DIABOLIK changes color to camouflage his climb to the residence of Sir Harold and Lady Clark, in search of a birthday present for Eva.
Libio, where the climactic scenes of I coltelli del vendicatore had been filmed. What follows are a combination of live automobile interiors and miniature exteriors as a toy Jaguar rolls through various fabulous tunnels and eleva- tors. The area where the car finally settles was a near-empty stage, with only the borders of the passage built to keep the car aligned with the mattes, as well as an aluminum-col- ored stairwell to accommodate Marisa Mell’s exit from the shot. She walked up the stairs onto an ordinary backlit catwalk, which was blocked from the camera’s view by a hanging maquette of a steel, streamlined passage with opaque windows; as the scene unfolds, she appears to be entering and walk- ing through the maquette. Some of the more fabulous trappings of Diabolik’s cave—like his combination safe—had to be built from scratch, but many of the unusual devices on display therein were made up of little more than ev- eryday household items, such as smoke alarms, electric fan grilles, plastic hoops, and art supplies, some of them carried over from Terrore nello spazio—including the door of the spaceship Argos, which shows up as a ceiling fixture.
Bava was also pressed into action
by the dictum that money can’t buy everything. “I could never find the scenery that I wanted, so I took care of that by hanging silhouettes of houses, cut out of cardboard, over a sheet of glass in front of the camera.”14 Law remembers an instance of this,
as well: “We were out on a hillside, one day . . . I was doing the scene where I come down in a parachute, gather everything up and go running up to this cabin to rescue Eva. Mario couldn’t find a cabin that he liked. They went out and looked for some cabins, but he didn’t like this and he didn’t like that . . . Finally, he said, ‘Let’s break for lunch; give me a maga- zine’ and he cut a little cabin, maybe an inch-and-a-half high, out of a Camel cigarette ad. He glued it on one
