I'm always amazed by first-time directors whose first outings are so mature that it seems like they'd been doing it forever. Orson Welles, Vincent Gallo...perhaps they were genetically coded to direct. So was (is) Dario Argento. The Bird with the Crystal Plumage was his first directorial job, and one would never know it because of his inate abilty to compose a perfect shot. Also, his ability to move from near-dark to deep, primary well-lit color in a scene is an amazing feat. And yes, I realize that the acting is stilted, and there isn't the psychedelic color scheme's of Suspiria...but his use of darkness in this film is mind-bending. The guy's a damn genius.
I'll shut up now. Enjoy!
From Stuart Galbraith IV at DVD Talk:
Perhaps DVD's greatest legacy, at least for many die-hard movie fans, is how it introduced them to movies and genres up to then unavailable except in heavily bastardized versions on television and tape, or through the murky underworld of murky bootlegged videos. Thanks to DVD's popularity and pervasiveness, the ability to buy, sell, and trade DVDs on the Internet, and a growing demand that facilitated boutique labels like Blue Underground, Fantoma, Mondo Macabro, and All Day Entertainment, movies and even whole genres we may have only vaguely heard about suddenly became available, and in quality transfers that enabled viewers to see films in a good approximation of the theatrical experience, as experienced by moviegoers in their country of origin. German mysteries, Indonesian action films, Bollywood musicals, Hong Kong comedies, Spanish horror films, Soviet Bloc science fiction dramas - you name it.
One of the most enjoyable and surprising discoveries of this DVD age has been the Italian Giallo film, Hitchcockian mystery-thrillers noted for their stylish direction, cryptic titles, imported American and British stars, twist (and sometimes multiple twist) endings, and occasional horror elements, particularly the slasher film which giallo helped define. Giallo have something of an overstated reputation for nudity and bloodletting, but during the 1970s at least - the Golden Age of the Giallo -- the films generally were much less explicit than, say, Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972), one of the most giallo-like non giallo films.
Outside Europe, the giallo was largely unknown except as fodder for under-funded UHF stations for airings in the middle of the night. But then Anchor Bay released The Giallo Collection to DVD in June 2002, and more giallo titles gradually followed.
It's appropriate then that one of [BU's] first Blu-ray releases should be what might be considered the seminal (though not the first) giallo film, Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (L'Uccello dale piume cristallo, 1970). Though many of its then-innovative components have since become genre cliches, it's still an impressive work with extremely good cinematography. Blue Underground's transfer is fine and the extras, though carried over from an earlier DVD release, are plentiful and informative.
Sam Dalmas (Connecticut-born Tony Musante) is a novelist living in Rome. He has writer's block and no wonder - his girlfriend, Julia (Suzy Kendall), is a beautiful British model.
Shortly before they plan to return to the U.S., Sam is walking the streets late at night when across the road, through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows of an art gallery, he sees a woman being stabbed by someone in a dark raincoat, who then disappears through a back door. Sam rushes to the woman's rescue, but finds himself trapped between the two glass doors leading into the gallery.
The woman, Monica (Eva Renzi), the wife of gallery owner Alberto Ranieri (Umberto Raho), survives the attack, and the following day Police Inspector Morosini (Enrico Maria Salerno, whose upper lip hair suggests a hot chocolate mustache) takes possession of Sam's passport, preventing the writer from leaving the country during the ongoing investigation. For his part, Sam begins to suspect Alberto, but in any case both Sam and Julia become the target of further attacks. Meanwhile, Sam is haunted by nagging memories of what he saw that night, convinced he's somehow not registering a vital detail that might solve the mystery.
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage was Dario Argento's first credit as director. Before this he worked as a screenwriter for several years, notably on Once Upon a Time in the West, in which he collaborated with Bernardo Bertolucci and director Sergio Leone. After Mario Bava's death Argento became Italy's leading horror filmmaker, but it was during the '70s, in films where he merged giallo with horror and surrealism, that Argento made most of his best films, famously Suspiria and Deep Red.
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is a good showcase for Argento's talent though personally I much prefer his next film, The Cat o' Nine Tails (Il gatto a nove code, 1971), which is more confidently stylized and has better performances (by James Franciscus, Catherine Spaak, and especially Karl Malden). Tony Musante, who has a tendency to overact, oddly is too subdued and uncharismatic here, delivering one of the least interesting leading performances in the genre. Nevertheless, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage was a big hit in Italy and to some degree abroad. Wikipedia reports a budget of $500,000 but I'd be surprised if it was half that. An Italian-West German co-production filmed in English - which accounts for the appearance of ubiquitous German character actor Werner Peters, late of myriad Edgar Wallace thrillers, as a gay antique dealer - the film was a big hit, earning about 1.6 billion lire in Italy alone at a time when Mario Bava's much less expensive thrillers weren't even making back their negative cost.
There are many fine set pieces: a line-up scene featuring a masculine transvestite amusingly calling herself "Ursula Andress"; a fall from an apartment window daringly filmed by tossing the camera out the window and letting crash onto the pavement below; an amusing chase of an assassin (creepy-looking Hitchcock veteran Reggie Nalder, no less) who disappears into the crowd at a boxing commission meeting, where everyone's wearing the same style of blue cap and yellow jacket. The scenes at the austere gallery are the film's highlights, with its proscenium framing also suggesting a reptile's aquarium, with rubber-necking passersby peering into the crime scene. The stabbing of Monica and Sam's inability to reach her is extremely well staged and visually very interesting.
Technical Information:
Title: L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo/The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
Year: 1970
Country: Italy, West Germany
Director: Dario Argento
Source: Retail BluRay
Video Codec: 1080p-x264
Container: .mkv
Size: 6.55 GB
Length: 1:36:30
Programs used: mkvmerge
Resolution: 1920x816
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Video: MPEG4 AVC H264 @ ~9727 kb/s
Frame Rate: 23.976 fps
Audio: Italiano- Dolby AC3 5.1 @ 448 kb/s
Subtitles: English
(Our prefered x264 player is Media Player Classic.)
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