Ah-Ah-Argento #5: The Five Days

aka Le Cinque Giornate
1973, d. Dario Argento - blu-ray

Dario Argento's filmography is pretty consistent genre-wise. He works is the realm of horror, mystery and paranormal fantasy, usually a blend of any two, or all three. In that regard, The Five Days, is not just an outlier, but it is the outlier in his film canon.

The Five Days is a historical comedy, taking place at the onset of the Italian war for independence. Argento isn't exactly known for his period pieces, or his comedies, considering he had never attempted one or the other before, and, in part due to this film's commercial failure, he would never try again. It would be considered his "lost" work since it never really got much international distribution until Severin Films remastered it and released it on 4K and blu-ray in 2022. Casual fans of Argento didn't really know of its existence (or if they did, since it was such a tonal outlier, didn't care so much).

The Five Days opens in a prison in Milan, circa 1848. It a rotty, rat-infested dungeon of a place, with shaggy dirty men wiling their time away sleeping on hay-covered floors. If you look closely, there's a guy pooping in a bucket. Two men, patriots, talk of their impending escape, how the revolutionaries will break down the walls and provide them freedom...but they must be careful to ensure only their fellow patriots are let loose, for these other hardened criminals escaping to the streets would sew chaos, which is not their objectives. The Austrians must go! Milan for the Milanese!

But when a cannonball rocks a hole in the wall, the only man to escape is petty thief Cainazzo (Adriano Celentano), and from there it's a series of farcical events he finds himself thrust into as he searches the streets of Milan in the midst of a revolution for the criminal who owes him money (who just so happens to have become a leader of the liberation).

Until this point, Argento's films have all been murder-mysteries, Giallis that find someone thrust into the unintentional position of playing detective to solve a murder (or murders). That style of film, for Argento, is a patient one, one in which Argento can plan long tracking shots, or stage precise set-ups of his camera creating artistic compositions. The patience of his crime, and later, horror films is for the purpose of mood, of impending dread, and, on occasion, subversion or relief from the dread.  Here, there is no time for patience.

The Five Days moves at lightning speed. Title cards represent the many chapters of the film, but within each chapter is so much forward momentum. Cainazzo finds himself swept up in the revolution even though he's definitely no patriot... but, it turns out, he's not not a patriot as well.

Much of the film winds its way into a buddy comedy, as Cainazzo, fairly early on in his exploits, comes across the Roman baker Romolo (Enzo Cerusico, Il Tram). While Cainazzo is no thinker, he looks like Plato next to the simplistic Romolo, who follows him around like a lost puppy. There's real big-dog, little dog energy to their dynamic.  

The hapless duo at one point find themselves helping a pregnant woman deliver a baby, helping to build a barricade for a countess (far too enthused by all the conflict going on), and getting swept up with a vainglorious baron who is leading his own rebellion against the Austrians. They find themselves, more then once, caught up in the center of a massacre, sometimes on the side of the aggressors and sometimes on the receiving end. Cainazzo is none-too-enthused by either scenario. Along the way they get entwined with the elites of Milan who, if they're not boastfully leading the way, are otherwise pretending like nothing impactful is really happening. Argento, more then once, lays heavy criticism on the conflict, heavily indicating that the rich used the poor to drive the Austrians out of the city so the rich could benefit more from their absence.  

The Five Days borrows liberally from Buster Keaton's The General, by Argento's own admission (in the bonus features on the blu-ray, Luigi Cozzi, who co-wrote the film's treatment, further stressed how much they were trying to make an Italian version of that film). The screenplay was co-written by Argento with political socialist writer and poet Nanni Balestrini, as well as consulted heavily with professors of Milan's history for detailed accuracy.  These outside influences find a film at odds with itself. It wants to be a retro-styled slapstick comedy, it wants to be a historical drama, and it wants to be a political commentary, but the tonal shifts it needs to be all three create such whiplash as to make the film an highly uneven viewing experience.

The attention to detail is pretty phenomenal, it is an appropriately big production with fantastic wardrobes and redecorated streets to make everything feel as it would have 130 years earlier. Argento staged his first-ever battle scenes and mob scenes and worked on a scale that, by his own admission, made him uncomfortable (and he would never truly attempt again). He had a steady hand in legendary Italian cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller, so the film looks amazing, especially in its restored form.

