RETRO REVIEW: THE WHIP AND THE BODY (1963)
Nevenka (DALIAH LAVI) becomes a prisoner of her own kinky desires in MARIO BAVA’S 1963 film, THE WHIP AND THE BODY.
At some point in E.L. JAMES’ grammatically comical, yet widely successful book, FIFTY SHADES OF GRAY, the bland-as-unbuttered-toast dominant known as Christian Gray is getting ready for his first encounter with the equally bland Anatasia Steele in his infamous red “playroom.” To muster his domineering persona before he goes in, he partakes in a very specific ritual: “In my closet, I strip off all my clothes and from a drawer pull out my favorite jeans. My DJ’s. Dom jeans.”
In MARIO BAVA’s (credited as JOHN M. OLD) lush 1963 sadomasochist horror film, THE WHIP AND THE BODY, actor CHRISTOPHER LEE doesn’t don sex jeans, but he does weld a big whip and even bigger dom energy than Christian Gray could ever hope to attain.
CHRISTOPHER LEE stars as Kurt Menliff, a nobleman who returns to his family estate to reconnect with his estranged father and former lover, Nevenka.
PLOT:
CHRISTOPHER LEE stars as Kurt Menliff, the sadistic son of a wealthy Count, who returns to the family castle, much to the dismay of his relatives, their servants, and the beautiful Nevenka (DALIAH LAVI) with whom he shares a fondness for the lash. When Kurt is found murdered, it brings no peace to those who had feared him, as his vengeful spirit cannot be contained by the grave, and he returns to torment those unfortunate enough to remain within Menliff Manor.
Nevenka shares Kurt’s love for pain in Bava’s THE WHIP AND THE BODY.
KILLS:
The spectre of death hovers over the entirety of this Gothic tale, so it’s no wonder that the first death in it is the most important, and the most surprising. Kurt has returned to his family estate as the black sheep, desiring to get back into the good graces of his father in order to have his title restored to him. Years ago, there was some messiness involving the daughter of their housekeeper Giorgia (HARRIET MEDIN), who got involved with the charismatic Kurt. After he had his sadistic fun with the young woman, he abandoned her and she killed herself by stabbing herself through the neck with a dagger which, in a move that would make any high-school goth kid swoon, now forever remains enshrined, blood and all, in a bell jar in the family home.
Let me backup a second. Kurt is kinky. And by kinky, I don’t mean cheap, $10 fuzzy pink handcuffs and sex dice that come up with some bullshit non-erotic action like “tickle ear” to perform. Kurt likes to flog ladies, and they seem, for the most part, to enjoy it as well. On the first day of his return back to the family home, he reconnects with the lovely Nevenka, who is now engaged to his brother Christian (TONY KENDALL). He confronts her when she is down by the beach alone, kissing her passionately, but she pushes him away. He brings out his trusty horse whip and proceeds to start whipping her back, intoning that she hasn’t changed at all and that she’s always loved violence, until they are passionately entangled in the sand together. The problem is Nevenka seems to run away from her own fetishes and Kurt seems hell-bent to bring them out of her.
Okay, back to the death stuff. Everyone in the family has it out for Kurt, so when he is stabbed through the throat in his room by an unseen assailant, the entire household is immediately under suspicion. What makes it worse, is that the dagger used in his death is the same that the young jilted woman used to kill herself. The Menliff clan hold a funeral for the now-deceased Kurt, entombing his body in the family crypt on their property. Incidentally, there is a fantastic shot of a close-up of the cross on the casket as it slides down to reveal CHRISTOPHER LEE’s face inside of it, a great nod to his famous role as Dracula only five years earlier.
But because this is Bava, the dead don’t stay dead for long. After the funeral, Nevenka begins to see Kurt around the castle, still wearing the bloody bandage around his neck. She even sees him come into her room one night to flog her, leaving muddy boot prints behind him, but when her fiancée comes into the room upon hearing her cries, the prints are gone. When Kurt’s father is found dead in his room one morning (also from a knife wound to the neck), Nevenka becomes convinced that Kurt is still alive, leading her down a trail of psychosis that will ultimately be her undoing.
A scene from MARIO BAVA’S gothic romance, THE WHIP AND THE BODY.
VISUALS/SFX:
MARIO BAVA films have a visual style that never seems to get gimmicky or old no matter how many times you watch them. The play between shadows and light, the vivid hues, and lush photography are remarkable and compelling to watch, and THE WHIP AND THE BODY is no exception to the Bava rule. It is a Gothic masterpiece of long, creepy hallways, candlelit rooms, and shadowy crypts bathed in reds, purples, and greens. UBALDO TERZANO was responsible in part for the incredible cinematography, and he regularly worked with Bava on several films such as BLACK SUNDAY and BLOOD AND BLACK LACE. Even Bava himself contributed the cinematography on THE WHIP AND THE BODY, in addition to also doing the special effects for the film, but was uncredited.
