Maybe you’ve seen something so important you don’t recognise… sometimes what you actually see and what you imagine get mixed up in your memory like a cocktail…
This collaboration features an urgent and unsettling Goblin
score for Dario Argento, two years before Suspiria and the carefully
paced, atmospheric mystery is very much a foretaste of that film. There are
many cuts of this film but I watched the 126-minute L’Immagine Ritrovata
restoration from 2014 which includes all of the graphic violence as well as the
humour and you really can’t have one without the other can you; comic relief
only heightening the punch/slash lines.
David Hemmings is on-hand as the audience cypher, a man who can't walk away from the evil he has seen and, like us, albeit with considerably more at stake, he just has to see it resolved. Hemmings is someone we saw growing up on screen, here he's a greying 34-year-old, still recognisably the cool photographer from Blow Up and a world away from his skinny youthfulness in the early sixties’ films like Some People and his childhood roles in the fifties. Before his voice broke, he was Benjamin Brittan's favourite soprano and he's a musician here again, albeit a jazz pianist. He's perfect for Argento, intense and alert with a quick humour which undercuts the tension only to propel it further forward as the moods change and the director's preference for shadowy spaces and natural dark rarely give us any respite from the mood and the menace.
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| Hopper-style Blue Bar with and David Hemmings |
We're on our guard right from the get-go with a bloody death involving a child cut from a low angel leads us into the film as Goblin's mournful tones lead us through the titles to a rehearsal of Hemming's character, Marcus Daly's jazz band in what looks like a crypt. Even the stills look unsettling, bright lights on the players and darkness surrounding them and a white piano that looks like a tomb...
Its thoughts are of death… you have killed and will
kill again!
We switch to a talk being given by a psychic Helga Ulmann (Macha Méril) and a Professor Giordani (Glauco Mauri) in a half-empty theatre during which the former senses the presence of a purely malevolent mind. Almost in pain she reaches out to the person indicating that she feels their blood lust, their murderous intent and knows they will kill again. The meeting breaks up but we feel the presence of someone watching Helga as she’s helped on her way by Giordani and tells him that she may be able to identify the person…
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| Helga picks up the signals... |
Meanwhile, Marcus walks into a huge square, with a piano bar highlighted like an Edmund Hopper painting - Nighthawks to be precise - darkness all around and yet the interior bright through large windows; one of those moments when you sit up and point at the screen, "Hopper!". Argento likes his bright interiors especially when locked behind glass and surrounded by the dark uncertainty of the late night. Marcus meets Carlo (Gabriele Lavia) a fellow musician but one reduced to playing at the Blue Bar and relying on tips. Carlo is drunk and has many demons but Marcus likes him and wants to help. He hears screaming…
If Argento likes illuminated interiors he also likes his murders witnessed through the dark and a murderee helpless behind the glass and this is exactly what we get as Marcus turns the corned and seeing a woman, Helga, fighting for her life on an upper story, her head smashed through the window.
He races up to her apartment, through a corridor crammed with art only to find himself too late and the woman’s body collapsed lifeless on the floor. The police arrive in lazy and almost comedic form as they go through the motions all too run down by the prosaic nature of murder and not expecting much from this witness. Then Gianna (Daria Nicolodi, Argento’s wife at the time and mother of Asia Argento), a journalist, arrives and begins to ask questions whilst also noting the handsome musician and snapping his photograph sensing a scoop.
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| Marcus and the Italian plod... |
You won’t get away; I’ll kill you sooner or later…
Marcus and Gianna begin to bond and attend the funeral together sharing information. Unfortunately, she’s used the snap of him she took on the front page of her newspaper and the killer now knows that he’s the main witness… Their relationship has a screwball edge and, as her car is also broken, he sits very low in the broken passenger seat as she towers over him driving and he can only get in and out via the sunroof. We also get to learn more of Marcus’ relationship with Carlo as he goes in search of him at the apartment of his mother Martha (Clara Calamai), who’s very welcoming and gives him the address of his friend Massimo Ricci (Geraldine Hooper, playing a male or transgender character). Here he finds Carlo drunk and full of self-disgust at his sexuality. It matters not to Marcus – he’s a jazz musician! – and the two end up playing a duet at the Blue Bar.
All this is done to distract though and Marcus is soon visited late at night by the dark figure in a black leather coat he witnessed leaving the scene of the crime. He manages to lock his door to prevent their entry and the growl the above threat through the wood… he's on borrowed time. But Marcus, aided by Gianna isn’t going to wait, he goes in search of a song he heard the night of the murder and this leads him to stories of hauntings as relayed by an author whom is murdered brutally before he gets to her… Everything seems to have ears around her, he says… but he ploughs on and the mystery will have not one but two classic twists before being resolved as Argento teases us with short clips of music, childhood dolls and eyes caked in black eyeliner.
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| Hemmings and Daria Nicolodi |
And all the time he puzzles over the strange picture he saw out of the corner of his eye in the moments after the first killing: it disappeared when he next walkled the corrider, is it the clue to solve the case… maybe he imagined it, as Marco suggests at the top. Imagination and memory soon intertwine after all.
Dusty verdict: Deep Red is rightly regarded as a classic of Giallo Cinema and has enough strands to engage the modern audience along with great performances all round. The score is also excellent and its interesting to see that Argento tried to recruit Pink Floyd – as Antonioni had done for Zabriskie Point – before turning to the Italian Goblin whose leader Claudio Simonetti wrote two of the compositions in one night. Quick and effective workers, he signed them as soon as he could and, of course, they would work together in future.
Well worth watching on a windy dark night in the British winter… and take car in those seemingly safe city squares and streets.
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| Pretty collectible first Italian pressing soundtrack LP! |
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| Edmund Hopper, Nighthawks (1942) |
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