Fear - The Autobiography by Dario Argento

Silver Tongued Devil

Fear - The Autobiography
(Limited Collectors Edition 0184/1000)
by Dario Argento
FAB Press
ISBN: 9781913051051

There are, of course, a number of books on Dario Argento that have tried... and sometimes succeeded... in doing justice to a director who, for me, is one of the most interesting Italian directors around (more so than, say, the wonderful Fellini, the impressive Antonioni or the sublime Bava). A couple of my favourites would be Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento by Maitland McDonagh (I have the old edition with the ‘Opera’ cover) and any one of numerous ‘just that little bit better than the previous one’ editions of Dario Argento - The Man, The Myth & The Magic (as it’s currently subtitled) by the great Alan Jones. This look at him, however, is a little different to previous books exploring this iconic, cinematic figure.

This time it’s the turn of Argento himself to tell his own story and I snapped up a copy of the first edition English translation of this tome put out by FAB Press last year... which is a beautiful, limited edition hardback with silver edged pages (Argento translates as Silver in English), its own cloth strip bookmark and a nice, silver embossed image of The Bird With The Crystal Plumage on the cover, beneath a dust flap depicting the writer/director himself. This edition also has, I’m pleased to say, the great man’s signature on a book plate inside... this is the second time I think I’ve got a book with his signature in it... the other was one of the Alan Jones' editions, which Jones also signed for me.

Now, if you’ve been reading my more ‘bookish’ reviews on here for a while, you’ll know I find autobiographies a bit of a hit and miss affair. The worst ones leave you with none of the questions about the work of the author explored at all whereas, the best ones will be so well written and breezy that they will just leave you wanting more. Which is, of course, somewhat of the same thing... but I’ll take the speedy, witty read any day and, thankfully, that’s just what we get with Mr. Argento’s biography.

One of the things I noticed right away is that, while it covers all the usual things about growing up and the major relationships of the central figure... it never stays anywhere for very long and, although it certainly isn’t jumping around like some of these kinds of books (far from it), it certainly goes through things at a fair pace. Starting with Argento’s childhood and telling of how he used to hob nob with the film stars as a young ‘un in his parent’s photographic studios... it runs right through to where he is now in life (or where he was a few years ago at any rate, when the Italian edition was first published).

One of the things which surprised me is that he does so in quite a candid fashion. For instance, after a lovely forward by Alan Jones, the book starts off with a written snapshot from 1977 with Argento in his hotel room, waiting to see how the new film he is working on, Suspiria, is going to turn out. He is not shy in admitting his suicidal tendencies and, as he goes to throw himself from the hotel window, he can’t get past the dresser which he’s had placed in front of said windows to stop exactly this thing from happening. After this teaser, he then starts from the beginning of his life and goes through until, roughly two thirds of the way through the book, he catches up to this point and passes it.

He’s also not shy in mentioning various things about his love life with a variety of women over the years. Some of them are left unnamed (including his latest lover) and some of the more high profile ones, like Daria Nicolodi, who starred in many of his movies and gave birth to his second daughter, Asia Argento, are also included in his quite honest assessment of the state of things. Saying that, it seems to me that he’s never disrespectful of them and he certainly gives Daria full credit for helping him write and research Suspiria. He also, finally, tells of the misunderstanding around the central casting of the lead actress in that film, which pushed them apart for some time.

I found out, or perhaps was reminded, that while a voracious reader as a child his real first loves were the tales of Edgar Allan Poe and these certainly infused his imagination in his later career, I suspect. I also discovered that we have the same favourite episode of The Twilight Zone in common, so that’s nice (Time Enough At Last).

One of the problems with autobiographies of famous people, at least as I’ve found, is the tendency to shy away from talking about their work. Thankfully, Argento doesn’t do that and, although I was very much wanting more from his priceless anecdotes, he does manage to touch upon one or two little gems from most of the films and TV series in which he’s had a hand. So you’ll hear in his own words how he and Bernardo Bertollucci (both yet to start their real careers) worked with another of my favourite Italian directors, Sergio Leone, to write Once Upon A Time In The West. You’ll learn stuff like how the aquarium of the producer of The Five Man Army (which Argento wrote) inspired one of the ideas that manifested in The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, how much he and Tony Musante didn’t ‘get on’ working on that movie... as well as how much he did ‘get on’ with Michael Brandon on Four Flies On Grey Velvet and with David Hemmings on Deep Red (Profondo Rosso).

