Cat O' Nine Tails (1971)

Cat O' Nine Tails was Dario Argento’s second feature film, and his second giallo. It was released in 1971.

I first saw this movie many years ago, in the early days of DVD. The DVD copy I saw was truly atrocious. Image quality was mediocre VHS quality and it was pan-and-scanned. I liked the movie but it’s perhaps not surprising that I wasn’t totally blown away by it.

In fact most of the Argento movies I’ve seen I have only seen in poor quality early DVD versions which may be why I’m not as enthusiastic about as his work as some people are. One of my current move-watching projects is to rewatch Argento’s early films on Blu-Ray. I suspect that when this project is completed I may well rate Argento much more highly.

In any case I’m now the proud owner of the Arrow Blu-Ray release of Cat O' Nine Tails.

Blind former journalist Franco Arnò (Karl Malden) is walking down the street when he overhears an odd conversation taking place in a car. He obviously can’t see the man who is speaking but his ten-year-old niece Lori gets a good look at him.

That same night there’s a break-in at Professor Terzi’s genetics research laboratory. Nothing is stolen. That puzzles reporter Carlo Giordani (James Franciscus).

And one of the scientists at the institute is killed in a freak railway accident.

When Carlo and Franco get together and realise that the accident was no accident and that the scientist was murdered they decide they may have stumbled on to something big.

Carlo thinks that Professor Terzi’s wild free-spirited daughter Anna (Catherine Spaak) knows more than she’s prepared to admit. It’s a lead worth following up, and in the course of following it up he ends up in bed with her.

Carlo and Franco know they’re on to something when somebody tries to kill both of them. Presumably the same person who killed Carlo’s photographer friend who had uncovered a vital clue.

The murderer is clearly determined to cover his (or her) tracks by killing everyone who could possibly provide incriminating evidence and the corpses quickly start to accumulate.

There’s plenty of suspense. For Carlo and Franco it’s not just a matter of uncovering the truth, it’s a matter of doing so before the killer gets around to killing them as well. And before the killer gets around to killing too many more people. So there’s a race against time element, always a good way to ramp up the suspense.

There are a couple of very Hitchcockian moments. The very fine murder in the railway station set-piece struck me as having a very Hitchcock flavour.

Very few people could pull off spectacular visual set-pieces as well as Argento could and this movie contains some prime examples. The art design isn’t as lush as you’ll find in some of his other movies. Visually it’s rather restrained.

This is early Argento. In early Argento you get the spectacular visual set-pieces you expect but you don’t get all that much in the way of gore. It wasn’t until Deep Red in 1975 that Argento came to embrace the concept of artistic gore. There are only two very brief slightly gruesome moments but because Argento is so sparing in his use of shock effects in this film those moments actually have more impact than the more operatic gore effects of his later movies.

James Franciscus seemed headed for major stardom but it didn’t quite happen. He delivers a solid performance here. Karl Malden is of course excellent. Catherine Spaak is adorable, charming and slightly odd and mysterious. She was a superb actress who gave a magnificent performance in the wonderful sexy comedy The Libertine (1968).

Argento’s debut feature The Bird with the Crystal Plumage had been a huge hit not just in Europe but in the U.S. so the producers had high hopes for Cat O' Nine Tails which was rushed into production to capitalise on the success of his first movie. Cat O' Nine Tails flopped in the U.S. but did well in Europe.

The Arrow Blu-Ray looks terrific. The extras include an interview with Argento. This is apparently his least favourite of all his movies. He felt it was too Hollywood. He does however have very fond memories of working with Karl Malden and he has reasonably positive things to say about James Franciscus and Catherine Spaak. There’s an audio commentary with Alan Jones and Kim Newman. It’s a good commentary but they do reveal spoilers for a lot of Argento’s other movies!

I don’t think Cat O' Nine Tails is as good as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage but it’s still a fine thriller. The plot doesn’t make much sense (in fact it makes no sense at all) but plot coherence is not a necessary ingredient of a top-class giallo. Cat O' Nine Tails is enjoyable and it’s recommended.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)

If you mention the giallo genre the chances are that the first director most people with think of is Dario Argento. In fact Argento made only a handful of pure gialli. He very quickly started to movie in the direction of supernatural horror. His most famous and most celebrated film, Suspiria, is a supernatural horror movie rather than a giallo. By the time he returned to the giallo genre with Tenebre everybody else had stopped making them.

