Blood and Black Lace (Italian: 6 donne per l'assassino, lit. '6 Women for the Murderer') is a 1964 giallo film directed by Mario Bava and starring Eva Bartok and Cameron Mitchell. The story concerns the brutal murders of a Roman fashion house's models, committed by a masked killer in a desperate attempt to obtain a scandal-revealing diary.
The film began development shortly after Bava had ended his long-time association with Galatea Film, for whom he had made most of his earlier works as a cinematographer and director. Made with a budget that was lower than several of the director's prior horror films, Blood and Black Lace was an Italian, French and West German international co-production between Emmepi Cinematografica, Les Productions Georges de Beauregard and Monachia Film. Different sources and ministerial papers provide varying degrees of information on the authorship of the film's screenplay, with most sources crediting Marcello Fondato, Giuseppe Barillà and Bava as co-writers; co-star Mary Arden is credited with having adapted the script's dialogue into English. Most of the technical staff and several cast members were veterans of Bava's previous films. Principal photography began in Rome in late 1963 with an international, multilingual cast; some actors read their lines fluently, while others performed them phonetically.
Film critics and historians such as Tim Lucas and Roberto Curti have identified Blood and Black Lace as representing an evolution in both Bava's style and the thriller genre depicted in cinema. Having used thriller conventions in his earlier films The Girl Who Knew Too Much and "The Telephone", a segment of Black Sabbath, Bava used this film to combine elements of contemporary West German murder mystery films (krimis) with the lurid juxtaposition of eroticism and violence present in popular fiction of the time, namely the long-running Giallo Mondadori series of pulp novels. Though it did not start a trend in the genre, the film has retrospectively been described as being among the first giallo films, as its exaggerated use of colour photography and eschewing of a traditional mystery in favour of a focus on set pieces of graphic murder would become staples of the form.
The film premiered in Rome on March 14, 1964, where it was commercially unsuccessful. Contemporary and retrospective reviews primarily praised Bava's direction and its visual style, although some found its plot to be weak and lacking in characterisation. After the successful release of Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in 1970, a wave of gialli were made in Italy, with many sharing stylistic traits from Blood and Black Lace. Works by such filmmakers as Martin Scorsese and Pedro Almodóvar have referenced the film, and it has appeared on several "best of" lists related to thriller, horror and slasher films.
Plot[]
Isabella, one of many beautiful models employed at Christian Haute Couture, a Roman fashion house, is walking through the property's grounds at night when she is violently killed by an assailant wearing a white, featureless mask, a black fedora and a trenchcoat. Police inspector Silvestri investigates and interviews Massimo Morlacchi, who co-manages the salon with the recently widowed Countess Cristiana Cuomo. He also questions Isabella's ex-boyfriend Franco Scalo, an antique dealer; Silvestri discovers that he is a cocaine user, and that Isabella had attempted to break his addiction.
It is revealed that Isabella kept a diary detailing the staff's personal lives and vices. One of the models, Nicole — who is Scalo's current lover — finds the diary and promises to give it to the police, but her co-worker Peggy steals it during a fashion show. That night, Nicole visits Scalo's store to supply him with cocaine when she is stalked by the murderer, who kills her by slamming a spiked glove into her face. The figure searches the corpse and her purse for the diary, but cannot find it. Marco, a nervous, pill-popping dresser who has unrequited feelings for Peggy, visits her at her apartment offering protection, which she politely refuses. She is then confronted and beaten by the killer, who writes a demand in a notebook for the location of the diary. She says she burned it in her fireplace because it contained details of an abortion she underwent. Enraged, the murderer knocks her unconscious. The assailant then carries her away just as Silvestri arrives, takes her to another location, ties her to a chair, and continues the interrogation. Peggy pulls off the mask and is shocked to recognise her assailant, who kills her by pressing her face against a burning furnace.
Silvestri surmises that the murderer is a sex maniac and is one of the men associated with the salon, so he arrests everyone he believes might be responsible. Panicking when he is identified as having visited Peggy's apartment, Marco tries to accuse Cesare, the house's eavesdropping dress designer, for the killings because of impotency; he then suffers an epileptic seizure and is hospitalised, and his drugs turn out to be medication for his condition. While the suspects are in custody, Greta, another model, finds Peggy's corpse stashed in the trunk of her car, and the killer smothers her to death. Having discovered Peggy and Greta's bodies, Silvestri releases all the men; as they collect their confiscated belongings, the killer's notebook is shown to belong to Morlacchi. After returning to Cristina, he is revealed to be Isabella, Nicole and Peggy's killer, while Cristiana murdered Greta to give him an alibi; the hypersexualization of the killings was merely a red herring to disguise their motivations. Their killing spree began with the murder of Cristina's husband, which they made to look like an accident, allowing them to marry in secret. Isabella had found out the truth about the crime and blackmailed them.
Morlacchi convinces Cristiana that, although the diary has been destroyed, they must commit one more murder to satisfy Silvestri's hypothesis. Later that night, Cristiana drowns a fifth model, the voluptuous Tao-Li, in her bathtub; to implicate her as the murderer, she leaves the mask, hat and coat strewn around the bathroom, and slashes Tao-Li's wrists with a razor, making her death seem like a suicide. Cristiana prepares to leave the apartment when she is interrupted by a loud knocking on the front door. She escapes through a second-story window and climbs down a drainpipe which falls under her weight, slamming her to the ground.
At the fashion house, Morlacchi excitedly searches through Cristiana's desk for her jewellery. A bloody and bruised Cristiana enters the room, now realising that their marriage was merely a means for him to become the heir to her fortune. He had been the "policeman" knocking on Tao-Li's door, and knowing how Cristiana would attempt to escape, deliberately sabotaged the drainpipe. Morlacchi attempts to persuade her, but she shoots him dead. After calling the police and asking for Silvestri, the mortally wounded Cristiana collapses next to Morlacchi's body.