Its wings were crystal...Its ways were murder!

If there is one thing horror auteur Dario Argento does masterfully, it is to create a feeling that sustains and manipulates an audience throughout the course of an entire film. This is in fact, what all of the truly brilliant horror/suspense films do well. One need look no further than John Carpenter's Halloween, Hitchcock's Vertigo, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, the original vampire film Nosferatu, or Argento's other seminal horror flick Suspira. Like these films, Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage owes much of its success to a kind of visceral intensity that plays the audience like a piano. in Argento's case, it is not necessarily taut story-telling, or intriguing characters that mark him as a director. Rather, it is telling a story that is disorientating not so much in form, but in style.

Sam Dalmas is an American writer who has been lving in Rome for quite some time. He and his model girfriend are all set to return home when Sam witnesses something that will dramatically change the course of events for the next few weeks. While walking by a museum late one night Sam notices a struggle within. He realizes that he is witnessing a woman being attacked by an assailent dressed entirely in black. Sam tries to help, but finds himself stuck between two giant mechanical glass windows. the attack ends with the woman lying bleeding on the floor, as the attacker is able to cleanly make a getaway. The authorities, realizing that Sam is the lone witness to the attack, and a vital part of the ensuing investigation, confiscate his passport, preventing him from leaving the country. What slowly pulls the audience into the plot is the fact that Sam becomes obssessed with the idea that he saw something that night that he can't fully explain. It's a haunting realizition that somehow the vital piece of evidence to the case is alluding him, while all the while there like a splinter in his mind. He knows that he knows something yet he doesn't fully know what he thinks he knows. whew!

Argento has been dubbed the "Italian Hitchcock" and it's hard to miss the comparisons in this film. Both directors use all the tauted tricks in their aresenal to keep the audience always at bay, yet thouroughly intrigued. The audience witnessess the crime right along with Sam. We know just as much as he knows, yet throuhgout the course of the film we find ourselves questioning just what it is that we think we saw, and how to best intrepret it. Our theories change, we start to doubt, we start to believe, and ultimately try to understand what it is that is happening. Everything we try to analyze comes from the only means by which the main character has to work with: his memory. There are virtually no flash-backs, no other witnesses but us. This is powerful filmmaking. The one noticeable difference between the two directors is that the acting in the vast majority of Hitch's films are far superior to that of Plumage. Argento almost gets away with it though, by creating a dizzying style of story-telling that is rarely surpassed anywhere else on screen. An interesting film to say the least. Definitely one worth checking out.

3.5/5