Celentano was a massive celebrity in the 1970's, both an actor and a pop star (I've been familiar with him for over 20 years, every since friend and reader GAK introduced me to Celentano's proto-hip-hop gibberish track Prisencolinensinainciusol, having dozens upon dozens of times watch him perform this song in a few different settings, as archived on youtube), and here makes for a pretty winning and game lead. It helps that Celentano is handsome, incredibly fit, and those pantaloons hug him juuust right. Not to be overshadowed, Cerusico is every bit as endearing as he was in Argento's entry in the Door Into Darkness anthology, while playing a wildly different role. Here, a loveable doofus, as opposed to Il Tram's savvy police detective.

These two scruffy, handsome leads are a pleasure to watch, and each vignette, on its own, pretty much works, but they all don't work together. The speed-ramped slapstick shenanigans contrast against the messages about the abuses of the poor by the wealthy, how liberation would only be for the few, not the many. The brutal realities of war, the cycles of violence, revenge and rage are presented here, quite intentionally, as not exciting or glorious, and the men who proclaim themselves as liberators have darker cores to them.  There's also an undercurrent to this film where the only women featured are either made horny by the heroism and/or bloodshed around them, or they are victims of assault by the supposed "good guys" (not our main characters). The pregnant woman is the only exception. I found the segment of the countess (Marilù Tolo) getting all hot and bothered by the tumult pretty funny (to a point), but the widow (Carla Tato) who just witnessed her husband hanged as a traitor and escaped death as a result of Cainazzo and Romolo's intervention working through a flurry of emotions before taking Romolo to bed was pretty confounding. The assault on a Milanese woman by the baron was both egregious and direct to the point Argento is trying to make about "heroes" of war, the elites and their entitlement. For a director who generally shies away from gratuitous sex or nudity, these scenes, especially when taken as a whole, are pretty unfortunate.

At first it seems like Cainazzo's sympathetic criminal is going to get swept up into the fervour of the moment, to become an unexpected leader and hero of the rebellion, but that is not Argento's story. There's no heroes in war, no glory, it's all a con job. "We've been conned" are Cainazzo's final words, as the city celebrates their victory over the fleeing Austirans. "They've conned us" he says, pointing to the men in the formal wear and high-hats, the elites who did not fight, now basking in the glory of the war that just passed. Cainazzo cannot sit with it. He also doesn't make the big speech at the end...he is not a big speech maker. All he can speak is the truth he sees, that many, many, many people died and he truly doesn't see what for.

By no means a bad film, but also by no means a great one, there's plenty to be both impressed and disappointed with in The Five Days. It is probably the most maintstream effort Argento ever attempted, so it's pretty ironic that it was the least successful of his films during this period of his career.

Ah-Ah-Argento #3: Four Flies on Grey Velvet

I started my watch/rewatch of Italian suspense/horror maestro Dario Argento in January 2025, and I got all of two films in before I hit a wall. That wall was the wildly unavailable Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Argento's third film. It too disappeared for a long time between its North American theatrical release in the early 70's and when it finally became available on home video in the late 2000s. I ordered a Blu-Ray copy of the film from my local physical media purveyor, never to arrive, and attempts to find it elsewhere from Canadian sites came up empty. Beyond scouring the local used stores in town, I regularly watched a stub entry for the DVD version on a website for a Southern Ontario used music and video retail chain, and after many, many months it finally was available and delivered to me last month. And so now we resume with Ah-Ah-Argento....

(aka "4 mosche di velluto grigio") 1971, d. Dario Argento - dvd

Argento's third film shows the director not yet at the height of his powers, but certainly coming into them. His stylistic flourishes here aren't all consuming but when they're utilized one sits up and takes notice of them, and it starts from the first frame.

Our lead character in Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Roberto (Michael Brandon) is in a music store wailing on the drums, and Argento shoots it like a music video, before music videos were a thing. First we're in a series of close-ups of the kit from an overhead shot, which pulls out to reveal Roberto, and it pans around him reveal that he's in a store, and it continues to pan until we're looking out the store window to see a man in a hat and sunglasses looking in and we see Roberto sense the man's glare, before a hard cut to a black screen and left of center a vibrant red heart, heavily pounding. Then a seemingly seamless cut to Roberto in studio, jamming out with his post-hippie psych-rock band, still wailing on those drums (at one point we cut to a shot from the inside of an acoustic guitar, a hand eventually interrupting the shot as it strums). Close up of Roberto is being pestered by a fly, trying not to lose his concentration. We cut to the exterior of the studio, as Roberto walks through the parkette out front. In the distance, the same man with hat and sunglasses. Once more, hard cut to the black screen and pounding heart, before cutting back to Roberto driving his car. In his rear-view mirror he spies, in the car immediately behind him, that same man. Same hard cut. Black screen. Pounding heart. And then back to the studio, Roberto wailing on the drums, but that fly (looks like a mosquito) still buzzes around him, even causing him to lose his timing for a moment, before it lands in the middle of his hi-hat. This whole sequence, the band's wailing psych-rock has been playing, interrupted only by the black-screen/pounding heart, and as the song hits its crescendo, we view Roberto through the top and bottom of the hi-hat, his gaze fixed on the mosquito, until *CRASH*, the song ends, the bug is dead, the slyest of smirks crosses Roberto's face.

