The directorial debut of Dario Argento, and the first of what would become his “animal trilogy”, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage is a visually-pleasing and entertaining murder mystery. It is a giallo that both shows the intended path of a film career that would keep Argento on a high for the next decade or two and yet also tries harder to keep things logical and tidy (unlike a number of the more barmy examples of this sub-genre that aim for style and memorable deaths over any kind of plausibility).
Tony Musante plays Sam, an American living in Rome with his girlfriend, Julia (Suzy Kendall). Walking home one night, Sam witnesses the attempted murder of Monica Ranieri (Eva Renzi). He is unable to properly see the attacker, or even help, as he is trapped in an area between two glass doors. Once Monica is safe, with police and medical personnel on the scene, Sam tries to untangle exactly what he just witnessed. Immediately coming under suspicion from Inspector Morisini (Enrico Maria Salerno), Sam decides that he has to provide his innocence AND find the killer. Yes, it is time for him to turn amateur detective.
A lot of people love this film, and the subsequent films that came along soon after it, but I never have. It’s important, establishing some of the main elements that Argento would go on to polish and perfect by the time he delivered Deep Red, but it lacks the savagery and memorable madness that feels soaked into so much of Argento’s filmography. There’s one highlight, the main sequence in which our hero is trapped while watching the attempted murder take place, and the ending returns to that idea, but it’s not quite enough to make this a classic. It is good, but you can find a hundred other examples of this kind of film that are good.
Argento keeps his script pretty low-key and grounded, and also keeps it fairly close to a Fredric Brown novel titled “The Screaming Mimi” (apparently, I am not familiar with that material so cannot say just HOW close this is), which gives him more time to make viewers cringe with dialogue that weaves between the laughably bad to the horribly outdated. He already shows a good eye for set-piece moments though, but just cannot throw in enough of them while taking more care than usual to deliver a standard narrative.
It's tough to judge the acting on display, especially when heightened melodrama is the tone of most scenes, but I guess you could say that everyone feels right for the time and the place. Musante is a decent lead, helped by the fact that his “relationship” with the killer feeds into his need to get the case solved ASAP, and Salerno is good as the typically displeased cop who is very reluctant to let our hero get too far away from him. Kendall and Renzi are fine, the latter having a bit more fun once the immediate threat of murder is gone, and Umberto Raho, Pino Patti, Giuseppe Castellano, and Mario Adorf all help, populating the screen with memorable characters/suspects.
A score by Ennio Morricone also proves to be a bonus, although it is far from his best work, and there’s a fascination in seeing Argento begin his directorial career with something so intriguingly full of indicators of what he would circle around, again and again, throughout his career. I may not love it, but I certainly admire it.
6/10
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