You’ll learn just how he got those intense colours on the actors faces in Suspiria, by shining light through velvet and just what things happened to him in real life to birth his ideas on movies like Tenebrae and Phenomena. I was spellbound as I read how he’d used lots of life size mannequins manipulated by neighbouring extras in the audience in Opera to keep the cost down, a story which reminded me of similar movie magic trickery used in both the chariot race in Ben Hur and the pod race in Star Wars - The Phantom Menace (cotton reels, if I remember the model I saw exhibited years ago correctly).

Above all, the book feels like it’s fresh and relatively unfiltered. He is, perhaps, a little less critical of his least successful films than I had suspected, given the candor which he shows in all the other aspects of his life but it doesn’t really harm the book at all. You just get a sense that it’s not that important to him... or, at least, to his public facing image. Ultimately, its a fun read, informative in the way he releases little nuggets of information about his work and also, I found out that he actually spent a day or two locked up in a jail cell (for something he didn’t do, I hasten to add). He even gives a little hope that there may be material enough left for a second book at some point (which would be nice). So, yeah, if you’re a fan of the work of Dario Argento and want to know a little more about the man behind the magic, a man who hugely popularised the Italian giallo movie in the wake of Mario Bava, then his autobiography, Fear, is something you should read as there are lots of little details about his life and work which you won’t easily find anywhere else. Definitely get this one onto your book shelves if you are of a mind to.

The Bird With The Crystal Plumage

Knife ‘N’ Easy

The Bird With The Crystal Plumage
(aka L'Uccello Dalle Piume Di Cristallo) Italy/West Germany 1969
Directed by Dario Argento
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

It’s been a while since I last watched Dario Argento’s first feature film (as a writer/director, although he had written stuff for other directors such as Sergio Leone before this), The Bird With The Crystal Plumage. I first came by it via a couple of American DVDs in different editions over the years and I remember the last time I saw it was maybe 10 years ago when the BFI had a screening of it, in what turned out to be an astonishingly grubby print. This new Arrow Blu Ray edition brings back Argento’s early signature classic in style and, if like me you bought the limited boxed edition rather than their standard reissue, you also get some nice printed extras included in the slip case such as a thick booklet, a double sided poster (if you have any wall space to hang it) and, a big draw for me, a set of postcard reprints of the original Fotobustas (basically, the Italian version of lobby cards).

The film itself is remastered and, while it doesn’t look as crystal clear as the title might imply, I think it’s probably the best I’ve seen it looking here. If you are new to Argento and want a good jumping on point, this Arrow version would be a good place to start.

While it’s certainly not the first giallo of its kind... Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood And Black Lace (reviewed by me here) both pre-dated it... this is what single handedly started the slew of gialli that followed in its wake and it’s certainly the genre which gave Argento his fame and the one in which he’s worked the most. Not to mention, of course, that it’s the film which earned him the name ‘the Italian Hitchcock’. It’s also what was the start of what has been unofficially titled ‘the animal trilogy’ although, the only common links other than director style and genre is that animals are mentioned in the titles of the next two... The Cat O’ Nine Tails (which is a different thing altogether anyway) and Four Flies On Grey Velvet.