The psych-rock tune is just derivative nonsense (not sure if this film's composer, the legendary Ennio Morricone was involved in the creation of that tune, but if he was I would suspect the derivativeness of that nonsense was the point) but it's somehow essential to get across Roberto's profession and juxtapose the jubilant wail of the tune against the anxiety of seemingly being followed. The camera, whether moving or still, is superb, Argento's framing is exciting. The edits are a bit jumpy but effective in adding to Roberto's anxiety. And that pulsating red heart on the black screen, a chef's kiss to the whole process that feels like the influence of Mario Bava.

The plot kicks off immediately following this opening sequence, with Roberto seeing the hat-and-sunglasses man and chasing him down into an abandoned theatre. The man refuses to answer any questions and pulls out a switchblade. He lunges at Roberto, who grabs his wrist and as the man twists he's stabbed in the side and falls off the stairs into the orchestra pit. A noise from above reveals a figure on the balcony, a large mascot-sized cartoon head with a big grin looking down on the scene. A camera in hand, photos continue to be taken. Roberto runs, returns home and is bitter towards his wife Nina (Mimsy Farmer). 

His dreams haunt him, then a phone call harassing him. In the paper the next day, the story of a body dumped in the river, the victim unidentified. The next night someone is in his house. It's dark, the lights won't turn on. He's grabbed from behind, a cord around his throat, and he's told he can be killed at any time, but not now. First he needs to suffer. Then, in the mail, comes the passport of the man he killed. And that night, at the party, someone there slipped one of the photos taken at the murder scene between Roberto's records. He eventually comes clean with Nina, and the maid overhears (Roberto and Nina only seem to call her "the maid", despite the fact that she lives with them...fucking rude man). The maid knows who it was who put the photo there, and she tries to blackmail the harasser, only to get herself killed.

It all sort of escalates from there. Roberto attempts to get help from his outsider friend God (Bud Spencer), and God has his transient friend, The Professor (Oreste Lionello) watch Roberto's house for the next few nights. In my recollection of Argento's films (it's been years since I watched most of his later films and over a year now since I watched his first two) but I don't recall Argento having a lot of humour in his films. But characters like God and especially the Professor bring a lot of unusual energy, taking this outside of the typical Giallo I've experienced. Lionello especially has a incredible knack for physical humour with the  subtle, fluid grace of a Chaplin or Lloyd. Far more broad is the thick-glasses performance of Gildo Di Marco as the postman who Roberto mistakes as his stalker and beats on him. Not all the comedy fits into the production, in fact most of it feels like it's from another picture entirely. It doesn't suit the mood of the piece.

By far the best favourite aspect of the film was the inclusion of Gianni Arrosio (Jean-Pierre Marielle), the private investigator Roberto hires to help find out who is harassing him. Gianni is an effeminate gay, not coded in the slightest. He's right out there. But he's not comic relief. He is witty, but he's not the butt of any jokes. Marielle brings this character to life and he's the most richly drawn character in a production that otherwise feels cast full of one-note, one-dimensional figures. Marielle gets his own slice of the picture, starting with an investigation montage that leads him on full journey through Rome and beyond. I could have watched a whole film, hell, a whole series of Marielle's gay detective... just a remarkably lively performance. Of course he gets murdered, but it's because he's figured out who it is, only they catch on to him first.

Four Flies... is a mystery, but it's kind of a ramshackle one that doesn't fully hold together, especially once the reveal happens. I mean, it doesn't fall apart, but it's not satisfying in the slightest, and is kind of a corny, of-the-era take on mental illess. I don't really expect better of films from that time, but I'm certain even then it wasn't a satisfying reveal. It seems so cliche. This film's climax involves the concept of optography, that the last thing someone sees before their death is captured on their retina like a photograph. It's utter bullshit, and even science of the '70's should have known better, yet it's the turning point of the film. Writers like Kipling, Lovecraft and Verne have had stories with optography as a plot point, and even modern movies and TV shows like Fringe toy with the idea.

