MARIO BAVA camping it up in a footman’s powdered wig, to the amusement of Michel Piccoli.
little sheet of glass—you know, about 2' x 2'—stuck it there and then he put a platform up on the hill behind it. He said, ‘Look, John—just run up there, walk up those two steps, step forward onto the platform and then don’t move—because you’ll be masked by this little thing on the glass.’ Sure enough, I went up there and, you know, [on film] it looked like I was banging on the door and I stepped in- side and that was it. The cabin wasn’t even there. I was just standing in space there on a little box!” Bava worked his magic similarly in the earlier scene of Diabolik meet- ing with Valmont’s men outside their private plane. The best way to explain the magic is to state, very simply, that no plane was rented for use in the film. The action on the airstrip was shot outdoors on the grounds of Dinocittà, with the actors standing behind a large glass matte where the wing and a por- tion of the hull of a prop plane was painted. Production stills reveal that a glass matte was also painted to show the plane in flight, as Diabolik awaited it on the ground below; the plan may have been to move the glass matte on a dolly, to “animate” the plane, but for whatever reason, the shot was sacrificed. The shots of characters dropping through the trap door in Valmont’s plane were shot on a min- iature floor with an articulated trap door, positioned above a rotating matte painting of the ground below; by stepping through the film one frame at a time, it is easy to identify the fall- ing figures as ordinary store-bought G. I. Joe dolls, redressed in appro- priate clothing, but the editing is so precise, the illusion is successful. John Phillip Law remembers that Dinocittà was revving up for Barbar- ella at this time by acquiring various new-fangled effects equipment for its facility, including elaborate blue screen and front projection systems. The studio was also a warehouse for
“YOU can tell by looking at this picture how well we got along,” says John Phillip Law of this photo from his personal collection.
