Bava decided to depict her as a troubled artist, sometimes using her Munchean paintings to venture backgrounded remarks on the fore- ground action. When she discovers the dead body of Jacques on the beach, she is wearing a caftan of swirling, psychedelic colors, which comple- ments the shot of her fallen tubes of oil paint, squeezed out and merging with the sand and sea. After Marie is added to the deep freeze, the scene cuts to Jill pleading with George to help her get off the island—as a self-portrait of a wild-eyed woman, not unlike Bar- bara Steele, glowers derangedly from her easel.
The scene of Jill’s suicide is per- haps the film’s most inspired feat of design and storyboarding. Faced with the prospect of shooting a banal fistfight between George and Nick, Bava made the decision to view the fracas through a grating, thus splitt- ing up our view of the action into doz- ens of tiny squares. During the fight, a tabletop objet d’art is knocked over, sending countless glass balls of all sizes spilling across a series of differ- ent colored floors, so that a screen full of squares literally explodes into a screen full of circles. The camera fol- lows the balls as they roll and bounce down a spiral staircase flecked black, white and gray, roll across a red floor and then plop by the dozens among the soap bubbles in a sunken bath, where Jill is found with both wrists slashed—her blood cutting scarlet swathes across the blue screen. The grating outside the bedroom was a real part of the modernist house in which they were shooting, as was the spiral staircase, which Bava posits in the background as George, Nick, and Jack bully Fritz on the subject of money; in this shot, the staircase with its cen- tral pole forms such a literal dollar sign that I didn’t grasp the visual pun until my umpteenth viewing. If there was any negative result of having to work quickly, it is that Bava occasionally falls back on obsessive images we have seen before, and oth- ers we will see again: the child on the swing as the zoom thrusts in and out
MARIE joins Jacques and Peggy in the meat locker—an echo of the polyethylene shrouds in TERRORE NELLO SPAZIO.
