Barbara Steele is “Just a Big Blade”

Barbara : “I feed my dog fresh salmon.”

Me: “The next song I write will be called I Want to be Barbara Steele's Dog.”

Barbara: “You already are.”

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Any serious contemplation of the true extent of Barbara Steele’s gifts can reach only one, inevitable conclusion. There is no question of her being a good, often great, screen presence, but to say that in every meaningful sense her abilities end there, is to admit one thing: she is not highly skilled as an “actress.”

To be fair, the experience gained as part of the stable of starlets of the J. Arthur Rank Organization is no equivalent to a season or two at the Moscow Art Theatre. But what she emits from the screen is far more important — at least to me — though precisely what I’ve been pursuing for the past twenty years, will probably always remain a mystery. 

What I can identify is the concrete workings of Barbara Steele’s magic. 

“I recognize the expression on fans, a kind of sexual melting,” says Steele herself, though she would never admit that — from the denizens of mom’s basement to intellectuals performing their cleverness — her screen-image reaches across decades to find acolytes who liquefy on the spot. Here, a complete list of the various symptoms defining “magic” must include Andre Breton’s dream, which Steele brings to fruition six years before his death, thereby making the Surrealist impresario a bonafide prophet: "Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all." 

Nor does Jean-Paul Török ooze into nothingness before the lightning flash Black Sunday (1960). 

Instead, he spasms for us all.

When aesthetic admiration is absolutely fused with desire and terror, it "blacks out”…. Where are your vaunted intelligence and your cultivated taste when everything in you freezes and is fascinated before the revelations of the utmost horror? Beneath the flowing robe of this young woman with so beautiful a countenance there appear, distinctly, the tatters of a skeleton. Is she any less desirable?

Of course, there’s no need to answer the slew of rhetorical questions inspired by Steele’s particular  brand of pulchritude/strife. “They sense something in me,” she once said of her fans, but surely it was true of her directors also. “Maybe some kind of psychic pain.” The diva dolorosa of the 1910s, reincarnated as voluptuous revenant. 

In the course of a conversation about something thoroughly innocuous — miscellaneous home repair, let’s say, or weather in Los Angeles, or something equally drowsy — she’ll slide, right before you know it, into surrealist syntax. Suddenly we’re discussing a marriageable chair made from Van Gogh sunlight, then the hordes of damp, obese, bikini-clad horror fans that haunt the autograph shows. She’s rushing off later to an event dubbed Crypticon Seattle, or some such extraordinary thing. Why, only yesterday she archly characterized the looming trauma of the event as “moving into a Dianne Arbus weekend.” 

It’s downright incongruous. Not the event, really, or even her presence at it (though when you think about it, there is that). No. It’s the whole universe summoned by the totality of this woman’s life through just a few minutes’ gab: the high culture allusions (Arbus, Van Gogh) slamming up against the sweat-soaked, panting cheapness of her destination; as if all of it laid bare particular facts concerning the last century. But then, this essential incongruity has always embraced Barbara Steele. In Europe — unlike the United States, where certain lines of division are observed more devoutly than we care to admit — the boundaries between high and low culture, art and trash, are not so much permeable as they are wholly non-existent. 

If Federico Fellini, for example, could pop for the price of a dazzling cameo in Otto e Mezzo (1963), chances were that a Mario Bava or a Riccardo Freda could afford you as lead in a still-forbidding gothic chiller or, later, a candy-colored giallo. In other corners of the globe, ours for instance, a career arc like that would be viewed rather askance, a garden variety one-way journey to the skids or, worse, American-International Pictures. Barbara Steele was different. Always. She could leap like a ballerina out of Nightmare Castle and into Young Törless; or from Terror Creatures from Beyond the Grave into L'Armata Brancaleone. “I was made for horror,” she finally admits after years of denials, a pronunciamento confirmed by the epiphany that is Black Sunday’s opening sequence.

