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''Five Dolls for an August Moon'' (Italian: ''5 bambole per la luna d'agosto'') is a 1970 Italian
giallo In Italian cinema, ''Giallo'' (; plural ''gialli'', from ''giallo'', Italian for yellow) is a genre of mystery fiction and thrillers that often contains slasher, crime fiction, psychological thriller, psychological horror, sexploitation, and, ...
film directed by
Mario Bava Mario Bava (31 July 1914 – 27 April 1980) was an Italian filmmaker who worked variously as a director, cinematographer, special effects artist and screenwriter, frequently referred to as the "Master of Italian Horror" and the "Master of the M ...
. It concerns a group of people who have gathered on a remote island for fun and relaxation. One of the guests is a chemist who has created a revolutionary new chemical process, and several of the attending industrialists are eager to buy it from him. Business problems become moot when someone begins killing off the attendees one by one.


Plot

At the private island retreat of wealthy industrialist George Stark, a group of people have assembled for a weekend getaway; among the guests is scientist Professor Gerry Farrell. The first night passes uneventfully, but Farrell is enraged the next morning to discover that Stark and the other guests planned the weekend to coerce him to sell his latest invention: a formula for a revolutionary industrial
resin In polymer chemistry and materials science, resin is a solid or highly viscous substance of plant or synthetic origin that is typically convertible into polymers. Resins are usually mixtures of organic compounds. This article focuses on n ...
, which he is reluctant to divulge due to his colleague's death during its invention. Farrell's wife, Trudy, is having an affair with Stark's artist wife, Jill. Stark's business partner, Nick, is verbally abusive to his coquettish wife Marie, but does not object to her sleeping with other men, one of whom is the Starks' manservant, Charles. Stark is less of a husband to Jill than he is a business manager. He arranges for her to have her paintings and artwork publicly displayed and is a source of constant criticism. The sole happy couple is Nick's co-worker Jack and his wife Peggy. Also on the island is Isabelle, the teenage daughter of Stark's
game warden A conservation officer is a law enforcement officer who protects wildlife and the environment. A conservation officer may also be referred to as an environmental technician or technologist, game warden, forest ranger, forest watcher, forest g ...
; Isabelle's parents are away for medical reasons. As Stark, Nick, and Jack badger Farrell for the formula - the original documents for which he has secretly destroyed - by offering him cheques for $1 million each from their Swiss bank accounts, Jill discovers the dead body of Charles on the beach. Having already sent the motor launch away to prevent Farrell from leaving the island, and with the radio out of commission, Stark has no way of contacting the mainland. Charles' body is moved into a large walk-in
freezer A refrigerator, colloquially fridge, is a commercial and home appliance consisting of a thermally insulated compartment and a heat pump (mechanical, electronic or chemical) that transfers heat from its inside to its external environment so th ...
. The next morning, Farrell is walking alone on the beach. Trudy and Jill, walking hand-in-hand nearby, hear a gunshot and find Farrell's body. They run away to tell the others. The sniper, Isabelle, drags Farrell's body to the sea. As tempers flare to Farrell's apparent death and disappearance, the killings escalate. Peggy, standing on the balcony of her room, is shot dead by an unseen assailant. Jack arrives on the scene first and accuses Stark of being responsible. Marie is found to have been tied to a tree and stabbed in the chest. Jill turns up dead in her bathtub, her wrists slashed in an apparent suicide. Each of the bodies is placed in the freezer. The four remaining survivors - Stark, Jack, Nick, and Trudy - hold up in Stark's living room for the night. After bickering with Trudy, Nick storms off. The next morning, he too is found dead, and his body is placed in cold storage. Stark offers Trudy his cheque for Farrell's formula, which she reveals still exists on a microfilm, and uncovers a previously-hidden motorboat which will take them to the mainland. As he returns to the house to get supplies, Jack confronts him and reveals he killed everyone, except for Farrell, to steal their cheques; he also killed Peggy for nearly discovering his plan. Jack shoots him dead. Confronted by him in the freezer, Trudy offers to give him the formula in exchange for his cheque; during the handover, they simultaneously shoot each other; Trudy dies first. Isabelle steals the cheque and the formula, but not before an expiring Jack tries to stop her. Sometime later, a now-wealthy Isabelle visits Farrell in prison, where he is awaiting execution for the murder of his colleague, the rightful discoverer of the resin. Isabelle claims that she loves Farrell and had decided to save him by rendering him unconscious with a
sodium pentathol Sodium thiopental, also known as Sodium Pentothal (a trademark of Abbott Laboratories), thiopental, thiopentone, or Trapanal (also a trademark), is a rapid-onset short-acting barbiturate general anesthetic. It is the thiobarbiturate analog of ...
pellet of the kind her father had used to tranquilize animals, but was unaware of sodium pentathol's
truth serum "Truth serum" is a colloquial name for any of a range of psychoactive drugs used in an effort to obtain information from subjects who are unable or unwilling to provide it otherwise. These include ethanol, scopolamine, 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate, ...
properties, leading him to confess to killing his partner to the authorities. Isabelle reveals that she is broke, having cashed and spent George's and Jack's cheques but not Nick's due to her not knowing the account number. Aware of his inescapable fate and thankful to her, Farrell gives Isabelle the number, and she happily leaves, instructing her chauffeur to drive her to
Lausanne , neighboring_municipalities= Bottens, Bretigny-sur-Morrens, Chavannes-près-Renens, Cheseaux-sur-Lausanne, Crissier, Cugy, Écublens, Épalinges, Évian-les-Bains (FR-74), Froideville, Jouxtens-Mézery, Le Mont-sur-Lausanne, Lugrin (FR ...
.


