While watching this, more than any other Bava film, I think for the first time I really understood exactly what Anna Biller has been affectionately parodying in her work all this time. I wish I could say this was a compliment, but really it just made me wish I was watching one of her ironic deconstructions instead.
Still a bit better than Bay of Blood, in my opinion. A controversial take I know, that film being the closest to an…
In retrospect, this feels much more like a blueprint for the sort of films Gomes' O Som e a Fúria collaborator João Nicolau would go on to make, complete with playfully absurdist non-sequiturs and deadpan musical numbers, than it does any of Gomes' later work (Nicolau even appears as a character named Nicolau here).
Consequentially, this is also why it is easily my favorite of Gomes' films, although that said, now that I've seen Nicolau's work this isn't quite as…
(I was originally planning on writing my review as an open letter to Hitchcock himself, which I might still do at some point, but this will suffice for now. The only part I regret not including was a question asking him how he'd like to be addressed. Hitch? Alfred? Al? Mr. Cock?)
Reading that Orson Welles apparently hated this makes me so happy, especially when you consider that The Immortal Story is kind of the same thing except actually good...…
