The Bird with the Crystal Plumage

Dario Argento was still a few years from being the acknowledged maestro of Italian horror cinema when he made this effective and absorbing little Giallo (i.e. “yellow” films, originally a reference to cheap Italian knockoffs of popular English mystery and crime books). It presents to us a rather trite concept—a man that can’t remember the murder, or, in this case, attempted murder he witnesses. We’re never quite apprised of why this is the case; I mean, he doesn’t seem like the sort of fellow who is suffering from shock. However, we’re taken on a slow immersion into the world of Mr. Dalmas the writer, who is in Italy to recharge his literary batteries and, along the way, score with all the hot Italian ladies. Or, at the very least, one blonde one, Julia (Suzy Kendall).

Sam, played by Tony Musante of "Toma" and "Oz" fame, witnesses the attempted murder by a trench coat-wearing silhouette in a black hat. The woman whose life was almost ended, Mrs. Ranieri (Eva Renzi), works in a prestigious art gallery full of somewhat disturbing statues, and is only injured. But the killer is prolific, and victims begin to pile up. The killer is seen first gloating over his (or her?) collection of knives. In a short amount of time, threatening calls begin to come in for Sam, who begins to be pulled deeper and deeper into the mystery.

There’s a fair amount of blood, although little of it is convincing. Morosini (Enrico Maria Salerno), the detective, becomes a nuisance to Dalmas, confiscating his passport so as to keep him there until his memory about the “missing clue” that he witnessed surfaces. Meanwhile, Dalmas, visiting an antique store where the first victim worked, takes a look at the last item she sold—a painting, rather amateurish, of a murder. (I’m not quite certain why a painting that was sold is still in the shop, but there it is.)

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage | Official Trailer | 4K

Sam visits the artist, Berto (Mario Adorf), a dirty, eccentric recluse who informs him his painting was based on an actual murder—also, that he enjoys eating caged cats and has, by implication, fed Sam some tasty fricasséed pussy. Unthrilled, Sam leaves and the world continues to spin into the chasm of dark insanity.

The rest of the film, until the denouement takes us home (via, perhaps, a jetliner back to New York, L.A. or points beyond), hinges on the isolated call of a mysterious bird, heard in the background of the killer’s phone messages. Sam’s ornithologist friend (because everyone needs at least one good ornithologist friend) informs him that it is the ultra-rare Siberian bird, the “Bird With the Crystal Plumage,” a rare type with nearly translucent wings, “like glass.” Very good. Set up the image of a thing of beauty that can be seen through—but what is on the other side of that symbolic vision? Glass wings, too, would be awful brittle.

The ending serves us up a twist; a surprise that feels trite, but also hints at a deeper meaning in the film, a subtext that implies the threatening core of femininity, how Sam might project his insecurity, his sexual anxieties even, onto a feminine figure, someone that becomes dark, hooded, threatening. The knife as a castrating pseudo-phallus, taken into the hand of the killer, who becomes the projection of unrestrained desire, bestial lust and fear—the fear of death. That the first murder takes place in an art gallery is a comforting, illusionary environment of artifice, of bourgeois recontextualizing of the monstrous, the unrestrained. The portrait of madness—sexual madness—and the “kept bird” with brittle glass wings, whose mien is transparent. Crystalline.

But that would be a bit much, and would give away the ending. The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is a masterful first step on the bloody, maggot-blasted pathway Argento would make legendary in the ensuing decades. Here, he sails out on wings, not of glass, but ones certainly dripping here and there, droplets of crimson stain.

Bird With the Crystal Plumage

My book: Cult Films and Midnight Movies: From High Art to Low Trash Vol. 1

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