Over the last few years Arrow Video has
gradually been releasing what are surely the definitive home video
editions of the classic films of Italian horror maestro Dario
Argento. With 4k restorations, extensive documentaries, and
Criterion-esque limited edition packages as well as more inexpensive
standard editions, Arrow has so far gotten the last word on Deep
Red, Tenebrae, Phenomena, The Bird with the
Crystal Plumage, and The Cat O' Nine Tails (and
while it is neither a 4k restoration nor a fancy limited edition,
they currently have by far the best blu-ray version of Inferno
as well). But sadly for North American collectors (at least,
those who don't have region-free blu-ray players, which every
cinephile probably should), most of those releases were UK-exclusive,
and region-B locked, since other companies beat Arrow to the North
American blu-ray rights. While Arrow's region-B discs are superior,
region-A-only collectors at least have Synapse's recent restorations
of Phenomena and Tenebrae
which are a reasonably close second-place, and still quite impressive
in their own rights. Much more unfortunate was that the US had to
miss out on Arrow's stellar 2016 edition of Deep Red,
since Blue Underground's 2011 US blu-ray has extremely sparse special
features, and a transfer which is perfectly acceptable, but nowhere
near the quality of Arrow's more modern 4k restoration techniques.
Even at the time the Blue Underground disc was far inferior to
Arrow's original region-free UK blu-ray from the year before, which
boasted a large amount of new extras that put Blue Underground's
single 10-minute featurette to shame, so it really stung when the UK
got a still-better region-B-locked upgrade while we were stuck with
the same lackluster disc for one of Argento's most iconic films.
Fortunately, Blue Underground's rights to Deep Red
expired at the beginning of this year, and Arrow was able to snatch
up the North American distribution rights and re-release their
limited edition of the film in the region-A territory. The definitive
Deep Red hit store
shelves last Tuesday.
The Film:
Deep Red is
often held up by fans as the quintessential giallo (that distinctive
brand of brooding and bloody Italian murder-mystery thrillers), the
film that kicked off Argento's most iconic era as a filmmaker, and
one of his greatest films in general. It certainly was a game-changer
in many ways, and marked the debut of Argento's more outlandish and
stylized horror sensibilities that would soon give us Suspiria
and Phenomena.
But the timing of this Arrow special edition, with its US re-release
shortly following their special editions of The Bird with
the Crystal Plumage and The
Cat O' Nine Tails, reframes the
film not just as the start of his horror work, but as a reworking of,
and a departure from, the more traditional Hitchcockian thrillers
which came before. Revisiting the film so soon after revisiting and
reappraising his first two features allows us to not only see the
obvious ways in which it introduces the more extreme stylistic
flourishes that would soon take the forefront in his work, but the
change in sensibility away from that past work, in ways both good and
bad. Particularly, this is the film where we start to really see the
attitude of Argento as a filmmaker which earned him the often-cited
criticism of being style-over-substance.
On the
one hand, Deep Red
takes the already very impressive visual style of the “Animal
Trilogy,” with its kinetic dolly and handheld camerawork and
gorgeous 2.35:1 shot compositions, and fully matures it into a
spectacularly innovative, experimental, and inspired aesthetic which
sets Argento apart as one of the most artistically powerful horror
filmmakers in the history of the genre. But on the other hand, the
film also sees Argento become increasingly disinterested in whether
his stories really cohere at a narrative level, as he treats the plot
less as the backbone of the film, and more as the tool to get the
movie from one spectacular visual setpiece to another. One could
argue that this is just a symptom of him moving away from past
cinematic influences and towards his own personal style, which favors
visual audacity and experimentation over conventional genre tropes.
There is no doubt that from a technical and artistic
standpoint this is his most impressive and accomplished film
by this point, and probably one of the most technically impressive
and accomplished that he would ever make, second only to Suspiria.
