DARIO ARGENTO

DARIO ARGENTO. James Gracey. Kamera Books; 2010.

This interesting book looks at the oeuvre of Italian giallo  specialist Dario Argento, beginning with his work on The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and on to the appropriately named Giallo. Gracey is obviously a big fan of Argento's but he can also see the man's flaws and can readily confess that Phantom of the Opera is "an absolute mess of a film." Gracey divides the discussion of each movie into general comments on the production; the pictures'  themes; notes on its technical style; and the verdict on each movie. There are also sections on Argento's work for television and the films that he has produced, such as Demons. He recognizes Deep Red as one of Argento's most memorable films and also admires Trauma much more than others do (I think Trauma is easily the equal of Deep Red.)  Although there are times this sort of resembles a term paper, for the most part Dario Argento is a worthwhile, informative, and well-written study of a flawed but talented director's career and work. Contains an insert of black and white and color photographs.

Verdict: Recommended for fans of Argento. ***.

DARIO ARGENTO'S DRACULA

Thomas Kretschmann as Dracula

DRACULA (aka Dario Argento's Dracula and Dracula 3D/2012). Director: Dario Argento.

Jonathan Harker (Unax Ugalde) arrives in the town of Hapsburg to do work for Count Dracula (Thomas Kretschmann), who has a sinister reputation. Waiting for his wife, Mina (Marta Gastini), to join him, Harker renews his friendship with Lucy (Asia Argento), who begins withering from the attacks on her by Dracula. Apparently Dracula is primarily interested in Mina, whom he believes to be a reincarnation of his wife, who died 400 years earlier. Will Van Helsing (Rutger Hauer) be able to save her from the fatal "love" of the vampire? Argento's version of Dracula seems to take its cue from the earlier Dan Curtis telefilm (and other versions), adding an unconvincing pseudo-romantic subplot that barely amounts to anything. The film's main strength is Kretshmann's excellent portrayal of the undead count -- attractive and compelling he makes the best Dracula since Christopher Lee. If only Argento's picture had the entertainment value of the best of the Hammer Dracula films. There is one striking scene when Dracula forms from a swarm of bees then rapidly dispatches several men who are conspiring against him -- naturally this has its share of gore a la Argento -- but otherwise the film is relatively lethargic and minor, with no real justification for yet another version of the story. The other actors all give good performances for the most part, although a fatigued Hauer seems rather uninterested in the proceedings. The picture is not especially scary, but there are some good FX, including a giant preying mantis that seems dragged in as an extra added attraction. This version takes place entirely in Hungary. The following year Kretschmann played Van Helsing -- not Dracula -- in the TV series, Dracula.

Verdict: Paging Peter Cushing. **.

THOSE BLOODY ITALIANS

This week Great Old Movies takes a look at Italian horror films, specifically those bloody "giallo" movies or gialli (the plural).

"Giallo" simply means yellow in Italian. (You would think it would denote the color red for blood, but the term derives from Italian pulp-type fiction with yellow covers.) But giallo has come to mean a certain type of mystery film or thriller. It has a broader usage in Italy itself, but elsewhere it denotes a specific type of shocker. There is usually an unknown maniac (or at least someone who acts like a maniac but may be quite sane and cunning) on the loose killing several victims in often flamboyant and vicious ways. There is a gruesome emphasis on the deaths. And a convoluted plot that may lead decades back into the past to explain motives or bring the killer to light.

Gialli were influential in some ways on the American slasher films that followed, although these tended to have much more simplistic plot lines. One could also argue that Brian De Palma, who made very classy "slasher" films at the beginning of his career, was as much influenced by Italian gialli as he was by Hitchcock.

Probably the first great giallo director was Mario Bava, whose Blood and Black Lace was very influential on later films, including those by the second great giallo director, Dario Argento. (Argento should certainly have been represented in this week's films, but when I put in my DVD of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage it proved to be defective. However, type in his name in the search bar above and many of his films will come up.) Argento helmed such gems as Deep Red and Dario Argento's Trauma, both of which are masterpieces of the genre.

DARIO ARGENTO AND THE ITALIAN GIALLO FILM

Dario Argento

DARIO ARGENTO.

Why do I like many of the films of Italian horrormeister Dario Argento, and dislike others just as much? Part of this is Argento's over-reliance on gore (although this can be very effective in some movies) and his acceptance of screenplays that, to be charitable, need a lot of polishing that they don't always get.

On the other hand, if you study Argento's films, especially his great ones, you can easily see that the Italian giallo filmmaker is miles ahead of the hack (no pun intended) directors of "mad slasher" schlock like, say, most of the Friday the 13th films and their ilk. His films generally have plenty of style, and his best movies are undeniably creepy and suspenseful and have some kind of (slightly demented) mind behind them, as well as some bravura sequences.

