Film Review: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo, 1970)

Italian cinema has long enriched global film culture with its vivid lexicon of genres, from neorealist drama to spaghetti westerns. Among these, the giallo — a lurid hybrid of murder mystery and proto-slasher — stands out as a distinctly Italian contribution, reaching its zenith in the 1970s through stylised violence and exploitative flair. The genre’s international breakthrough arrived with Dario Argento’s directorial debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), a film that cemented both the director’s reputation and the giallo’s place in cult cinema. Argento, later hailed as the genre’s maestro, infused this thriller with such visual panache that it transcended its pulp roots, becoming a touchstone for suspense-driven horror.

Loosely adapted from Fredric Brown’s 1949 novel Screaming Mimi — previously filmed in 1958 as a forgettable Anita Ekberg vehicle — Argento’s reinterpretation jettisons much of the source material. Gone are the novel’s psychological intricacies; instead, the director crafts a labyrinthine plot centred on Sam Dalmas (played by Tony Musante), an American writer in Rome whose plans to return home are derailed after he witnesses a knife attack on Monica Ranieri (played by Eva Renzi) in a starkly lit art gallery. Joining Inspector Morosini (played by Enrico Maria Salerno) in the investigation, Sam begins to look iinto a series of gruesome murders targeting women, unwittingly provoking the killer to threaten both him and his girlfriend, Julia (played by Suzy Kendall). While the premise nods to Brown’s work, Argento’s focus on aesthetic bravura over narrative fidelity signals his departure from conventional mystery tropes.

As a whodunit, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is serviceable but unremarkable. The plot, laden with red herrings, culminates in a twist that modern audiences — particularly those versed in psychological thrillers — may find predictable. Yet Argento compensates for narrative shortcomings with arresting visuals and mood. Collaborating with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (in his first colour feature), he bathes Rome in icy blues and garish reds, transforming the city into a surrealist playground of menace. Ennio Morricone’s discordant score — all jarring strings and eerie whispers — amplifies the unease, rendering even mundane moments sinister. Though the film features flashes of gore and brief nudity, it avoids the excesses of contemporaneous exploitation fare, relying instead on sustained tension. A scene of a woman’s protracted stalking in her apartment, intercut with the killer’s gloved hands, exemplifies Argento’s ability to wring dread from anticipation rather than bloodshed — though one particularly gruesome murder did provoke censorship debates.

Argento’s flair for originality shines in set-pieces that defy genre expectations. The opening attack, staged in a clinical, modernist gallery, traps Sam between glass walls, his impotent voyeurism mirroring the audience’s own. This emphasis on aestheticised violence — a giallo hallmark — is heightened by the titular “bird,” a cryptic clue woven into the plot with absurdist glee (ornithological accuracy be damned). The director’s Hitchcockian DNA surfaces in darkly comic detours, such as Sam’s consultation with a jailed pimp (played by Gildo Di Marco) whose garbled speech becomes a perverse punchline. Equally memorable is Mario Adorf’s turn as a bohemian artist with questionable taste in food, a moment of grotesquerie that underscores the film’s tonal unpredictability. Even a chase sequence dazzles: as Sam pursues the killer through streets ending in hotel with identically clad conventioneers, Argento transforms urban chaos into a surrealist maze.

Musante’s everyman protagonist anchors the film with a credibly harried performance, though he is inevitably overshadowed by Salerno’s world-weary inspector, whose sardonic exasperation lends gravitas. Conversely, the female roles — Kendall’s shrieking girlfriend, Renzi’s traumatised victim — feel regrettably shallow, reduced to hysterical archetypes typical of the era’s exploitation tendencies.

The film’s brisk runtime belies pacing issues; an overlong opening saps momentum, while the climax resorts to a jarring deus ex machina (an offscreen police intervention) that undermines narrative cohesion. Yet such missteps scarcely dimmed the film’s impact. A commercial triumph, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage spawned Argento’s “Animal Trilogy,” followed by The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971) and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971), which further refined his signature blend of baroque violence and stylistic excess.

While not without flaws, Argento’s debut remains a cornerstone of giallo cinema, its influence echoing in filmmakers from Brian De Palma to Nicolas Winding Refn. By privileging style and suspense over narrative rigor, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage redefined horror aesthetics, proving that even within exploitation’s constraints, artistry could flourish. For all its lurid trappings, the film endures as a testament to the potent allure of Italian genre cinema.

RATING: 7/10 (+++)

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