Movies dubbed as 'Giallo' had been creeping around Italian cinema since the mid 1960's....inheriting the same nickname, Italian for yellow, as the yellow-covered paperback thrillers that mixed murder mystery with lurid sex and gore. But it took a young film critic turned first time movie director, Dario Argento, to pump new blood (and we mean that literally, too) into this homegrown genre and scarily gross out the whole world with it.....
He certainly captured everyone's attention. So much so that Argento followed up "The Bird With The Crystal Plumage" with two more 'Giallos' in rapid succession, constituting what film buffs dubbed his 'animal' trilogy.....(the other two titled 'Cat 'O Nine Tails' and 'Four Flied On Grey Velvet'....)
Here's the breakdown of his formula....
An Innocent Abroad.....usually played an American B-list actor desperate for work. His character, through no fault of his own, becomes embroiled in serial murders......playing amateur detective invariably leads to multiple attempts on his life and more beautiful girls sliced up like deli meat by the psycho killer......
The Killer.....Giallos provide equal opportunity for psychotic lunatics, so the killer could be either man or woman. Regardless of gender, they outfit themselves as strictly as the military. (there must be a Quartermaster Corp for Giallo wackos..).......black leather gloves, black trench coat, black hat. Weapons of choice: jumbo knives, straight razors and any wire handy for strangling. Backstory: always a horrific childhood, including mind-destroying sexual attacks and long stretches in the funny farm.....
Psycho-Cam! A plentiful supply of hand-held killer's-point-of-view shots as he or she lurks, creeps, stalks and finally zeros in on the victim.....usually finishing up with the camera poking down into victims' vibrating tonsils as they gurgle their last scream......(John Carpenter heavily borrowed this trope for his first 'Halloween' slasher....and all its imitators followed suit.)
Music To Murder By.....Crucial to the genre and forever solidified by maestro Ennio Morricone's scores for all three of the 'animal' trilogy. Think of it as Horror-Jazz.....too cool downbeats, sudden stabs of sax and other horns, heavy female breathing, otherworldly child-like choral work.....the whole mix sounding cold, weird and dark......
The deaths......the more sadistically horrible, the better.....with huge closeups of victims' eyes, bulging with terror as they meet their fate. (In the second and third films of his trilogy, Argento reserves the most gruesome, spectacular deaths for the killer......but not out of any sense of vengeful closure; these movies have a fairly non-existent respect for human life in general.. It's just a way to end a Giallo with a showstopper, the same way that fireworks shows send up all the rockets at once for the finale.....
"Bring out the deviates!"......barks a detective in 'Crystal Plumage', organizing a police station line-up of the usual Giallo suspects....overly swishy gay guys. Like many 70's movie directors, (including a good share of Americans), Argento uses a limp wristed mincing gay for some cheap laughs....for an extra yock, he assigns that thankless role in 'Crystal Plumage' to rotund German actor Werner Peters, normally the go-to guy to play Nazi Gestapo thugs in war movies. As an added bonus, Argento throws in the cadaverous, iconic Reggie Nalder (the assassin of Hitchcock's 1956 "Man Who Knew Too Much" and the Noferatu bloodsucker of TV's "Salem's Lot") playing a hitman whose sequence in this film ends with a great visual Hitchcockian gag. .....
Put all these elements together and you have the first Dario Argento 'Giallo' that encouraged a tidal wave of imitators, much the same way that the James Bond films touched off hundreds of Euro-spy cut-rate Bond duplicates. But Argento's eye-catching visual style and icy control of his storytelling set him apart from the galloping stampede of Giallos that followed in the wake of his first big hit......with our black leather gloves, we'll stab out 4 bloody stars for this one..(****).....and steel our courage to survive Dario's next effort in our next post.....where it's all about the chromosomes.......
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