The film starts with the typical black gloved killer typing out a letter, still clad in said black gloves. Now I know 1960s typewriters were somewhat ‘gappier’ than modern day keyboards but, seriously, have you ever tried typing a letter wearing thick leather gloves? It seems somewhat silly and, furthermore, why would the killer not want to get any fingerprints on their own typewriter? This kind of doesn’t make sense. The scene also has the killer ‘fetishistically’ sharpening one of a set of nicely laid out knives. We then have the credits running properly, set to Ennio Morricone’s wonderful score, as the camera follows a young woman on her daily journey and Argento employs a trick here which he does throughout the movie in some fashion or another... he freezes the frame constantly and accompanies it by the shutter sound of a camera, the killer’s camera, taking a picture. Hold that thought, I’ll come back to this a little later. After this credit sequence we join the main protagonist as he is introduced, as an American writer based in Italy, staying with his girlfriend Julia (played by Suzy Kendall). Just before this, his friend buys a newspaper from a street kiosk which also has prominently displayed, some of those famous giallo magazines/novels of the time... so right away Argento was setting the scene for the genre in which he would, for the most part, work on for the rest of his life.

I remember that, when I first saw this movie decades ago, I had already seen four of the director’s movies. I had seen his two main horror movies, a genre which he rarely works in compared to the giallo, Suspiria and the direct, ‘official’ sequel Inferno. I had also seen Deep Red (aka Profondo Rosso, reviewed here) and Tenebre (aka Tenebrae... reviewed by me here). Now the thing about those two gialli is that they both have twist reveals as to the identity of the killer and, unusually for me, they both completely surprised me when said culprits were revealed at the end. The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, however, is the first one by Argento where he not only didn’t take me by surprise but the one where I worked out the identity of the killer within about five minutes of the opening credits. I always wondered why my dad, who was watching with me on that first viewing, never figured this one out because, for me, it just seemed quite obvious what was going on, when main protagonist Sam, played by Tony Musante, finds himself observing an attempted homicide as he is trapped between two sets of glass, sliding doors in the entrance to an art gallery, while he looks on as Monica Ranieri (played by Eva Renzi), is struggling with her stab wound on the floor. Now, I have to say, I always thought those double sets of doors with six feet or so between each set on either end of a long area were an invention of the movie because the design has always seemed completely impractical to me. Funny, then, that I now work in a building which has pretty much exactly the same set up in its entrance... I guess buildings like this do exist after all.

Even from this early scene, where Sam is watching the struggling girl pulling her bleeding body across the floor, Argento was displaying some of those wonderful shot designs he is so famous for... as this includes a lovely, almost iconic, shot looking up from Monica Ranieri’s POV as the camera looks up at Musante and frames his head and shoulders completely with the pattern on the ceiling above him... it’s lovely stuff.

By now, if you are an astute viewer, you have everything you need to solve the identity of the murderer and so Argento spends the remainder of the film trying to convince you that various people are the killer, by giving them character traits which match a somewhat false clue given early in the film and letting the audience get on with it and assume characters with matching traits (smokes Cuban cigars, is left handed etc) could be the killer and, like many a good giallo that was to come after it, various suspects die just when the audience figures out it could be them (not this audience member though... like I said, I found this one surprisingly easy to figure out after both Deep Red and Tenebre had fooled me). While it does this, it also keeps reminding the audience that there was definitely something a little 'off kilter' with the attack that Sam witnessed, by having Sam flashing back to it constantly with footage shot from different angles which, like the opening title sequence where the camera shutter sounds stopped the action dead, he uses in a similar manner to overtly step back from the film and highlight this mental process in as stylised a way as possible, in much the same manner that Godard would sometimes want to pop his audience out of the action to contemplate more what they were watching. And it works brilliantly here.

It’s also very interesting in terms of how Argento progressed as a director here because, although he often uses characters having what I shall call ‘memory attacks’ to remind the audience that there are doubts as to the nature of what they witnessed, he rarely does it in quite the way he does it here, literally calling a great deal of attention to those flashback moments, both visually and with hits of Morricone’s score, whereas in later films he tends to segue to them in a much smoother manner. That being said, I love the way he does it here and I am going to have to watch the new Arrow version of The Cat O’ Nine Tails (a film I haven’t seen for even longer than I have the gap between screenings of this one) to see if he’s still using this way of doing things there.