Argento never got mainstream respectability, like Hitchcock, but Argento is not in Hitchcock's league as a filmmaker. Some of his fans are simply interested in the gory shock scenes (Argento tends to cater to them too much) even though there are those of us who also enjoy the twisting plots and tense moments that are virtually in all of his movies. As Argento got older, he perhaps tried too hard to capture the young American mad slasher/splatter movie crowd even though he was capable of far greater things. Argento has never quite fulfilled his potential despite such memorable films as Deep Red and Trauma. (Argento's first film was the creditable The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in 1970).

Argento's other films are of varying quality. Great: Sleepless. Good: Phenomena; The Card Player; Cat O'Nine Tails. Mediocre: Four Flies on Grey Velvet. Bad: Do You Like Hitchcock?; Giallo. And there are others.

Argento's films were clearly influential on such diverse movies as The Eyes of Laura Mars and 88 Minutes, among others. Argento, who is now seventy-five, last directed Dracula 3D, and his next film will be the serial killer thriller The Sandman.

Below you will find reviews of some of Argento's other movies, as well as a write-up on a book about the director and his work.

MOTHER OF TEARS

MOTHER OF TEARS (aka La terza madre/2007). Director: Dario Argento.

"The city is 2700 years old, and we are standing on five layers of graves."

There was twenty-seven years between Inferno, the second of Argento's Three Mothers trilogy, and the third and final installment, Mother of Tears -- it wasn't worth the wait. The problem begins when certain artifacts are removed from a chest that is consistently referred to as an "urn" and immediately weird things begin happening. Sarah Mandy (Asia Argento), the daughter of a woman killed by another witch in Suspiria (the first part), discovers that her mother's spirit (Daria Nicolodi) is protecting her when the Mother of Tears reawakens and throws all Rome into chaos -- witches from all over the world are descending upon the city and there are many more murders and suicides. Some of these witches seem like "mean girls" with attitude, while the head mother, supposedly the embodiment of evil, looks like a sleazy hostess in a topless bar. Mother of Tears could have been a great and exciting horror film, but instead it's an often silly and mindless gorefest for the "gore geeks" in the audience. Some of Argento's better movies are less offensive because there's an intriguing storyline and some inventive directorial touches to go along with the graphic mayhem, but that isn't the case with Mother. Some of the gore is so over the top that it becomes almost comically unrealistic. We have the woman strangled with her own intestines, and in a mind-numbingly offensive and sick scene a gay woman has a metal rod thrust into her vagina and out of her mouth. Again, because of the lack of other positive attributes, Argento's sickening violence against women appears positively misogynous [although, to be fair, there are male victims as well]. There are a couple of interesting scenes: people pursuing Sarah can't see her due to her mother's spell; and those too-clean-but-creepy catacombs that are the lair of the bitchy witches. The Omen-like musical score only reminds one that the three Omen movies made up a much slicker and more memorable trilogy. It's as if Argento, desperate to expand a youthful audience, decided to concentrate on grisliness and to hell with the script. The performances of the leads -- Argento's daughter Asia, and Adam James as her boyfriend, Michael -- border on the amateurish, although Ms. Argento has her moments.

Verdict: Sad actually. *1/2.

GIALLO

GIALLO (2009). Director: Dario Argento.

Linda (Emmanuelle Seigner) is horrified to learn that her sister, Celine, a model, is the latest in a line of women kidnapped by a disfigured, unknown maniac. She teams up with an American F.B.I man working in Rome, Inspector Enzo Avolfi (Adrian Brody), to try to save her sister and trap her abductor. This is Dario Argento treading water, as the film is well-acted [hard to figure how or why Brody wound up in this but he's made other bad film choices after winning an Oscar for The Pianist in 2002] but not very absorbing or interesting. Argento has made much, much better films than this, but at least it's slightly better than his tedious 2005 telefilm Do You Like Hitchcock? Brody also appeared in Predators, Hollywoodland --which showcased him much more as an actor -- and the most recent King Kong, all of which, despite their flaws, are better than this disappointing "thriller."

Verdict: Not the Argento you remember. **.

LEARNING TO LIVE OUT LOUD Piper Laurie

LEARNING TO LIVE OUT LOUD. Piper Laurie. Crown; 2011.

