describes the weather as freezing cold, and claims that long days were spent out of doors on location, in the drafty castello, and on location in actual tombs. “Bava was deathly ill,” she claims, “as was everybody else. Everybody had some terrible virus and we were totally asphyxiated by all the dry ice. It’s just as well that the film was dubbed later, because everyone was utterly nasal.” 25
Asked
about the freezing cold, Armando Govoni counters, “We shot from March through May; don’t you think it would be difficult for a Roman spring to be like a polar spring?” And, as al- ready pointed out, La maschera’s various tombs, crypts, and cemeter- ies were all built on sound stages at Scalera Film.
While much of what Steele has said on (and off) the record about the production is discredited by pro- duction records and other on-set wit- nesses, a few of her stories have the ring of truth. For example, she talks about herself and John Richardson getting a case of the slap-happies in the midst of some last-minute shoot- ing: “You reach a point of no return when you start to laugh. You laugh because you’re nervous, then you become so guilty you can’t stop. I just couldn’t look John in the eye any more, so I’d look at his nose, the left part of his forehead—anything! Bava nearly had a heart attack at the end. He thought we would never get through it!” 26
La maschera del demonio may have been a difficult production, but Armando Govoni insists that Bava’s first experience as a credited direc- tor was undaunting. “To think that a film of this kind could impose dif- ficulties on Bava is to insult him,” he says. “Bava had been a major di- rector of photography. Directors called on him all the time for advice about where they should place their camera to get the best point of view. So, for Bava to direct this movie was ‘business as usual.’ He had some problems, perhaps, in directing the actors.”
This is virtually the only point on which Steele and Govoni agree. “I
PROMOTIONAL shot of Steele and Richardson chatting in costume.
