Il rosso segno della follia—Hatchet for the Honeymoon


coaxing her performance loudly from behind the camera, Laura Betti couldn’t keep herself from laughing. At some point during the Barcelona filming, Bava had a chance encounter in his hotel corridor with his old friend, Cameron Mitchell, who was aston- ished to find “Signore Solamente in Italia” on foreign turf.


“The last time I saw Mario was in Spain,” Mitchell remembered. “I was doing a film there at the time—I don’t remember the title—and, one day in the hotel, there was Mario! I couldn’t believe my eyes. I said, ‘Mario! What are you doing out of Italy?’ “‘Slumming.’ That was his answer.” Not all of the film’s interiors were photographed at Franco’s villa. The discothèque scenes, two interiors and one exterior (as John is thrown out), were filmed at Balcazar Studios in Barcelona. Bava’s crew were forbid- den to film upstairs at the villa, which necessitated the addition of scenes filmed later at Villa Frascati, one of Italy’s perennial horror film loca- tions—a short drive northeast of Rome. This explains why the film’s credits list two individuals, one Span- ish and one Italian, for some of the key crew positions. In truth, some of the credits exist simply to fulfill co- production quotas; Lamberto Bava, for example, worked as his father’s as- sistant in Spain as well as in Italy, and was also responsible for all the second unit shooting in Paris. The Frascati footage includes John’s encounter with his “inner child” before meeting with Alice afterhours in the salon, the seance sequence with Dr. Kalleway, the scenes in the Harringtons’ bathroom and bedroom (note that the camera never moves from the staircase directly into the bedroom), and the scenes in John’s toy- and mannequin-haunted menag- erie. For the climactic scene of Inspec- tor Russell bursting into the menag- erie to save Helen from John, Bava was faced with the problem of insert- ing a Spanish actor (Jesús Puente) into an Italian location scene where he was not present. This was done by filming Dagmar Lassander reaching toward a similar door that was acquired for the shooting at Villa Frascati, and then cutting to a tight zoom shot of Puente bursting through the door, which was shot back at the Franco villa.


By viewing the scene frame-by-frame, the viewer can see that the two doors are similar but not the same. Another instance of Bava inserting an illusion where one is not readily apparent. Attentive viewers may also notice that the Harringtons’ bed is the same one that appears in the boudoir of the Duchess Du Grand in I vampiri, in Rosy’s apartment in the “Il telefono” segment of I tre volti della paura, and also in a scene of Le meraviglie di Aladino. Seen here, the formerly empty area of the ornate headboard has been cheaply filled with a sheet of wallpaper, which rattles visibly when John drops onto the mattress, exhausted.


Despite the Spanish and Italian lo- cations used for Il rosso segno della follia, and the English names given to its characters, producer Manuel Caño decided to further confuse events by setting the story in Paris, the European hub of high fashion. To drive the point home, Stephen Forsyth and a second unit crew led by Lamberto Bava trav- elled to Paris to capture some exteriors,


at which point the production ran out of funding.


“It wasn’t really a cheap produc- tion,” Forsyth insists. “All of the cos- tumes I wore were made specifically for me; they really spared no expense. In fact, I still have the belt I wore in that movie. But they did run out of money after we got to Paris. All of the exteriors were shot in Paris, but if you look closely, you’ll notice that my char- acter is always shown in the distance in these shots, because that was a double; I didn’t shoot at all in Paris. I stayed in my hotel room because they hadn’t paid me for two weeks! They didn’t stop shooting; they just put a double into those scenes. But he wasn’t able to wear my costumes, because I was up in my hotel room, holding them hostage, while waiting for my check! You see, I had an agree- ment that I would be paid for each week of work at the end of the preced- ing week. I made sure I was paid some- thing up front, and then I was paid the balance week by week. By the time we got to Paris, I had already worked


JOHN and Mildred will remain married till death do they part—or do their vows endure beyond the grave?


one week for nothing and, as we came to the end of another week, I think they seriously didn’t have the money; otherwise, I’m sure they would have given it to me. And that was basically how my acting career ended, with me in my hotel room waiting for the check that never came. That’s how the movie ended, actually; I never did shoot those last scenes. But I’ve talked to Lamberto since then, and he’s forgiven me for that.”


In the final cut of Il rosso segno, not too many Paris exteriors survive. In the end, Mario Bava salvaged the failed Paris shoot by inserting a shot of the Eiffel Tower, grabbed by Lamberto while on location, and a newspaper headline printed in French— the sort of tricks he had used in I vampiri more than a decade earlier. After his star turn in Il rosso segno— a role that required him to kiss nude


785


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