Morricone’s score, too, is a big talking point of this film, as far as I’m concerned. Argento was lucky enough to have the Italian musical superstar score his first three features before moving briefly onto Gaslini and then, of course, reinventing the sound of both Italian horror and giallo movies for all time by employing progressive rock band Goblin on Deep Red and many of his subsequent movies. Morricone would score a couple of his later movies (his score for The Stendhal Syndrome is wonderful) but these first three are probably what his musical collaboration with Dario Argento are best remembered by. The Bird With The Crystal Plumage fuses a melodic, contemporary jazz approach with a certain amount of ‘stinger’ atonalism and some wonderful wordless vocals which were, according to the IMDB, not sung by the usual suspect Edda Dell’Orso. Still, that haunting ‘la la la la la la la laaaa’ is not something easy to forget from Morricone’s score here.

And that’s all I’m going to say about this one here. The Bird With The Crystal Plumage is a wonderful giallo thriller from the maestro of the genre, Dario Argento... which he populates with a certain intensity balanced with a very likeable police inspector, played by actor/writer/director Enrico Maria Salerno and some decidedly oddball and larger than life characters who bring a lot of humour to the film. Definitely a good starting place if you’ve never seen any of this director’s work before and, if you can ignore some of the bad acting and ridiculous plot details which are part and parcel of this genre... Argento’s films in particular... and instead concentrate on the visual poetry of the film which he brings to all his work, then you will surely find this film wins you over with its edgy charm. And if you’re going to buy it, definitely grab the latest Arrow Blu Ray version because it’s the best version around, to date (and not the older Blu Ray they did from years ago which was incorrectly cropped on the image). If you're going to do Argento... do it right.

The Detective

Die Hard Zero Issue

The Detective
USA 1968
Directed by Gordon Douglas
20th Century Fox Region 2

Warning: Routine spoilers will be pursued and outed.

There are two reasons why I wanted to watch the Frank Sinatra movie The Detective. One is because the score is by Jerry Goldsmith... and it’s always worth seeing how his musical cues which you’ve lived with for a while match up to the images in context.

The other reason is that I could remember loving the Tony Rome films when I was a kid and when it came to eventually catching up to the movies on DVD I found that it was actually cheaper, at around the £8 mark, to buy the two films in a box set with The Detective than it was to buy the two films individually. If there’s a concept I like best with my movie purchases then it’s “value for money”.

Now then... there’s something very spooky about my choice of viewing when I sat down to watch this film because I found out something about it just before I wrote this review that I didn’t know before, to my knowledge, and therefore didn’t trigger my choice subconsciously. I was going to watch the first four Die Hard movies, more or less back to back, for one of those longish “film series in one gulp” reviews I occasionally do. For some reason, though, I reached for the Sinatra box instead and watched this. Which is very interesting because...

The Detective stars Frank Sinatra as policeman Joe Leland, the character in the book of the same name on which this film was based, written by  Roderick Thorp. So far, so good. However, the writer also wrote a sequel about this character called Nothing Lasts Forever and, Frank Sinatra was contracted to have first refusal on the part although, when they finally got around to making it, Sinatra was 76 years old and turned it down. The book apparently tells the story of what happens when Leland’s daughter gets trapped in the Claxxon Oil Corporation skyscraper because it is taken over by German terrorists and... yeah, you guessed it. They offered the part in the sequel to Bruce Willis, changed Joe Leland to John McClane, changed his daughter to his wife, changed the corporation name to Nakatomi and renamed the story Die Hard... and pretty much launched the career of Willis in film after he’d had such a successful time on television.

So there’s that... but I didn’t know any of that when I came to watch it.

The Detective is a very unusual movie in that, and this is especially true of the time in which it was made, the narrative is a little disjointed and spans a few years before wrapping up things which look like they don’t match up and adding a certain amount of downbeat closure to things.

Even the opening is unusual in that it starts with the standard shots of a US city skyline, but it’s all upside down. Now I saw the same thing done in the excellent horror movie, Devil, a few years back, but Devil didn’t seem to have any rationale to shooting this in this manner. The Detective is really neat because, about halfway through the upside down title shots, the camera suddenly pans up and you get the lower half of the screen still upside down with the city the right way up in the top half of the screen. This is because the camera has panned up to show you that what you’ve actually been looking at is the buildings reflected in the roof of Frank Sinatra’s car as he drives to the scene of the murder which kick starts the movie. This is pretty good and I was pleased that I’d seen this movie already, just from the titles.

