Dario Argento’s debut film is an astonishing piece of work.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is an astonishing debut film. As a reviewer who has seen all but one of the director’s movies (1973’s comedy drama Le cinque giornate [The Five Days], which remains unreleased in America and the UK) and both of his episodes of the TV series Masters of Horror, I have to admit that I was beginning to doubt the director’s talent in recent years: my memories of his excellent early films began to fade and were replaced by his recent output, which has gone from the below average Do You Like Hitchcock?, The Card Player and Non ho sonno in the first half of the last decade to the actually unwatchable - Giallo and Mother of Tears: The Third Mother - in the last three years. However, returning to The Bird with the Crystal Plumage after a gap of several years has revealed a film that is still fresh, innovative and deserving of its status as a seminal giallo.

Having not read the uncredited novel by Fredric Brown, I don’t know whether any of the striking set-pieces, costumes and characters can be attributed to Brown, but the plot is significantly different from the novel’s (filmed previously in 1958 by Gerd Oswald), so it’s possible that Argento only kept the book’s basic premise of an artist obsessed by a traumatised woman who is being stalked by a serial killer. There are numerous memorable scenes in the film: the powerless spectator trapped behind glass as he witnesses a murder, the police pathologist who wears dark glasses while a bank of open reel computers process the evidence behind him, a couple having sex while a metronome ticks, the protagonist throwing a cigarette packet to a suspect to see which hand he catches it with, and bizarre lines of dialogue such as ‘How many times have I had to tell you that Ursula Andress belongs with the transvestites not the perverts’!

This is a film that provides a segue from the noir genre that inspired it - the femme fatale and the amateur detective following her - to a new form of filmmaking and storytelling that seems equally inspired by Ennio Morricone’s jazz score (Argento often cut his films to his musical scores) and Freudian dream logic. While Mario Bava can stake a claim as the progenitor of giallo cinema, Argento also looks elsewhere to international filmmaking (he was a professional film critic before becoming a script writer) with chase scenes reminiscent of The Third Man, featuring close-ups and characters lit by car headlights, the familiarity of those elements made strange by Morricone’s discordant strings and the director’s fast zooms and cuts.

Only the final scene of the movie disappoints, as a police expert explains the motives and psychology of the killer; Argento doesn’t have the blank stare of a comatose Norman Bates to juxtapose with the banal monologue, so instead cuts to random shots of planes on runways as the hero sits waiting to leave the country.

Alex Fitch

Mathematics is a difficult topic to film. Ron Howard’s biopic of brainiac John Nash, A Beautiful Mind (2001), was hampered in its attempt to make maths visually interesting by the boring nature of maths itself. Scott Hicks easily managed to make mad genius attractive in Shine (1996) primarily because a mad genius pianist is recognisably brilliant, even to those who don’t play the piano. A mad genius mathematician, on the other hand, looks very similar (to the uninitiated naked eye) to a mediocre mathematician, a merely good one, or indeed a rotten one. All the filmmaker can do is surround his genius with intelligent-looking people whose mouths occasionally drop open in wonder when confronted by a manically scribbled equation (used also in Gus Van Sant’s 1997 Good Will Hunting), or resort to tricks like getting him to write on windows, an image nicked from Howard by David Fincher in a desperate attempt to make the writing of computer code look cinematically interesting in The Social Network (2010).

Darren Aronofsky‘s debut, Pi (1998), is a stumbling success in conveying mathematics as a serious subject matter primarily because the maths is not as important as all that. All of Aronofsky’s films are about obsessive madness. Be it drug addiction, wrestling, scientific research or, most recently, ballet, his films all follow the trajectory of characters tearing themselves apart to get at their obsession, literally tearing themselves apart in most cases: the arm in Requiem for a Dream (2000), the heart in The Wrestler (2008), the fingernails and toenails of Black Swan (2010) and finally, where it all began, the brain in Pi. Shot in a granular black and white and with a close-up intensity that feels like an invasion of personal space, Aronofsky’s film tells the story of mad genius Max (played by Sean Gullette), who shuffles from apartment to subway station and back again, suffers intermittent debilitating attacks and becomes embroiled in two conspiracies, one involving a shady Wall Street operation and the other a bunch of Hasidic Jews searching for a numerical answer to the Torah. Max is given succour and advice by a friendly neighbour (Samia Shoaib) and a wise old mentor called Sol (Mark Margolis), who has himself given up being an obsessive genius to devote himself to dishing out wisdom to Max, games of Go and feeding his fish.

