• The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is the auspicious debut for first time director Dario Argento. It marks quite the meeting of talented Italians with Argeno (thirty at the time) working with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (also thirty, his first color film, and this was the same year he worked with Bertolucci on The Conformist) and Ennio Morricone (an unnerving score using some vocalizations).
  • It is an important film in the Giallo subgenre (there was a sort of post-Spaghetti Western boom about to happen). Yet, this is also clearly tied to the successful Italian import Blow-Up from Antonioni in 1966. There is a serial killer– a “dangerous maniac” on the loose attacking beautiful women. Tony Muscante plays Sam. Sam witnesses a murder (Argento cares about set pieces and modern architecture right from the outset, the first murder is in an art gallery, the next in an antique shop) and becomes obsessed with figuring it out. This is more of a crime procedural (using an early computer for clues, details of the crime) than existential exploration (Blow-Up).
  • Splice editing, flashback, and freeze frames on victims… there is a rapid montage sequence in a phone booth.
  • 2.35 : 1 aspect ratio in Eastmancolor
  • Also, like Blow-Up, the protagonist obsesses not only on the mystery, but the symbol involved (in Blow-Up it is the photograph itself). In The Bird with Crystal Plumage the symbol is the painting the killer buys from the antique store (which is definitely inspired by The Hunters in the Snow by Pieter Bruegel the Elder).
  • This popularized the Giallo film (name derived from the yellow books these type of mysteries used to be in print), but also the point-of-view stalking camera (legacy from Peeping Tom in 1960 to Argento’s own Deep Red in 1975). In one scene here, Argento’s camera even ducks behind a tree to hide.
  • Architecture, clean lines—the triangle shape of the stairs at the 49-minute mark (above).
  • A stunner at the 90-minute mark (also above) with the entire frame in black and the singular door open creating a beacon of yellow light.
  • the film has a bit of an anti-climatic karate chop to the back of the head finale and then the psychiatrist surmising the film for us giving the killer’s diagnosis and motive a la Psycho.
  • Recommend/ Highly Recommend border