A Frightful Legacy Rescued

One of the benefits of the ever-expanding DVD market is the way in which entire oeuvres are being salvaged from obscurity. Italian director Mario Bava, for example, never received widespread recognition during his lifetime, but his stature grows with each passing year, thanks in part to the increased availability of his work on home video. Largely known as a director of gothic horror pictures, Bava’s filmography also includes sex comedies, spy movies, gladiator pictures and other genre oddities, although many of his films never received proper theatrical distribution in the U.S.

Continuing its project of reviving forgotten genre films, on Friday the American Cinematheque kicks off a retrospective tribute that includes new prints of many of Bava’s better-known films, as well as a selection of lesser-known gems. The series opens with “Kidnapped,” originally shot in 1974, unfinished at the time of Bava’s death in 1980 and only recently completed by Bava’s producer, Alfredo Leone, his son Lamberto Bava and grandson Roy Bava.

In some respects a “filmmaker’s filmmaker” even though his name may not be known to a broader audience, Bava had an influence that can be seen in the diverse group of directors who have acknowledged their indebtedness to his work, including Martin Scorsese, Vincent Gallo, Joe Dante and Tim Burton. The Beastie Boys’ music video for “Body Movin’” was an explicit knockoff of Bava’s swinging spy thriller “Danger: Diabolik,” the same film director Roman Coppola has pointed to as an influence on his own debut feature, “CQ.”

Bava’s father was a respected sculptor and cameraman in the Italian studio system. He worked on films such as the landmark “Quo Vadis.” So it is not a stretch to say that Mario, born in 1914, had filmmaking in his blood.

An in-demand cam- eraman by the 1940s, Bava toiled out of the spotlight for years. As the story goes, a temperamental director walked off the set on two pictures in a row, which Bava finished shooting without him. His employers then asked him to direct a picture. And so, at 46, he directed his first film, “Black Sunday.” Now seen as a landmark, the film about a vengeful reincarnated witch was highly influential for its moody black-and-white look and made a minor star of British actress Barbara Steele.

During the next decade and a half, Bava would reinvent horror filmmaking, creating sleek, stylish films that unfolded as if in a dreamlike trance. His “The Girl Who Knew Too Much,” released in America as “The Evil Eye,” is frequently credited as being the first “giallo,” a peculiarly Italian brand of stalker-thriller that melded violence and eroticism into a frightening psychosexual wallop. Bava’s 1971 “Bay of Blood” (also known by the delightfully evocative title “Twitch of the Death Nerve”) would become a veritable blueprint for American stalk-and-slash films of the 1970s and ‘80s, while his 1965 “Planet of the Vampires” provided key concepts for the decidedly higher-class “Alien.”

It was while working on the 1969 sex comedy “Four Times That Night” that Bava first met producer Leone, called in by the film’s financiers to assist after the Yugoslav producers ran out of money. Leone was impressed by what Bava had done with limited resources, as the lavishly hip, ultramodern bachelor pad seen on screen was made of little more than cardboard and cellophane. The men would ultimately work together on five projects.

Dapper and energetic during a recent lunch at the Friars Club, Leone said he has become the keeper of Bava’s legacy, purchasing rights to other Bava films in addition to the ones they worked on together.

After “Four Times,” the pair worked on “Baron Blood,” starring Joseph Cotten and Elke Sommer. Filmed in a castle in Austria, which came complete with a genuine torture chamber, the film was another step forward in Bava’s exploration of psychological terror. As with many of his films, it was released in the U.S.--by Samuel Arkoff and James H. Nicholson’s American International Pictures--only after being severely reedited, poorly dubbed and with an inferior score.

Nevertheless, “Baron Blood” was enough of a success that Bava and Leone next undertook “Lisa and the Devil,” a tale of possession and obsession again starring Sommer, this time paired with Telly Savalas as the Devil. (In an interesting footnote, Savalas is first seen here with his trademark “Kojak” lollipop, supposedly after Bava suggested it as a method to help the actor quit smoking.) Screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973 to overflow crowds, Leone nonetheless was unable to secure distribution for “Lisa” and stood to lose more than $1 million.

After much pleading with Bava, the pair retooled the film to seem more like the then-popular “The Exorcist,” a ploy that led to the eventual release of “The House of Exorcism.”

Trying to put that debacle behind them, the pair began planning a project based on an Italian news story about a botched robbery and kidnapping. It was to be a different kind of film for Bava, based on the contemporary fears of modern life rather than the more detached terrors of his gothic films. When the story rights were stolen out from under him by his own production manager, Leone found his director gone as well. Bava had made a decision to follow the story, and although he and Leone were to remain friends, they would never work together again.

Once Bava completed shooting, the production ran out of money, and after the renegade producer died of a heart attack, the film was stopped in its tracks. Without funds for post-production, for the only time in his career Bava was forced to abandon a project as unfinished.

The unedited footage sat in a Rome vault for more than 20 years before being assembled and released in 1998 on a DVD overseen by Lea Lander, one of the film’s stars, and Tim Lucas, Bava biographer and publisher of the popular cinephile magazine Video Watchdog. Titled “Rabid Dogs,” even in that cobbled-together version, the film was unlike anything else Bava had done--told in real time, shot mostly in a single car speeding around Rome, using only available light.

Once Leone came into possession of the footage, he decided to finish the film himself. Bava’s son Lamberto, a successful director in Italy, was initially hesitant to undertake the project. Eventually agreeing, he brought aboard his son Roy, and although much of the original cast had passed away, the three assembled as much of the film’s original crew as they could, setting out to complete scenes and create the transitions necessary to finish the picture. The film also features a new score by Bava collaborator Stelvio Cipriani.

With the goal of moving Bava’s influence into the future, Leone also recently partnered with production company Kismet Entertainment to pursue remakes of Bava’s films, much as producer Joel Silver has done with the catalog of exploitation pioneer William Castle.

For Leone, the experience of completing “Kidnapped” has brought him full circle in his relationship with Bava. Asked to describe the director and his own motivations for keeping Bava’s legacy alive, Leone says simply, “I’ve meet some fine people in this bus- iness, but absolutely no one with the compassion, the intellect and the genius of Mario Bava.”

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American Cinematheque presents “The Haunted World of Mario Bava,” beginning Friday at 7:30 p.m. with “Kidnapped” and concluding June 12. Information: (323) 466-FILM.