Dec 1st Four Flies on Grey Velvet
This is part of my “Watching every Dario Argento movie, ever” category. Here I go through all the movies written and directed by Dario Argento, and provide you with the pleasure of reading my views on them!
Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971, original title: 4 Mosche di Velluto Grigio) concludes Argento’s “Animal Trilogy” and, after a brief foray into television (and the rarely seen non-horror Le Cinque Giornate), would catapult him into what many consider his 12-odd-year “golden period.”
But that’s for another post, and it could be argued that Four Flies on Grey Velvet (and indeed the rest of the “Animal Trilogy”) is one of his best works. Here the more conventional film making of its “prequels” was starting to be pushed aside to make way for the more Argento-esque. The Ennio Morricone score, for example, plays a smaller role, and is accompanied by a more jazz-y prog-rock soundtrack. Morricone and Argento apparently had some disagreements over this, and it would be Morricone’s last score for Argento until 1996’s The Stendhal Syndrome. (He was, of course, for the most part replaced by Claudio Simonetti and his band Goblin.)
As part of the trilogy, this movie feels a whole lot more like a pure giallo than The Cat o’ Nine Tails. The plot of a man set up to commit a murder by a photographer in a creepy mask who continues to stalk and taunt him with pictures of the killing… Yes, there’s definitely something pulp about the whole set up. But it’s wicked fun to watch.
Four Flies… was largely considered Argento’s “lost movie” as its availability was pretty much non-existent until early 2009, when the remastered uncut DVD was released. Apparently Paramount sat on its rights for all those years, refusing to release it, which is odd, seeing a new version of Suspiria is released every other week. (That might be a hyperbole.)
Again, I digress. In terms of a giallo murder mystery, Four Flies on Grey Velvet is as classic and classy as they come. The pounding soundtrack, good chunks of humor (Jean Pierre Marielle walks a fine line in his portrayal of a homosexual private investigator, without stumbling to the wrong side of aforementioned line), and “bullet effect” before its time, make up a thriller that truly is an Argento classic.
