The Bird with the Crystal Plumage

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is a 1970 giallo film written and directed by Dario Argento, in his directorial debut. It stars Tony Musante as an American writer in Rome who witnesses a serial killer targeting young women, and tries to uncover the murderer's identity before he become their next victim. The cast also features Suzy Kendall, Enrico Maria Salerno, Eva Renzi, Umberto Raho and Mario Adorf.
A co-production of Italy and West Germany, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is the first in what has been called his thematic "Animal Trilogy", along with Argento's next two gialli, The Cat o' Nine Tails (1971) and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1972). Argento's screenplay borrows liberally from Fredric Brown's 1949 novel The Screaming Mimi, which had a previously been made into a 1958 American film.
An international commercial and critical success on release, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage has been credited with popularizing giallo, an Italian genre of horror-thriller developed in the 1960s, and launched Argento's career as a filmmaker.
Plot
Sam Dalmas is an American writer vacationing in Rome with his English model girlfriend, Julia. Suffering from writer's block, Sam is on the verge of returning to America but witnesses the attack of a woman in an art gallery by a mysterious black-gloved assailant dressed in a raincoat.
Attempting to reach her, Sam is trapped between two mechanically operated glass doors and can only watch as the villain makes his escape. The woman, Monica Ranieri (the wife of the gallery's owner Alberto Ranieri), survives the attack and the local police confiscate Sam's passport to stop him from leaving the country. The assailant is believed to be a serial killer who is killing young women across the city, and Sam is an important witness.
Sam is haunted by what he saw that night, feeling sure that some vital clue is evading him, and he decides to help Inspector Morosini in his investigation. He interviews the pimp of a murdered prostitute and visits a shop where one of the victims worked. There, Sam finds that the last thing she sold on the day of her death was a painting of a stark landscape featuring a man in a raincoat assaulting a young woman. He visits the artist but finds only another dead end. As he makes his way back to his apartment, a black-gloved figure attacks Julia, but Sam arrives home just in time to save her, and the assailant escapes.
Sam starts to receive threatening phone calls from the killer. The police manage to isolate an odd cricketing noise in the background, which is later revealed to be the call of a rare breed of bird from Siberia called "The Bird with Crystal Plumage" due to the translucent glint of its feathers. This clue proves crucial since the only one of its kind in Rome is kept in the Italian capital's zoo, allowing Sam and the police to identify the killer's abode. They once again find Monica Ranieri struggling with her husband Alberto, who is wielding a knife. After a short struggle, Alberto drops from six stories onto a concrete sidewalk below. As he dies, he confesses to the murders and tells them he loves his wife.
Finding that Julia and Monica have run off, Sam goes after them, eventually coming to a darkened building. He finds his friend Carlo murdered and Julia bound, gagged, and wounded. The assailant emerges and is revealed as Monica Ranieri. Sam suddenly realizes that he didn't miss anything during the first attack in the gallery, but that he misinterpreted what he saw: it was not Monica being assaulted, but Monica attacking her husband, who was wearing the raincoat. She flees, and he pursues Monica to her art gallery. There he is trapped, pinned to the floor by the release of a wall-sized sculpture of wire and metal. Unable to free himself, he is teased by the knife-wielding Monica as she prepares to kill him. As she raises her knife, the police (who were notified by Julia, who escaped) burst in and apprehend her. Sam is freed, and Monica is taken to a psychiatric hospital.
It is revealed through an interview with a psychiatrist that Monica was the victim of a traumatic attack ten years before. Seeing the painting of the attack drove her mad, causing her to identify with the assailant and not the victim. Alberto likewise suffered from an induced psychosis, helping her cover up the murders and committing some himself. Sam and Julia are reunited and return to America.
Cast
Influences
Though Dario Argento is credited as the film's sole writer, the story closely follows the 1949 pulp novel The Screaming Mimi by American writer Fredric Brown. Argento was initially exposed to the book by director Bernardo Bertolucci, who was considering purchasing the film rights. Among the changes Argento made to Brown's story were a change of location from Chicago to Rome, making the killer the wife of an art dealer rather than an exotic dancer, and having the artwork that triggers her be a painting rather than a statuette. Brown's novel had previously been made into a Hollywood film, Screaming Mimi (1958), directed by Gerd Oswald.
The story is thought to have been influenced by the early Mario Bava giallo The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963), which also involves a witness to a murder later realizing that the person they took to be the victim was actually the perpetrator. The killer's outfit of a black raincoat, hat and gloves, which would go on to become a standard giallo trope, was introduced in Bava's Blood and Black Lace (1964).
Production
Development
Dario Argento was introduced to Brown's novel by his friend Bernardo Bertolucci, who had acquired the rights to Brown's novel and intended to direct a film adaptation himself. Argento wrote the screenplay over several weeks vacationing in Tunisia. Titanus mogul Goffredo Lombardo optioned the script after being impressed by Argento's work on the film Metti, una sera a cena.