And if you mention Dario Argento’s name people are going to think of gore. He was famous for making gore artistic and even, in a perverse way, beautiful. But Argento’s first few gialli contain very little gore.

His first foray into the world of the giallo was The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in 1970.

This movie opens with one of the finest visual set-pieces in all of cinema. And there’s virtually no gore. It’s simply a very cleverly staged scene. Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante) is an American writer living in Italy. Walking along the street he notices something in an art gallery. When he takes a closer look he realises he is witnessing a murder. A woman is being murdered. He can see what’s happening but he can’t do anything about it. Between Sam and the murder are two sheets of plate glass. The front part of the gallery is like a gigantic show room with a glass front facing the street. He manages to get through the first glass window only to find himself trapped between two huge panes of glass. He can see the murder but he can’t hear what is happening in the gallery. He can see out onto the street but he cannot hear anything happening on the street and nobody in the street can hear him.

It turns out not to be a murder. Not quite. Sam came along just in time to scare the killer off. The victim, a woman, has been stabbed but she will recover.

Inspector Morosini (Enrico Maria Salerno) is very anxious to hear Sam’s account of the crime. There have been three recent unsolved murders. The victims were women. It seems likely to the police that Sam has just prevented a fourth murder.

Sam’s evidence is frustrating, to the inspector and to Sam himself. He knows there was something wrong with the scene he witnessed. Something that didn’t fit. But no matter how hard he tries he can’t put his finger on what it was. Inspector Morosini thinks that whatever it was could be the key to solving three murders, if only Sam could remember.

Sam is having a very busy day. After leaving the police station someone tries to decapitate him with a meat cleaver.

Sam can’t stop thinking about that scene he witnessed. He is happy to help the police but he becomes so obsessed that he does some investigating on his own (with Inspector Morosini’s blessing). He receives threatening telephone calls rom the murderer, warning him off. There’s a vital clue in those phone calls, both Sam and Inspector Morosini are sure of it, but it’s another elusive clue. The police subject the tapes of the phone calls to rigorous analysis. Their technical people know there’s a clue there, but they just can’t pin it down.

There’s a kind of double race against time spect to this movie. Inspector Morosini has to solve the case as quickly as possible because the murderer is adding new victims all the time. Sam has to solve the case before the murderer decides to add him to his list of victims.

The resolution of the puzzle is handled with considerable skill.

In this movie Argento isn’t trying to do anything dazzlingly original in terms of content. It was his first movie and mostly he’s content to work with standard thriller tropes - the hero witnesses a crime and the killer is out to silence him, there’s a threat to the hero’s girlfriend, the hero decides to play amateur detective, there are two parallel investigations (by the police and by the hero). At his stage Argento seems to be trying to position himself as the Italian Hitchcock - don’t worry too much about the plot because it’s the visuals that matter and include at least one show-stopping visual set-piece.

Argento wrote the screenplay, based on Fredric Brown’s novel The Screaming Mimi, and the twists at the end are delightfully devious. Argento might generally be more concerned with style than substance but in this movie he’s provided himself with a nifty plot as well. In fact the plot is more coherent and better structured than one expects in a giallo.

This is a movie that is much less bloody than it appears to be. When the murders occur we get the impression that they’re bloody but actually the bloodiness is almost entirely suggested rather than shown. We think we’ve seen something much more graphic than we actually have seen (just like Hitchcock’s famous shower scene in Psycho).

It’s that initial murder scene in the art gallery that is going to grab your attention but there’s plenty more visual brilliance to come. For a guy making his first feature film Argento’s mastery of the visual language of the thriller genre is very very impressive.

The acting is OK, but it’s not a movie you’re going to watch for the acting.

Most of the characteristic giallo ingredients are in place here, there’s very effective suspense, it looks great and overall The Bird with the Crystal Plumage works in a very satisfying way. Highly recommended.