THE GREAT final shot of the film: a telephone hangs by its cord as two lives hang by a thread.
and evil world, very often the things we do for love are conquered by the common lust of others for money. As in La frusta e il corpo, Sei donne per l’assassino concludes with a woman simultaneously embracing and slaying her lover, whose lav- ished affections are revealed as il- lusory. Bava directs both scenes in such a way that we feel that Death liberates neither partner, but unites them instead in the Great Beyond. Bava’s uneasy marriage had taught him that we are forever bound to the people we love; we may sometimes hate them too, but these relation- ships are fated and thus inescapable. The film ends as the camera zooms past the dead bodies of Christina and Max to the red tele- phone receiver, knocked off its cradle, swinging on its cord—the image rhymes enticingly with the opening shot of the red sign falling and swinging on its chain. It obviously reflects a film prepared with a for- mal sense of design, but Bava pre- tended to scoff at anyone who took it seriously. “Some people from Cahiers du Cinema once came ’round to my house,” he wrote in his La città del cinema memoir. “My daughter told me they were interested in know- ing the connection between the sign swinging in the storm at the begin- ning of my film, and the telephone left dangling when Bartok died at the end. I couldn’t remember how the film had ended!” Actually, there is a connection— it is hard to believe that Bava wasn’t at least somewhat conscious of it— which is very well expressed by Luigi Barzini in The Italians: “Fear can be detected behind the Italians’ pecu- liar passion for geometrical patterns, neat architectural designs, and sym- metry in general, which is part of their love for show—mainly the fear of the uncontrollable and unpredictable hazards of life and nature . . . [Even the] greatest Italian literary master- piece, Dante’s Divina Commedia ... is composed of an introductory canto and three parts, each of thirty-three cantos, each ending with the same word, ‘stelle.’”
