Arrow Video has once again proven
themselves to be the final word on Dario Argento (Synapse's
definitive Suspiria aside) with another beautifully-packaged
limited edition box set, featuring a brand-new 4k restoration and a
very thorough array of special features. Last year they gave us their
definitive editions of Phenomena (UK-only) and The Bird
with the Crystal Plumage, both in lavish sets with gorgeous,
haunting and dream-like artwork by painter Candice Tripp. Now they
are giving that same treatment - complete with another beautiful
Tripp cover - to The Cat O' Nine Tails, Argento's follow-up to
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in his so-called Animal
Trilogy. A bit of background for those unfamiliar with Argento's
early work: the Animal Trilogy isn't really a trilogy at all in the
narrative sense (the three films are unrelated plot-wise), but a
triptych of stylistically-similar giallo thrillers shot back-to-back.
They are his first three films - The Bird with the Crystal
Plumage, The Cat O' Nine Tails, and Four Flies on Grey
Velvet - modern-day homages to Hitchcock with some extra blood
and visual style to burn. Crystal Plumage is a staggeringly
confident debut feature which announced Argento's arrival as an
auteur in a big way; it is every bit as great a successor to
Hitchcock as anything that Brian De Palma did around the same time,
and Arrow's reverent release made an irrefutable argument for its
classic status. Now, in the context of this likewise Criterion-esque
special edition, let's see if his rapidly-made follow-up feature can
live up to the greatness of its predecessor, or if in retrospect it
is something of a sophomore slump.
The Film:
The Cat O' Nine Tails begins with a superficially similar set-up to The Bird with the Crystal Plumage: a bystander witnesses a shadowy and uncertain event which they are sure is the key to solving a mysterious murder. But rather than repeating the same formula, Argento does something completely different with that set-up, once again exploring the power and deceptiveness of perception (the central theme of Bird), but from a perspective that only a few other thrillers – notably the classic Wait Until Dark – have. The film begins with a blind man (Karl Malden), who had once been an investigator before he lost his sight, inadvertently overhearing a blackmailing which culminates in murder. The blind ex-detective teams up with the reporter investigating the crime (James Franciscus) to try and solve the mystery, but they quickly find themselves in over their heads in a world of corporate espionage, personal vendettas, and a rapidly-mounting body count as the killer eliminates anyone who starts putting the pieces together.
The Cat O' Nine Tails begins with a superficially similar set-up to The Bird with the Crystal Plumage: a bystander witnesses a shadowy and uncertain event which they are sure is the key to solving a mysterious murder. But rather than repeating the same formula, Argento does something completely different with that set-up, once again exploring the power and deceptiveness of perception (the central theme of Bird), but from a perspective that only a few other thrillers – notably the classic Wait Until Dark – have. The film begins with a blind man (Karl Malden), who had once been an investigator before he lost his sight, inadvertently overhearing a blackmailing which culminates in murder. The blind ex-detective teams up with the reporter investigating the crime (James Franciscus) to try and solve the mystery, but they quickly find themselves in over their heads in a world of corporate espionage, personal vendettas, and a rapidly-mounting body count as the killer eliminates anyone who starts putting the pieces together.
It
is often said that Dario Argento is a style-over-substance filmmaker
whose mysteries don't make much narrative sense. That certainly is
not the case here: yes, the style is ultimately king in The
Cat O' Nine Tails,
but it is also a tightly-plotted film whose twists and turns tend to
feel quite well-earned indeed (well, for the most part, anyway). Yes,
he veered rather strongly off into style-over-substance territory in
the 1980s, but his second film, like his first, finds him to be quite
a disciplined filmmaker in his manipulation of plot as well as
suspense. The mystery genuinely keeps the viewer guessing, as Argento
loads it up with macguffins, red herrings, and dead ends; the title
comes from a conversation between Malden and Franciscus's characters
about how many loose threads the investigation seems to have. It
isn't the sort of mystery which is necessarily meant for the viewer
to be able to solve before the detectives do, but is instead the kind
of mystery that feels like a rollercoaster, and it makes for a very
fun and suspenseful ride.