Max’s explanations of what he’s looking for have a demented Johnny Ball feel, as Aronofsky supplies illustrations and Clint Mansell pounds away with a soundtrack that feels a bit too cool for the main character. The two forces that approach and seek to exploit Max, the stock market thugs, representing the material, and the frankly mad Jews, representing the mystical, are likewise a threat to the rationalist Max. They are trying to get their hands on the 216-digit number that is the film’s MacGuffin. It is Sol who argues the most coherently that once you focus on a number you will see it everywhere as you filter out all that doesn’t fit in. Sol is the voice of sanity and rational retreat. His voice is, in fact, all too sane, showing Max up for the humourless, dour nerd he really is.

Stylistically, there’s a lot of Eraserhead (Lynch, 1977) in here, but, as with Black Swan, Polanski is the main influence, and especially the claustrophobic madness of Repulsion (1965). In the end, we are left wondering how much of the film is real and how much happens in Max’s own head. The forces conniving against him seem more credible, not only as paranoid illusions, but also as projections of Max’s inflated sense of his own importance.

Ultimately, things don’t quite add up.

John Bleasdale

Way back in 1921 young Fritz Lang apparently concocted the screenplay for this bit of exotic adventure, but wasn’t trusted to direct it; studio politics intervened, then an inconvenient Second World War. Cut to the late 50s: émigré Lang has fallen from favour in Hollywood; his last film, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), was a while back, and the offers aren’t exactly rolling in, when he gets a call from German producer Artur Brauner who tells him his old script has resurfaced, and there’s only one man they want in the director’s chair….

The Tiger of Eschnapur (Der Tiger von Eschnapur) and The Indian Tomb (Das indische Grabmal), the two halves of what became known as Fritz Lang’s Indian Epic are some of his last work, his penultimate film, made when he was approaching 70 and given more freedom and money than Hollywood usually offers its ageing masters. It was a lavish production, given extensive location shooting, an international cast, elaborate sets, crowd scenes and more elephants and tigers than you could shake a stick at. The result is one of the most deliriously unreal slices of cinema that it’s ever been my pleasure to witness.

The story is pure hokum. A German architect (Paul Hubschmid) is hired by the maharajah of Eschnapur (Walter Reyer) to construct a temple on his palace grounds. Unfortunately he promptly falls for dancer Seetha (the, frankly, smoking hot Debra Paget), on whom the maharajah has matrimonial designs, and the two lovers have to flee for their lives. Whereupon the architect’s unknowing sister (Sabine Bethmann) and partner arrive in Eschnapur, and are commissioned to construct a tomb for living inhabitants, full of traps and hazards, while in the wings, revolution is brewing amongst the palace courtiers…

All of this is the framework on which to hang lots of proto-Indiana Jones business: there are traps and escapes and close calls, flaming torches and carved stone. Fate and the ability to avoid it is continually questioned, whether our lives are our own, or in the hands of unseen forces. But it’s primarily a visual experience; nearly every frame looks like the cover to a pulp novel, all coloured back lighting and sweaty muscle. Hubschmid would have made a fine Doc Savage, Paget is a Frank Frazetta dream. India is used as a fount of exotic imagery, of jungle tiger attacks, rope tricks, coloured silk and glowering statues. It’s like a lurid and brutal children’s film, one that can accommodate Seetha’s sinuous, near-naked dance routines and a nightmarish attack by some Romero zombie-like lepers.

As the leper sequences illustrate, this is all undoubtedly loaded with cultural insensitivity and ideological dodginess. Colonial attitudes are present, if not emphasised. All the key Indian roles are played by ‘browned up’ Europeans and Americans, and the whole 203 minutes have no time for the political and social realities of life in the subcontinent. This is an India of the mind, dreamed up for silent film in 1921, and as accurate as Rousseau’s jungle canvasses. It would take an especially humourless viewer to watch this without a grin forming on their face at all the sumptuous fakery. I would say that the first half writes a cheque that the second half doesn’t quite pay out on, with more studio-bound scenes of verbal to and fro to little effect, but I’m quibbling. This is vivid, brilliant nonsense. ‘India is like an intoxicating drink,’ indeed.

The Eureka Masters of Cinema’s two-disc edition has fine-looking transfers of both films plus a host of extras, trailers, commentaries, a documentary, on-set footage and more.

Mark Stafford