MILL OF THE STONE WOMEN
Il mulino della donna di pietra aka DROPS OF BLOOD, ICON 1960, Mondo Macabro, DD-2.0/16:9/LB/ST/+, $19.99, 95m 27s, DVD-0 By Tim Lucas
Of all the major films that compose the Golden Age of Ital- ian Fantasy, none is more mys- terious in origin than MILL OF THE STONE WOMEN. Were this opulent gothic signed by Mario Bava or Riccardo Freda, it would be easier to pigeonhole, but its direction is credited to Giorgio Ferroni (1908-1981), a writer-di- rector of infrequent prior activity who showed no previous inter- est in the horror genre and, de- spite the international success of this one-shot, would not return to it for a dozen more years, spending much of the interim churning out Westerns and spy pictures under the sobriquet “Calvin Jackson Padget.” Adding to the curiosity of this French/Italian co-production are its claim to be based on a story from FLEMISH TALES by Peter van Weigen (“I RACCONTI FIAMMINGHI di Pieter van Veigen” in Italian, but no text of either name has come to light); the presence of German actors Wolfgang Preiss (the 1960s Dr. Mabuse) and Herbert Böehme in the cast, implying an otherwise unnoted German cash involvement; a score credited to Carlo Innocenzi that includes one notable cue from Maurice Jarre’s score for Georges Franju’s Les Yeux sans visage [EYES WITH- OUT A FACE, 1960]; a persistent but apparently unfounded rumor that the film is dedicated to Terence Fisher and, last but not least, its onscreen accrediting of Galatea Productions, an affilia- tion found nowhere in Italian print references. Photographed in color by Pier Ludovico Pavoni
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(HEAD OF A TYRANT), it has a quirkily inconsistent visual style that alternates between looking like Carl Dreyer’s VAMPYR, a French belle epoque romance, and in its most impressive mo- ments, the work of Mario Bava. The film was partially shot at Cinecittà in the early months of 1960, when Bava was between jobs on THE GIANT OF MARA- THON (June-August 1959) and BLACK SUNDAY (March-May 1960), both produced by Galatea. There is no documentation to support his involvement, other than that Bava was a workaholic technician under contract to the company who was known to work on friends’ movies for no credit, and was not otherwise engaged at the time; also, per- haps relevantly, Bava is known to have anonymously replaced cameraman Sandro Mancori on a later Giorgio Ferroni film, Il pistolero segnato da Dio aka TWO PISTOLS FOR A COWARD (1968). On the Mobius Home Video Forum, Henrik Hemlin has compiled an arresting se- lection of screen grabs from MILL and presented them in contrast with others from various Bava films, as proof of a shared visual aesthetic (
www.mhvf.net/ forum/euro/posts/
46640.html) that is difficult, if not impossible, to deny.
Pierre Brice stars as Hans Van Harnim, a young writer sent to a small town outside Amsterdam— called “Baizé” (sp?) on the English track, though the village sign reads “Veeze”—to research a monograph due to be written on the centenary of The Mill of the Stone Women, a mechanized, wax museum-like display of ma- cabre statues housed inside a disused windmill. Owned and operated by Dr. Gregorius Wahl (Böehme), the mill becomes the unexpected site of romance when Hans catches sight of
Wahl’s voluptuous but mysteri- ous daughter Elfy (Scilla Gabel). The emotionally unbalanced girl seduces Hans, who is made aware by the experience of his real love for childhood sweetheart Lisalotte Cornaim (THE HANDS OF ORLAC’s Dany Carrel). After overhearing Hans’ declaration of love to Lisalotte, Elfy suffers a fatal seizure but her father and his assistant Dr. Bolem (Preiss) restore her life with the blood of another young woman (Liana Orfei) and cover up the incident by drugging Hans, who loses all contact with reality. The hero’s de- scent into delirium is a remarkable bit of macabre pre-psychedelia that prefigures not only the “dop- pelgänger/cobweb dementia” se- quence of Bava’s KILL, BABY... KILL! but entire David Lynch fea- tures like the psychologically freeform LOST HIGHWAY and MULHOLLAND BLVD.
Mondo Macabro has done a wonderfully thorough job in bringing this underrecognized film to DVD. Not only does this “Uncut Euro Version” go the ex- tra distance by including the glimpses of Ms. Carrel’s bare nipple as she strains against the bonds holding her to a transfu- sion table late in the film, previ- ously included only in the French and Japanese versions, but Mondo Macabro have also pro- vided two distinct English lan- guage audio options, one from the US release and the other from the UK release as DROPS OF BLOOD. The UK version is essentially the master English track prepared in Italy for export; the US version contains the same track as later augmented by “su- pervisor” Hugo Grimaldi, which opens with the astonishing, mi- sogynistic voice-over narration: “Trouble began with a woman... [Our hero is] a young man, a writer, who would deny that ob- vious truth, for he is naïve... He
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