son. Knowing how important dogs were to Bava personally, and to his family, we can understand how even the irregular presence of one in the film would be, to him, an important factor in evoking a sense of home. Speaking of the Helmut/Moki re-
lationship, there is also a troubling edit in the film, which abruptly cuts short a marvelous scene in which the man uses a handmade cage to edu- cate the boy in the trapping of ani- mals. At one point, Moki laughs and remarks that animals must be stupid to wander so willingly into a trap, and Helmut/Rurik’s expression becomes almost pained with conflict as he counters, “No, not necessarily . . .” By this point in their conversation, the viewer is completely absorbed, not least of all because Rurik appears to be on the point of drawing a parallel between the desperation that would make an animal risk its freedom to satisfy its hunger, and his own earlier situation in coming to Karin’s door- step begging for food. Our high expec- tations of the scene are frustrated by a sudden cutaway, but the scene is nevertheless redeemed by a comic ex- change between Karin and Helmut, when the Queen narrowly escapes being hit by one of his thrown dag- gers. Feigning anger, she yells that he should stop using his knives to in- struct the boy in the ways of war and come inside to cut strips of lard for her cooking. “Use my knives for kitchen work? Never!” Helmut laughs—but when Karin goes to pull the knife from the wall, she finds that its impact has already stripped a length of lard from a rack of bacon left hanging there. In this moment, paternal braggadocio and spousal cooperation are wed in a single, elegant gesture and Helmut/ Rurik’s domestication is complete. With its unusual mixture of mys- ticism and barbarism, I coltelli del vendicatore can be seen not only as a “Viking Western,” but also as a dis- tinct forerunner of the “sword and sorcery” genre that first came into bloom with John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian (1982), scripted by Oliver Stone. As someone who regularly binged on pulp fantasy fiction, Mario
BELGIAN affiche, crudely repainted from the Italian locandina design.