The plot, as would become standard in the giallo film throughout the 70s, is suitably convoluted. Sure that he saw something vital that he can’t recall, Dalmas becomes obsessed with solving the mystery, putting himself and his girlfriend Julia (Suzy Kendall) in danger. Trapped between two glass doors, Dalmas is helpless and although the woman, Monica (Eva Renzi) survives the attack, her assailant escapes.
Here, the protagonist is American writer in Rome (two more of Argento’s recurring tropes – the out-of-place American and the creative artist) Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante) who witnesses a woman being attacked in an art gallery while out on a late night walk. The plot is Argento’s first workout of one of his favourite obsessions – the protagonist who sees something that they can’t quite remember, a detail that eventually turns out to be the key that unravels the mystery. As will all of his best films, he packs it full of memorable set-pieces, innovative camerawork and pioneering use of unexpected musical case (in this case, a jazz-inflected score supplied by Ennio Morricone). It’s a film that oozes both style and a youthful arrogance, Argento displaying a supreme confidence in his own abilities rare in directors making their first feature. It’s a remarkably assured debut, a taut and unrelenting example of that peculiarly Italian genre, the giallo, brutal tales of sex and violence named after the yellow-jacketed murder-mystery paperbacks published by Mondadori from the late 1920s, reprinting the likes of Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace and Raymond Chandler. It was an immediate hit when it opened in in Italy in February 1970 and launched Argento on a career that would peak in the late 70s but continue on until into the next millennium. In 1969 he adapted (uncredited) Fredric Brown’s 1949 novel The Screaming Mimi which he took before the cameras under the title L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo ( The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) later in the year.
Launching Argento to international stardom and gaining him several Hitchcock comparisons along the way, the film is a veritable checklist of the visual and thematic obsessions that he would return to throughout his career.ĭario Argento was working as a film critic for the Rome newspaper Paese Sera when he started writing screenplays, notably collaborating with Bernardo Bertolucci on the script for Sergio Leone’s C’era una volta il West/ Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). While Mario Bava’s formative 1963 murder mystery The Girl Who Knew Too Much set the giallo blueprint, Argento’s soaring debut, about an American in Rome who fears for his life after witnessing an attempted murder in an art gallery, crystallised the sub-genre’s popularity.
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