review

DEEP RED

After a brief segue into historical comedy with LE CINQUE GIORNATE or THE FIVE DAYS OF MILAN, Argento returned to the giallo in 1975. With DEEP RED, Argento exceeds all expectations. From a purely aesthetic view, the film is flawless, full of sinuous, gliding pans and shocking close-ups. From a narrative stand point, no film in Argento's oeuvre has more narrative cohesion, memorable characters, or variety of experience. In the entire catalog of Argento's gialli, this is his Faust, a true masterwork.


Deep Red David Hemmings in a role not unlike his role in Blow-Up

A psychic is giving a demonstration for an audience when she suddenly keys in on someone in the auditorium. Seems there is a murderer in their presence, someone who has killed and 'will kill again'. As usual in gialli, before long the psychic is brutally murdered in her apartment, an event witnessed by a jazz musician, Marc Daly, who is the first on the scene. If you're familiar with THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, you're already one step ahead of the game. Marc is convinced he's seen something in that apartment, a painting or a portrait, that holds the key to the puzzle and soon he is targeted by the killer.


Unlike THE CAT O'NINE TAILS, which took a scientific angle with it's story, DEEP RED reaches into the supernatural. The film is full of precognitions: Marc's statement about playing the piano, about how he equates striking the keys with bashing his father's teeth in, will find it's horrible counterpoint later on when a man has his open mouth slammed repeatedly into the corners of a desk. Marc burns himself on a coffee machine and, a little later, a character is boiled to death in a bathtub. Carlo's words in the plaza take on a new, terrible meaning at the film's end as will Marc's own declaration that women are the weaker of the genders. It even has it's own haunted house, complete with a walled-up corpse, and a school which seems to breed psychotics. This is definitely a different kind of giallo, a break from the norm of Argento's earlier narratives and the essential link between Argento the giallo filmmaker and the Argento of SUSPIRIA and INFERNO.


Death becomes brutal in Deep Red

This also marks the first collaboration between Argento and the prog-rock group Goblin. We often overlook the importance or significance of a film's score. We only seem vaguely aware of it when sitting in our seats at the theater, maybe aware of it's emotional manipulations, maybe not. It's a tribute to Goblin's music that we are constantly aware of it during the film. Would SUSPIRIA be nearly as effective without their haunting score? Probably not. If Carpenter's HALLOWEEN has taught me one thing, it's that music is often the deciding factor between tedium and brilliance. Goblin's score exudes menace. Watching the film in surround sound, feeling the bass vibrate through your chest, listening to the haunting children's song - an important plot point in and of itself - echo through the house, helps to create the all-encompassing sense of terror that marks DEEP RED as not only a giallo masterpiece, but a horror masterpiece as well.


A tender moment in Deep Red

Rarely has Argento seemed so comfortable with his actors. David Hemmings - his presence in the film is an obvious homage to Antonioni's BLOW-UP - combines a sense of humor with a sense of determination that makes him one of Argento's few truly likable heroes. Daria Nicolodi portrays his partner in the investigation, the strong-willed and vibrant journalist, Gianna Brezzi. She and Hemmings have a remarkable on-screen chemistry, the first of it's kind in any of Argento's gialli. While the other male-female pairings in Argento's Animal Trilogy have fallen flat due to the lack of chemistry - and in some cases, the utter lack of interesting actors - here we have a couple which we actually like and actually care about. When Gianna takes a knife to the stomach, collapsing on the floor saying 'all for a story...' we feel a slight twinge of regret. Regret that they did not just pack up and go to Lebanon as they planned. We might even feel a little guilty. Had we not wanted to see, had we not wanted this mystery to be solved, her blood would have been spilled.


It's hard to tell how much of the script belongs to Argento and how much belongs to Bernardino Zapponi. Argento had collaborated with other writers on THE CAT O'NINE TAILS and FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET and the result was a much deeper, more humanistic screenplay. On THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, Argento wrote alone and, although he was a screenwriter for many years prior to the production on that film, the film seems remarkably flat compared to DEEP RED. Argento himself does not recollect what was his material and what was Zapponi's. I'd wager that the lighter material was Zapponi's. Comic scenes abound in the film and the result isn't one of diluding the material. Rather, it elevates it. DEEP RED is his most memorable giallo because it has, at it's core, the most memorable characters.



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