Morricone delivers a magnificent theme for the film, a lyrical, haunting string humming over a pulsating heartbeat that feels like it's either going to break into a love song or something terrifying and it never leaves that tension. I can hear hints of what would become the theme to Twin Peaks percolating within its tones. The rest of the soundtrack doesn't have anything so immediate or attention getting, but it's one of Morricone's great compositions that probably isn't cited much (it would be Argento and Morricone's last collaboration for 25 years, due to a falling out).

For Argento viewing Four Flies... seems a transitional movie. The director's first two films were incredibly solid entries in the suspense realm, and this one, with it's cast performing in English (despite still being dubbed) seemed to be a grasp at something that seemed more American in style. I don't think Argento would strain much to operate in that style again. But then again, I've never seen his next film, The Five Days which is the only film of his that truly operates outside his expected genres.

Ah-Ah-Argento #2: The Cat O' Nine Tails

1971, d. Dario Argento - dvd

If I were to guess why I didn't watch (or rent or buy on DVD) The Cat O' Nine Tails when I was first getting into Argento back in the early 2000s, it was likely because it was one of Argento's lower-ranked films. Argento himself has said its his least favourite of his movies (he notes that it's too referential to other films and genres and doesn't establish its own uniqueness).

Despite claiming to love Argento, I'm still a relative neophyte. I still have much to watch and learn about the director and his repertoire. That said, from what I know is coming, I would agree that this is his weakest film (at least until we get into his 2000's-era output).

It is very much in keeping with traditional giallo -- being a detective mystery sans detective. Here, James Franciscus (an actor I only know as Brent, the lead from Beyond the Planet of the Apes) plays a newspaper reporter who, with the help of a blind ex-reporter (Carl Malden) and his young ward, starts to connect the pieces to a break-in at a lab and subsequent murders.

The lab was working on identifying the XYY (ex-double-why) chromosome as a signifier of violent tendencies (it was speculation at the time, but since absolutely debunked). It's only natural to suspect the murderer is someone involved in the project, and it's kind of obvious who it might be.  The only thing is, conceit of the XYY chromosome is only introduced about halfway through the film, so the film relies heavily on learning about what the precipitating incident (the break-in) was about, and thus learning about the project.

Also being very much a giallo neophyte, I don't know if it's common in the genre for the police to aid a civilian detective in their investigation(s). It's something that also happened in The Bird With The Crystal Plumage and it's just so odd. There's a phenomenal moment here were Franciscus is socializing with a police acquaintance who is holding out on him, and Franciscus says "You're a real bastard" to which his police friend says "Naturally, cops are all bastards... we beat confessions out of people, we take bribes, we oppress minorities...." This is 1971, remember.

Argento is clearly experimenting with this film, playing with visuals and pacing and styles. His use of point-of-view (POV) camera work is next level, particularly the early sequence where the killer carries the body of a security guard and tosses it back inside his security booth. I just don't recall anything like that before. Her Argento aslo toys with manufacturing suspense a few times, in sequences that drag on longer than they should, really interrupting the pacing of the film. But he does have livelier sequences as well, such as a car chase sequence which I'm sure is an homage to The Italian Job. It's very well executed and big extra points for the driver being the film's femme fatale, while our protagonist sits in the passenger seat trying not to look panicked. 

I didn't mention that The Bird With The Crystal Plumage's score was by Ennio Morricone, since the master delivers a solid, but rather routine work.  Here, Morricone's score is a complete other level, sound wise, like it skipped a couple generations. Experimenting with repetition (Argento describes it as being like a music box), Morricone establishes themes and patterns and remixes them throughout. "Bold, dissonant and traumatic" he calls it, "I wrote themes that were more simple, nearly childish".  Only someone of Morricone's talent and genius would think that a masterful, controlled score like this were "childish".

One final note, I have to give a lot of respect for Argento's gay and trans representation in this film. At one point Franciscus needs to enter a gay lounge which is all trans, drag and gay men. Franciscus clearly feels out of his element, but he his neither repulsed nor harassed (though it is clear he is seen as the outsider). It is a scene that shows people just having an enjoyable evening out, listening to live music and socializing. Later Franciscus learns of a gay love triangle with some hard feelings that could point to murder, but doesn't.  It treats this very much in the same manner as if he uncovered a straight love triangle. There are just hurt feelings of lovers, and there's nothing sensationalistic about it.

It's by no means a bad movie, but it's not a great mystery, and t.  

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.