By Todd Garbarini
Attempting
to view the Jess Franco filmography in its entirety is intimidating and
virtually insurmountable as the late writer/director had nearly 200 credits to
his name. Finding all of them on video
is nearly an impossible task, but thanks to DVD and Blu-ray, many of his most
revered titles are now available in high quality transfers. One of the most prolific directors in the
cinema, Mr. Franco, who hailed from Spain and passed away in 2013, was busy up
until the end of his life and while he openly chided the quality of his own
work (rightfully so in his later outings), he has legions of fans the world
over.
It
is impossible to look at the cinema of Italian director Dario Argento, who
himself was influenced by the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and Edgar Wallace, without
knowing that he was heavily inspired by his mentor Mario Bava. The colorful sets and off-kilter camera
angles are trademarks of both directors. The Girl Who Knew Too Much,
Mr. Bava’s 1963 film which is also known as The
Evil Eye and starred John Saxon, is considered by some to be the first giallo film (a subset of the Italian
horror film that is a thriller or a “whodunnitâ€), however another film that can
arguably don this mantle is Mr. Franco’s The
Sadistic Baron von Klaus (1962), a beautifully lensed black and white thriller
that must have been shocking to audiences at the time of its release in a
similar fashion to the reception that Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) received here in the States two years earlier. Like Psycho,
Baron von Klaus has its origins in
literature. Based upon the novel The Hand of a Dead Man by David Khune, Baron von Klaus takes the monster out of
the monster and puts it into a human being. Along with Mr. Bava, Mr. Franco no doubt had an impact on Mr. Argento’s
style and themes. So-called trademarks
attributed to Mr. Argento appear in this film, such as a mysterious killer
donning black gloves; a self-appointed sleuth who attempts to unmask the
identity of the killer; the use of women as sexually desirable objects to be
possessed or dispatched with violently should they spurn the killer’s charms; and
the use of shadows. The plot involves
the titular character, Baron Von Klaus, who comes from a lineage that is cursed
by the ghost of a killer that is more than likely possessing the mind of our
poor anti-hero. Anyone born into this
family has the potential to become a murderer. This becomes a convenient excuse for Von Klaus to behave reprehensibly
and by today’s standards, the film is very tame. However, to have seen this type of story and
depiction of torture and murder in 1962 must have been extremely jarring, and
certainly must have made the audience uneasy. If Mr. Franco was willing to show them this, then they would have to be on their guard just in case he
showed them that.
Von
Klaus’s fiancée is a wonderful woman who loves him unconditionally and cannot
come to terms with the idea that her beloved might somehow be the same person
murdering young women. A police
inspector arrests the wrong man but eventually lets him go. In some ways, this is a segue thriller,
because on the one hand it takes elements of the supernatural which were so
prevalent in the Universal and Hammer thrillers of the preceding decades and
weaves it into this story which anticipates the types of thrillers that were to
become a mainstay of Euro-horror for many years later on. An element that appears multiple times in the
film is one that has been depicted in countless other examples of the genre so
as to become a cliché: a woman takes to the dark and deserted streets alone
after hours on her way home and virtually guarantees that someone will follow
and attack her. At the time this film
was made, it’s possible that audiences simply weren’t expecting someone to do
something so foolish, yet it happens in the dark and dead of night. If the film were remade today, the casting
directors could showcase a pretty young thing sporting the ridiculous white
earbuds that are all the rage, making it more convenient that ever for a killer
to sneak up on her undetected and dispense with her before she knew what hit
her.
Following
the knife-in-the-shower shock murder in the aforementioned Psycho, Baron von Klaus depicts
violence in an explicit and shocking way for the time. Contemporary audiences are numbed to screen
violence in a way that viewers 50 years ago could never have imagined. The dark shadows on the walls of the neighborhood
that the killer haunts are creepy and harken back to the Val Lewton thrillers.
The
new Kino Lorber Blu-ray is transferred from a print that has some imperfections such as
lines that may have been embedded in the emulsion, but nothing too distracting. Overall, this is a very sharp and beautiful
transfer.
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