The Bird with the Crystal Plumage

Dario Argento ,in the Italian horror movie field is second to none,with the eventual exception of Mario Bava.The young generations ,as I wrote in my "profondo rosso" review,do not know,have no idea that he was slagged off by the "earnest" "intellectual " critics for years before they realized he was actually a genuine auteur.

"Ucello" was to the Italian horror cinema what "Rosemary's baby" was to the American one.By combining Bava's stunning lighting effects with Hitchcock's sense of space and of suspense,Argento created a genre I would depict as "horror opera".Although it's not his first work,it's the one which asserted his skill.

Hitchcock comes to mind when the hero (Musante) sees a murder in a room he cannot enter.Here the sentence "there's more to the picture than meets the eye" perfectly describes the extraordinary first scene.

Argento's geometry is non -Euclidian,no one used the setting as he did :the lighthouse in this film,the houses in "inferno" ,the corridors in "suspiria" ,the list is endless.

And most of all, when contemporary screenplays take barely two or three pages,Argento's stories,even if they are full of implausibilities , grab the audience,take them into a maze ,where they lose themselves with delight.The stories have their own logic,never the viewer feels disappointed when the solution is revealed.

You are not a true horror movies buff if you do not know Argento's best works (roughly the sixties thru the eighties)