Ah-Ah-Argento, #1 - The Bird With The Crystal Plumage

1970, d. Dario Argento - blu-ray

My memory of how I discovered Dario Argento is extremely hazy. I suspect it was in the late 90's when I was helping a local shop with their mail-order cult video rental business by writing synopses and reviews of the films. I'm pretty sure this is where I saw The Bird With The Crystal Plumage for the first time. It put Argento on my radar, but it would be a couple more years, when Anchor Bay was releasing them on DVD that I would see any further Argento films. 

Phenomena would have been the first, a blind buy (as was my disposition at the time, following early websites that would provide details on upcoming releases and hitting up The Future Shop in Thunder Bay on a near-weekly basis to peruse the new releases), and it remains my favourite, but Deep Red, Tenebre, and Suspiria would follow in subsequent years, and I really, really liked them all (I don't know why I never got Inferno). I'm a horror dabbler in recent years, much more comfortable with the genre than I ever was, but 25-ish years ago and I certainly was still a wuss about it. But Argento's style, and the giallo subgenre in general, wasn't full of the gore and jump scares I was trying to avoid.

The Bird With The Crystal Plumage is very much a traditional giallo, but an early version of the more horror-laden subgenre it would become. It leans more into the mystery/discovery element and less into the acts of violence. It has, since my first viewing, held a real soft spot in my film-loving heart. To be honest, I think I've been nervous to rewatch for the first time in probably two decades because I'm worried it wouldn't hold up.

But it does hold up, in its own way. Not perfectly, but it's still full of the charms that originally endeared me to Argento, and has its own little surprises.  There are, of course, aspects that are outright absurd, such as the police basically encouraging a civilian to conduct their own investigation into a string of serial murders and even providing assistance. And there are also terribly outdated sexist tropes, like how the women just crumble into hysterics when faced with any sort of threat, that this feels like it should be smarter about.

Beyond that it's a somewhat jaunty mystery, where an American writer comes across the scene of a woman being stabbed in an art gallery, which is then correlated to a string of murders over the prior weeks. The writer cannot seem to resist carrying out his own investigation, even when threatened by the killer and had a couple attempts on his, and his girlfriend's life.

What one has to be mindful of is that The Bird With The Crystal Plumage is not a horror movie. It's leaning more into Hitchcock suspense terrain, but it also has a playfully subversive sense of humor that I found charming.  Since this was made in 1970, there have been countless hours of "procedural" television that show us how an investigation works, and there have been countless hours of forensic television that we have a sense of how that works as well. This film takes stabs at procedural investigation and forensics and it's almost tongue in cheek with how ... off... it all is. I delighted in it.

But the bones of The Bird With The Crystal Plumage are a solid mystery, one which is actually quite compelling to watch as it weaves an veers in unexpected directions from the typical mystery (in one sequence our protagonist is dodging bullets from an assassin, only to escape into public, and then immediately turn around and follow his attacker...I still don't think I've seen that anywhere else). I went from being worried about whether the film was actually any good to being completely sucked in by minute 20.  It's flawed, but super fun.

I had lent out my modest Argento collection to a friend of a girlfriend, only to lose touch with the lendee following the break-up. It was a write-off. I've lamented the loss of my Argento Anchor Bay DVDs for two decades now, and just last year started re-acquiring them and filling in some of the other Argento gaps I had. I'm excited to explore these films again, and some for the first time.  I've heard that by the 1990s Argento had lost his touch (and giallo, as a subgenre had definitely gone dormant in the wake of 80's slasher movies) so I may bow out of covering his entire portfolio at some point, but I know I'll be covering the 70's and 80's fully.