{"id":15098,"date":"2020-10-09T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-09T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=15098"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:17:43","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:17:43","slug":"classic-corner-the-bird-with-the-crystal-plumage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/classic-corner-the-bird-with-the-crystal-plumage\/","title":{"rendered":"Classic Corner: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It\u2019s a safe space and we\u2019re all friends here, so this is as good a time as any to admit that giallo<\/em> is a huge blind spot for me. There\u2019s no good reason; sometimes things just don\u2019t come into your sight lines until it\u2019s too late, and there\u2019s an entire subgenre you\u2019ve missed out on (with a handful of inescapable exceptions), and it feels impossible to backfill. But curiosity should always win out over shame, and it\u2019s a fine month to catch up on scary movies, and thus I spent a couple of hours with Dario Argento\u2019s directorial debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage<\/em> (now streaming on Tubi<\/a>). I heartily recommend you do the same. It\u2019s a hell of an entry point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tony Musante stars as Sam Dalmas, an American writer working (sort of) in Rome, where he hopes to draw inspiration for his own work but ends up just doing some hack ghostwriting (in a freelance writer mood for the ages, he waves off a copy of the book he penned in favor of his payment: \u201cWho needs it, I have this\u201d). But then he stumbles upon something shocking, witnessing an attempted murder at an art gallery \u2013 one which he\u2019s unable to prevent, since he can\u2019t get past the building\u2019s giant glass doors, so he can only watch the poor, bleeding woman wriggle closer to death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That sequence is genuinely upsetting, for both the viewer and the protagonist, who shouts desperately, \u201cHOW DO I OPEN THE DOOR?\u201d The police initially apprehend Sam as a suspect, confiscating his passport (which he was about to use), and thus Argento\u2019s screenplay cleverly mashes up the two of the most durable Hitchcock premises: the guy who sees something he wasn\u2019t supposed to, and the innocent man wrongly accused.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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But he\u2019s haunted by what he\u2019s seen, even assaulted by flash images of the assault while trying to folic in bed with his lady, so he offers to help the police who were just trying to lock him up, a good sport if there ever was one. \u201cIs it really necessary?\u201d asks his girlfriend. \u201cRunning around, playing detective?\u201d But the amateur policier<\/em> element is key in these early Argentos (his follow-up, The Cat O\u2019Nine Tails<\/em>, features not one but two armchair sleuths) \u2013 less, it seems, as a model of civic responsibility than as a method of redirecting energy. \u201cWhat\u2019s happening to me?\u201d Sam asks, reasonably. \u201cThis damn thing is turning into an obsession.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When giallo<\/em> is only in your peripheral, you hear a lot about its influence on slasher movies \u2013 an accurate assessment, to be sure. But what was most striking to this novice, while watching The Bird with the Crystal Plumage<\/em>, was its influence on De Palma. The aforementioned Hitchcock is the go-to connection for the \u201870s whiz kid, but there\u2019s as much of this picture in his seminal 1980 thriller Dressed to Kill<\/em> as there is Hitch\u2019s Vertigo, <\/em>if not more. (The straight-razor murder in the apartment building may as well be a pre-viz.) What\u2019s more, Bird<\/em>\u2019s obsession with surveillance and voyeurism, from the still photo snapping of the opening sequence to Sam\u2019s recording of his phone calls, reverberates through De Palma\u2019s filmography \u2013 particularly Blow Out<\/em>, which also features a gloved and decidedly giallo<\/em>-ish killer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there\u2019s only so much fun in playing connect-the-dots. What\u2019s most noteworthy about Bird with the Crystal Plumage<\/em>, as with Cronenberg\u2019s Shivers<\/em> last week<\/a>, <\/em>is the filmmaker\u2019s sheer mastery of suspense and terror technique, right out of the box: how he builds tension (particularly in the closing sequences), uses foreground and background (the shock reveal of the body in the apartment), and inventively deploys the first-person camera (this was not long after Hitchcock\u2019s attempt at an all-first person thriller, the aborted Kaleidoscope<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Of course, this is not just a case of a savvy beginner \u2013 every director should be so lucky as to have his debut picture scored by Ennio Morricone and shot by Vittorio Storaro. Then again, a template was clearly being made, and a style was being formed; even on this inaugural outing, Argento\u2019s tone is in place, the storytelling sense is set, and those reds, hew boy, they pop like blood vessels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Throw in that rarest of beasts, a genuinely shocking narrative twist (seriously, did not <\/em>see it coming), augmented by some of the most enjoyably feral acting you\u2019ve ever seen, and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage<\/em> is a first-rate thriller. I\u2019ll be keeping an eye on this Argento fellow. He seems to have some potential.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Bird with the Crystal Plumage\u201d is currently streaming on <\/em>Tubi<\/em><\/a> and <\/em>The Film Detective<\/em><\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dario Argento\u2019s feature debut \u2013 now streaming on Tubi \u2013 is also a fine (and spooky) entry point into the world of giallo. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":15102,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[1431,1422],"class_list":["post-15098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","tag-classic-corner","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15098"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15098\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22701,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15098\/revisions\/22701"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}