La donna del lago
Tags: horror

Plot synopsis:
Scotland under King James V (reigned 1513–1542) was in a state of unrest. Amongst the rebels were Douglas (Elena's father), Rodrigo (to whom she has been betrothed) and Malcolm (whom she loves). The King is in the habit of going about his lands disguised as Uberto. Seeing Elena he instantly falls in love with her, but she repels his advances stating that he is confusing hospitality and friendship for romantic interest. In the meantime he has realised that she is related to his enemies. The clans gather to overthrow the king, and Rodrigo and Douglas discover Elena's secret love for Malcolm. She tries to keep the peace, but the call to arms diverts the soldiers. The battle does not go well, and Rodrigo is killed. Again the king in disguise encounters Elena and gives her a ring to take to the king if she is ever in trouble. She decides to use it and goes to Stirling Castle where she finds that both Malcolm and Douglas are prisoners. She pleads their cases, and the king magnanimously pardons them and blesses the union, now unimpeded by Rodrigo, between Elena and Malcolm.

Review: Having been very impressed by co-director Bazzoni's subsequent "The Fifth Cord", I have been very keen to see "The Lady of the Lake" since I first heard of it four or five years ago when i read Adrian Luther Smith's Excellent "Bloody and Black Lace" - a definitive collection of giallo reviews.
This is the only DVD outing I've ever heard of and there were both pros (a fantastic anamorphic print) and cons (it's Spanish and Italian only, with Spanish subs) - the cons apply as I'm an English speaker, but I was able to manage enough Spanish (with my dictionary at hand) to navigate through this beautiful, atmospheric film in Spanish with subs showing.It's as good as it's advance word suggests - an ice cool, incredibly shot mood piece which emerges as a giallo only in hindsight, as at the time it was filmed, the concept hadn't been formed and we were still four years away from the giallo cycle proper which was initiated by the box office success of Argento's "The Bird with the Crystal Plummage" and Martino's "The Case of the Scorpion's Tail" amongst others.
The writer presses on in his investigations, seeking the facts behind her death and finding an awful lot of problems lying beneath the town's impassive surface, but in doing so unleashes the pitch black heart of darkness that lies within this film's conclusion.
I suspect a lot of the time shifts come from co-screenwriter Gulio Questi, who would later return to the editing styles shown here in his own films such as "Django Kill...
It kind of is, in the same way The Girl Who Knew Too Much resembles a giallo, actually it's a 'woman gone missing' mystery shot in black and white where a lot of the usual giallo tropes are absent for the simple reason they had not been mapped down yet; the same movie made ten years later would have probably been shot in garish Technicolor, the murders would take place on screen and we'd be treated to the black-gloved hand of the murderer.
A lot of common giallo themes can be found here though, sexual obsession, distorted memory, a chain of events is unlocked when a character visits a place of his past, the boundaries between reality and fantasy/madness blurred by something that may or may not be a product of the mind, yet I'd place the movie closer to the psychological horror Polanski was yet to do than Mario Bava, or a movie that would influence the gialli of Sergio Martino more than those of Dario Argento.If you take it apart to study the parts it was made of, you'll find a lot of familiar ideas reconfigured together in similar ways in other movies.
This is the type of movie where a fiction writer (who is "dead inside" by his own admission) arrives at a remote town by a lake to look for a girl who presumably committed suicide a year ago, the town streets are empty and there's talk of a family harboring a "terrible secret", the writer stays at an old hotel where according to the suave-creepy owner "he's the only resident" because it's off-season, at some point a photo of the dead woman is presented that throws a new light into the situation, and there's a mysterious slaughterhouse behind the hotel that looks like the abandoned warehouse Nosferatu hauls his coffin to in Murnau's 1922 film.The movie does a lot of something I find annoying: a scene where people behave in odd ways or has a certain kind of offbeat atmosphere plays out and then we cut to a shot of the writer jolted awake in his bed back at the hotel.