It then goes straight into police procedure and it’s Sinatra and his team at the 19th Precinct working a horrendous murder case where a guy has been bashed in the head and his penis cut off and flung across the room. The sequence lasts for a good quarter of an hour or so and it seems everyone and their dog are in this movie... Sinatra, Ralph Meeker, Robert Duvall, Tom Atkins (his debut), Jack Clugman... heck, even boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson is in here. Alongside loads of “oh, it’s him/her” actors and actresses who will, no doubt, catch your attention.

However, after this scene, Joe goes to see his wife (from whom he has split up) and, as he leaves her to her friends at a party, the film then goes into an extended flashback set of sequences, lasting at least as long as the opening scenes, telling the story of Joe and his wife Karen, portrayed by the wonderful Lee Remick, and how they got together.

Then, after a while, the film goes back to the case which involves Joe's pursuit of a murderer in the gay community and this too is cut up with further flashbacks of Joe and Karen as they get married and have problems which can probably only be summed up as Karen suffering from a kind of extended nymphomania. Then Joe finds ‘the killer’, played brilliantly by Tony Musante, who some of my readers may know best from films like the spaghetti western Il Mercenario, Argento’s The Bird With The Crystal Plumage and The Last Run. I‘ve never had a great deal of time for the actor, to be honest, but he really gives a deranged and sympathetic, if short, performance here. Short because Joe presses him for a fast confession (because he’s eyeing a promotion) and he gets dealt with in the electric chair. Case closed... and we’re only halfway through the movie so far.

Then comes more flashbacks and non-flashbacks with Karen and then a second case, years later, which will end up bringing some interesting things to light, including some downbeat conclusions about the first case and a possible romantic attachment to another character played by Jacqueline Bisset.

The film is directed by Gordon Douglas who did such great work on films like THEM! and In Like Flint but who was never much one for making any elaborately attractive shots (except maybe with his work on Rio Conchos, reviewed here), or at least that’s how I’ve always thought of him. As I would expect, the mise-en-scene is adequate and the editing more than competent... nothing too special but very work-a-day and, in that sense at least, quite accomplished. You’re in the good hands of somebody who knows how to put a picture together.

There’s not a lot of action in this film... two small sequences, one involving a chase and another involving a brief but intense shoot out in an indoor car park, when Joe is targeted by people who don’t want him involved in the second case... but it’s not meant to be an action film, I suspect. It’s more of a character study of Joe and Karen’s relationship which uses the backdrop of Joes detective work and the politics of it, to further explore the way his mind works and the way that affects his home life.

Goldsmiths score is, at times, a bit bluesy and, in the action and suspense scenes, dynamic and propulsive in much the same kind of vein he used for his score to Escape From The Planet Of The Apes, only three years later, and maybe also foreshadowing his score to Chinatown too, in places. There’s not much of it in the movie. I’d guess less than 20 minutes of music scattered throughout the whole thing, but US filmmaking was a lot different in those days, and directors trusted that a lot of their movies didn’t have to be wall-to-wall score and only needed the enhancement of some good musical accompaniment at certain points. Goldsmith was a master of this talent of working out when to have music in the final cut of a film (called ‘spotting’ in the industry) and more than once argued for there to be a lot less music in a movie than was originally intended by the director. The music works pretty well here, although at certain places it gets a bit like it’s Mickey Mousing things a bit too much (Mickey Mousing is the practice of using sequences of musical notes and ‘stingers’ to directly reflect the actions taking place on screen) but at the end of the day underlines certain tensions and emotions in just the right way... not always an easy tightrope to walk.

So there you have it. Frank Sinatra in The Detective. All the performances by the cast are top notch, it’s gritty to the point of brutal in some places (for the time) and it’s a fine film. Now I need to go and watch the sequel, Die Hard, again sometime soon.