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Very few European horror movie directors have been revered in the same way as Dario Argento. Referred to in equal measures as “The Italian Hitchcock” and “The Master of Horror” (despite making only two films that can be comfortably bracketed in the genre), he impressed enough to be brought over to America to make a studio film, without a great of success but more of that later. Picking up themes and trends from earlier Italian movies by the great Mario Bava and of penny dreadful style crime books published in Italy, Argento began his film career as a critic, moving into screenwriting including a credit on Sergio Leone’s sweeping western epic “Once Upon a Time in the West” with Bernardo Bertolucci in 1968.

He didn’t have to wait long for his directorial debut, the internationally renowned “Bird With the Crystal Plumage” in 1969, what proved to be an archetypal Argento film. A flop on its original release, it became an international hit and can be viewed as a template for future Argento thrillers. The black gloved killer, an everyday man who witnesses a murder and is persuaded to investigate, feeling he saw something that doesn’t add up, strange phone calls and outrageous set pieces.

The film starts with Sam Dalmos (Tony Musante), who thinks he’s stumbled across the identity of a serial killer in Rome when he witnesses a murder whilst trapped between two panes of glass. This marks another familiar trademark of Argento’s work, a pane of glass, window or mirror featured during key scenes, through which the images are never quite what they seem. The movie marked the first of what’s frequently referred to as the director’s “Animal Trilogy”, closely followed by “Cat O’Nine Tails” and the rarely seen “Four Flies on Grey Velvet”, both released in 1971.

Both solid Giallo entries and did little to detract Argento’s growing reputation as a director with a mind for suspense and an eye for the fancy camerawork, his reputation for coherent plots though was beginning to take a nosedive. This was a downfall of the genre, famed for its set pieces and final scene plot twists, “Flies” was to be his final Giallo until his next movie, a comedy called “Five Days of Milan”, sank without trace in the box office. ATthis turned out to be a blessing as Argento returned to the genre that brought him fame, and with some style.

The word ‘masterpiece’ is misused frequently, but “Profondo Rosso”, or “Deep Red” to give it its English title began an unbroken run of six movies that have rightly gone down as classics of the genre. Starring David Hemmings as a Pianist who witnesses the hatchet murder of a psychic (through her flat window, note the motif!), he arrives at the flat too late but finds the body impaled on the broken glass. Returning later to find a painting missing, he’s convinced of its importance but can’t place why and tells police he saw the killer. His photograph with the claim appears in the paper so he must solve the murder both to satisfy his own curiosity of the painting’s importance and to prevent himself becoming the next victim.

“Deep Red” is perhaps the first to represent Argento’s flare for violent, spectacular and flamboyantly directed set-piece murder scenes. We see a man attacked by an inexplicable walking doll (left, echoes of which appear in “Saw”) before having his teeth smashed out, a woman’s burnt alive in a bath before condensation is used as a clue, an “Omen” style death resulting in a squashed head and a beheading by lift. We also have increasingly stylish camerawork as characters are dwarfed by immense Roman statues, cameras plummet entire buildings before resting on two characters talking to each other. We have a five minute scene following Hemming’s character investigating a building, watching him leave the building to revealing to us the clue he missed. Again the motifs are there. A black gloved killer, menacing phone calls from the murderer, a protagonist who agonises over something he believes is important but there’s more here, an element of horror.

The movie shows the first signs of Argento leading towards the supernatural. “The House of the Screaming Child” where bad things happen, a soundtrack that suggest the presence of something hanging over the key characters, the killer leaving sinister objects for its victims to find such as a toy doll hanging from a noose, the mechanised doll that attacks one victim and paintings by a child that detail graphic murders. It also introduces a theory of telepathy Argento would later turn into a feature with “Phenomena”.

Profondo Rosso, aka Deep Red: Not for the faint-hearted!

So ends part one of my epic blog about Argento’s work, but there’s much more to come. I’ll be back with a second part detailing the first two of his proposed “Three Mothers” trilogy and “Tenebrae”, a third looking at the four movies up to “Opera”, a fourth looking at his American work and subsequent return to Italy and a fifth taking in the poorly received “Phantom of the Opera” and a return to the Giallo in the passing of the millennium. So stay with me and we’ll get there in the end, until then…

“Beware the moon and stay on the path…”