Though the visuals are unquestionably stunning, Bava doesn’t sleep on his sound design either. Like a jazz virtuoso, he makes it about the notes you don’t hear, and in the silences and shadows the tension and impact is revealed and built masterfully. The night the Menliff patriarch is found murdered in his bed, Nevenka hears what sounds like a whip slicing through the air repeatedly, following the sound to Kurt’s bedroom. She goes inside and finds nothing, but when a gust of wind blows open the windows, a tree vine comes swinging into the bedroom, cracking back and forth like a whip, and with almost gleeful delight, the audience realizes that she can’t run from her kinky predilections forever, after getting her karma clapped on by that extremely symbolic branch.
DALIAH LAVI as Nevenka and CHRISTOPHER LEE as Kurt in THE WHIP AND THE BODY.
PERFORMANCES:
CHRISTOPHER LEE was a force to be reckoned with in all of his films, and THE WHIP AND THE BODY is no exception. As the sadistic nobleman Kurt Menliff, Lee infuses the character with enough charisma and BDE to make Christian Gray look like a flacid simp. In one scene, Giorgia, the housemaid whose daughter killed herself because of Kurt’s cruelty, brings him a cup of tea, to which he pointedly asks her, “Poison?”, his voice positively dripping with gleeful snark. Lee is perfectly cast, somehow making the depraved Kurt more than just a one-dimensional villain. Part of what makes this film so revolutionary for its time is that it embraces the eroticism of BDSM, instead of just making Kurt a monster who likes to beat women for his own pleasure. Make no mistake, Kurt is a sadomasochistic dick, but he’s also unashamed of his own desires and what gives him pleasure. He’s free in a way that Nevenka won’t allow herself to be, and he doesn’t hesitate to constantly call her out on that fact.
Speaking of Nevenka, Israeli actress DALIAH LAVI gives an absolutely fantastic performance as the beautiful yet repressed former flame of Kurt’s. Once Kurt is killed, her descent into madness kicks off, as she sees the spectre of Kurt everywhere she goes. One night, when she sees the ghost of Kurt come into her room with the whip, she initially holds up a pair of scissors to him, but he deftly plucks them out of her hand, and when he starts whipping her back on the bed, she at first denies that she still wants him, but then erotically bits her knuckle in an attempt to silence her pleasured moans. Nevenka likes to be dominated, but she hides and fights it every step of the way, afraid of what it says about her. Not only does she have her shameful fantasies to contend with, which would no doubt be seen as subversive and perverse in her society, but she also has to deal with the fact that her fiancée Christian is in love with Kurt’s cousin, Katia (EVELYN STEWART). Once that is revealed, Nevenka’s journey goes from subjugated noblewoman to full-on DARREN ARONOFSKY BLACK SWAN realness, with Nevenka descending into a swirling maw of sexual repression, hallucinations, and conflict of identity. By the end, much like BLACK SWAN’s protagonist Nina, Nevenka can no longer distinguish reality from her hallucinations, and, like Nina, the culmination of that ends in a heartbreaking and finite action.
Nevenka is haunted by the ghost of her former lover in THE WHIP AND THE BODY.
OVERALL IMPRESSIONS:
Bava masterfully combines all the elements of a Gothic romance, murder mystery, and psychosexual horror film into one big, steamy, licentious stew. Even watching the film now, nearly 60 years after its release, THE WHIP AND THE BODY still has the ability to shock with its taboo subject matter, making non-normative sexuality a central motif, and that’s precisely what makes it so subversive. Even in our modern and seemingly more progressive society, BDSM is still viewed either as a fringe sexual microcosm, or has been distilled down into more palatable vanilla construct for general audiences to easily consume en mass, such as the ubiquitous FIFTY SHADES OF GRAY phenomenon. I’m not saying that THE WHIP AND THE BODY gets BDSM dynamics right, as the core tenants of healthy BDSM relationships are trust, communication, and consent (all of which are sorely lacking between Kurt and Nevenka), but it does create an important dialogue. Combining Hitchcockian vibes with big Edgar Allen Poe goth energy, THE WHIP AND THE BODY is a stunning snapshot of perverse urges, familial guilt, repressed sexuality, revenge, and the psychological terror the mind can unleash upon itself.
And not a pair of Dom jeans in sight.
THE GORY DETAILS:
This is one of the few European movies that CHRISTOPHER LEE made without providing his voice for any of its language tracks, as he had returned home to Switzerland by the time shooting wrapped (as a result, he is dubbed in the English version by DAN STURKIE). He would quickly regret not dubbing his voice for this movie, as he considered it to be the best of his European movies, and ensured that he provided his voice for at least the English versions of all of his later movies.
Most of the cast and crew were required to use English pseudonyms because the producers hoped to fool the intended Italian audience into thinking this movie was produced incognito by a British or American studio, such as HAMMER FILM PRODUCTIONS or AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL PICTURES. When MARIO BAVA was asked by LUCIANO MARTINO to use "an old American name", he jokingly took the suggestion to a literal degree by creating his alias "John M. Old".
CHRISTOPHER LEE had hoped to work with Director MARIO BAVA on another movie, but their busy schedules kept them from working together again. Lee had also heard inaccurate rumors suggesting that Bava's mental health was in decline, and upon seeing A BAY OF BLOOD (1971), he was so disgusted by its violence that he left the theater in protest.
MY RATING: 8/10
WHERE TO WATCH:
Sling TV, Amazon Prime, Shudder and YouTube
