Lisa and the Devil

Lisa and the Devil
Directed by	Mario Bava
Produced by	Alfredo Leone
Written by	Mario Bava Alfredo Leone
Starring	Telly Savalas Elke Sommer Sylva Koscina Alessio Orano
Music by	Carlo Savini
Cinematography	Cecilio Paniagua
Editing by	Carlo Reali
Running time	92 min
Country
Language	Italian

Lisa and the Devil (Italian title: Lisa e il diavolo) is a 1972 Italian horror film directed by Mario Bava. The film has developed a cult following among fans of European horror, it is particularly praised by fans of Mario Bava. Like most of Bava's films Lisa and the Devil possesses inventively stylish direction and evokes an atmosphere of bizarre and eerie, yet surreal beauty. The film is said to have been one of Bava's personal favorite works, though the director wouldn't see the film released, in his lifetime, as he had made it. Difficulty finding a distributor for the film forced it to be drastically altered. It was originally released in 1975 in the United States under the title "House of Exorcism", an alternate cut of the film that removed much of the original film's content in favor of new footage shot specifically for the US version of the film, as well as an entirely new script. Years after director Bava's death the original version of the film emerged again and is now available on DVD.

Plot

Tourist Lisa Rainer (Elke Sommer) wanders away from her tour group in Toledo and encounters a man called Leandro (Telly Savalas) who resembles the portrait of the devil in a fresco she has just seen. When she is unable to find the tour group again, she takes refuge in a crumbling mansion owned by a blind Countess (Alida Valli), where Leandro is the butler. The Countess's son (Alessio Orano) is drawn to Lisa because of her physical resemblance to his dead lover. As people begin to die off at the villa at the hands of a mysterious killer, Lisa finds herself in a surrealistic nightmare that she cannot escape from.

Cast

• Telly Savalas, Leandro
• Elke Sommer, Lisa Reiner
• Sylva Koscina, Sophia Lehar
• Alessio Orano, Maximilian
• Gabriele Tinti, George
• Kathy Leone, Lisa's friend
• Eduardo Fajardo, Francis Lehar
• Franz von Treuberg, Shopkeeper
• Espartaco Santoni, Carlo
• Alida Valli, Countess

Trivia

• Leandro frequently having a sucker in his mouth was a trait added by Telly Savalas. Savalas had recently quit smoking and used the suckers as an alternative. The suckers would become a popular character trait on his television series "Kojak" which started that same year.
• Director Mario Bava had reportedly wanted to do this movie for years. After the huge international success of his 1972 film "Baron Blood" producer Alfredo Leone gave Bava free rein to do any project he wanted.
• Lisa's friend was played by Kathy Leone, the daughter of producer Alfredo Leone. It was her only film role.
• Anthony Perkins was offered the role of Maximilian, but Perkins turned it down.
• The scene where Leandro breaks the corpse's feet to stuff it into the coffin is a reference to the H.P. Lovecraft story "In the Vault".
• Shot in seven weeks.
• Director Mario Bava was a superstitious individual and considered the color purple to be bad luck. When he saw Alida Valli wearing a purple gown as part of her costume he thought it was a bad omen. Indeed there were complications throughout the production.
• The film was shot without sound and the dialog was dubbed in after principle photography. Reportedly while directing the cast on the set Bava would play Rodrigo's "Concerto d'Aranjuez" to get the emotion he desired from the actors.
• It wasn't until two years after Bava's death that "Lisa and the Devil" was finally released in its full-length original version. Ironically its premiere was an airing on American television in 1983.

Alternate Titles

• Der Teuflische (West Germany)
• Diablo se lleva a los muertos, El (Spain)
• Lisa and the Devil (USA)
• Lisa e il diavolo (Italy)
• The Devil and the Dead
• The Devil in the House of Exorcism
• The House of Exorcism (USA) (recut version)

The House of Exorcism Edit Controversy

In the late 1960s, a string of flops resulted in Mario Bava losing his coveted American distribution deal with American International Pictures and sent the director's career into a downward spiral, that ended with the success of his 1971 film Twitch of the Death Nerve. As such, Bava entered into the production of Lisa and the Devil with renewed confidence in his freedom to produce films without much studio interference.

Film producer Alfredo Leone, who had worked with Bava on his previous film Baron Blood, gave Bava free rein on the making of Lisa and the Devil and allowed Bava to produce a film that was very much non-commercial fare with its surrealistic tone and dreamlike direction.

Unfortunately, when it was released in Italy, the film was a commercial flop. Furthermore, when Leone took the movie to the Cannes Film Festival, US film distributors turned down offers to release the film in the US.

In a desperate attempt to get the film released in the US, Leone convinced a very reluctant Mario Bava that they should revamp the entire film as an Exorcist clone, in order to cash in on the popularity of said film, complete with new footage being shot of an exorcism involving Elke Sommer and Robert Alda, who was cast as a priest in the new footage. The film itself was then heavily cut, removing over twenty minutes of footage (including the film's ending) and having the remaining footage editted into the new footage as an extended flashback sequence that Sommer's character tells Alda's character.

Leone clashed with Bava over the new footage shot of Alda and Sommer; Leone wanted profanity and strong sexuality in the new footage, something Bava refused to do. At first he would set up the scenes and then leave the set so that Leone could direct the actors; later he tried to convince Elke Sommer not to act in these scenes, and eventually he left the film altogether. As such, the finished film's direction was credited to Mickey Lion.

House of Exorcism was released in the United States in 1975, where it was a critical and commercial flop. Leone's plan to try and exploit the popularity of The Exorcist backfired, as many critics and viewers denounced the film as a blatant rip-off of The Exorcist.

Legacy

Ironically though, the re-editing of "Lisa and the Devil" as "House of the Exorcism" would cause the film to gain cult status amongst horror fans as far as being a "lost classic". As "Lisa and the Devil" was commercially unavailable (and for a time, thought to be truly lost forever until an intact print of the film resurfaced in the late 1990s), the film's reputation grew amongst fans and critics as one of Mario Bava's best films and arguably his final masterpiece.

External links

• Lisa and the Devil at the Internet Movie Database
• Lisa and the Devil at Allmovie