Danger: Diabolik: Bava's Pop-Art Crime Fantasia

For years the widest audience Danger: Diabolik ever reached met it as a punchline, the film being pulled apart in the final episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 in 1999. That is a strange fate for one of the most purely beautiful things Mario Bava ever made, and it says more about how the world lost track of Bava than about the film. Watch it clean, without the silhouettes and the wisecracks, and Danger: Diabolik reveals itself as a pop-art dream: a comic-book heist fantasia conjured, in 1968, out of coloured gels, forced perspective, a masterful cutting rhythm and almost no money at all.

Bava was already the presiding genius of Italian genre cinema, the cameraman-turned-director who had more or less invented the modern giallo four years earlier with Blood and Black Lace. Diabolik let him swap the fashion-house murders for something sunnier and even more design-obsessed. The source was one of Italy’s most successful fumetti, the pocket-sized comic series created by the sisters Angela and Luciana Giussani, whose masked super-thief had been terrorising a fictional European state since 1962. Producer Dino De Laurentiis wanted a hit in the James Bond mould. Bava gave him something odder and better.

A world built out of coloured light

The legend of Danger: Diabolik is that it was made for roughly three million dollars and looks like ten times that, and Bava then quietly handed a large chunk of the budget back. Whether or not every figure holds, the film is a masterclass in the illusion of expense. Diabolik’s underground lair, all rotating platforms and hidden vaults, is built from a handful of small sets, mirrors, matte paintings and Bava’s uncanny command of where to put a camera so that a cramped stage reads as a cavern. He had spent decades as a cinematographer and effects artist, and every trick he ever learned is deployed here to make poverty look like decadence.

The colour is the film’s true special effect. Bava lights whole rooms in saturated primaries, a wash of arterial red giving way to cool electric blue, and the palette is lifted straight from the printing process of the comics themselves, where cheap ink and flat colour created a look. He is translating a graphic language into light. The most celebrated image is the bed of cash: Diabolik and his lover Eva Kant making love on a rotating platform heaped with millions in stolen banknotes, a single idea that tells you everything about the film’s amoral, gleeful sensibility. It is pop art in the most literal sense, taking the disposable iconography of crime comics and mounting it like a gallery piece. Consider that the celebrated bed of cash was reportedly built from real banknotes that had to be counted and guarded, a small production nightmare in service of one unforgettable image, and you begin to understand how the film’s priorities worked: spend the worry where it will show.

Diabolik, Eva and the pleasure of no morals

John Phillip Law plays Diabolik as a smiling cipher in a black bodysuit, a thief with no backstory, no politics and no interest in anything but the next impossible score and the woman who plans it with him. Marisa Mell’s Eva Kant is his equal and his co-conspirator, and the film’s genuine romance is in their partnership, two beautiful predators who trust each other completely and no one else at all. There is no redemption arc waiting for either of them, and the film is far better for it. Bava understood that the appeal of the character was his total freedom from consequence, the fantasy of a man who simply takes what he wants and vanishes in a wall of coloured smoke.

Ranged against them are Michel Piccoli’s harried Inspector Ginko and Adolfo Celi’s gangster Ralph Valmont, and the film treats the forces of order and the forces of organised crime with the same amused contempt. The state is pompous and the mob is greedy, and Diabolik glides between them, robbing both. Ennio Morricone’s score, playful and lounge-inflected with a wordless vocal hook, completes the tone: this is crime as a lark, violence as choreography, a heist film with the moral weight of a fashion shoot and the visual invention of a great one.

The wit is easy to miss under the surface gloss. The film is quietly satirical about the society Diabolik preys on, staging a government minister’s anti-crime crackdown as farce and letting the thief expose the vanity and corruption of everyone in a position of power. Bava has no political programme here; he simply enjoys the spectacle of a beautiful anarchist embarrassing a smug establishment, and that current of mockery keeps the candy from cloying.

Watch how Bava stages the action set-pieces, and you notice he almost never shows you the whole geography of a scene. He cuts between tight, iconic images, a gloved hand on a lever, a car mid-leap, Diabolik’s masked face filling the frame, and lets your mind assemble the space between them. This is comic-strip storytelling smuggled into cinema: the panel gutter, that white space between drawings where the reader supplies the motion, becomes the cut. It is also, conveniently, how you disguise the fact that you cannot afford a real car chase. Necessity and style are the same decision, which is the recurring miracle of low-budget filmmaking at its best, and Bava was its supreme practitioner.

The comic-book film before comic-book films

The collector’s argument for Danger: Diabolik is that it solved the problem of the comic-book adaptation decades before anyone else took the form seriously. Most attempts to film a comic either apologise for the source or drown it in realism. Bava did the opposite. He embraced the flatness, the bold colour, the frank artificiality, and built a film that moves and looks like the panels it came from, with clean poster compositions and transitions that snap like a page turning. When people praise later directors for finally capturing a comic’s visual grammar on screen, they are describing something Bava had already achieved in 1968 on pocket change.

Its immediate cousins are the mod, tongue-in-cheek Euro-crime pictures of the same moment, the fumetti adaptations and the psychedelic spy spoofs that filled European screens as the Bond franchise minted money. It shares DNA with the comic-strip cool of Godard’s Alphaville and the sixties Batman’s candy palette, and it points forward to every stylised graphic-novel film that would follow. For a home-grown parallel, look at the way The Warriors later turned a pulpy premise into a stylised, almost panelled comic-book world through design and rhythm rather than budget; both films understand that a comic is a way of seeing before it is a story.

And it belongs, above all, to Bava. Set it beside his horror work and the same sensibility runs through everything, the same conviction that colour and composition can carry a film where money cannot. His giallo murders and his pop-art heists are two faces of one obsession with the frame as a designed object, an obsession his admirers, Dario Argento chief among them, would inherit and push toward the operatic. Diabolik is the joyful, sunlit expression of it.

Where to watch: the film has been restored to its full saturated glory on disc, and it deserves the best presentation you can find, since colour is the whole point and a muddy transfer flattens everything Bava did. If you have only ever seen it through the MST3K frame, watch it straight at least once.

Spoilers below

The ending is the sharpest joke in a film full of them, and it is worth spoiling because it reveals how completely Bava trusted his own tone. Cornered by the authorities after his most audacious theft, an attempt to melt down and seize the nation’s gold reserves, Diabolik is caught in an explosion at his own foundry and encased alive in a shell of molten gold, frozen into a gleaming statue. It should be a tragedy, the master thief undone by his greatest ambition and entombed in the treasure he coveted.

Bava plays it as triumph. The final shot lingers on the golden Diabolik, and behind the mask his eyes are visibly moving, and he winks at Eva. He is not dead; he is simply waiting, and the two of them share a private joke over the heads of the police who think they have won. It is the perfect close for the film’s amoral fairy tale, a promise that this beautiful thief cannot really be caught or punished, only inconvenienced, and that even sealed in gold he is already planning his next escape.

That final wink is the whole film in a single gesture. Nothing has weight, nothing has consequence, and the pleasure is entirely in the style and the sang-froid. Bava made a film with no message and no soul in the moralist’s sense, and made it so gorgeously that the emptiness becomes exhilarating. Danger: Diabolik is a con artist of a movie, spending almost nothing and leaving you convinced you have seen something lavish, and like its hero it gets away clean.