MARIO BAVA on location during the beachfront filming of LA FAMIGLIA PASSAGUAI: between takes, conferring with actor–director Aldo Fabrizi, twirling pasta.
film’s best moments are too highly strung with nervous tension, such as the sequence in which Peppe borrows Gardini’s lavish apartment to misrep- resent it as his own to Giocondo, his “Countess” wife (Marisa Merlini), and his colleagues. As Gardini plays the role of the Passaguai butler, the guests manhandle his irreplaceable valuables with Peppe’s amiable in- dulgence; the humor of the sequence is overwhelmed by uncomfortable suspense over what will break first: the valuable antiques, or Gardini’s façade, as he threatens to lose his pa- tience with these fatuous intruders. However, the film contains one great sequence of paramount interest to the story of Bava’s own creative develop- ment: When Peppe is finally goaded by his associates into lending his worth- less signature to a personal check for many millions, the scene cuts abruptly to an expressionistic nightmare se- quence. Peppe is shown in a striped jail uniform, screaming behind bars. Out- side, a tempest rages. His daughter, in tears, reproaches him from outside the barred window—and transforms into one of Giocondo’s associates in a woman’s wig! Apparitions of his son Pecorino, dressed in Napoleon garb, pop up and down like a jack-in-a-box from a hole in the ground. Faces viewed through bevelled prisms laugh. As Peppe wrenches his prison bars in panic, the camera pulls back to reveal them as part of a hanging grating that can easily be walked around to free- dom! At this new vantage, even the roar- ing winds visible on the cyclorama out- side the prison walls are revealed as occupying only half the sky . . . which is now obviously a stage cyclorama. As Peppe runs through the artificial tem- pest—the shadows of tree branches revolving on the studio sky behind him—Napoleon races after him and leaps onto his back! The shock awak- ens the guilt-stricken Peppe, who finds himself at home in bed.
This sequence is an early milestone in Bava’s creative arc because—how- ever amusing it was intended to be, and is—it represents his first attempt
