The film that put the Italian giallo genre on the international map, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo) is Dario Argento’s directing debut and the great cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s first film in colour. It’s archetypal giallo in many ways. Archetypal Argento, too, you could say, for bad and good. Formless plotting but a good twist, abrupt psychological transitions but beautifully sustained mood, a schoolboy approach to sexuality (ooh, look, a nipple) but a heightened sense of threat.
Argento wrote it in five days and came up with a story he’d re-use multiple times, of an artist of some sort (a writer, in this case), a foreigner (American here) in Italy caught up in a series of senseless killings. Rather than leave it to the police, Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante) decides to start investigating himself, hoping, incidentally, to release himself from the creative dead end he’s found himself in. He can’t leave the country anyway, because the cops have confiscated his passport.
The opening sequence is particularly good, visually and narratively. On his way home one night after having completed a hack job for an Italian publisher, Dalmas witnesses what appears to be a murder taking place in a gallery with a big picture-window frontage. He attempts to intervene, botches it and finds himself locked in a glass vestibule between the outside world and the interior of the gallery. Impotent, he can’t stop the killer, nor can he call for help and has to wait there until he’s freed by the police. By this point the victim, dressed entirely in white, is bathed in blood and nearly dead. Dalmas is obviously a witness, and, because the police like to keep things simple, a suspect too. Enter Enrico Maria Salerno as Inspector Morosini, a humane and thoughtful policeman who drops all suspicions about Dalmas once Dalmas himself is attacked. Someone wants the writer dead.
It’s a basic whodunit but it’s well done. Don’t look at the Wikipedia page before watching the film, like I did. It ruins what is a good denouement and neuters most of the good work Argento is doing, introducing likely characters and keeping the hunter/hunted ambiguity going right to the last moments.
As said, schoolboy sexual sniggers can be had from the sight of a breast here and the references to “deviancy” – homosexuality, cross-dressing – dropped in entirely gratuitously. Part of the Argento cocktail. Ignore them and focus instead on Argento’s leisurely conjuring of atmosphere, which prefigures William Friedkin’s in The Exorcist – the two were a mutual appreciation society so it’s not entirely fanciful to suggest Friedkin later did some stylistic borrowing for his horror opus.
There’s a nod to Hitchcock in a nighttime chase sequence in which Dalmas follows a suspect dressed in a yellow bomber jacket, only to wind up in a convention hall where everyone is dressed in the same colour – “giallo” translates as “yellow”, so Argento is probably also punning a bit on that (red is more his signature colour).
It’s the remarkable looking Reggie Nalder in the jacket, just one of an array of interesting males Argento has assembled, like Gildo Di Marco as the stuttering pimp Garullo, or Werner Peters as a very camp antiques expert with the hots for Dalmas, and Pino Patti as Faiena, a fount of underworld knowledge who speaks entirely in riddles.
Argento’s women are chosen more for their looks than their fascinating characters, though Suzy Kendall does well as Dalmas’s liberated British girlfriend (and useful sounding board) and Eva Renzi is pivotal as Monica Ranieri, the victim Dalmas first spots being attacked.
It’s a very neat and tight thriller, with polish added not just by Storaro’s lighting but also by Ennio Morricone’s score – cascading pianos, jazzy arrangements and breathy distant vocalising keeping things just unsettled enough the entire time.
A hit, it was followed by The Cat o’ Nine Tails and Four Flies on Grey Velvet in 1971 and 72, the three of them comprising Argento’s so-called Animal Trilogy.
Seekers after authenticity might wonder whether to watch it in English or the “original” Italian. The dialogue is dubbed in both cases, but most of the cast were speaking English so, if only to have lips and speech more in sync, I’d say go for the English. Either way, enjoy!
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2025
