Last night I celebrated the memory of Mario Bava (born 112 years ago around this time) by revisiting FOUR TIMES THAT NIGHT (1968), in its Italian version. Yes, there's no denying it's one of his lesser films, but seeing it via Indicator’s new 4K release was like seeing it through a new lens.
To appreciate this oddity in his filmography, we need to set aside the expectations we bring to his work in horror and fantasy, and consider it in the context of what else was coming out of Italy at the time of its first crisis since the Hollywood on the Tiber years - stories set in strangely artificial worlds like THE WITCHES and THE DOUBLE, and early erotic gialli like THE SWEET BODY OF DEBORAH and PARANOIA. It’s not as well-heeled as those others but it’s very appropriate to such company, which means that Bava—who was reacting (and perhaps overreacting) to the production interference he received during DANGER: DIABOLIK—was reaching up with this one, not opting out, and attempting to say something witty yet genuinely philosophical about human perception and the acts of seeing and processing information in the guise of a mild sex comedy.
Star Brett Halsey remembers not being sure at the end of each day if he’d be coming to work tomorrow (the production was that precarious) and it’s a testament to Bava’s control that he was able to make a film as stable as this one looks; it’s only the mock-science sidebars from the white-coated narrator played by Calisto Calisti that feel half-baked and fall short of what fuller concentration might have made of them. And yet it is the presence of this character that ties the film, as an analytic musing on the science of optics, to the early documentaries on the sciences that Bava worked on as a young man.
I recorded my audio commentary for this film for Kino Lorber’s 2019 Blu-Ray, and I don’t think I bothered at the time to examine the film anew since writing my chapter on the film for my Bava book some years prior. I listened to most of my commentary to see how it held up, thinking I’d done it longer ago than it really was, and it holds up; when Indicator approached me, I thought perhaps I should record a new track but they felt it wasn’t necessary and I now agree with their call. I am especially happy to see that the film too is aging better than I expected. It encompasses a very early effort to include gay relationships in what begins as an emphatically hetero story, starting out as exploitative but taking a surprising turn in which Pascale Petit discusses homosexuality calmly, openly, and warmly in response to a provincial character’s initial recoil. (If memory serves, her tone in the English dub is more calculating and sinister.) There is also an unfortunate white hair in the gate through a good deal of Secondo Tempo, but the film is so clever, well-designed, and symptomatic of his Continental Pop period. And the Italian dialogue is often witty, as opposed to the painful dubbing of the English cut.
Bava is one of the most supremely visual artists of genre cinema, and here he steps back to question and explore exactly how he/we/anybody sees - and processes that information, an intriguing response to working in a genre whose principal purpose is to please and excite the eye. It feels a little too rushed at times, a little too consistently frantic (which I suppose is true of many Italian comedies), and the budget could have used another investor but, I have to say that, while I’ve always been one of this film’s apologist defenders, this was the first time I’ve watched it and fully enjoyed it.
(c) 2026 Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.
