A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, September 10, 2024

Deep Red (Dario Argento, 1975)


Cast: David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi, Gabriele Lavia, Macha Méril, Eros Pagni, Giuliana Calandri, Piero Mazzinghi, Glauco Mauri, Clara Calamai. Screenplay: Dario Argenti, Bernardino Zapponi. Cinematography: Luigi Kuveiller. Production design: Giuseppe Bassan. Film editing: Franco Fraticelli. Music: Giorgio Gaslini, Goblin. 

Dario Argenti likes his protagonists to keep sticking their noses in places where they shouldn't. In The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, for example, it's an American writer who witnesses something that he should have left to the Italian police to investigate, but he persists in trying to solve the crime, putting himself and his girlfriend in peril. And in Deep Red it's a British jazz pianist, Marcus Daly (David Hemmings), who witnesses something that he should have left to the Italian police to investigate, but he persists in trying to solve the crime, putting himself and his girlfriend, journalist Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi), in peril. Well, if a formula works, use it. And it does work, though largely because Argenti has such delight in flinging the most improbable situations and the most colorful (not to say bloody) images at the viewer. He also likes to load his films with a variety of eccentric characters, some of whom are red herrings, but most of which are just there to keep the protagonist on his toes. (There's a touch of homophobia in Argenti's treatment of some of them, like the antiques dealer in The Bird who keeps hitting on the writer, and the androgynous lover of Marcus's friend Carlo (Gabriele Lavia) who elicits a puzzled response from Marcus.) It's best not to try to solve the mysteries along with Argento's amateur detectives, mainly because nothing in his elaborate plots makes sense, like the mechanical doll that spooks one of the victims, or even the identity of the killer. Hemmings, who was usually cast as somewhat creepy, is instead a likable and intrepid protagonist, and Nicolodi is more the entertainingly spunky sidekick than the romantic interest.   

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