LAW and Deneuve (in a Pop Art dress by Luciana Marinucci and Piero Gherardi).
gold-shrouded remains; in these pho- tos, it is obviously she who is to be adored. Her casting would have badly weakened Diabolik’s all-important au- thority and thrown the film completely off-balance.
At the end of the week, Deneuve butted heads with Bava for the last time when she flatly refused to par- ticipate in one of the movie’s most celebrated scenes. In short—as John Phillip Law says, laughing—“She didn’t want to fuck in the money.” Bava reminisced about his prob- lems with Deneuve to Luigi Cozzi: “She wouldn’t allow me to show so much as her ankle or her calf! Don’t even mention her breasts! So we packed her back off to France, and replaced her with Marisa Mell. And do you know what film Deneuve made as soon as she got back to France? Belle de Jour— where they were practically showing every inch of her naked skin under a microscope, so that you couldn’t miss a thing! I suppose it takes an actor to understand one.”9 Perhaps it does. “Catherine may not
have been ready for the part,” Law reasons. “She had not yet done Belle de Jour. I think if she had done Diabolik after Belle de Jour, she might have been more relaxed, and things might have worked out a little differently.” Law was thinner than usual and had shorter hair in these early stages of production, and he looks this way in isolated shots of the finished film—as Diabolik prepares to deposit the stolen millions in his personal safe before conceiving a better use for the cash, as he drives solo, and as he contacts Valmont from a tele- phone booth—so shooting evidently proceeded as best it could while a suitable Eva was being sought. With only a minute or two of usable foot- age in the can after two full weeks of shooting, an exasperated Dino De Laurentiis finally relented on his casting preferences.
8 Catherine Deneuve was, at this time, the ex-
wife of Vadim. 9 Luigi Cozzi, Il cinema dei mostri (Rome, Italy:
