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The
Bird With The
Crystal Plumage
VCI Entertainment
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8
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6 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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On
the surface, Dario Argento's directorial debut, 1970's The
Bird With The Crystal Plumage, bears striking similarities
to his tour-de-force "giallo" thriller Deep
Red (1975). Both films center on a foreigner in Italy who,
by random chance, becomes embroiled in the hunt for a vicious
serial killer. In each story the main character witnesses a
crime, then later struggles to recall a tiny detail that holds
the key to the mystery. Bizarre paintings figure prominently
in the plots of both films, as do the repression of traumatic
childhood memories. In each case the hero becomes obsessed with
learning the truth and, dissatisfied with the progress of the
police, launches his own private investigation. Eventually he
succeeds in unmasking the murderer
but not before placing his own life in extreme jeopardy.
Deep
Red's protagonist was an English jazz composer living
in Rome. In Bird, Tony Musante
plays Sam Dalmas, a frustrated American novelist who originally
moved to Italy to cure a bout of writer's block. To pay the
bills he's taken a job as a technical writer, penning a nature
manual on exotic birds. Check in hand, Sam is set to return
home to the States when, during a stroll back to his apartment,
he notices something happening at an upscale art gallery. Through
the gallery's glass faηade he sees a woman struggling desperately
with a black-garbed figure who appears to be attacking her.
Drawn closer, Sam watches
as the figure in black darts through a door into
the back of the building. The woman, who's been stabbed, staggers
toward Sam, beseeching
him for help. Sam rushes through the glass vestibule only to
be trapped between two sets of transparent sliding doors. In
the film's stunning signature sequence, Sam watches helplessly
as the injured, bleeding woman collapses and crawls toward him.
(Like the audience itself, Sam is the ultimate voyeur to violence
and its aftermath
incapable of doing anything but
watch.) Finally Sam is able to alert a passing pedestrian, who
summons the police.
Fortunately the woman's stab wound is not fatal. According to
the cops, the victim
Monica Renieri (Eva Renzi), beautiful wife of the gallery's
owner
is the first survivor of an attack by a serial killer who's
already claimed a number of female victims in the city. The
cop heading the investigation, Inspector Morosini (Enrico Salerno,
dubbed by a voice actor with a pronounced Scots burr), posits
that only Sam's chance appearance prevented Mrs. Renieri from
being killed. Once he tells Morosini that there's something
he witnessed, something he just can't put his finger on, the
policeman seizes his passport to keep him from leaving the country.
In hopes of jogging his memory Sam embarks on some amateur sleuthing
of his own, aided by his sexy fashion model girlfriend, Lisa
(Torso's Suzy Kendall). Even though
the initial clues he uncovers fail to pin down the killer's
identity, he's obviously getting close... A hired assassin (creepy
Reggie Nalder of Mark
Of The Devil) tries to gun Sam down in the street.
Meanwhile the killer strikes again, brutally slaying two more
women. Will Sam unmask the murderer before both he and Lisa
are added to the list of victims?
With his first stint
behind the camera, Dario Argento crafts a taut, suspenseful
mystery thriller that lays the foundation for much of his work
to follow. Visually compelling, with meticulous attention paid
to each composition, the viewer
like Sam
will see things that don't quite register in the brain the moment
they're glimpsed. The editing is terrific; for a film over 30
years old its visual style is surprisingly undated
another hallmark of the Argento ouevre. Unlike most of
his films, however, Bird's storyline
is very tightly focused, perhaps the best structured of Argento's
screenplays to date. (There's no wandering off on unnecessary
tangents merely for an exercise in aesthetics.) The film's humorous
bits, provided by an assortment of oddball characters whom Sam
encounters in the course of his amateur detective work (a stuttering
pimp, a cagey stool pidgeon, an eccentric artist with a most
unusual diet), don't seem forced or strained as is often the
case in other Argento flicks. As for gore, aside from a few
spatterings of blood it's practically non-existent here
a marked difference from
the sanguinary excesses of Tenebre
(1982) and a more recent giallo, Sleepless
(2001). Not that I have an aversion to movie gore, mind you,
but Bird proves that it wasn't
always a necessary ingredient in the director's cinematic recipes.
I can also report
that composer Ennio Morricone's jazzy, often dissonant score
is quite good. Fans of Argento's later films, especially those
featuring rock-flavored soundtracks by Goblin, may be disappointed,
but I found that Morricone's music works perfectly.
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This
is VCI's second DVD pressing of The Bird
With The Crystal Plumage. The first, released in '99, had
a few frames of one of the murder scenes presented out of sequence.
(In all honesty it wasn't a particularly horrendous gaffe; I only
noticed it on the second viewing.) Also, the title of Argento's
most famous work, Suspiria, was misspelled
on the back of the packaging. The continuity problem was rectified
in 2000 and the disc was issued with different text on the back
of the keepcase sleeve in 2001. (The Suspiria
reference was dropped altogether.) The corrected edition uses
the same video transfer, which is letterboxed and anamorphically
enhanced for 16x9 TVs. While certainly not pristine the flick
never looked this good on VHS. Print damage is evident, however.
Colors occasionally seem muted but are generally well balanced
throughout. The main
thing is getting to see the film in its proper aspect ratio. Audio
quality is a different matter
sound effects and music are significantly louder than the dialog,
which might have you reaching for your stereo remote a time or
two. Fortunately this is only occasionally distracting. Also,
when played on my equipment, anytime one of the disc's chapters
began with spoken dialog the first few words were much louder
than any subsequent spoken lines. It's a strange anomaly that
I've never seen with any other DVD before.
Extras include brief
talent bios of Argento, Musante and Kendall and the rather psychedelic
U.S. theatrical trailer. Also provided is an "isolated" soundtrack
that allows one to listen to Morricone's score minus the dialog
and sound effects. A separate menu screen permits the selection
of individual tracks rather than having to listen to the entire
thing. This is a really neat
feature, one I've seen on only a handful of discs.
2/26/02 |
| UPDATE
Blue Underground released a new 2-disc remastered special edition
of the film in October 2005. You can read the EC review of it
HERE. |
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