Mario Bava
La ragazza che sapeva troppo

It is remarkable that the first Italian thriller opens in the same place - Fiumicino - where, twenty years later, the last masterpiece of the genre, Argento's "Tenebre," would begin. It is equally remarkable that one of the protagonists of "The Girl Who Knew Too Much" - John Saxon - is, at the same time, among the main actors involved by Argento in his last great film. It is similarly remarkable that Bava's film tells the stories of a foreigner who comes to Italy as a tourist and, against her will, gets entangled in a story bigger than herself, made of crimes and mysteries, much like what happened to the protagonists of almost all of Argento's best films, from "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage," through "Deep Red" and the mentioned "Tenebre." It is decidedly remarkable that the protagonist's inspirations in Bava's film largely stem from reading detective novels, as would happen in "Tenebre," but in a decidedly reversed perspective...

If mystery writers know that three clues make a proof, we might go so far as to say that viewing "The Girl Who Knew Too Much" ('62) represents not only the archetype of Argento's entire cinematography but, by indirect filiation, of all Italian genre cinema, which, with few exceptions - attributable to Bava himself! - essentially reiterated, in the following decades, this work by the Ligurian-origin master.

Without delving too much into the film's plot, partly foreshadowed, partly too delightful to be summed up in a few lines, I note how in this, his first giallo (Bava's previous works should indeed be attributed to the "gothic"), the director set the genre's canons not so much in terms of narrative, but above all, in terms of staging and setting of the story.

While previous gothic works - comparable to certain works by the English Hammer - were characterized, like all genre cinema, by a rural setting, Bava's thrillers are typical urban stories, where the protagonists get lost in a maze of streets, buildings, elevators, first losing their bearings, then their very reason. It is an intelligent and not obvious way of provoking anxiety in the viewer, who shares with the protagonist at the time (in our case, a young American tourist) a progressive alienation and a loss of spatial, and temporal, references in which the individual orients themselves. This technique also allows the director to divert the investigator's attention - and the viewer's own - from the essential details of the story, leading, about three-quarters of the way through the film, to abandon any attempt to decipher reality, to know the murderer's identity, or, simply, to be able to anticipate the story’s very ending.

Alongside this, one should note the particular attention to the photography, in strict black and white, characterizing the film: mindful of the German expressionist school, Bava alternates open fields characterized by particularly intense light (an inspiration Argento himself embraced in the aforementioned "Tenebre") with shots in interior spaces dominated by darkness, sometimes pierced by stage lights, with unnatural and artful cuts. Consider here the unsettling scene where the protagonist enters a deserted building in Rome - Coppedè, reaching a long corridor in the building's attic, illuminated by powerful light bulbs that, however, suggest the darkness of the adjacent rooms, in which the current maniac could be hiding: the light as a guide for the protagonist and her path on one hand, but also a dividing line between brightness (certainty) and the looming darkness (uncertainty, death), with a markedly anxiety-inducing effect on the viewer.

The play of lights also allows the director to work with narrative ellipses, in scenes which, abstracted from the narrated story, have a masterful rhythm and course: think of the shot of the Trinità dei Monti bell towers reflected in a puddle: initially nocturnal, the puddle is tapped by the first drips of rain, distorting the reflected image, then moving to a second, morning moment, where, after the storm, the church reflected in the puddle appears in all its clarity. Here too we symbolically witness the fracture between night, storm, irrationality, and day, light, rationality.

Mario Bava did not seem to take his cinema too seriously, qualifying his films as low-cost products (and often, with little success), shot with makeshift means and without too many pretensions. We will never know if it was false modesty or a form of understatement of a gentleman from another era, as would seem to be suggested by watching this film, recommended, of course, to everyone.