Cast

* William Berger as Professor Gerry Farrell (Professore Fritz Farrell in the Italian version) *
Princess Ira von Fürstenberg Princess is a regal rank and the feminine equivalent of prince (from Latin ''princeps'', meaning principal citizen). Most often, the term has been used for the consort of a prince, or for the daughter of a king or prince. Princess as a subst ...
as Trudy Farrell *
Edwige Fenech Edwige Fenech (, ; born 24 December 1948) is an Algerian-born Maltese-Sicilian actress and film producer. She is mostly known as the star of a series of ''commedia sexy all'italiana'' and ''giallo'' films released in the 1970s, which turned her ...
as Marie Chaney * Howard Ross as Jack Davidson *Helena Ronee as Peggy Davidson *Teodoro Corrà as George Stark * Justine Gall as Isabel *Edith Meloni as Jill Stark *Mauro Bosco as Charles (Jacques) *
Maurice Poli Maurice Poli (2 December 1933 – 26 April 2020) was a French actor, mainly active in Italian productions. He is regarded as one of the few actors to have taken part in virtually all the genres developed in Italy in over more than thirty years.Enr ...
as Nick Chaney


Production

Produzioni Atlas Consorziate purchased Mario di Nardo's script for ''Five Dolls for an August Moon'' with plans to make it into a vehicle for actress
Edwige Fenech Edwige Fenech (, ; born 24 December 1948) is an Algerian-born Maltese-Sicilian actress and film producer. She is mostly known as the star of a series of ''commedia sexy all'italiana'' and ''giallo'' films released in the 1970s, which turned her ...
, though early publicity instead spotlighted
Princess Ira von Fürstenberg Princess is a regal rank and the feminine equivalent of prince (from Latin ''princeps'', meaning principal citizen). Most often, the term has been used for the consort of a prince, or for the daughter of a king or prince. Princess as a subst ...
(who was one of the film's principal investors). The film lost its director just days before filming was scheduled to begin, leading producers Mario and Pietro Bregni to appeal to
Mario Bava Mario Bava (31 July 1914 – 27 April 1980) was an Italian filmmaker who worked variously as a director, cinematographer, special effects artist and screenwriter, frequently referred to as the "Master of Italian Horror" and the "Master of the M ...
to take over. Though there is no record of who the original director was, Mario Bava biographer
Tim Lucas Tim Lucas (born May 30, 1956) is a film critic, biographer, novelist, screenwriter, blogger, and publisher and editor of the video review magazine ''Video Watchdog''. Biography and early career Lucas, born in Cincinnati, Ohio, was the only ...
reasons that it was mostly likely
Guido Malatesta Guido Malatesta (1919 – 14 June 1970), born in Gallarate, Italy, was a film director and screenwriter. He began working as a professional journalist. After he moved to Rome, he was drawn to cinema, as creator of treatments, then scriptwriter ...
. Bava was very reluctant to take on the project, since he felt the script was a poorly written ripoff of Agatha Christie's novel ''
And Then There Were None ''And Then There Were None'' is a mystery novel by the English writer Agatha Christie, described by her as the most difficult of her books to write. It was first published in the United Kingdom by the Collins Crime Club on 6 November 1939, as ...
'', but agreed to do it under the condition that he be paid up front. He was further dismayed when, at the meeting where he was presented with the contract for the movie, the Bregnis told him that the original director's departure was so last-minute that the cast and technical crew had already been selected and filming was to begin in just two days, leaving him no time to rework the script. However, in addition to insisting on the use of his usual camera crew (headed by Antonio Rinaldi), Bava made two significant changes to the film's script: putting the corpses in polythene bags inside a walk-in freezer (di Nardo's script put them in underground graves with cross-shaped headstones) and adding on the twist ending with Farrell and Isabelle. The film's budget was so low that most of the cast had to wear their own clothes. The exterior of the Stark house was a