Autobiographies of second and third tier celebrities are often worthless because the author is too interested in settling scores or vomiting bitterness over being overlooked, ignored, or hidden behind a bushel, but luckily this is not the case with Laurie, who has several Oscar nominations to her credit and once again became a sought after actress after her initial Hollywood period [although she refers to herself as a "star," which may technically be correct, she never exactly had the career of say, a Joan Crawford]. Laurie had a difficult childhood, but became closer to her parents in later years. She writes of her sexual experiences with Ronald Reagan and Mel Gibson [one would think some women would now be embarrassed to admit they'd had sex with those two!], her affairs with director John Frankenheimer and others, and her marriage to a movie critic, Joe Morgenstern. She writes with admirable candor of her personal life, and doesn't neglect her film or television career, either. Laurie struggled against an indifferent studio system which apparently saw her as little other than superficial cheesecake and had to fight to gain respect as an actress. She had a comeback of sorts in Brian De Palma's film version of Carrie, which led not just to other macabre assignments but more "serious" work as well. Occasionally, Laurie seems to pull back from total truth; surely there was more behind the break up of her marriage to Morgenstern than what she writes. She appeared in The Thornbirds but either never met star Barbara Stanwyck or chooses not to write about her. Some fans may be disappointed that she makes absolutely no mention of working with Italian director Dario Argento on his grotesque but rather excellent Trauma [if anything, Laurie's character is even more horrible than the mother in Carrie.] Still this is a very well-written and surprisingly absorbing read from a Hollywood, theater, and TV insider who was around for the studio system and the Golden Age of Television and writes intelligently about all of it.

Verdict: A worthwhile read. ***1/2. 

DO YOU LIKE HITCHCOCK? [TI PIACE HITCHCOCK?]

DO YOU LIKE HITCHCOCK? (aka Ti piace Hitchcock?/2005 Italian telefilm). Director: Dario Argento.

Dario Argento was once a very popular director of stylish and gory Italian thrillers such as Deep Red, Suspiria, Phenomena and Trauma, and he may still have a large following in Italy [in the U.S. he's more of a cult favorite]. But this lame telefilm, even if Argento were hampered by TV's restrictions, is a real come-down, just another in a long line of bad films that invoke Hitchcock without displaying one fraction of the Master's genius -- or ability to entertain. When film student Giulio (Elio Germano, pictured) learns that the mother of a pretty young woman named Sasha (Elisabetta Rocchetti) has been brutally murdered, he becomes inexplicably convinced that she "traded" murders with another woman a la Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. In scenes that remind one more of De Palma's Dressed to Kill than anything in Hitchcock, Giulio follows around this other woman apparently in the hopes of discovering which of her acquaintances is supposed to be murdered by Sasha. There's a prologue involving witches' rites in the woods when Giulio was a boy that seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the movie. The only "style" to the film is that Argento seems obsessed in delivering extreme close-ups of tumblers turning inside locks. At one point Giulio breaks his leg like Stewart in Rear Window -- that's the only similarity, really, to the work of Hitchcock. There is a tense rooftop climax, but --- and Hitchcock could have told Argento this after the former's experience with Saboteur -- it's the wrong person dangling from the roof! Neither Argento nor composer Pino Donaggio [who did some fine scores for thrillers by Brian de Palma] seem very inspired by their material this time. This becomes positively tedious after awhile.

Verdict: Even Four Flies on Grey Velvet was better than this. *1/2.

FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET

FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET (1972). Written and directed by Dario Argento. 

Roberto Tobias (Michael Brandon), a rock musician in Italy, accidentally kills someone in self-defense, but the dope doesn't go to the police, opening himself up to blackmail and worse. We learn fairly early that someone is out to get Tobias, by framing him and making his life miserable. A series of murders occur when others learn who the person is behind the plot, or if they come too close to learning the truth. An early film by Italian horror specialist Argento, Four Flies holds the attention but is never quite satisfying. Mimsy Farmer plays Tobias' wife. Calisto Calisti plays Carlo, a gay private eye that Tobias hires to find out who's behind his torment. "What do you think -- that this fag is going to jump on a chair when he sees a mouse?" Carlo asks Tobias, although the point would have been better served had Carlo not been so stereotypical. There is some moderate inventiveness -- and a certain hoariness -- to the murder scenes. The title refers to the image seen on a murder victim's retina after death, supposedly captured by a photographic device. There's a lot of foreshadowing throughout the movie of the film's climactic and gruesome death. There's a certain over-the-top ugliness to the theme and tone of the movie, which is true of many of Argento's productions. After an career in the U.S. in the sixties, Farmer has worked mostly in Italy, with many more roles after Four Flies. This was Brandon's fourth film; he has exclusively appeared on television ever since. 

Verdict: Not Argento's best but probably not his worst. **1/2.