It’s not personal pain that matters in such moments, but the channeling of a much larger agony. Final Impenitence finds its voice as the heavens crash around Steele’s witch: “Go ahead,” she thunders, “tie me down to the stake, but you will never escape my hunger, NOR THAT OF SATAN!” She is the first female horror star, although no one, including Steele herself, has bothered to notice this enormous fact. 

Before Black Sunday women had been associated with the horror genre only in fits. Elsa Lanchester was iconic in The Bride of Frankenstein, but her horror career was blasted to atoms at the moment of creation. Fay Wray screamed impressively in King Kong and The Mystery of the Wax Museum, and character players like Gale Sondergaard became typed in sinister roles, and there were exotics like Acquanetta (possibly born Mildred Davenport), "star" of three Universal ape-woman “films," but nobody showed any actual staying power. 

Italian cameramen and Steele’s face were an unexpected 1960s marriage. A brazen collision that would herald the new thespic truth that, from this moment forward, the art of acting was in how you responded to light, and how light responded to you. Expressionism has a way of achieving transcendence without much caring about the lines it crosses; and Steele is nothing if not a natural, even physiognomic case of lived expressionism: you don’t need askew sets or painted shadows with a face like that. If, instead of expressing emotion through the decor, or through refined acting or method-school angst, you were going to do it just by being an exquisite and uncanny human sculpture positioning yourself just so, you needed a look that contained contradictions, complexity, confusion, a different madhouse of passion from every angle. 

Enter a 22-year-old actress holding the patent on gothic atmosphere, and occasionally leasing it to cinema. Not to mention the most gifted film critic who ever lived, johnny-on-the-spot, to seal her in memory. Pondering Barbara Steele from a distance of three years, because Black Sunday had been banned in England, Steele’s original supplicant, Raymond Durgnat, poured critical infatuation onto the page. And he did so in the spiritual home to every true cinephile, i.e., his mother’s basement. Where does Steele herself emerge from but the “Rank Charm School,” another dark hole in the ground? Actors’ energies were systematically tamped down, imprisoned in elaborate instructions about the “correct” way to walk, to get out of a car, to sit, to stand, every movement roboticized so that actual human emotion is bound to appear like a strange eruption amid the congested artifice, a breaking-through of Life which perversely feels more like demonic possession or madness. Durgnat describes a quality beyond performance, capturing the sylph I know and love: “Surely vast tracts of virgin territory lie unexplored to a screen personality situated, perhaps awkwardly, but how fascinatingly, somewhere in the regions between a Celtic feminine occultism and a devil-may-care energy.” 

Steele’s mutable visage, its discordant composition (Durgnat calls it “an art-school face, with something wild and regional, possibly even Mary Webb-ish”) finds a dark liquid pool to be Protean in. American films use the camera to bird-dog the cast, or to push in, making thought perceptible. Since Cabiria, Italian films have used the camera to explore space, show off the sets, bring the environment to dimensional life. In horror cinema, this becomes an atmospheric duty, the prowling lens that suggests a roving POV dislocated from anyone onscreen. Absorbing Steele’s autumnal presence, Italian cinema pits the anachronism of its silent-era Gothic mien against a Brylcreem world. 

While American horror movies struggle for a prosaic sense of following characters into danger, Italian entries in the genre float or somnambulate, adrift from narrative and character, jerking into sudden focus in shock moments and then gliding off again, glassy-eyed and detached. Barbara Steele’s face follows the same identikit pattern as the cinema that launched her — possessing beauty that invites mixed metaphors.

The id of Irony made flesh, she is an instinctive shape-shifter who can summon a steely, almost self-parodic Vaudeville of her own presumptive star power (Elizabeth I, by way of Norma Desmond); lashing out wildly against other women like a blind man with a pistol — the word ‘hate" fluorescing, dancing on chapped lips into telephone dada. Steele-speech is composed of startling word-images, piled giddily on top of one another, evoking the landscape around her L.A. home – “coyotes come down the hill like perfect ghosts, walking like Nijinsky,” the Adriatic – “all wonderful 2000-year-old blonde stones – breathing light – like an old cathedral – every cell in my body receives this landscape like a blind man” – Paris –“every encounter is like a little love affair… including the dogs…” – Croatia – “nocturnal medieval eels, swimming in the skull-infested Roman fortress, under the full moon in the inky sea” – or Senator Elizabeth Warren’s earlobes – “two appalling clitorises”.