Bazzoni is a little too quick to point out "DREAM SCENE!!" to his audience, a little too quick to reassure the viewer that "this part that didn't make sense wasn't really supposed to" so that as the movie begins to morph into something else we're lulled back to the safe environment of the genre picture, where the protagonist can narrate his thoughts in voice-over and where 'dream scene' appears to be the director's way of saying "I want to shoot with the whites washed out".But even that is not what it seems, because at some point we get the flashback of a memory of something that happened in one of the writer's previous stays in the hotel, the writer walks up the stairs and spies on a love scene between the dead woman and a man he can't identify, and we get extreme closeup shots of an eye watching this through a keyhole.
Later this memory is expanded upon in the writer's mind and what we saw at first suddenly takes new meaning so that the love scene may had not been a love scene and the victim may had not been the victim after all, but it doesn't become clear whether this is a repressed memory unlocked by circumstance or a wish fulfillment dream, the writer furnishing a twisty conclusion worthy of one of his pulpy books to an incident that remains unexplained and ambiguous like most real life situations usually are.
Fittingly this new twist feels very film noir, deceit and greed is involved and for a moment the moral universe of the film is turned on its head.This is what I take from the Lady of the Lake, like the blurry photo that is only a magnified detail of a larger frame, the sense of mystery partially revealed to us for a moment then withdrawn from our eyes again.
One morning she's found dead and if only we'd have gone down there to talk to her while there was still time.Near the end the movie shifts from eye-level Shining track shots of hotel corridors to vertical shots of the protagonist going down a spiral staircase, the whole geography is now inverted, and we're invited inside the mysterious slaughterhouse for the big reveal.
It's all a bit like we're seeing the seedy industrial locations of Tetsuo through the wintry viewfinder of Sven Nykvyst, or like fetish filmmaker Maria Beatty had brought her inky blacks to the glowy diffused whites of Funeral Parade of Roses.For the end the movie feels the need to explain itself and provide a definitive conclusion, with the villain recounting the whodunit details to the protagonist, and then in very melodramatic fashion a crazed woman is running down the beach, arms flailing wildly.
This early giallo has the look of Bazzoni's later The Fifth Cord and the mood of his last film Footprints On the Moon, and once again the director impresses with a mix of noir-ish visuals and people thinking a lot.Bernardo is a burned out writer who, following a failed relationship, heads to a hotel on the edge of a lake where he was once infatuated with a maid named Tilde.
First off there's the owner's daughter Irma, who is upset that the family's reputation is shattered, then there's her brother Mario and his weird wife who barely talks and walks around the lake at midnight, then there's the owner himself, whose happy, servile façade begins to slip as Bernardo goes snooping around the place.Although there's not a lot of action in this one the general moodiness of the piece is cranked way up.
Just like the brilliant Fifth Cord, Bazzoni uses light sources a lot here and often has his actors standing in front of harsh lighting, saving the weirdest light tricks for when Bernardo is either fantasising about the suspects motives or having one of many vivid dreams.
There's quite a lot to compare to Footprints on the Moon as well, with one lonely character in a deserted holiday resort trying to figure some strange puzzle out.For a really early giallo, and for Bazzoni's debut, this is a slick, well made film.
However, I would say that the film is closer to a supernatural mystery film than a Giallo and it also shares a lot in common with the popular American film noir style; stemming from it's picture, execution and subject material.
The film is very much of the high quality variety and director Luigi Bazzoni takes time and a lot of care to ensure that the film is haunting and mysterious as possible - which pays dividends as the plot starts to pan out.
However, it would appear that there is more to the apparent suicide as Bernard is shown a picture suggesting she was pregnant...The film is directed by Luigi Bazzoni, who go on to make one of the best seventies Giallo's with the excellent The Fifth Cord as well as one of the oddest genre films with Footsteps in 1975.