Argento initially had no intention of directing the film, but after several directors including Duccio Tessari and Terence Young turned it down, Argento decided to make it himself, and got his father Salvatore to produce. He and his assistant Aldo Lado heavily rewrote the script during filming, so that it became less and less directly tied to Brown's novel.
Casting
Argento cast American actor Tony Musante in the lead role, after he had previously starred in Metti, una sera a cena. According to Argento, their relationship was a tense one, as Mustante's method acting sensibilities clashed with Argento's technical directing style.
Through a co-production deal with West German studio CCC Film, the film cast West German actors Eva Renzi, Mario Adorf and Werner Peters. Character actor Reggie Nalder, who had a played a hitman in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much, after Argento saw him filming an American TV show in Rome.
Filming and post-production
Filming took place primarily on-location in Rome, mostly in the Flaminio quartiere. Studio scenes were shot at the INCIR De Paolis soundstages. The racecourse sequence was filmed at the Agnano Racecourse in Naples.
Argento's inexperience as director led him to nearly be fired and replaced by Lombardo mid-production, but thanks to his robust contract he was able to complete the film.
To accommodate the international cast and better facilitate English-language distribution, the film was shot primarily in English and MOS, with all dialogue and foley dubbed in. The English-language version was supervised by Robert Rietti; Tony Musante and Suzy Kendall did their own English dubbing. The Italian version was overseen by Mimmo Palmara.
Music
The score for The Bird with the Crystal Plummage was composed by Ennio Morricone, his first for a giallo film and his first of five collaborations with Argento.
Release
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage was released in Berlin, Germany with a 94-minute running time at the Gloria-Palast on 24 June 1970. In Germany it was marketed as an adaptation of a Bryan Edgar Wallace story. It was released in the United Kingdom under the title The Gallery Murders.
Critical reception
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage was relatively well received by critics. The New York Times wrote, "[It] has the energy to support its elaborateness and the decency to display its devices with style. Something from each of its better models has stuck, and it is pleasant to rediscover old horrors in such handsome new décor. " A number of American critics compared the film (favourably or unfavourably) to the thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock, such as Roger Ebert, who gave the film three out of four stars, writing, "it's a pretty good [thriller]", but that "its scares are on a much more basic level than in, say, a thriller by Hitchcock."
The film was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe award for best motion picture in 1971.
The film was placed 272nd in Empire magazine's "500 Greatest Movies of All Time" list.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 85% based on 40 reviews, and an average rating of 7.50/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Combining a deadly thriller plot with the stylized violence that would become his trademark, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage marked an impressive horror debut for Dario Argento."
Home media
The film was originally cut by 20 seconds for its US release and received a 'GP' rating, though it was later re-classified as 'PG'. The film was later released on DVD by VCI with the restored violence, but had problems with a sequence of shots referred to as "the panty removal scene". Later pressings fixed it. Blue Underground later obtained the rights and re-released the film completely uncut, adding an extra shot of violence previously unseen. The picture was completely restored and the sound was remixed into both 5.1 audio for both Italian and English tracks, but contained another soundtrack remixed into DTS-ES 6.1 Discrete in English.
Blue Underground released the film on Blu-ray Disc on 24 February 2009. Tech specs saw a BD-50 dual-layer presentation with newly remastered 1080p video and English audio tracks in DTS-HD Lossless Master Audio 7.1 Surround and Dolby TrueHD 7.1 Surround plus the original Italian audio track. It is now out-of-print. VCI announced on their Facebook page that they plan to release the film on Blu-ray Disc sometime soon and was released on September 12, 2013.
Arrow released the film on Blu-ray in the UK on June 13, 2011, but drew some criticism due to the film being cropped to 2.00:1 (which is director of photography Vittorio Storaro's current Univisium aspect ratio). In June 2017, Arrow re-released the film on a limited edition Blu-ray/DVD combo pack in the US and the UK containing a remastered 4K transfer from the original camera negative made exclusively for the release.
Impact
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage has been credited as a significant milestone in the popularization of the giallo genre. The genre is considered to date back at least as far as Mario Bava's 1963 film, The Girl Who Knew Too Much, but The Bird with the Crystal Plumage was the first giallo to achieve significant commercial and critical success. The film spawned a brief fad for gialli with similar verbose titles involving animals such as Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971), The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire (1971), and Don't Torture a Duckling (1972).
See also
Vittorio Storaro filmography
Notes
References
External links
1970 films
1970 horror films
1970s mystery horror films
1970s psychological thriller films
Giallo films
Italian mystery horror films
1970s Italian-language films
English-language Italian films
1970s English-language films
Films directed by Dario Argento
Films scored by Ennio Morricone
1970s serial killer films
Films about fictional painters
Films based on American novels
Films based on thriller novels
Titanus films
Films set in Rome
Films about writers
Films with screenplays by Dario Argento
Constantin Film films
21st Century Film Corporation films
1970 directorial debut films
Italian serial killer films
Italian exploitation films
1970 multilingual films
Italian multilingual films
1970s Italian films
Films about dissociative identity disorder