I have now seen 6 Argento gialli. In my teens I was somewhat agreeably puzzled by l'Uccello dalle piume di Cristallo, then it went downhill from there. As if Dario Argento was just interested in putting together bizarre scenes only to find himself totally at a loss with narration. Eventually I concluded he is just a spoilt producer's son who played with his toy-camera and never made one single good movie. He is bad at directing actors, in all his movies actors are just walking through waiting for some action to jump at them. And he had quite a few fine actors at his disposal (somehow he got the best results while directing his daughter: not the greatest actress in perhaps his least interesting movies, if that ever means something with this gonzo director).
I was only curious to check '4 Mosche di Velluto Grigio' because of the falling out with Ennio Morricone, and also to see how the great Jean-Pierre Marielle would fit in such a carnival of self-aggrandizement.
Answer #1, as acknowledged by Ennio Morricone himself, he was at fault here and in quite a dead-end when he would 'compose' these improvisational scores. It would take them 25 years to work again together, and the titles and opening of 'La Sindrome di Stendhal' are worth watching because Morricone's score elevates the moving pictures and accounts for more than 50% of your desire to jump into the story and get totally absorbed by it.
I do appreciate the Goblin scores that Argento got during the Morricone intermission but quite frankly their raw energy is totally at odds with the slow rhythm and overflowing attention to visual imagery.
Answer #2, Jean-Pierre Marielle suggested to make his character gay and here we have a blindingly magnificent evidence of bad directing because his over-the-top characterization is totally out of place (which was incidentally the same issue a couple of years before in 'Sans Motif Apparent', where Marielle would ham a supporting character for a bad director in one bright example of a movie that is outlived by its wonderful Morricone score). If he ever understood anything about directing Argento should never have accepted in bulk the creative idea of Marielle. In his memoir Marielle recalls he was just happy to travel and spend a week in Italy all expenses paid (actually more than a week as I remember because the Italian job of production planning was not done by real pros).
Bottom line: can I find a couple of interesting things in the big slow protracted mess of this Argento playground of a movie? I liked the titles, although Michael Brandon already looked bored and passive while just playing the drums (you only get on screen the energy you give to the cast as a director). I liked the idea of the murderer's mask, very unsettling and now very cliché since it has been referenced and copied in many horror movies since (I would argue that the idea originally came from the puppet in 1945's Dead of Night). The park setup with the maid waiting was interesting but, seriously, as usual with such a limited director, the interesting idea then feels full of itself and we get some pedestrian build-up. The optometry scene was just plain ridiculous and it really felt tacked around here to close a loop in the plot (as if such a thing mattered with Argento's randomly intriguing hallucinations of a plot) so why not put it there earlier and have the characters wonder about it for most of the movie? No wonder Argento never came close to Hitchcock in mastering suspenseful storytelling.
I was only curious to check '4 Mosche di Velluto Grigio' because of the falling out with Ennio Morricone, and also to see how the great Jean-Pierre Marielle would fit in such a carnival of self-aggrandizement.
Answer #1, as acknowledged by Ennio Morricone himself, he was at fault here and in quite a dead-end when he would 'compose' these improvisational scores. It would take them 25 years to work again together, and the titles and opening of 'La Sindrome di Stendhal' are worth watching because Morricone's score elevates the moving pictures and accounts for more than 50% of your desire to jump into the story and get totally absorbed by it.
I do appreciate the Goblin scores that Argento got during the Morricone intermission but quite frankly their raw energy is totally at odds with the slow rhythm and overflowing attention to visual imagery.
Answer #2, Jean-Pierre Marielle suggested to make his character gay and here we have a blindingly magnificent evidence of bad directing because his over-the-top characterization is totally out of place (which was incidentally the same issue a couple of years before in 'Sans Motif Apparent', where Marielle would ham a supporting character for a bad director in one bright example of a movie that is outlived by its wonderful Morricone score). If he ever understood anything about directing Argento should never have accepted in bulk the creative idea of Marielle. In his memoir Marielle recalls he was just happy to travel and spend a week in Italy all expenses paid (actually more than a week as I remember because the Italian job of production planning was not done by real pros).
Bottom line: can I find a couple of interesting things in the big slow protracted mess of this Argento playground of a movie? I liked the titles, although Michael Brandon already looked bored and passive while just playing the drums (you only get on screen the energy you give to the cast as a director). I liked the idea of the murderer's mask, very unsettling and now very cliché since it has been referenced and copied in many horror movies since (I would argue that the idea originally came from the puppet in 1945's Dead of Night). The park setup with the maid waiting was interesting but, seriously, as usual with such a limited director, the interesting idea then feels full of itself and we get some pedestrian build-up. The optometry scene was just plain ridiculous and it really felt tacked around here to close a loop in the plot (as if such a thing mattered with Argento's randomly intriguing hallucinations of a plot) so why not put it there earlier and have the characters wonder about it for most of the movie? No wonder Argento never came close to Hitchcock in mastering suspenseful storytelling.