Overall, The Lady of the Lake will probably not please all viewers; but it's a very well made mystery and anyone that considers themselves a fan of Italian cinema should check it out!.
A young writer Bernardo (Peter Baldwin) decides to come back to a small town, set nearby a lake, where he had previously stayed and met a attractive maid and waitress – Tilde (Virna Lisi).
He plans to rediscover her and starts searching, after which he is informed by the owner of the hotel about her mysterious death This is often considered to be one of the earliest examples of giallo genre, along with Blood And Black Lace (1964).
In spite of this fact, this cannot be considered, just like later effort by Bazzoni, masterful Footprints On The Moon (1975), to be a typical mystery that made a pattern for all films of this genre, as it differs drastically.
Owing to this, the viewer is able to follow all the vacillations of the main character and follow all possible ways of Tinde's demise accompanying this mystery envisioned by Bernardo.
Fortunately, on account of tremendous direction by Bazzoni, his visual style, exquisite taste for creating adequate atmosphere of anticipation and ambiguity, The Possessed (1965) (La donna del lago) is a true gem.The cast is nothing special, but all of the actors manage to achieve a satisfying level of acting artistry.
Their roles are rather a minor ones, as Peter Baldwin is the most important character and the action revolves around him.Overall, La donna del lago (1965) might not be as visually striking as gorgeous Footprints On The Moon (1975), nonetheless it's a very impressive little movie that should be more known than actually it is.
Luigi Bazzoni attaches a great importance to a psychological aspect of characters in the film and owing to this outshines many other flicks in its genre.
The film, in fact, can perhaps best be described as an arty semi-giallo; interestingly, it contains several echoes to Bazzoni's later effort: the resort town, the central hotel setting, the strange characters encountered by the hero (in FOOTPRINTS, the bewildered protagonist was a woman), the mystery revolving around a missing person  not to mention the deliberate (and deliberately-paced) oblique narrative.What is immediately arresting here (in spite of the somewhat fuzzy quality of the print on display) is the supreme style allotted to the film's look  which is wintry, bleak and forbidding  by its two directors (incidentally, this was Rossellini's only stint in such capacity!); to this end, they wisely recruited veterans such as cinematographer Leonida Barboni (but who also adopts peculiar framing throughout, none more so that the pan in extreme close-up of a character's face with the gleaming lake for backdrop!) and production designer Luigi Scaccianoce.
 was co-written (with Bazzoni and Franco Rossellini) by Giulio Questi; for the record, as a director in his own right, the latter went on to make such idiosyncratic yet haunting revisions of genre convention as the Spaghetti Western DJANGO, KILLIF YOU LIVE, SHOOT!
(1967) and the giallo DEATH LAID AN EGG (1968).The cast is compact but exceptionally noteworthy: Peter Baldwin (very good in Dino Risi's LOVE IN ROME [1960]  here, in what I assume to be his most significant role, he's downright excellent!), Salvo Randone (as the owner of the hotel whom the hero suspects of both lechery and murder, he manages to alternate between a genial and sinister countenance throughout), Valentina Cortese (a typically fine performance, though her weather-beaten looks make it hard to convince us she's Randone's daughtereven if a reasonable age gap separates the two actors!), Philippe Leroy (having appeared in so many films from the 1960s and 1970s that I've watched in recent years and, thanks also to his remarkable versatility, the French actor has become a firm favorite of mine!), Virna Lisi (while undeniably sensual, her contribution basically amounts to an extended cameo  since her character, who seems to have turned the heads of virtually the entire male cast at some point, is already dead when the film opens and we only see the girl in flashback/fantasy sequences!) and Pia Lindstrom (a rare cinematic appearance by Ingrid Bergman's elder daughter  being similarly steeped in mystery, alas, she too is barely given time to create a flesh-and-blood characterbut, then, her resultant fragile performance emerges to be all the more moving for it!).The plot concerns an author (Baldwin) arriving off-season at a resort town he habitually retired to in order to work, hoping to meet again a servant-girl (Lisi) he's enamored of employed at the hotel run by Randone; however, he's told she's no longer therebut notices that her cloak is still hanging in the closet, follows a woman in the streets he sees wearing it (and is eventually disappointed to learn the outfit now belongs to Lisi's replacement).
