The Slave (Scacco alla regina, 1969)

Having been enormously impressed by Pasquale Festa Campanile’s clever, witty, sophisticated and good-natured sex comedy The Libertine I’m now frantically looking for more of Campanile’s movies to watch. And it just so happens that Check to the Queen (Scacco alla regina) has been released by Mondo Macabro under the alternative title The Slave (which was the title of the book on which it was based). This movie had originally been released in 1969. Radley Metzger had picked up The Libertine for American distribution and it’s surprising he didn’t pick this one up as well.

For convenience I’ll refer to the movie as The Slave (which is certainly an appropriate title).

Sylvia (played by the gorgeous Haydée Politoff) is at a loose end. Her husband is off to Paris on an extended business trip but Sylvia hates all great cities so she’s staying. She assures her husband that she will find something to amuse her. Sylvia is very young, very pretty and she’s bored so she takes a job as a kind of lady’s companion to fabulously rich movie star Margaret Mevin (Rosanna Schiaffino). Margaret explains her duties to her. Sylvia is to be a good obedient girl and obey any and all instructions without question. She is to address Margaret as Mistress. Perhaps those dominatrix boots Margaret was wearing should have given Sylvia some hints as to what is in store.

But Sylvia doesn’t seem to mind. Which is not surprising since we already know that she has lurid sadomasochistic sexual fantasies.

Sylvia moves into Margaret’s house.

Margaret isn’t into whippings or anything like that. She just likes to dominate people psychologically and emotionally. To dominate them and humiliate them.

People such as Dina, her secretary. Dina is the one who got Sylvia the job. And people such as Spartaco. He’s her chauffeur but his duties also including pleasuring the Mistress sexually. Just to make sure he’s properly humiliated Margaret insists on paying him for servicing her. He gets 10,000 lira a time, which Margaret has ascertained is the going rate for a second-class call girl.

Sylvia is told she’ll have to be Margaret’s stand-in in her new movie. There are several scenes in which Margaret gets slapped, and Margaret has no intention of being slapped herself. Sylvia agrees to do it. She will get paid for it. Paying people for doing things such as this is Margaret’s favourite way of humiliating them. It makes them feel like whores.

Margaret has another job for Sylvia. She is planning a party and Sylvia will be the centre-piece. She will be covered in plaster to act as a living statue. It’s very uncomfortable and a bit of frightening, which of course is why Margaret wants her to do it.

As is the case with all Italian movies of this era the set design is rather spectacular. Flavio Mogherini did the production design for both this film and Campanile’s The Libertine. There are some excellent surreal fantasy sequences, with Margaret as a kind of debauched Roman empress.

There’s also Margaret’s mechanical horse, a very nice touch. Either Campanile had an erotic fascination with horses or he assumed that women have such a fetish. The heroine of The Libertine has a very strange horse-related sexual kink.

Sylvia becomes Margaret’s slave. Now you know where this relationship is headed, or you think you know, but you’re wrong. They have a sadomasochistic relationship of sorts but it’s not a sexual relationship. It’s a relationship that is certainly erotic, but it not’s actually sexual. They don’t have sex. It’s not a lesbian relationship although it has some of the features of lesbian relationships.

And the sadomasochism doesn’t quite head in the direction you’d expect. There’s some very mild bondage and one whipping scene, but they don’t play out at all the way such scenes invariably play out in movies of this era.

The power relationship between Margaret and Sylvia is not what it seems to be either.

Margaret’s motivations are extremely complex, as are Sylvia’s.

We really don’t know how all these complications are going to be resolved so the ending is, like everything else in the movie, a bit of a surprise although it feels right.

Everything depends on the two female leads and both Rosanna Schiaffino and Haydée Politoff give superbly subtle performances.

Mondo Macabro’s Blu-Ray/DVD combo release offers a fine anamorphic transfer plus interviews with several of the people involved in the film.

The Slave is stylish erotica with the emphasis on the atmosphere of unconventional erotic desires rather than on sex. It has some very amusing moments but it’s essentially a psycho-sexual melodrama. It keeps the viewer constantly in a state of tension - just as we think we understand Margaret’s motivations we realise we didn’t understand her at all and the same goes for Sylvia. It’s not the characters behave inconsistently, it’s just that it’s a movie that is obsessive about avoiding the obvious and the crass. There’s quite a bit of nudity but no frontal nudity and no actual sex scenes.

It’s a visually stunning offbeat movie and I recommend it very highly.