American Nora Davis (Leticia Roman) travels to Rome for a vacation only to find herself embroiled in a mystery much like one of the thrillers she reads after a nightmarish sequence of events climax in her witnessing what appears to be a murder – only for the victim's body to vanished before anyone else can see it.
As its title suggests, Mario Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much is as much a light-hearted play on Hitchcockian themes as anything else. Indeed, to describe the film as the first giallo, as critics often do, is problematic. For one thing, the film is not the first Italian thriller by any means. For another, for a founding text to exhibit such a high level of self-consciousness is unusual, being more characteristic of a late, decadent period. (cf. the Trinity series or Bava's own Roy Colt and Winchester Jack compared to the works of Leone for the spaghetti western, or Sergio Corbucci's Atrocious Tales of Love and Death for the gialli itself.)
Thus, it's probably safer to argue that the film marks an important marker on the road to the full-blooded giallo, but that its import is significantly less than the no-nonsense viciousness of Blood and Black Lace .
This said, it cannot be denied that The Girl Who Knew Too Much would have an influence on later giallo. Key elements and themes such as the disembodied tape recorded voice luring the hero into danger and the role of gender assumptions in misleading the protagonist, crop up in Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Deep Red to name only the most obvious, while the same director's Tenebre can profitably be read as a self-conscious reinterpretation of Bava's film with a protagonist whose occupation as thriller novelist marks him as a master of giallo discourse.
Nor will the film disappoint those who take it on its own terms, as a black and white comedy thriller rather than a colour giallo. Bava's direction seems more restrained than the norm, with some carefully studied compositions and less zooming and noodling, while the performances from Leticia Roman and John Saxon – the Italian-American actor here convincingly essaying the role of an Italian doctor who assists/romances Roman – are perfectly pitched and invite the viewer to care about their characters more than usual for Bava.
Even the incidentals, like a slightly awkward drugs subplot straight out of Reefer Madness land, work for the film as often as against it, adding to the naive charm of the piece and again signalling its status as the end of one style as much as the beginning of another.
Image Entertainment's Region One DVD of The Girl Who Knew Too Much is released under the rubric of their Mario Bava Collection.
The film is presented in its 1.66:1 OAR, with mono Italian dialogue and English subtitles. While the print used shows its age, the scratches are insufficient to offset a solid transfer with well defined shades and nice sized, always-legible yellow subtitles.
The extras package is good but not outstanding: the usual well written liner notes, biographies and filmographies by Tim Lucas, original theatrical trailer and stills/poster gallery. While the inclusion of the full English language version, The Evil Eye , would have made a superlative extra it was probably never on the cards. A few choice excerpts, such as the oft-mentioned sequence where Bava makes a cameo appearance as a leering figure in a portrait, would have been nice, nonetheless.
Still, this is another solid release for Bava afficionados.
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
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