L'uccello Dalle Piume Di Cristallo: An Odd Bird

Today, I’m going to be writing about my latest in an ongoing attempt to familiarize myself with classic Italian horror. Most of what I’ve taken away so far from the films I’ve seen is that classic Italian horror is visually stylish and utterly unacquainted with things like “subtlety” or “nuance.” And L'uccello Dalle Piume Di Cristallo (The Bird With The Crystal Plumage) is where a lot of this begins. It was director Dario Argento’s first sole directing credit, and it…for better and worse…really lays out the thesis for what would follow.

The film opens on an unseen figure typing a note that appears to be the location for a meeting. And then a pair of hands, clad in black gloves, unwrapping an impressive array of knives. There’s a lingering over the knives, over the leather of the gloves. It’d be really obvious to call it “fetishistic,” but that’s because it’s really obviously fetishistic. It’s an opening that leaves nothing in doubt: People are going to get stabbed.

And then we’re whisked away to meet Sam Dalmas. He’s a writer from the United States, in Rome to write a manual about varieties of birds. He was hoping for a novel, but writer’ block means he’s taking the work he can get. He doesn’t even want a copy of the book he’s just written - the check is enough. Sam is maybe kind of a dick, but he’s a dick with a hot model girlfriend and a week or two left on the lease for his apartment. He’s getting ready to move back to the U.S. with abovementioned hot model Julia. And so Sam’s walking home one night, and he ends up going past an art gallery, well-lit, full of sculpture and a front wall and entryway made entirely of glass…

…which makes it very easy to see the black-clad figure inside attempting to stab a woman to death.

Sam manages to drive the attacker off by creating a commotion, and to his credit, sticks around to make sure the potential victim is okay. He is now also the sole eyewitness to this crime, and after an interview with a detective ends in a game of “whoops, got your passport” that Sam loses badly, he’s stuck in Italy until there’s some kind of resolution. So he does what anyone would do in this position, and begins his own search for the assailant, even though he has no background or credentials in law enforcement. It’s not like there’s much else he can do.

The basic structure of the story revolves around Sam’s attempts, working both with the police and on his own, to figure out who tried to kill this woman even as more bodies start to pile up. It’s a mystery, but not necessarily an especially artfully crafted one. In fact, I think the best way to describe this film is as…eccentric. 

It’s eccentric from a visual standpoint - there are a lot of point-of-view shots from both the killer’s and victim’s perspectives (which actually work pretty well even if they are a little predictable(, a lot of close-ups of eyes and (screaming) mouths, and an editing style that can only be described as “jarring.” It’s a film where scenes of violence cut immediately to scenes of domesticity, often in the middle of a conversation, without any real transition or indication that the scene is about to change. It’s also a film in which a police crime lab is represented by a sterile white room with banks of whirring tape drives, as classic a visual shorthand for “SCIENCE!” as you could want. It’s a more visually subdued affair than Argento’s later film Suspiria, depicting everyday Italy in both its glamorous art galleries and modest apartments in crumbling neighborhoods, but the way it’s shown lends it a sheen of strangeness nonetheless.

But it isn’t always gratuitously strange, some of the visuals can be quite inventive. One especially memorable scene has Julia recounting the other murders to Sam in voiceover while we see stills of the crime scene photos from each killing, and it works really well. It also makes good use of flashbacks, sometimes freeze-framed or played over and over, inserted into the middle of scenes in a way that makes them feel almost like intrusive thoughts. And all of this is scored with a soundtrack that is equal parts discordant jazz and wordless female vocalization, landing it somewhere between a crime film and a supernatural horror film, which is appropriate. Though the killer isn’t a supernatural figure, the narrative requires that we don’t see their face until the final reveal, so for most of the film they seem less like a person and more like a presence, an undetectable, unstoppable force.

It’s narratively eccentric as well. It’d actually be more accurate to say that it’s all over the shop. It’s tough to believe that law enforcement would just let a civilian - an American one, no less - just run around conducting his own ad hoc investigation, and on multiple occasions, we get flashbacks to things Sam’s experienced that depict events clearly and vividly, but he struggles to remember the things we’re seeing right in front of us on the screen. It almost makes it feel like he’s holding something back, though at no point is he implied to be the killer. There are strange comic touches as well, like a stuttering pimp and an informant whose portrayal borders on slapstick and who feels like he wandered in from an entirely different movie, along with a deeply eccentric artist with some peculiar dietary habits, and one especially odd scene where Sam recounts an upsetting phone call to a friend, only to turn around and start making out with Julia with such fervor that the friend shows himself out. Between this and the cinematic choices, it’s a film with a tone best described as abrupt. 

None of those things are necessarily weaknesses, given the right context, but it’s got some full-on weaknesses as well. The sexism is toned down compared to Argento’s film Profondo Rosso, but the casual homophobia and transphobia from that film shows up here as well and is, equally juvenile and off-putting here. The end is a mess of fake-outs before the final reveal, jettisoning the offhand clues we get through most of the film to land on a final reveal that mostly comes out of nowhere (unless you’ve seen Profondo Rosso, in which case you will, like me, be expecting it), explained with a lot of psychobabble that to modern sensibilities will probably land as at least a trifle offensive. 

Still, it was Argento’s first sole directing credit, and though it might not have been the first giallo, it’s certainly where the form took off and it sets a tone for a lot of the films that followed. On that level, it’s an assured and confident debut with a distinct vision, and it pioneers themes and techniques that echo through his later work and into the work of other directors. It’s a clumsy mystery, but one that blazed a trail.

IMDB entry

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