Profondo rosso – Deep Red (1975)
My friend Hans showed this one to me last Wednesday. Hans is a huge fan of European cinema and Italian horror director Dario Argento so I usually let him introduce to me to cool stuff that I haven’t seen.
We’ve been watching quite a few of Argento’s films lately. So far my favorie has been Suspiria with this one coming in second.
Deep Red seems to follow a very similar plot to to other Argento films. A foreigner in Italy gets entangled in a murder mystery and conducts his own investigation into the crimes. In this case here it’s British actor David Hemmings (from Blow-Up) who plays the musician who gets sucked into the mystery after witnessing the murder of his neighbour.
The plot might not be one of the strongest points of the film but it’s there just in the service of setting up stunning set pieces and visuals. Everything about this movie is just eye popping and gorgeous, there is not a dull shot in the film. This is Argento at the very top of his game and he is staging some of the more elaborate murder scenes I’ve ever seen here. The transfer on the DVD is also stunning and really does justice to the beauty of the film. If you are looking for logic here you might be disappointment, but for sheer eye candy you can’t beat this one. Bear in mind that this is all before digital color correction and manipulation.
I’ve always been a huge fan of Brian DePalma and now that I’m going back and watching these Argento films it is really clear to me how much DePalma was inspired by these movies.
A perfectly framed scene from Deep Red
This “giallo” on the verge of horror is undoubtedly Dario Argento’s finest work. Regretfully, his subsequent movies have never matched the previous, powerful one. Nevertheless, I can’t help noticing Argento’s subtle ability of annexing to himself and skilfully transforming existing little pieces of work pertaining to other films. In “The spiral staircase” (Robert Siodmak, 1945), we can find the Deep Red serial killer very prototype with his homburg, raincoat and black leather gloves, to say nothing of the killer’s eye terrific close-ups. Also, taking a look at the opening credits of “To kill a mockingbird” (Robert Mulligan, 1962) we are struck by the evident similarity with the analogous Argento’s macro-photography shots. The childish singsong we hear in the same credits may also have suggested the director using the nursery rhyme for the murder scenes…