The Bird With the Crystal Plumage

Trevor Willsmer

at 2:13 am

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is not particularly gory, but it does establish a blueprint for most of Dario Argento’s later work, with the crucial misunderstood attempted murder both referencing Antonioni’s Blow-Up and prefiguring the killer-in-plain-sight twist of Deep Red. Best of all is Argento’s mastery of vivid color and the Scope frame (the gallery window is even designed at an exact 2.35:1 to match the screen ratio). It still lacks the bravura and panache that would distinguish Deep Red, Suspiria and Inferno, and the best that can be said of the performances is that they don’t get in the way: Tony Musante’s hero and Mario Adorf’s cameo as a cat-eating artist pass muster, as does Enrico Maria Salerno, the Italian voice of Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone’s westerns (the perverse side of my nature thought Eastwood could at least have returned the compliment by dubbing him into English), but Suzy Kendall definitely looks better than she acts and some of the supporting cast pull out most of the stops. Still how can you not love a film with lines like “How many times do I have to tell you, Ursula Andress belongs with the transvestites, not the perverts!”

Blue Underground’s new Region 1 NTSC DVD is some 30 seconds longer than the previous VCI issue and boasts superb picture quality and a choice of English or Italian tracks (it was shot in English, as per all of Argento’s films). The extras aren’t plentiful enough to justify a second disc – some 47 minutes of interviews, including an inadvertently revealing one by Eva Renzi pretty much badmouthing anyone who ever offered her a part for destroying her career – but if you don’t have the film it’s worth picking up for the remastering alone.

Rating: 4 / 5

Anonymous

at 5:05 am

This film is great it deserves the 4 stars I gave it. It is a wonderful debut from a brilliant film directer. But this UK version is cut. Why? I dont know the BBFC said they would have no problem releasing it uncut. Oh well.

The film is great thought using many of the cinematic techniques and tactics that would be so brilliantly portrayed in his later films. This film shows a talent in the making and at the time a man who even Hitchcock feared would take him down.
Rating: 4 / 5

D. R. Clarke

at 9:17 am

I was really looking forward to this film, and my disappointing 3 stars is not due to the film itself but to the fact that the film is still apparently censored after all these years. Indeed, if you watch the trailer for the film included on the DVD, you will see that one of the murders remains trimmed for British audiences!! I am sure that the BBFC, in its more recent leniency, would now pass this film in a completely uncensored print (bearing in mind it has recently released the likes of H.G Lewis’s ‘The Wizard of Gore’ uncut, albeit after some 30 odd years!!!) but it is typical of many British releases that they do not even bother to examine the print to restore the cuts before releasing onto DVD. If you want my advice, get yourself a multi-region DVD player and buy this film from Amazon.com in the States, as, ironically, American film distributors tend to show far more care and consideration for these European cult classics than we do ourselves. Argento’s first film may lack the overtly stylish direction and explicit violence of something like his undoubted masterpiece, Profondo Rosso, but it is still a taut, well made film – after ‘Blood and Black Lace’ one of the most genre defining giallo’s ever made. If minor cuts in films do not bother you then by all means buy this film, but, personally, I still prefer to watch films exactly as the director intended.
Rating: 3 / 5