The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)

Even though I am no connoisseur of Dario Argento's films (having seen only one or two, many years ago), I highly enjoyed the utterly stylish and stylized horror sleaze of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. The standard fare story involves a bystander in a labyrinthine quest - its unclear what this quest is, but at first he sets out to find a murderer, then he is accused of the murder himself, and then he is chased by the murderer. The images evoke a world of cat-eating weirdos, stuttering pimps and dark alleys. Cheap tricks are used to great effect. The main character, the American bystander, has the sort of innocent mania that is propulsive in this kind of context. During the first dramatic part of the film, we see him witnessing a horrifying scene in an art gallery, where a man is trying to kill a woman. The American enters the gallery by breaking the window, but is then trapped. The images immediately create a splash; colorful, kitschy and evocative. Argento knows his craft and plays on the viewer's worry about what will happen the next second. Some argue that The Bird with the Crystal Plumage hints at broader social topics and that it contains several references to patterns of social domination. I must admit I did not pay much attention to such undercurrents. I just noticed that cages were an important image (birds kept in a cage, a lunatic artist keeping cats in cages, the apartment that becomes a leathal cage), and is also mentioned in the title. The ending scene shows a boxy television and on the screen we see a cheesy studio, in which a murder is transformed into sensationalism - a sort of entertainment cage.