The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)
Directed by Dario Argento
An American writer living in Rome witnesses an attempted murder that is connected to an ongoing killing spree in the city and conducts his own investigation, despite him and his girlfriend being targeted by the killer.
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6 films that influenced this film
What critics say influenced The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
Argento wrote the script with the popular mystery novelist Bryan Edgar Wallace (whose works are part of a similarly sadistically violent genre of German thrillers known as "krimi"), but it's really an edited version of Fredric Brown's thriller "Screaming Mimi" (previously made into a 1958 film).
Two films as touch points: Hitchcock's Notorious and Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up.
Though the genre's invention (named after the yellow/giallo covers of Italian penny dreadfuls) is credited to compatriot Mario Bava (see, especially, his astonishing Blood and Black Lace), Argento's scary polish and cunning for film language bridged the cultural, mainstream/arthouse gap with agility and audacity.
To continue the metaphor, Bava's 1964 Blood and Black Lace (a colorful mistranslation of Sei donne per l'assassino, or Six Women for the Killer) is the Halloween of gialli: the film that really nailed down almost all of the "rules" for the style, with the understanding that "giallo" is a much less specific category than "slasher", based on mood, style and narrative ingredients rather than a easily-identified narrative structure.
Two films as touch points: Hitchcock's Notorious and Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up.
That pianist is David Hemmings, whose Blow-Up Thomas owes something to the same concept, a clue like a dream that recedes just as, even making love, BCP?s artist, writer Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante), obsessively visualizes the scene of the crime but cannot get the missing link into focus.
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But it's not merely an intellectual exercise (in fact, the obscurity of the clues (its title at once revealing the identity of the killer and referring obliquely to the red herring of The Maltese Falcon) makes deciphering the procedural improbable at best)--rather, it's the visceral nature of the exercise that delights.
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is the forefather of not only Argento's own Deep Red and Tenebre (in the double reveals of the murderer and a corpse), but of the straight-razor/elevator/Psycho murder stolen by archrival Brian DePalma for his Dressed to Kill and the essential discomforts of Alexandre Aja's High Tension , too.