Rosso Segno della Follia

Analysis by Scott Andrew Hutchins

Forthcoming columns will include looks at Michel Legrand and Jun Fukamachi's Hi no Tori (The Phoenix, Kon Ichikawa, 1978), David Newman's The Runestone (Willard Carroll, 1990), Kent H. Randolph's Kamillions (Mikel B. Anderson, 1989), Jeff Alexander's Dirty Dingus Magee (Burt Kennedy, 1970), Christopher Komeda's The Fearless Vampire Killers (Roman Polanski, 1966), and others.

Mario Bava's Rosso Segno della Follia (A Red Sign of Madness, 1969) was released in the United States under the rather lurid title "Hatchet for the Honeymoon" in 1976 (it was later reissued in Italy under a translation of this title). The film contains five major musical themes by Sante Romitelli: the lyrical main theme, a waltz, a progressive rock piece used as source music, a dissonant synthesizer theme, and a bleak and childlike (strange and appropriate combination) for John as a child.

Rosso Segno della Follia is a dark comedy, written by Santiago Moncada, in a similar vein as Psycho. Both films deal heavily with the main character's attachment to his mother, both of whom died under virtually identical circumstances. While Norman Bates has no idea that he is crazy, John Harrington (Steven Forsyth) describes himself as a "paranoiac," driven to kill women in wedding dresses because each time he does so he sees more of the image that disturbs him--a woman calling out to him. It is easy for him to find victims, since he took over his mother's bridal gown operation.

Harrington loathes his wife, Mildred (Laura Betti), and seems to take an interest in his various models. Despite their negative relationship, she refuses to grant him a divorce, insisting they will always be together, and will meet again in hell. Scenes of this parody of domestic bliss are scored with a slow, stepwise piece with melody for flute.

The film opens with an animated montage using a process I cannot really describe. It appears to be images printed on clay pushed and pulled around, but it is a very bizarre effect, and it is accompanied by the main theme, a lyrical piece for a small orchestra consisting predominantly of strings and flutes augmented by horns. The theme often recurs when John is with a model he seems to have grown attached to and feels he eventually must kill. Frequently before this happens, he dances with the model to a beautiful waltz. This is a very surreal image filled with swirling camera angles as they dance in a large, high-ceiling hall surrounded with mannequins.

Harrington believes that a woman should marry, love once, and die, or at least that is what he says. One of his models he kills before she has married. The first scene in the film has him killing one, Rosie Miller, inside a train, and then cutting to a close shot on a toy train that pulls back to reveal him playing with it. When he kills them in his factory, like Alice Norton, he incinerates them in his hothouse, and Bava cleverly cuts from the smokestack to Harrington's wife complaining of burning toast, quite some time later.

The unique part of the film comes when John finally murders his wife, bludgeoning her in the back with a cleaver. He is inexplicably wearing a bridal veil and lipstick when he does this, and when buzzed at the door by Inspector Russell and Jimmy Kane, Alice Norton's fiancÈ, he wipes his lipstick off with the veil and shoves it in a vase, all the while watching his dying wife's blood dripping off the edge of the stairs. (Yes, Bava meant it to be as funny as it sounds.) As he is burying Mildred, we see John as a child wandering through the scene, a recurring image in the film. An odd melody played by flute, clarinet, harpsichord, guitar, and metal xylophone. It is slightly baroque, very childlike, and slightly sinister. It begins with the harp and continuing with the flute playing the main theme, then the guitar plays a second part of the melody, bridged with the flashback scene's guitar version of the waltz, then the melody repeated, which stops when John cracks open a poached egg, shown in close-up the next morning. Perhaps the strangest music in the film is when Mildred, at the sÈance, fairly early in the film, is accompanied by an odd organ droning wail leading from John's obsession with his mannequins to voice-over humming of Brahms's lullaby while she communes with her dead husband, also named John.

Even once she is dead, he cannot get rid of her. Everyone sees her around except him. She talks to people at his fashion show. This scene has a two-four progressive rock piece for organ, guitar, and drums, very similar to the output from Goblin at the time. This music was featured prominently in the American theatrical trailer. Also during this scene, Inspector Russell confronts him about the fact that there are no screams in Bava's earlier I Tre Volti della Paura (Three Tales of Fear, 1965) prior to the portion he turned on for them the previous night (when Boris Karloff's Wurdulac stalks his niece). Harrington burns his wife's corpse and puts her ashes in a satchel, but he can neither get rid of the satchel (as she always appears where it is, which gets him accused of perversion when he his on other women), nor stop her from appearing once he has dumped her ashes. She returns to him in the night with an eerie warbling synthesizer theme.

An undercover model, Helen Wood (Dagmar Lassander), a plant from the inspector, is given the same treatment as the earlier model, but he has grown to love her, and the waltz theme is augmented with a larger orchestra before John attempts to strike her with the cleaver. There are many shots of the cleaver being raised before it actually is, as though we are seeing the images in his mind. She knows it is coming and is able to dodge the blow, before the truth is finally revealed to John. I won't give it away explicitly here (though if you look back through this review I have, though by this time, most audience members will be waiting to see if John finally figures it out, as the clues are so laid out, he seems to be the last to get it. Indeed, the main title theme is played halfway through the film as Helen explains who she is and what she is doing, and John does the same, both truths that go unbelieved by the other part. Upon this revelation, and the image of his child self in action, the waltz theme is played harshly on an electric guitar, more adequately representing what the theme has meant.

Rosso Segno della Follia is a stylish, clever film that includes masterful use of voice-over narration and bits of stream-of-consciousness editing (most notably in the opening train scene and the cleaver shots described above). The film is due to be reissued on laserdisc by the Roan Group, uncut and letterboxed (it is already available that way from Something Weird Video, albeit with their logo emblazoned in the corner of the image all the way through it), which means an Anchor Bay collector's edition is likely as well. Media Home Entertainment released Avco Embassy's TV print (pan and scan and mostly complete, but trimmed to assure a GP rating) in 1985, which tends to be available at video stores with larger selections (unlike Blockbuster). It was also released by Charter Entertainment, titled, at least on the box, Hatchet for a Honeymoon (which is also on the Media tape's label.

The soundtrack was released on OST 138 in Italy, though I learned of its existence too late to have listened to it for this article. It is appropriately coupled with Bruno Nicloai's I Tre Volti della Paura, a score that was replaced with one by Les Baxter when the film became Black Sabbath for USA release. Incidentally, Baxter's score was highly influential (virtually plagiarized) by Angelo Badalamenti for Lost Highway.

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