TRAVELS (1939). Had it been made in the United States, one imagines it would be at least as well-known as THE OLD MILL or other important Disney anima- tion shorts, but as it is, it’s all but unknown—and tantalizing enough to make one wish for a collected works of Tsekhanovsky.
THE VIRGIN OF NUREMBERG
La vergine di Norimberga aka THE CASTLE OF TERROR, HORROR CASTLE
1963, Media Blasters/Shriek Show, DD-2.0/16:9/LB/+, $24.95, 83m 49s, DVD-1 By Tim Lucas
Based on a novel first pub- lished in the Italian pulp
magazine KKK I CLASSICI DELL’ORRORE (attributed to “Frank Bogart,” but, according to BIZARRE SINEMA author Anto- nio Bruscini, probably the work of its “translator” Maddelena Guy), this is one of Antonio
Margheriti’s most fondly remem- bered films and one that walks the tightrope between gothic melodrama and giallo horror. Newly wed to German aristocrat Max Hunter (Georges Rivière), Mary (Rosanna Podestà, who spends nearly the entire film in a ruffly nightgown) is beset by a series of waking nightmares af- ter moving into the ancestral castle, where the hired help are creepy (a scarfaced Christopher Lee, the icily catty Anny Degli Uberti) and the décor is Classic Inquisition, thanks to a museum on the premises. After “dream- ing” of finding a fresh corpse in the titular torture device, Mary is told about the Hunter family’s closet skeleton, The Punisher (Mirko Valentin), a hooded sadist who tortured people at the castle in the 17th Century, but who seems to be still active. Shot with three simulta- neously rolling cameras at the same empty villa where Mario Bava’s THE WHIP AND THE
BODY was filmed a short time earlier, the movie has a luxuri- ous look and features numerous familiar Eurocult props, includ- ing the ornate bed headboard previously seen in I vampiri, BLACK SABBATH’s “The Tele- phone” and later in HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON, and the large slab sculpture of a knight in repose previously seen in MILL OF THE STONE WOMEN and later in Margheriti’s own CASTLE OF BLOOD and Bava’s KILL, BABY... KILL!. Uberti also ap- pears to be wearing Harriet White Medin’s WHIP AND THE BODY hand-me-downs. The sound is also lush, thanks in large part to a sinfully suave jazz score by Riz Ortolani (which CAM released in tandem with Ortolani’s CASANOVA & COM- PANY as a surround sound CD in 1993). Working as “Anthony Dawson,” Margheriti milks the thin material for all it’s worth, with an outrageous rat-cage torture sequence (“the old ways
Rosanna Podestà must brave a discouraging dungeon to unearth the skeleton from her husband’s closet in THE VIRGIN OF NUREMBERG.
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