DEEP RED (1975)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*                                                                                                                       The above lobby card for Dario Argento's fourth giallo, directly following FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET, is most appropriate to to describe the director/co-writer's approach to the mystery genre. As I've noted in other reviews of Argento-films, the rational type of detective pulls together a variety of disparate phenomena that lead to a rational understanding of a mystery. The irrational type, however, may solve a particular mystery, but often he does so just by bringing various phenomena into juxtaposition, but not creating a rational worldview at all. In the lobby cardm the glass-shards-- rent asunder when the first murder-victim collides with a window-- were part of a distinct whole. But now the broken pieces reflect murders-to-come, all elements of a greater enigma that resists rational explication.                                                                                 

  Technically the murder-victim mentioned above is only the first the audience sees slain in the film's 1970s era. A brief prelude depicts a knife-slaying, one adult slaying another adult, both seen only as shadows on a wall. Someone drops a bloodied knife on the floor and a small boy picks it up, while nearby a Christmas tree testifies to the festive time of year. Then the film shuttles to the current era, in modern Rome. In a lecture-hall two scholars introduce a famous psyshic, Helga Ulmann (Macha Meril). Helga gives the audience a small taste of her ability to read minds, which she says can even extend to impressions of things done years ago. She then announces that someone in the audience is harboring murderous thoughts, as well as thinking about an old house and a children's song. That night, when Helga returns to her apartment, she's murdered with a hatchet (hence the film's subtitle "The Hatchet Murders," which isn't accurate since the psycho does use other methods). Helga, BTW, is the only consistently "marvelous" phenomenon in the story, everything else being confined to the uncanny phenomenality. Helga functions only to uncover a guilty secret, not unlike the quasi-scientific device in FOUR FLIES, able to read images from the corneas of dead people.                                                                                                      

By chance professional pianist Marcus (David Hemmings) lives in the same building as Helga, and he's possibly on his way home when he comes across a colleague, Carlo, who's in the middle of a drunken binge. They're at least friendly enough that Marcus doesn't take offense when the sardonic Carlo accuses Marcus of being "bourgeoise" while Carlo is "proletariat." They both hear a scream, and Marcus looks up to see Helga being slain in her apartment window. He rushes up too late to apprehend the killer, so he dutifully calls the cops.                                                                                                           

Most solid citizens would leave things at that, but Marcus catches the detective bug. His main motivation is that the murder challenges his own confidence in his perceptions, because when Marcus first entered Helga's apartment seeking to render help, he glimpsed a painting in her apartment-- and yet, that painting seems to have gone missing by the time the cops arrive. A lady reporter named Gianna (Daria Nicolodi) gloms on to Marcus's private investigation in the hope of landing a big scoop. The two have a fractious relationship-- when Marcus gives the girl reporter static about feminism, she challenges him to an arm-wrestling match-- so they only work together on-and-off. Marcus interviews the two psychic scholars, and they just happen to guide the amateur sleuth toward the mysterious house of Helga's vision-- which most audience-members will assume has something to do with the murder committed in the prelude.                                                                                                     

Meanwhile, the mystery killer does what most mystery-killers do in these situations: after making few if any attempts on the sleuth's life, they content themselves with cutting off loose ends in the form of potential witnesses to the crimes. The killer's methods are fairly basic, though I'll give points for the use of a mechanized doll to distract a victim and set up the target for elimination. In his quest for clarity, Marcus keeps turning up more and more evidence of the world's enigmatic nature-- a little girl whom her father accuses of being a witch, Carlo's eccentric mother, who keeps calling Marcus an "engineer," and Carlo himself, who has a secret relationship with an epicene young fellow wearing (possibly) rouge. (To Argento's credit, the gay relationship is treated with some sensitivity, in marked contrast to many giallos of the period.) Further links in the chain of clues seem to lead Marcus and Gianna to Marcus's friend Carlo as the killer-- but all is not as it seems. The true killer is identified and slain in the act of trying to finish off Marcus, and the pianist even gets an answer to the question of the missing "painting." Still, the world has been rendered as more irrational than it was before Helga had the vision that cost her life, and the lives of many others.