During an already prolific year, Mario Bava agreed to rescue a production titled “Knives of the Avenger” from destitution. After a scant six days, he completed primary filming. What results is one of the most surprising works in the director’s canon and an anomaly of cinema: A spaghetti Western disguised as a Viking tale which unabashedly explores human nature, contradiction, and irony within the human predicament while using the theme of morality as a structural crux.
When Arald (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) leaves during a famine in hopes of finding grain for his kingdom, everyone except his wife, Karen (Elissa Pichelli), and his son, Moki (Luciano Pollentin), believe him to be dead after three years. During this time a drifter, Rurik (Cameron Mitchell), appears and befriends the presumed widow before protecting her and her child from the advances of the exiled Hagan (Fausto Tozzi) and his tribe of pillagers and rapists. Gradually it is revealed that the conspicuous stranger’s past is intricately linked with everyone.
Both the famed genre of the Western and its lesser known action counterpart, the Viking saga, are associated with unrepentant escapism by way of gratuitous, audience-appeasing action, often at the expense of story and characterization. It is with this, the fact that both fields readily avail themselves to such low-caliber storytelling, that Bava iconoclastically challenges himself, as well as his audience, as he uses Knives of the Avenger as an opportunity to explore the moral complexities involved with human nature.
In a convoluted plot whose intricacies are rarely seen in any form of cinema (to say nothing of the Viking fable), and without giving too much away from the epiphany-laden narrative, what Bava’s work contains is a character study of an individual with a dark past who attempts to reconcile his history–not only with other, previously involved parties–but with himself. Dauntingly, a thought-provoking exposé follows which focuses upon the influence of the past; the nature in which storytelling, especially cinema, oversimplifies via categorization; the prevalence of good paradoxically coinciding with evil (a juxtaposed duality which many Westerns deny for the sake of brevity and as a consequence of a lazy pen), and our ability to confront and change ourselves and the views and opinions of others. To say or examine Knives of the Avenger in this respect to any greater degree would deprive the viewer of a truly, genuinely pleasant and perhaps revelatory experience, thus, I admittedly digress . . . .
Cleverly, not only does Bava utilize and incorporate a realm which is standard for the proposition of morality, the Western, he does so almost impenitently as he thinly veils the structural genesis of his tale within an episodic Viking narrative (though Marcello Giombini’s very Western score doesn’t bother attempting to deny the film’s etymological roots). Coyly, guns are replaced by knives as Bava’s “knife slingers” are sharpshooters-cum-throwers throughout. Fortunately, though the medium readily permits action to predominate, character precedes at all times and, admittedly, if viewed strictly as a Western incarnate, Knives of the Avenger is a bit slow in its pacing yet, in this regard, it nonetheless hosts a beautifully backlit fight sequence which is illuminated by the reflection of the setting sun off the ocean’s undulating tides before being followed by a barroom scene which continues through an open fjord, a scuffle which makes John Huston’s The Quiet Man look pacifistic. In respect to authenticity, what can be said of a work which, though shot in under a week, took the time to include the very impressive nuance of the characters’ condensated breath when speaking in a frigid Scandinavian tavern?
Two years prior to Knives of the Avenger, Mario Bava directed The Road to Fort Alamo, which undoubtedly permitted him to more readily craft his surprisingly complex psychological profile of what at first appears to be an anti-hero before transforming him into a empathetic hero extraordinaire by which he examines the complexities and nature of human morality. If nothing else, how many other directors could transform a murderous rapist into a very feasible humanist within the course of a little under an hour-and-a-half?
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
