DVD Tuesday: The Girl Who Knew Too Much

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This week's DVD Tuesday pick is Mario Bava's La Ragazza che sapeva troppo/ The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963), available as part of Anchor Bay's must-have Mario Bava Collection Volume 1 (at least, I had to have it) or as a stand-alone rental. Now for the why: Bear with me for a moment.

Italian horror comes in many flavors: English-style Gothic, cannibal gut-crunchers, extreme mondo. But to my mind the high water mark of horror al'Italia is the is the giallo, a very particular variation on the English mystery of elimination: Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians is ground zero -- a group of individuals is lured to an isolated place, trapped and murdered one by one -- and the American slasher film of the 1980s is the end game. In between, Italian filmmakers churned out a good 15 years of variations on a theme, some clever, some just plain nasty and some breathtakingly baroque. I always contend that European horror filmmakers are, as a group, more interesting than their American counterparts because the Europeans are steeped in centuries of the fantastique: literature, theater, painting, sculpture, music, secular and religious; Americans, pickled in pop culture, just strip mine other movies.

In any event, Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much was the first to pull all the strands that added up to the giallo together: The Hitchcockian perversity; the knowing pulpiness; the movie-musical structure plot development, set piece, plot development, set piece with elaborate murder sequences replacing the song-and-dance numbers; the ravishing visuals; the warped killers with their fabulously deranged motivations and the nutty narrative elipses. And unlike many later gialli, it's no more graphic than, say, Hitchcock's , The Man Who Knew Too Much so it's suitable for viewers who squirm at the really violent stuff.

Pretty, sheltered Nora Davis (Italian actress Leticia Roman), a naïve American girl who loves pulp crime novels, is en route to Rome for a vacation she's to spend under the watchful eye of Mrs. Batocci, an elderly family friend. Mrs. Batocci, who has a weak heart, is under the care of a handsome young Dr. Bassi (American actor John Saxon), who gives Nora his address and phone number, assuring her that she should be in touch at any hour of the day or night if she has questions or concerns. Later that night, Mrs. Batocci has a fatal heart attack as a blinding storm knocks out both the electricity and the phone. Nora throws a raincoat over her nightie and rushes out into the rain, where she's mugged and knocked to the ground on the picturesque steps of an old church. She hazily regains consciousness just in time to see a woman stabbed to death and passes out again. But come morning, when Nora is found by a policeman, the dead woman is gone and Nora suspected of being a drunken party girl: Why else would she be wandering around half naked under her coat and ranting about corpses that aren't there?

With Dr. Bassi's help, Nora convinces the police and doctors at the local psych ward that she's not a deranged lush, and together they begin investigating. They discover that a woman was indeed murdered just as she described but it happened ten years ago. The victim was the first to die at the hands of "The Alphabet Killer," so dubbed because the last names of his victims began, in order, with the letters A, B and C. Now Nora, her imagination fired by all the mystery novels she's read, is really worried: Her last name is Davis.

La Ragazza che sapeva troppo was first released in the US as The Evil Eye, dubbed and significantly recut to emphasize its light comic elements. The new version is in subtitled Italian, and plays to the story's darker elements. And I have to tell you, I love the opening sequence in which Nora is wooed by a suave fellow passenger, who offers her a cigarette (yes, you used to able to smoke on airplanes) and looks like a good candidate for a continental summer fling until, after they debark in Rome, he's suddenly seized en route to customs by the polizia. They search his carry-on luggage and, while he protests that there's nothing in their but toiletries, rip out the false bottom and snidely ask whether he's in the habit of using cocaine as talcum powder. Poor Nora then is understandable shocked, especially as she overhears the departing police talking about the marijuana-laced cigarettes her would-be swain is carrying. Now there's a fine way for a nice young woman to start her summer abroad: In a dope-addled haze.

Though improbable, the story is engaging and the widescreen B&W cinematography is just gorgeous. La Ragazza is a minor film, but a thoroughly enjoyable one that deserves better than to languish in obscurity, familiar only to serious fans of European genre cinema. So I'm doing my bit. And just FYI, the Bava collection also includes the ravishing Black Sunday (1961), starring the queen of Euro-horror, the one and only Barbara Steele, and the really spooky Kill Baby Kill (1966), from which filmmakers as diverse as Federico Fellini (the "Toby Dammit" segment of Spirits of the Dead) and William Malone (the crappy Feardotcom) appropriated the iconic image of flaxen-haired, little-girl ghost with a big rubber ball.

Things to consider:

La Ragazza che sapeva troppo belongs to a long tradition of "Americans abroad" movies in which unwary US tourists are accidentally caught up in scary matters when they travel to foreign countries. Even with every corner of the globe more accessible than any time in human history, this story archetype remains potent, witness Frantic, Hostel, Brokedown Palace, Red Corner, Turistas and even EuroTrip which spins the idea for raunchy laughs. What's the subtext?

What's your favorite experience of discovering a little gem of a movie completely by accident. Was it on late night TV? On video or DVD?

Previous DVD Tuesday blogs:

The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! - Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
http:/ / community. tvguide. com/ thread. jspa? threadID= 800073953#comments"> Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick

Also: This week's new DVD releases