Argento's
craft in creating this ride is once again admirable for such a young
filmmaker: his handling of tension shows him to be a scholar of film
thrillers well beyond his actual level of directorial experience, and
his command of visuals is already excellent. Once again his film
boasts gorgeous widescreen shot compositions which often make
striking use of architecture, and once again he employs a lot of
highly kinetic dolly and steadicam work. It must be said, however,
that the visuals are not quite as potent in this film as they were in
The
Bird with the Crystal Plumage,
since that film's cinematographer could not return for this project
due to a scheduling conflict, and his replacement isn't quite at the
same technical level. Argento's eye for shots is still obvious and
powerful, but the technical panache is a few notches lower. One
crucial artist from Bird
who was able to return is composer Ennio Morricone: the music legend
provides an excellent score for The
Cat O' Nine Tails,
which is instantly recognizable as his style from the very first
notes, even before his name appears in the opening credits. While
most fans will always associate Dario Argento film scores with the
band Goblin, his collaborations with Morricone on the Animal Trilogy
produced some truly great stuff, and made those films feel very
unique among his filmography.
Then
there's the matter of the film's actors: Karl Malden gives what is
probably one of the strongest performances by a lead actor in any of
Argento's films, and James Franciscus is pretty solid as well.
Franciscus is very much the archetypal macho and charismatic
hard-boiled investigator type, in the Robert Mitchum tradition, and
he plays the part quite well, even if his character is pretty tropey
and two-dimensional, and even if this is one of the reasons why many
fans think that Cat
O' Nine Tails
feels more like an American thriller than an Italian one. But it is
Malden who steals the show, both by bringing believability and
emotional depth to the concept of the blind detective, and by imbuing
the character with a warmth and humanity which is very rare in the
icy and ominous world of Argento films. One of the central traits of
Malden's character is that he is the surrogate grandfather of his
otherwise orphaned niece, and Malden cultivates in their
mutual-caretaker relationship a genuinely sweet and human connection
which has got to be the most touching interpersonal relationship in
the filmography of a director who usually couldn't care less about
such things. This relationship gives the film a sense of emotional
weight and personal stakes that it wouldn't have otherwise, and this
is all thanks to Malden's talent as an actor, and the trust that
Argento put in him to shape the film as a collaborator. Argento
famously has a short fuse when it comes to actors seeking to
influence his material (something he got from The
Bird with the Crystal Plumage,
dealing with Tony Musante's prickly ego), but in the special features
on this disc he raves about what a joy it was to work with Malden,
and how much better he feels the film is because of the expertise
that the veteran Oscar-winner brought to the project.
All
of these strong points about Cat
O' Nine Tails are
undeniable, but there are plenty of other ways in which the film is
rather uneven, and in the end it is not quite as successful, and not
as uniformly strong, as his debut feature. The biggest problem is
that, given the greater freedom Argento had over the final cut as a
result of his success with Crystal
Plumage,
Cat
O' Nine Tails
is a bit self-indulgent in its pacing. With a runtime just shy of two
hours, it is nearly twenty minutes longer than Crystal
Plumage,
and by no coincidence it feels about twenty minutes too long. The
middle drags considerably, and this is very much to the film's
detriment: one of the main reasons why Crystal
Plumage
is such a strong and confident debut is that the tension pretty much
never lets up, with its brisk pacing and suspenseful set-pieces
keeping the viewer on the edge of their seat throughout. This
obviously can't be true of a film with a quarter-hour of fat that
could be trimmed in the second act, even if it eventually recovers
and gets back up to full-steam by act three.
