The Bird with the Crystal Plumage

En route home one evening Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante), an American writer living in Rome, notices a masked man and a woman struggling in an otherwise deserted gallery. Though unable to prevent the woman being stabbed, Sam’s timely intervention causes the man to flee before he can inflict fatal serious injuries. Questioned by the police, Sam comes to feel that some vital detail of the scene is eluding him and, after narrowly avoiding an attack himself, embarks on his own parallel investigations…

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage might be described as the gialli equivalent to the spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars: Both films, while not the first of their type, opened the floodgates for a wave of imitators and introduced the mass audience to the directors who were to simultaneously define and transcend their respective genres.

But whereas Sergio Leone’s film might fairly be considered an apprentice work, being a somewhat hesitant essaying of themes and tropes that would only reach their fullest development with Once Upon a Time in the West, Dario Argento’s debut is a remarkably assured, confident, fully-formed work.

Though the late 60s technologies and fashions on display have obviously dated, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage feels up-to-the moment in terms of cinematic style, with the director’s skilful manipulation of point-of-view and use of the widescreen canvas particularly impressive.

Compared to Argento’s later films The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is more evenly balanced between style and substance, with more in the way of a coherent plot (lifted more or less wholesale from Fredrick Brown’s novel The Screaming Mimi, itself adapted for the screen by Gerd Oswald) and well rounded-characters. Whether this is a plus or a minus point and the director’s subsequent development a progression or regression depends, one supposes, on your view of Cinema, with a capital C.

Thematically, however, there is little difference between the film and its successors with many a familiar Argento motif – the traumatic primal scene of murder; the artistic outsider who feels compelled to play detective after witnessing a crime where something is not as it seems; the blurring and confusion of gender distinctions; and, of course, the fetishisation of murder, preferably by a black leather clad maniac – present and correct.

Image’s Region One DVD presents The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio, enhanced for widescreen televisions. The print has some grain and a fair few scratches, but no more than one would expect for a film of its vintage.

The Dolby 2.0 audio is clear, free from hiss and distortion. While hardly spectacular, it’s all the film really needs.

Extras include the original theatrical trailer; mini-biographies of Argento, stars Musante and Kendall, and an isolated version of Ennio Morricone’s score – a valuable addition when one considers that the hard to get Italian soundtrack CD would probably cost as much as the DVD on import. This said, a bit more in the way of supplemental materials – poster and stills galleries, an interview or two – wouldn’t have gone amiss and might propelled the DVD out of the nice to have into the must buy category.