aka L’Uccello Dalle Piume di Cristallo, aka Bird With the Glass Feathers, aka Phantom of Terror, aka Point of Terror, aka The Gallery Murders

• Written and directed by Dario Argento
• Starring
  • Tony Musante
  • Suzy Kendall
  • Enrico Maria Salerno
  • Eva Renzi
  • Umberto Raho
• Produced by Salvatore Argento

Long-time readers know that I’m a very story-centered movie watcher. I care about structure and momentum more than anything. That’s not that I don’t appreciate characterization, production quality, or visual flair; I just think that all of those elements should be in service of, not emphasized to the detriment of, the narrative. That’s why I always approach Dario Argento movies with a bit of trepidation. Argento, like many Italian directors before him (notably Mario Bava), was a visual artist; he elevated the critical standing of the genre movies on which he worked by grafting mature and self-confident visual storytelling onto plots dealing with crime and suspense. Unfortunately, the dark side to his gift is that he and directors like him occasionally — all right, frequently — subordinate the plot so far beneath their signature visual style that the movie ends up very pretty looking and absolutely incomprehensible. (That’s still better, I suppose, than those post-Argento Italian hacks whose visuals were completely pedestrian and whose stories still made no sense.)

“We’ll set it in Italy… but the hero will be an American… but he’ll be played by an Italian-American! It’s the best of both worlds!”

With that kind of background in mind, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage — written and directed by Argento, in his first directorial effort — is not only beautifully shot and composed, but it is also serviceable in the plot department. I wasn’t captivated by the story, but it moved along gracefully enough that it didn’t distract from the compelling camera work which is, really, the movie’s claim to fame.

However, since I can’t really show you the camera work in a text-based review, I’ll draw you the broad outlines of the story.

Sam, an American in Italy (played by Italian-American Tony Musante), is packing his bags at the end of a two-year stint in Rome, ready to return stateside with his Italian girlfriend Julia (Suzy Kendall). While wrapping up his affairs, he takes a night walk back to his apartment and spies a girl struggling for a knife with a black-clad man through the glass front doors of a gallery. He’s unable to get through the locked doors to help, but his presence scares away the man in black, leaving the girl traumatized and injured, but alive.

It’s still better than dying surrounded by Precious Moments figurines.

Unfortunately, being the sole witness to an attempted homicide can wreak havoc with one’s travel plans, especially, as Inspector Morosini (Enrico Maria Salerno) tells him, this is only the latest attempt in a string of random slasher murders in the past couple of months. With Sam their only slim chance to break open the case, the Inspector confiscates Sam’s passport to keep him around. Sam probably doesn’t help his case any by recounting what he saw, and then opining that there’s some detail that seemed wrong, but he can’t remember what it was.

That means, naturally, that Sam is now a target for the killer. Instead of staying in a police safehouse or under 24-hour guard at his apartment (on the fifth floor of an otherwise-empty building slated for demolition soon — gee, do you think that will come into play?), he starts to take a personal interest in the case, to the point that Morosini begins to treat him as a co-investigator. And it’s good that he does; somehow, the police force never seems to follow up on the leads that this interested private citizen — or rather, private tourist — traces back to their source. (The Italy of this movie, by the way, is a Star Trek Italy: one in which everyone, right down to cabbies and street sweepers, speaks the same language as the American protagonist.)

“I may not be an expert, but I know what I like.”

And some of the clues, nobody follows up on. There’s a long segment in the middle in which Sam is stalked through the streets by a gaunt man in a yellow jacket (I can’t tell from the credits who plays the role, but he looks like an Italian version of Reggie Nalder — and it says something about my assumed audience that I expect at least a significant percentage of you to know who that is). When the police can’t find and identify that man, Sam turns to an underworld connection, finds the man’ apartment, and discovers the man’s recent corpse. There is thereafter absolutely no discussion of the yellow-jacketed man: who he is, how he got involved (since he’s obviously not “the” killer), and what connection he could have to the serial killer. Heck, there’s not even any discussion of what Monica (Eva Renzi) might have told the police. I mean, she was a lot closer to the killer than Sam was, so why is Morosini constantly badgering him for details?

[Edit: A little research shows that it is an uncredited Reggie Nalder. Ta-dah!]

“Above all, I must remain inconspicuous.”

(Because this is essentially a mystery movie — though giallo films don’t always play fair with mysteries — I noticed “clues” which turned out to be not-clues. The largest one was that all of the first victims had honey-blonde hair, a feature which was also shared by Sam’s girlfriend Julia. Well, while Julia is indeed menaced by the black-coated, black-gloved figure — how could she not? — one of the later victims is black-haired. So much for that clue.)

But now you’re wondering: how does a bird’s plumage figure into all of this? You might think that it’s a metaphor of some sort, but it’s not; it actually comes from a minor clue in the middle of the movie, and once its scene is over, the image is never mentioned again. It would be as if Raiders of the Lost Ark were titled Escape From the Snake Pit — or even better, Boxing Match Beneath a Plane.

I would say you’re not getting your deposit back on this place, then.

But here I am nitpicking the plot to the degree that you might think I don’t like this movie. I do. It’s a feast of visual storytelling; Argento knew just how to use the vocabulary of cinema to be evocative and impressionistic while staying just this side of overbearing self-consciousness. The fact that he was such a young director on this movie is even more impressive. The result is a piece of very classy trash — and that’s a good thing when I say it.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 6
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Reggie Nalder (the uncredited man in the yellow jacket) played “Shras” the Andorian in the classic episode “Journey to Babel”