matte painting A matte painting is a painted representation of a landscape, set, or distant location that allows filmmakers to create the illusion of an environment that is not present at the filming location. Historically, matte painters and film technicians ...
painted by Bava himself, while the interior was a real beach house located not far from the beach where many of the scenes were filmed, on the
Torre Astura 260px, The medieval coastal Tower of the Frangipani. Torre Astura, formerly an island called by the ancients merely Astura (Greek: ), is now a peninsula in the ''comune'' of Nettuno, on the coast of Latium, Italy, at the southeast extremity of the ...
coastline. ''Five Dolls for an August Moon'' was the only film where Bava had to do the editing entirely by himself.


Release

Debuting on
Valentine's Day Valentine's Day, also called Saint Valentine's Day or the Feast of Saint Valentine, is celebrated annually on February 14. It originated as a Christian feast day honoring one or two early Christian martyrs named Saint Valentine and, thr ...
1970, ''Five Dolls for an August Moon'' was a failure at the Italian box office. ''Five Dolls for an August Moon'' was one of Bava's most obscure films, and did not receive an official American release until 2001 when Image Entertainment distributed it on DVD. After the Image disc went out of print, Anchor Bay re-released as part of the "Mario Bava Collection Volume 2" box set on 23 October 2007. The film was released in France as ''L'île de l'épouvante'' / ''Island of Terror''. In 2013,
Kino International The Kino International is a film theater in Berlin, built from 1961 to 1963. It is located on Karl-Marx-Allee in former East Berlin. It hosted premieres of the DEFA film studios until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Today it is a protec ...
released the film on Blu-ray in the United States.


Critical reception

AllMovie gave it two stars out of five, calling it "a confusing and not terribly exciting
whodunit A ''whodunit'' or ''whodunnit'' (a colloquial elision of "Who asdone it?") is a complex plot-driven variety of detective fiction in which the puzzle regarding who committed the crime is the main focus. The reader or viewer is provided with the c ...
." The reviewer placed the blame for the film's failure primarily on the script, and commended director for managing to inject some visual interest into the weak material. In his review of the 2013 American Blu-ray release for Slant Magazine, Budd Wilkins writes "''Five Dolls for an August Moon'' isn't top-tier Bava by any means, but for those with eyes to see, there are pleasures aplenty to be gleaned from this playfully abstract jeu d'esprit.".
Arrow Films Arrow Films is a British independent film distributor and restorer specialising in world cinema, arthouse, horror and classic films. It sells Ultra HD Blu-rays, Blu-rays and DVDs online, and also operates its own subscription video on-d ...
released the film on blu ray in 2016. In his commentary track for the Kino International Blu-ray release of the film, Mario Bava scholar Tim Lucas argues strongly against Cazzinos own assessment of the film as one of his worst and calls it one of his most beautiful and innovative films.


Notes


References


External links

* {{Mario Bava 1970 films Giallo films Films directed by Mario Bava Films scored by Piero Umiliani Italian thriller films 1970s Italian films