The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Italian: L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo) is a 1970 giallo film written and directed by Dario Argento, in his directorial debut.
It stars Tony Musante as an American writer in Rome who witnesses a serial killer targeting young women, and tries to uncover the murderer's identity before he becomes their next victim.
A co-production of Italy and West Germany, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is the first in what has been called his thematic "Animal Trilogy", along with Argento's next two gialli, The Cat o' Nine Tails (1971) and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1972).
An international commercial and critical success on release, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage has been credited with popularizing giallo, an Italian genre of horror-thriller developed in the 1960s,[4] and launched Argento's career as a filmmaker.
The woman, Monica Ranieri—the wife of the gallery's owner, Alberto Ranieri—survives the attack and the local police confiscate Sam's passport to prevent him from leaving the country.
He visits an antique shop where the first victim worked, discovering that the last item she sold on the day of her death was an eerie painting of a man in a raincoat stabbing a young woman amidst a snowy landscape.
[6] The story is thought to have been influenced by the early Mario Bava giallo The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963), which also involves a witness to a murder later realizing that the person they took to be the victim was actually the perpetrator.
Titanus mogul Goffredo Lombardo optioned the script after being impressed by Argento's screenwriting work on the film Metti, una sera a cena (1969).
[9] Argento cast American actor Tony Musante in the lead role, after he had previously starred in Metti, una sera a cena.
Character actor Reggie Nalder, who had a played a hitman in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), after Argento saw him filming an American TV show in Rome.
The website's critics consensus reads, "Combining a deadly thriller plot with the stylized violence that would become his trademark, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage marked an impressive horror debut for Dario Argento.
[citation needed] The film was later released on DVD by VCI with the restored violence, but had problems with a sequence of shots referred to as "the panty removal scene".
Blue Underground later obtained the rights and re-released the film completely uncut, adding an extra shot of violence previously unseen.
[19] In June 2017, Arrow re-released the film on a limited edition Blu-ray/DVD combo pack in the US and the UK containing a remastered 4K transfer from the original camera negative made exclusively for the release.
The genre is considered to date back at least as far as Mario Bava's 1963 film, The Girl Who Knew Too Much, but The Bird with the Crystal Plumage was the first giallo to achieve significant commercial and critical success.
[13][21] The film spawned a brief fad for gialli with similar verbose titles involving animals such as Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971), The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire (1971) and Don't Torture a Duckling (1972).