Perseo l’invincible—The Medusa Against the Son of Hercules


submersible, but also able to emerge from a lake and project a steady blast of flame from its fully articulated head. Nevertheless, it is Rambaldi’s Me- dusa that is most impressive. A star- tling new interpretation of the snake- haired spinster of Greek mythology, Perseo’s Medusa is an ambulatory tree, fleshed in bark of cobalt blue, its branches actually slithering, snapping snakes, with a single eye glowing from a knothole like a blood- shot sun. As this evil, repellent thing lunges toward the camera with its insinuating movements, it’s easy to understand how the soldiers of Seriphos could have stood transfixed by the sheer surprise of it. Composer Carlo Franci accompanies its every appearance with an unforgettable theme of jittery strings, such a per- fect complement to the creature that it seems a sound issuing naturally from its hypnotic orb. Impressive as it is, Rambaldi’s Medusa would have been no more than a mechanical prop without a convincingly desolate environment to reign over, and this is where Mario Bava’s talents came into play. Rich- ard Harrison: “I didn’t know Mario well at that time, but I remember him painting some mattes for that pic- ture and others that I did. Bava and I used to laugh . . . We were making this movie at Cinecittà at the time Cleopatra was also happening there, and it seemed that every movie in town was stealing from it—stealing props, costumes, or whatever. Also, the Americans didn’t know what


anything really cost in Italy, so they were being overcharged for everything. I knew one fellow who produced an entire film by overcharging Cleopatra for water. Water!”


For the scenes in the valley of the Medusa, Bava accentuated the natu- ral scenery with a series of glass mattes reconfiguring the entire val- ley and peopling it with the gorgon’s petrified conquests, man and horse alike. We see the first of the matte paintings early in the film as Prince Alceus and his army are shown riding into the valley; the camera shows them in long-shot riding on a dirt road along the edge of a sparsely wooded lake. The road, the lake, and the extras on horseback were real, but Bava capped the scenery with a dramatic desolate-looking mountain range, placed above the action on a large pane of glass.


Bava also painted an impressively


stylized cyclorama on glass to serve as a backdrop to the valley of the Medusa. It depicted an ominous- looking cave whose entrance shows a gaping maw of stalactites and sta- lagmites positioned like hideous, needle-sharp teeth. This matte was impressively extended to encompass an approximately 160° view of the entire valley, furnished with a com- bination of actual plaster statues and paper cut-outs affixed to glass. “Those Plaster of Paris things were so cheap, they put ‘em out there for nothing,” Harrison notes. When Perseus arrives in the val- ley late in the movie, he is shown


walking through a haze (partly sug- gested by a thin coating of Vaseline applied to the bottom of the camera lens), passing a series of petrified men as he moves toward the central area dominated by the image of the cave. The camera begins to move with him as he passes a large, pointed boulder that nearly reaches to the top of the frame. By watching the scene closely,


it is possible to see


Harrison step onto a slightly higher platform as he passes this boulder, which actually marks the edge of a long, curving, scenic cyclorama that seamlessly replaces the actual loca- tion backgrounds for the rest of the shot. The cyclorama is used in con- cert with the matte painting of the cave, but now the lower area—the valley of petrified men and horses— is painted on the cyclorama, with the brushstrokes diffused by the haze. It takes Harrison eleven steps to traverse the length of this backdrop, and as it begins to curve, he passes behind a foregrounded boulder—a technique often used by Bava to sell matte paintings with a false aspect of dimension, which here also helps to conceal the curving of the back- drop. As Harrison passes behind the plaster rock, and seems to stare out at a field of petrified bodies that stretch as far as the eye can see, he is actually staring at painted card- board and sandwiched between two layers of illusion scarcely far enough apart to accommodate his shoulders. While the majority of the stone fig- ures were painted directly onto the


THIS combination of frame enlargements illustrates the perfect fusion of Bava’s glass matte painting (positioned above the actors on horseback and plaster statues in the valley) with the painted landscape extending the territory of the Medusa’s valley.


board, the filmed evidence shows that director De Martino may have wished for more, as others were painted on paper, clipped, and added to the painted vista on location. (They can be seen flapping slightly in the breeze in the shot where the Medusa’s spell is broken.)


Elsewhere in the film, Bava also executed a glass matte that placed the kingdom of Seriphos—a huddle of ancient buildings bookended by two columned structures—on the hillside overlooking a lush, green, rustic valley.


The movie contains other basic il- lusions which did not involve Bava. For instance, there are a few close shots of Perseus and other characters riding on horseback, in which the horses are visible only in the back- grounds of the shots. “There was no blue screen work, not on that one,” Harrison attests. “For that, I remem- ber there was a truck on the backlot, and I climbed onto the back of it.” As the truck drove side-by-side with cos- tumed extras on horseback, Harrison was photographed jogging along on the back of the truck. The actor also re- members that the movie was so cheap that other “effects” scenes had to be done for real—for example, the


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