“This poisoned rose”: The mill of the stones women. Beauty between worlds, desperate parents, feverish lovers. A small jewel of Giorgio Ferroni

“The poisoned rose
That you gave to me
It left me half alive
And half in ecstasy” Elvis Costello.

The mill of the stones women (Il mulino delle donne I gave pietra)

The director: Giorgio Ferroni

Year: 1960

Country: Italy / France

90 min.

It photographs: Pier Ludovico Pavoni

Music: Carlo Innocenzi

Script: Remigio Del Grosso, Giorgio Ferroni, Ugo Liberatore, Giorgio Stegani according to the story of Pieter van Weigen (?) I distribute: Pierre Brice, Scilla Gabel, Wolfgang Preiss, Dany Carrel, Herbert Böhme, Liana Orfei, Marco Guglielmi, Olga Solbelli, Alberto Archetti

The Italian Gothic is still perhaps, the most stimulant, most creative and conceptualmente dense period of the Italian fantaterror and unfortunately one of least explored or known for having remained secret under the addictive yellow loudmouth who happened to him.

Giorgio Ferroni contributed to the splendor of the first 60 a piece of the esthetic caliber and the romantic - delirious depth of this one The mill of the stones women and the same way he collaborated in the unexpected and welcome comeback of the genre more than one decade later (that more propitious moment for a genre that treats about the death to film it once died as he remained already explained here). A brief resurrection that tried to infiltrate of "goticismo" the esthetics setentera prevailing (or vice versa), impelled precisely by the original creators, Bava, Margheriti, Freda … or he itself, which contributed the recoverable one The night of the devils (1972) with Gianni Garko and disarming Agostina Belli, an adaptation of The family Vurdalack of Alexei Tolstoi who had already served from base to one of the chapters of the excellent piece "baviana" three faces of the fear in 1962.

In this case the history is not definitely of ultragrave, as it was obligatory, but the beautiful one, a Scilla Gabel that is a pure appearance, is not completely dead although his enchantment and the unhealthy affectionate drive that it activates do not suffer for it; but in some intermediate estadío between the life and the death suffering from an illness in to the blood that forces it to constant finished transfusions. A species of “vampira of the science” through that there lives a time given by other young people to whom it bleeds a medical catastrophe to his constant service to which a viscous Herbert Böhme interprets in search of a permanent remedy that never comes and that allows him to support his insane influence on a desperate father.

The sense of madness, of impossible place of cinematographic wakefulness that presides at the movie (and the genre for extension) is born in this occasion, and in his best moments, of the illusion of the fantastic thing. A recreation doubly staging during his amazing central block, in which, to a time the personages and the director put in functioning a phantasmagoric fiction and alucinatoria destined so much to the feverish lover Pierre Brice (the mythical Winnetou for romantic westerns on Karl May for Rialto who here is debated between the mundane thing and the ultraarea, between the serviceability and the rise), as to us, explicitando sofisticadamente the proper nature of magic / unreal trick of the way.

Little more can add to itself without spoiling it completely (that is not that either), beyond recounting his influences / references to The crimes of the museum of wax (1953) of André De Toth (brilliant this carousel of “stones women” who conceal the fault in his casing) and to the most curious production of Robert Baker and Monty Berman (with everything what this means as for dismal tastes and grandguignolescos) The blood of the vampire (1958) of Henry Cass under script of essential Jimmy Sangster incorporating this already present medical / sickly component earlier in the fundacional I vampiri (1956), an exceptional contemporary review of the myth of the Countess Bathory and the eternal youth begun by Freda and finished off by Bava (neither more nor less) or the tonal and thematic parallelisms (the history of a father, here a splendid Wolfgang Preiss, degraded up to the crime and the dementia for saving a daughter) with The eyes without face (1960) of Georges Franju or Screams in the night (1961) of Jesus Franco. And of course to marvel with the purity of his style, a baroque and hasty planning that will transform the horror into tragedy, with his almost tactile chromatism (these symbolic yellow and red garments that the protagonist shows) or with the party that Ferroni extracts to the practically only stage, this Mill of sober exterior appearance that conceals an internal hell, perfect metaphor of tortuous Dr. Loren Bohlem. The most beautiful movie that there deserves more than one period that deserves much more.

Filed bajo:60's, special Agent (bent The big), The mill of the stones women, Fantastique, Gothic, Giorgio Ferroni, craftsmen's Union, horror, Italy, Melodrama Tagged: to the Italian, carousel, science, crime, devotion, The mill of the stones women, Fantastique, figures, Gothic, Giorgio Feroni, daughter, horror, medicine, Melodrama, death, father, Pierre Brice, representation, romantic, blood, Scilla Gabel, ultrtumba, vampirismo, Wolfgang Preiss Download Saturday Night Live S35E17 Jude Law/Pearl Jam online