A WHITE DRESS FOR MARIALE (1972)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

Eight years after Romano Scavolini directed MARIALE, he enjoyed some notoriety thanks to the British ban of the horror films called "video nasties," which included his 1980 film NIGHTMARE. I have not seen that film, nor any of the other films Scavolini worked on, though I have the impression that this quasi-giallo MARIALE is his only other movie to have received circulation in an English language dub.

I call the film a "quasi-giallo" because it does spotlight a half-dozen brutal murders as do real giallos. However, there's no detective work in ferreting out the killer, nor does the script give viewers any real suspects except the titular Mariale (Evelyn Stewart). The film's structure approximates that of the "old dark house" mystery, in which a bunch of people get stranded in an isolated locale while a killer knocks them off one by one. That said, MARIALE's two writers may have produced the more wildly colorful "old dark house" flick ever made, for the brightly lit "mansion of murder" is full of sumptuous furnishings and art-works.

A prologue establishes that as a child Mariale was somehow present when her cuckold father caught his wife (clad in the white dress of the title) and her young lover canoodling in the forest and shot them both. What happened next, no one knows, for the script catapults Mariale to her adulthood. She lives in the aforementioned mansion, which may or may not be her family's property, since she's married to a slightly older man, Paolo (Luigi Pistilli, about ten years older than Evelyn Stewart). Paolo, Mariale and a barely speaking servant (who keeps cages of animals in the basement) live at this country estate in isolation, partly because Paolo keeps Mariale doped up due to her past trauma. But at some point Mariale gets access to a phone and invites a half-dozen friends to drive out to the estate for a party. The partygoers descend on the mansion and Paolo can't come up with a reason to get rid of them, so they stick around for a big dinner (that winds up looking like a parody of the Last Supper).

The party animals apparently knew both Mariale and Paolo prior to their isolation, though the script never offers specifics of where any of them met. They're all raging assholes, particularly the Italian fellow who insults his Negro wife by calling her a "monkey." The black woman doesn't seem as nasty as the others, though one wonders why she married a foul-mouthed racist. The scripters couldn't care less about any relationship except that of Massimo (Ivan Rassimov), Mariale's former boyfriend, who clearly wants her to cheat on her husband with him. The guests' cavortings fill roughly twenty minutes before the killings begin.

The writers provide no red herrings to distract from Mariale, so it's no surprise that her trauma has made her a psycho-killer. Her old friends are an unsavory lot (and dumb, since after the first killing no one suggests running to the cars and driving away). But she has no particular grudge against any of them. The final sequence suggests that she has some sort of father-complex, possibly as the result of some incestuous act between her and her murderous sire. She may have been seeking a father-image in marrying the older Paolo, though the script does not say so. Does his act of drugging her translate to parental abuse? Maybe, but since the party animals are all sex-mad, and Mariale's mother died due to an act of illicit sex, maybe she invited them to her abbatoir so that she could use her old friends as symbols of the transgressions of her mother and the mother's lover.

There's only one moment where Paolo is explicitly compared to the dead dad. At the climax, Massimo catches Mariale killing her last victim, and grapples with her. Paolo comes in with a shotgun, rattles off a vague explanation about Mariale's craziness, kills both Mariale and Massimo, and then eats lead himself. In the shot where Paolo shoots Mariale-- who is clad in the same bullet-riddled dress her mother wore when slain-- director Scavolini flashes back to the opening scene showing the mother being shot by the father, so no viewer can doubt that there's some parallelism intended.

The plot is murky and the characterization illogical, but clearly the writers were shooting for some psychological myth here, perhaps one slightly akin to the previous year's HANDS OF THE RIPPER, where the Ripper's daughter begins her own career of carnage after learning her father's true nature. I'll give Scavolini and his writers a "B" for effort, even if their execution of their motifs rate only a "D."