Arrow Video continue to impress with their Blu-Ray releases of Italian Giallo films - this time with Massimo Dallamano's salacious and disturbing What Have You Done to Solange?. The film was released in 1972 (at the height of Giallo fever) and it positions itself as one of the more intriguing exponents of the genres. Dallamano (who had previously worked as a DOP on Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars and A Few Dollars More) delivers a lush-looking, highly disturbing and suspense-rich work that is enriched by Ennio Morricone's hunting score.
In lesser hands, Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace could easily have been a stagey and stiff whodunnit. The plot's premise is simple: a model is killed by a mysterious masked figure on her way to a fashion house show and leaves behind a diary that could potentially incriminate her employers, colleagues and former partner - further intrigue and a murder spree ensue. The film is instead credited with genre innovation (and has influenced many an auteur,including Martin Scorsese), as it established of the Giallo peculiarities
Another week, another Arrow Video Bava release. This time we have The Girl Who Knew Too Much (La Ragazza Che Sapeva Troppo, 1963), a film considered by many to be the first Italian giallo. While nodding firmly in the direction of Alfred Hitchock (at first impression, the title might even suggest a Hitchcock parody of some kind!), it certainly introduced some of the features that were eventually to become commonplace within the subgenre: in this case, an innocent tourist that witnesses a crime and becomes an amateur detective, a mysterious serial killer, and a convoluted plot with a twisted surprise ending.
Mario Bava (1914-1980) was an influential yet incredibly underrated Italian director (or, as he would have put it, a 'humble artisan of cinema'). During his long and prolific career, he experimented with a number of different genres (horror, sci-fi, peplum, western) with mixed results. He is mostly well-known for his supernatural horror films Black Sunday (1960), Black Sabbath (1963) and Kill, Baby Kill (1966), and for consolidating the 'classic' formula of what is known as the Italian Giallo with The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1962) and with his lush, spellbinding Technicolor masterpiece, Blood and Black Lace (1964).
