Lisa e il diavolo
Italy, 1973
Director: Mario Bava
Screenwriter: Mario Bava (with Roberto Natale and Giorgio Maulini)
Genre: Horror, mystery, satanic cinema
Soundtrack composer: Carlo Savina
Editing: Carlo Reali
Production company: Alfredo Leone
Main actors:
Telly Savalas (Leandro)
Elke Sommer (Lisa Reiner)
Sylva Koscina (Sofia Lehar)
Alessio Orano (Maximiliano)
Gabriele Tinti (George)
Kathy Leone (Lisa’s friend)
Eduardo Fajardo (Francis Lehar)
Franz von Treuberg (Shopkeeper)
Spartacus Santoni (Carlo)
Alida Valli (Countess)
Plot
Lisa is part of a group of tourists visiting Toledo. In one of the squares, the guide shows them a fresco depicting the Devil, and explains how the image “carries the dead”. Lisa walks away from the others into the narrow streets of the old town. She enters a souvenir store, where she sees a bald man with a disturbing look that reminds her of the Devil she has just seen in the painting. The young woman tries to return to her companions, but gets lost in the lonely alleys. The few neighbors she encounters ignore her, turning away or hostilely closing their windows.
Finally the disoriented Lisa returns to meet the bald guy from before… who is carrying a mannequin (just as the “Devil carries the dead” according to the traditional belief represented in the image of which the guide spoke). Frightened and hesitant, the girl asks him where she should go to return to the center. The strange man tells her with a malevolent smile to take one of the alleys…
Lisa runs anxiously in that direction, it is beginning to get dark. Suddenly she meets a man identical to the mannequin that the man from before was carrying. The stranger walks towards her, calling her “Elena”. Panicked, the tourist pushes him, causing him to fall down the stairs and become naked.
More terrified than ever, Lisa flees the scene as far as she can. At night, she sees an old car and goes to ask for help from the people inside: a middle-aged couple and their driver. They agree to take her back to her hotel, but on the way, on the outskirts of the city, the car breaks down. When they get out of the car, they find themselves in front of a large mansion, and they knock on the door to ask its inhabitants to help them.
The one who comes out to open the door is none other than the “Devil”, the mysterious bald man Lisa saw earlier in the city. It is Leandro, the butler of the Countess who lives there. At first the elderly aristocrat is not very hospitable, and orders Leandro to send the newcomers away. But Max, the countess’s son, upon seeing Lisa, asks his mother to agree to host them for the night. Max seems to know the girl “from before”, and like the one who fell down the stairs also insists on calling her “Elena”.
The guests are installed in rooms of the mansion. Sofia, the wife of the couple, has an adulterous relationship with George, the chauffeur. Frank, the husband, is aware of it; but he pretends not to. Lisa’s terror and anguish does not diminish once there, but even begins to increase. In the garden she sees again the figure of the man who fell down the stairs, being carried by the sinister butler. For his part, young Max, in love with her, rejoices that she has “returned”, still confusing her with the “Elena”. Max is completely dominated by his mother, who is very jealous of his interest in Lisa/Elena.
During dinner, noises begin to be heard on the upstairs floor. “I knew he would come back, it’s the fifth guest, the one who hasn’t shown up yet…” says the old blind countess enigmatically. The chauffeur George, meanwhile, tries to repair the car and is about to succeed. The women want to get out of there as soon as possible, especially the hysterical Sofia, whose nerves are getting on edge because of the unhealthy atmosphere in the “haunted house”.
When Sofia goes out to see how George is progressing with the car repairs, she finds him dead; someone has murdered him by stabbing him in the neck.
In the garden, Lisa is approached again by the man she pushed down the stairs, whose mannequin Leandro was carrying. The man, who says his name is Carlo, tries to calm her down; he assures her that he is there to help her, because her life “is in danger”…
Comment
Strange but interesting film by Mario Bava, Italian master of suspense and gothic horror. With an elegant and poetic style, the story itself is a bit confusing; because of the double identities and the different love triangles, which are revealed little by little. Moreover, it all unfolds as if in a dream.
The creepy Leandro (the Devil?) has a whole arsenal of mannequins, always representing dead people. The figure that Lisa has seen him transporting, and that has appeared to her “in the flesh” is that of Carlo; the second husband of the widowed countess, therefore Max’s stepfather. The two men were in love with the same woman: Elena, whose physical appearance was identical to that of Lisa. Elena was Max’s wife. The jealousy of the old countess towards that young woman was therefore twofold. Now that Max believes that Elena “has returned” with Lisa’s body, the young man assures that nothing will separate them anymore, he tells the girl that “I will help you to run away and you will help me to live”…
Elena/Lisa’s love affairs with Max and Carlo, the influence of the hostile countess and the presence, always hovering in the air, of the gloomy and diabolical servant, are joined by a chain of murders – of which the chauffeur George is only the first victim….
All this is very tangled, but as Leandro himself says in a certain scene with his characteristic dark halo: “Almost always in life there is a simple explanation for everything that happens”.
In the case of this film, what happens is wrapped in a surreal dreamlike atmosphere, and it is not possible to measure the events with logical parameters. Life and death, as well as love and hate, are confused with each other here.
The relationship between the Countess and her son, whom she overprotects and tyrannizes, is reminiscent of the Oedipal connotations of Norman Bates and his mother in “Psycho” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) or those between the headmistress of the boarding school and her adolescent son in “La Residencia” (Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, 1970).
Telly Savalas, famous for his role as Kojak, plays the disturbing Leandro. The old countess is played by Alida Valli, who appears in “Suspiria” (Dario Argento, 1977). Sylva Koscina, whom we saw in “Hercules” (Pietro Francisci, 1958), gives life to Sofia. Sylva Koscina also appears in “La mala ordina” (Fernando Di Leo, 1972), in “Rivelazioni di un maniaco sessuale al capo della squadra mobile” (Roberto Bianchi Montero, 1972) or in “Marquis de Sade: Justine” (Jesus Franco, 1969).
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