Durgnat places her between the Ancient and the Mod, while her career naturally equates High and Low. Meanwhile, Pauline Kael, who never publishes her program notes on Black Sunday, sees other strange harmonies. “The resurrected 200-year-old witch Princess Asa and the beautiful Princess Katia are both played by the English actress Barbara Steele in a deadpan manner that makes evil and good all but indistinguishable.” It takes a Brit with roots in Portugal to embody both paganism’s shameless desire and Catholicism’s threat of fire and brimstone — and balance them effortlessly, as Steele does. Her directors also become human fulcrums. Maybe the influence is Rome itself: even the lowliest pornographer or horror movie hack, based in such a city, would be immersed in ancient beauty. The Immortal City could be very immoral too, but the elegance and grandeur would impose themselves even on junk. Black Sunday was shot under battle conditions — a brutally cold December that saw cast and crew extremely ill with a virus — tending to reinforce Steele’s image of herself as a screen presence: “I don’t want to wear crinoline, I’m just a big blade.”

It is impossible to imagine Barbara Steele not surrounded and adored by men. Onscreen she oozes sex and sinister energy: a zealously witchy abandon that radiates from those eyes, those fingers, that voice; the inner Goth hippy-chick (a new paradigm!) with no solid contour to contain her. Steele’s features — two eyeballs with enough aqueous humor to make at least three; the cute little nose and massive slab of forehead — are those of a baby or a porcelain doll left over from the Victorian era.

Melting through the period trappings is an affect that is “Sixties” to the point of hysteria. It has an incongruous innocence that nevertheless reminds one and all just how neatly Lewis Carroll’s Wonderlandian flights of fancy fit into the mod-a-go-go psychedelic zeitgeist of all those decades ago. Otto e Mezzo remains a living, black and white testament to the notion that she will forever be — in critic Raymond Durgnat’s shorthand for that now-iconic moment when her youthful smile beamed from beneath  a black, wavy-brimmed hat — “a modern girl.”

Federico careened through a city whose graffiti-scrawled churches bore the hammer and sickle. He escaped two ideologies in his famous black Chevrolet — the Vatican and the Party — while Rome would leave Barbara saddled with loss, irreparable sadness. Calling herself “an unwilling immigrant” in L.A., she’s a Catholic, by ethnicity at any rate, wrought with agonizing regrets about coming to the States. However, she will occasionally send an inspired weather report: “Cold, sunny and sweet here, though my street is packed with beautiful ghosts,” coyotes again, “waiting to eat somebody’s cat.” 

I playfully call her "a closet exhibitionist.” 

“And YOU'RE the closet!” (Her response comes rapid-fire. Almost manic.)

“A BIG closet, with intricate Elizabethan locks made of brass. The inside is lined with baize so that nothing can be heard, a place where Mozart rehearsals are held.” 

In a brutal segue, she tells me of a gynecologist who displayed various objects he’d extracted from miscellaneous vaginas — these included small dolls, rocks and glass jars. Now, maybe her baroque imagery is a nod to her salacious (yours truly) audience; or maybe she’s an immense cabinet of curiosities awaiting some mysterious incantation to unlock its secrets. Do I believe my favorite telephone fabulist? 

Motion pictures are the original sin, a violation against the real. And Steele knows it, too. Very rarely do actors display such awareness of the implications of their craft (and its limitless) power to condition us.  Her seemingly endless manifestation of undead temptresses rises and falls on an ethical seesaw. Willfully, defiantly imperfect. I hang up the phone feeling giddy when she signs off:  

“Have a groovy day!”

By Daniel Riccuito