It
also doesn't help that this weak second act is dragged down by two
rather dubious plot-points. The first is a pseudoscience plot device
that might have seemed plausible at the time, but is based around a
theory that has been so thoroughly debunked in the intervening years
that modern-day viewers have to really work in order to suspend their
disbelief. This is the one part of Argento's otherwise
well-constructed mystery that falls flat in a modern context, and it
takes some good will on the part of the viewer to give it a pass and
focus instead on the other, stronger aspects of the mystery. Then
there is the romantic subplot between Franciscus's hard-boiled
reporter and the story's femme fatale: it serves no purpose except to
shoehorn some romance into the film for the sake of marketing, and it
feels extremely forced, with very little chemistry between the
actors. Not to mention that at its core, its view of sexual politics
and romance is dated and old-fashioned at best, and casually sexist
at worst. It unquestionably feels like a romance subplot right out of
a 1971 pulp detective story, which is exactly what it is, but which
is nonetheless somewhere between eye-rolling and a little cringey.
Surprisingly
more progressive and less old-fashioned is the film's attitude
towards homosexuality: the story has several gay characters, and they
and the gay-bar nightlife in which they reside are treated seriously
and matter-of-factly in a way which is pleasantly surprising for 1971. Yeah,
there is the expected unintentional camp element of this clearly
being a gay subculture written by a straight outsider who doesn't
quite know what he's talking about, but Argento's intentions are
clearly positive, and the characters are treated without much
(intentional) stereotyping, and certainly without judgment; indeed,
their homosexuality would be totally incidental to the plot, and just
an extra layer of character development, were it not for the
unexpected way in which the murder mystery interacts with the
homophobia they face. One of the gay characters comes to our
reporter/detective duo for help specifically because he is afraid to
go to the police, out of certainty that the cops would be homophobic
and either refuse to help them, or actually harass them. This crucial
detail makes this subplot ultimately feel like an indictment of the
homophobic, macho norms forced on men in Italian society at that
time. Argento is often fascinated with conflicts between Italian
cultural norms of sex and gender and the more complicated nature of
human sexuality, as can be seen in subplots like the gay detective in
Four
Flies on Grey Velvet and
the existential crisis of masculinity hinted at in The
Bird with the Crystal Plumage,
but this is his most fully-realized attempt to articulate these
conflicts thematically, and the result makes Cat
O' Nine Tails feel
like a pretty progressive-for-the-time film for LGBT inclusion, even
if its treatment of women is unfortunately lacking.
Unfortunately,
Argento gave his first signs of being a highly uneven filmmaker with
his next film, Four
Flies on Grey Velvet.
He cranked that movie out less than a year after The
Cat O' Nine Tails
to meet studio demands, and it feels very much like a movie thrown
together out of obligation to a distributor even though the script
wasn't anywhere close to ready. Four
Flies on Grey Velvet
is Argento's first bad movie; a rushed, borderline-incoherent mess,
and I would not recommend that anyone but the most hardcore fans seek
out that final chapter in the so-called Animal Trilogy. Both of the
first two installments, however, are great (or at least nearly-great)
films by an exciting new filmmaking voice, and the worthy foundations
of the iconic horror career which followed. And both are highly
deserving of the new spotlight that these Arrow special editions are
shining on them.
Score:
The
Video:
Just
like The
Bird with the Crystal Plumage,
The
Cat O' Nine Tails comes
to us in a brand-new 4K restoration sourced from the original camera
negative. And just like The
Bird with the Crystal Plumage,
this restoration is absolutely stunning. The picture is
crystal-clear, with fine detail never visible on a previous release,
and a healthy presence of natural grain that gives the transfer an
authentically filmic texture. This new restoration with its added
detail allows Arrow to present the film as it never really has been
before: this a very dark movie (in the lighting and cinematography
sense), and previous discs have upped the brightness on the picture
to make details visible, but this transfer is noticeably darker, in
keeping with Argento's intended aesthetic. Given the fine level of
detail, though, everything is still perfectly visible within the
darkness, and it never looks at all murky; indeed, the result is a
more atmospheric film. Arrow has knocked it out of the park with this
one: the film has never looked anywhere close to this good, and
between the quality of the remaster and the darker and more shadowy
aesthetic, Argento's visual power really shines through.
