Scarlet Billows

So today, instead of sticking to my Vincent Price diet, I decided to instead watch Dario Argento's Deep Red. Frankly, I was quite impressed. I had only seen two other Argento films before: Suspira, which I enjoyed but found the score by Goblin to be alternately overwhelming and distracting, and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, which I remember thinking was very stylish, but nothing I hadn't seen before. This, however, was a tense thriller that I could get into: the plot was compelling, and the colors were lurid. The Goblin score was still occasionally distracting, but it was a little jazzier and more enjoyable. There were bows to Hitchcock throughout the course of the film (The 39 Steps, Dial M For Murder, Psycho), but Argento has his own story to tell, and it never gets to the point of being like Brian De Palma's extended homages to Hitchcock's individual films.

One thing that struck me about it was how fair the director was in the disclosure of the killer's identity. The clues are there throughout the film about who it was, but you only really understand their significance around the same time David Hemmings' character does. An early exchange between him and a female journalist seems to be a sort of extended adversarial flirtation, only to have more meaning once the killer's identity is disclosed. I sort of guessed who the killer was early on, based solely on eye-shape, but questioned that supposition many times over the course of the film.

One thing that bugged me was David Hemmings's character: his obsession with the identity of the murderer is made to seem almost as reckless and destructive as the murders themselves. When he is accused late in the movie for forcing the murders to happen because of his own curiosity, there's really something to that. He's on the scene for something like three murders, and yet never seems inclined to contact the police about them. Indeed, he doesn't seem to be put off by the murders themselves at all, except as an elaborate puzzle for him to solve. He's actually kind of a jerk.

One other thing that I appreciated: there are two gay characters in the movie, and (unlike with Hitchcock) they're actually treated very respectfully, and as genuinely loving. I feared for a long time that one of them would turn out to be the serial killer -- the gays ALWAYS seem to end up being the serial killer -- but *SPOILER ALERT* this does not end up being the case. One of them does get his head run over by a car, but these things happen.

In short, I enjoyed it.