At one point, Lindstrom makes a weak attempt to communicate with Baldwin but, before they can meet (he had previously noticed the girl walking aimlessly by the lake at night a number of times, but never quite mustered the nerve to confront her), she too is found dead!
Eventually, the hero starts to think he may have gotten it all wrong: perhaps Lisi wasn't so much a victim of circumstance (periodically abused by both father and son!) as a femme fatale who got killed simply because she was too greedy.The final revelation then, takes things in another direction altogether; while certainly effectively handled, the scene does perhaps constitute a slight let-down  as it won't surprise anyone familiar with Mario Bava's THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1963), actually the film credited with originating the giallo tradition, in which Cortese also features.
This movie is about a writer that takes on a trip to the place where he use to go to write in hope of meeting the girl that was maid in the hotel last time he was there.He finds out she is dead and that it possibly is murder and not suicide as the official explanation is.
I think it is most for people that enjoy some certain style of black and white movies..
'Lady of The Lake' (aka) 'The Possessed is an enigmatic, almost impenetrable quasi-giallo by the excellent, Luigi Bazzoni, the talented, intellectual auteur behind the equally idiosyncratic, almost anti-gialli 'Footsteps On The Moon'(1975).
The difining moment for a man looking for something in the past took him in a cold resort try to find a mystery woman that disappeared without a trace, a rare picture that to fill up more a mystery than a giallo, whatever be the genre don't really matter at all, the freeze atmosphere hook the anxious audience who knows what's coming to next, two false step is cleary noticed, a lack of more acting of Virna and the scene in the shore of lake, the last one specifically, a priceless fine moment to see Valentina Cortese once again who was a great italian actress in near past, above average mystery!!!Resume:First watch: 2018 / How many: 1 / Source: DVD / Rating: 8.
It seems like a giallo, but it's way closer to a film noir.
Often, people say that a movie feels like it's inside a dream, but so much of this movie feels like one long evening of interconnected night terrors.Also known as The Lady of the Lake, this films was written by Giulio Questi (Death Laid an Egg) and co-directed by Franco Rossellini (who would later produce Caligula) and Luigi Bazzoni (The Fifth Cord, Footprints on the Moon).Bernard (Peter Baldwin) is a novelist who has given up on life, despite his growing fame.
And she may not have been the perfect woman that his creativity made her out to be.Much like the giallo protagonist -- a stranger on a strange who is often an untrustworthy narrator who must now investigate a crime that they themselves are implicated in -- Bernard learns more about how his vacation getaway also isn't the heaven that he dreamed that it was.Thanks to the recent Arrow Video releases, I've done a deep dive on the films Bazzoni and wish that he had made more than the three giallo-esque films on his resume.
Many consider the first real giallo film to be Mario Bava's EVIL EYE (aka THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH) made in 1963.
What some fail to note is that the genre did indeed begin in the sixties and this film, THE POSSESSED, was one of those earlier titles.The story revolves around a writer named Bernard (Peter Baldwin) who feels compelled to return to a small village where he vacationed previously.
There is also the Tilde's father who gets drunk and rants at the hotel from the street.The movie combines elements of the whodunit with a ghost like quality though it involves no spirits.
Much like her meeting with the writer influenced his decision to return looking for her, her presence hovers over the entire town as the true fate she befell gets closer with each passing minute of film.Shot in black and white the movie does possess a certain haunting quality to it.
It's an entertaining movie that fans of giallo will certainly enjoy.Arrow Video is releasing this version of the film in pristine fashion with a 2k restoration made from the original camera negative.