by Kenneth Butler
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
Central Cinema Company Film, 1970
Starring: Tony Musante, Suzy Kendall, and Enrico Maria Salerno
Director: Dario Argento
The plot: Sam (Musante) is an American writer staying in Rome with his pretty girlfriend, Giulia (Kendall). Bored and frustrated, Sam is on the verge of returning to America when he witnesses a vicious attack on a woman in an art gallery by a black-gloved, black-clad madman, believed to be a serial killer responsible for several recent murders of young women. Sam is of little help to the police, but an inspector (Salerno) sees Sam as his only link to solving the wave of killings and confiscates his passport. The woman who survived the attack behaves oddly, as does her husband, the gallery owner. Soon Sam receives chilling phone calls from the killer and it’s clear his and his girlfriend’s lives are in real danger.
Why it’s good: For a low-budget early slasher film, “Bird” is damn smart: the first clue is Sam’s off-hand observation, They were struggling, but something didn’t seem quite right. The huge implications of this casual remark resound in the finale, and Sam’s own ennui seems to drive his curiosity as much as the photographer in Blow-Up. The title is intriguing and the plot complex, but still easy enough to follow — the viewer definitely becomes a participant in solving the mystery. Argento gives us hints of the nightmarish horror he would later bring to bear in films like Suspiria and Phenomena (a grotesque painting of a girl being butchered becomes a key, disturbing, clue here). Ennio Morricone’s haunting lullaby score (an effect used so beautifully by Krzysztof Komeda in the previous year’s Rosemary’s Baby) and Vittorio Storaro’s stylish photography make a cheap film sound and look rather elegant. Musante and Kendall’s performances are by the book (one dated element of the film is how haplessly helpless this girl is when the killer’s trying to gain entrance to her apartment), but Salerno manages some depth with his clever police inspector.
Should I watch it? This movie was intended to be a formulaic Italian thriller in the giallo school. Argento saw his chance with this, his directorial debut, and upended the material (swiped without credit from short story master Frederic Brown’s The Screaming Mimi) with stylized atmosphere, violence, sex, and eccentric touches (a cat-eating painter is just one example). The West German and Italian producers weren’t sure what to make of it, but audiences and critics liked it (including Roger Ebert). The film had one of the earliest (and creepiest) television ad campaigns for a theatrical film, and the movie was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe award. The Arrow DVD release has some restored footage, but otherwise has no remarkable special features.