The Bird With the Crystal Plumage

Dario Argento’s first film, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (L'uccello dalle Piume di Cristallo) was the first and most important giallo movie ever made. Released in 1970, the film established many of Argento’s visual and textual trademarks, including stunning cinematography and the plot of a foreigner involved in a crime he/she does not fully understand. Tony Mustante stars as an American writer living in Rome who witnesses an attempted murder in a local art gallery. Trapped between two glass walls, he is unable to stop the violent action before him or to escape for help. When local cop Enrico Maria Salerno confiscates his passport and warns him not to leave Rome, needing him as both witness and possible suspect, every traveler’s nightmare has come to life. Both Mustante and his English model girlfriend (played by the minor horror actress Suzy Kendall) become targets of the killer in the black leather gloves. It is only the faint sound of an extremely rare bird, one with the piume di cristallo, that provides Mustante and local police their primary clue—as Mustante’s memory of the crime and trust in his senses are blurred, faded, distorted (common in Argento’s later work). Filled with many features of the giallo, such as the special blend of lurid violence, erotic undertone, whispers, confusion, primary colors, and sadism, The Bird With Crystal Plumage was scored by Ennio Morricone and filmed by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro—whose remarkable body of work in the seventies alone included Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, and 1900; Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now; 'Tis Pity She’s a Whore (a strange film known only to Charlotte Rampling fantatics); and The Driver’s Seat (an even stranger film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Andy Warhol). The Bird With Crystal Plumage, while perhaps overshadowed by Argento classics such as Suspiria, remains among his very best work.