Score:
The Audio:
The
audio on Cat
O' Nine Tails
is presented in its original mono format – nothing too fancy, and
no artificial surround mix, but just the audio as it was intended,
restored to the best quality possible. It sounds very good, with the
dialogue always coming through clearly and strongly, and Ennio
Morricone's excellent score packing plenty of punch. Granted, the
mono has its inherent limitations, but I'm a believer that the mix
created by the film's sound designer is the one to go with, rather
than an artificial upgrade, and I don't have a surround set-up
anyway, so I was more than happy with the presentation. Both the
English and Italian tracks are present, and as with most Italian
films of this era, it's about a 50/50 mix of actors speaking both
languages, so no matter which track you go with, someone is going to
be dubbed. I think the English track is the correct one to go with,
though, since that is the language that Malden and Franciscus are
both speaking, and the two of them are in almost every scene in the
film.
Score:
The Extras:
Once
again Arrow has put together a pretty solid array of extras for this
special edition, including not only several key people who worked on
the film, but some film scholars to give it context as well. First
are foremost are four brand-new interviews with the actress who
played Malden's young niece/surrogate granddaughter, the film's
co-writer, its production manager, and Argento himself. All of the
interviews are very interesting and go into a nice amount of depth
given that none of them are longer than 20-ish minutes (though it
should be noted that the review screeners of the disc had an error
that made the interview with actress Cinzia De Carolis inaccessible,
and while this error was fixed before the for-sale discs were
pressed, this means I was unable to watch and review that interview).
Production manager Angelo Iacono and co-writer Dardano Sacchetti both
have some very interesting behind-the-scenes anecdotes, especially
Iacono, since he was something of a jack of all trades during the
production; Sacchetti is very long-winded and meandering, however,
making his interview occasionally frustrating or tiresome.
The
interview with Argento is the most interesting, because of how candid
he is about his memories of the production, and how fondly he clearly
remembers it. Just as Argento is famous for having a low tolerance
for egos and personal drama from his actors, he is also famous for
being very vocal over the years about his dislike for The
Cat O' Nine Tails,
which he thinks was too influenced by American thrillers, and thus
doesn't feel to him enough like a personal Dario Argento film, or
even an Italian film at all. Yet despite this, it is clear from his
interview that he and his equally young and enthusiastic crew had a
wonderful time filming the movie, and the production was a very
positive experience even if the end result was not. He also speaks at
great length about his positive experiences with this cast, and
especially Malden, who he clearly has great respect for, and saw as
an important collaborator on the production. Between these different,
somewhat surprising attitudes, this interview provides a side of
Argento that we don't often get to see. Rounding out the extras is a
commentary by two Argento scholars, who provide a very entertaining,
enlightening, and thick with information conversation. It really puts
the film in context; context of Argento's body of work, of Italian
cinema, and of genre cinema. The disc also includes the script for
the film's original ending, which was shot, but changed after Argento
screened his rough cut. All in all, it is a very strong bunch of
extras.
Score:
This
is a fantastic special edition of an often-overlooked film in the
Argento filmography which truly does deserve the attention. It may
not be as well-regarded as The
Bird with the Crystal Plumage which
came before it, or Deep
Red
which came four years later, but it is a very strong film in its own
right, and a solid (if a bit inferior) follow-up to its excellent
predecessor. It is certainly recommended, and this Arrow special
edition is the perfect way to watch it. This current limited edition
package comes in a beautiful hard-case with a book, a set of lobby
cards, and a poster of the gorgeous Candice Tripp artwork. However,
many retailers have sold out of the limited edition in pre-order, so
if you want it, you have to act quickly. Don't despair if you miss
out on the limited edition, though: as always, Arrow will release a
non-limited variant in a few months, with the same blu-ray disc and
artwork in a standard plastic case. Whichever version you get, this
is the definitive presentation of this lesser-seen Argento classic,
and I can't wait to see which of his films they will restore next.
Overall
Score:
-
Christopher S. Jordan
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