A Black Veil for Lisa (1968) opens by looking up from within a grave, using the distorting wide-angle lens that will be featured throughout. Lisa (Luciana Paluzzi) wears her black veil, so the film opens by foreshadowing its end, as though the film in between is a flashback experienced by tearful Lisa. It’s not, because she’s not in most of it, even though the film’s truest subject is how fabulous Paluzzi looks in various get-ups. As for why the film begins with its ending, read on.
The first hour of the story plods through a dull police procedural in which Inspector Bulon (John Mills) tries to bust a German drug ring, which might have seemed a hot topic at the time. Some of its members are being executed by hitman Max (Robert Hoffmann) around the fringes of the plot, and the film will eventually treat these two men as doppelgangers for each other, with them on opposite sides of the law.
While this unprepossessing material is unspooling, Bulon is continually distracted by jealous and murderous fantasies about his glamorous and willful wife, Lisa, and her ultra-chic outfits, which seem beyond her husband’s salary. This becomes a paradigm of the viewer’s own attitude, because whenever Lisa graces the screen in her confrontational manner, the film comes temporarily alive, so we keep thinking about the little-seen Lisa, too, and wishing we were spending more time with her than with all these middle-aged geezers in trench coats. We needn’t see much of her to be on her side already.
This Italian-German production, whose Italian title translates as the more interesting-sounding (and more misleading) “Death Has No Sex”, is often identified as a giallo, which usually means a certain type of thriller marked by confusing plots, violence, style, surrealism, and button-pushing elements. But that style was only just on its cusp, so this 1968 film only qualifies as giallo in the broad sense of being a thriller: one indebted to cop stories even though it secretly wants to be Dial M for Murder (1954). An hour into the picture, the plot makes a left turn into Bulon’s psychological breakdown as the story finally concentrates on Lisa within a triangular murder plot and becomes belatedly intriguing.
The opening has already signaled Lisa’s apparent imperviousness to any threat, so even here the suspense is more on the order of how she’ll get away from the trap, whether Bulon’s suspicions about her are justified, and whether any of that matters. Paluzzi, best known for Thunderball (1965), comes across as a triumphant “femme fatale” whose sense of style and pride is a match for any man, who can only try to control her by violence. “Every man wants a Lisa, fears a Lisa,” declares the narrator of the trailer (not included) in an unwittingly revealing blurb of pop psychology. It’s too bad the story doesn’t make more room for her. Perhaps it really is afraid of her.
Director Massimo Dallamano would later make a very striking and plaintive giallo, What Have You Done to Solange (1972), but A Black Veil for Lisa is still treading an older, less hip style of noir, though it has a few moments of colorful design.
This bare-bones Blu-ray offers the English-language version only, which does have Mills’ own voice — something that the Italian soundtrack probably doesn’t. We get to hear famous voice artist Paul Frees (Boris Badenov) dubbing several actors.
Brief research indicates that the Italian version is longer, has a different score (a better one, by all accounts), and is edited differently, such that this English version’s decision to give away the ending at the beginning has nothing to do with Dallamano’s original vision. Did this English version try to make a more traditional film, to contain the threat of Lisa’s potential to upset the narrative? It’s too bad we don’t have the option of comparing them.