get to be named Patrick and he was not given the leeway to improvise that his co-stars were. He is the villain of the piece, if such a term can be applied in an ambivalent oeuvre. This is established in the opening vignette when we meet Adrien trying to cajole his girlfriend Carole (Mijanou Bardot) to join him at the vacation villa. She has a modeling gig in London which provides the film with a final punchline. Our knowledge of their relationship colors our perception of Adrien's subsequent tortuous flirtation with Haydée. Adrien is both attracted to her and repulsed by that attraction. He ends up virtually pimping her out to both Daniel and Sam. Not for nothing does Sam label Adrien Machiavellian. Rohmer's sympathy, as always, lies with the femme. The pill had given women sexual freedom, but it had and has not eliminated the sexual double standard. Rohmer much prefers sexual license to hypocrisy and manipulation. A moral stand, if you will. A near masterpiece that portends further variations.