But having recently been so pleasantly surprised by how
not-style-over-substance The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
and The Cat O' Nine
Tails were, and how well their
plots functioned as solid and coherent Hitchcock-esque mysteries,
it's hard to not be a tad disappointed by how Deep Red
seems fairly unconcerned with
these matters, and how readily it allows its plot to be driven by
deus ex machinas and tenuous leaps of logic. It is still a great
horror film well-deserving of its classic status based on its bravura
style alone, and at its best it still works very well as a thriller,
but viewing it in a sequential triptych with Arrow's releases of Bird
and Cat (leaving
aside the all-around misstep that was Four Flies on Grey
Velvet), it becomes clear that
Deep Red is also an
uneven film that is somewhat less than the sum of its parts.
Of
course some fans will surely say that I'm being a bit too hard on
Deep Red with that
critique, and maybe they're right: after all, the film is very
self-aware and up-front about its intentions and its emphasis on
style over conventional narrative structure, with an opening scene in
which the jazz pianist main character chastises his band for focusing
too much on formal perfection and neglecting the personality that
comes with loose spontaneity. “It should be more... trashy,” he
says, and one can't help but hear it as Argento rebuking the idea
that his style should be reigned in by typical storytelling wisdom.
But at the same time, the film invites this criticism by being more
or less a reworking of the same basic plot as The Bird with
the Crystal Plumage. Again we
have an English-speaking foreign artist (this time a British musician
played by Blow-Up's
David Hemmings) living in Italy while dealing with some serious
thirtysomething male ennui who witnesses a murder during his listless
nocturnal urban wanderings. Again he channels his own existential
crisis into an amateur-detective investigation of the murder,
becoming the killer's target in the process, and again he is haunted
by the nagging feeling that a detail he saw but overlooked holds the
key to the killer's identity. Of course, from this remarkably similar
set-up Argento embarks upon a very different film, in keeping with
the “artistically bold but not formally perfect” thesis of
Hemmings' opening speech to his band. In addition to the move away
from narrative-driven mystery storytelling, Argento seems to have
stepped into an altogether different genre space. Deep Red
is the first of Argento's gialli
which truly feels like a horror film rather than a mystery/thriller,
full of creepy and atmospheric Gothic menace, stalk-n-slash sequences
that foreshadow the conventions of the slasher genre, and bloody
kills that still pack a nasty punch 40-some years later. If The
Bird with the Crystal Plumage and
Cat O' Nine Tails feel
like contemporaries of early Brian De Palma, Deep Red
feels like a predecessor to John Carpenter or Tobe Hooper. It is a
nasty, unsettling film made all the more effective in its unnerving
qualities by how gorgeously, artfully shot the whole thing is. It
almost makes it not matter that the mystery is frequently moved along
by plot devices that feel rather arbitrary, although I would posit
that the film would have been even better if the plot cohered a bit
more strongly.
Just
as Deep Red reworks
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage's
story in a way that is an odd mix of compelling yet scattered, it
does the same thing for that film's themes. Like Crystal
Plumage,
Deep Red
is interested in shifting norms of sexuality and gender in a changing
and modernizing world, and both films are centered around
traditionally-masculine male characters feeling a certain amount of
uncertainty about how they fit into a world that has moved away from
the norms that they were raised to accept. But the film doesn't seem
entirely clear on how it feels about the issues at hand, or exactly
what it is trying to say. At the heart of the film is the (literal
and figurative) odd couple of Hemmings' conservative musician with a
casually sexist certainty than men are superior to women, and Daria
Nicolodi's tough, intelligent, and resourceful feminist reporter who
for some reason wants to be romantically involved with him. The
dynamic is clearly meant to present Hemmings' Marc Daly as the
representation of dated, old-school European gender norms, and
Nicolodi's Gianna Brezzi as the empowered future who he is afraid is
leaving him behind; the movie repeatedly aligns itself with Gianna's
viewpoint, gives her most of the meaningful detective work, and
frames Marc as an out-of-touch stooge whose fear of being overpowered
by women directly hinders his murder investigation. But that the film
seems to have active disdain for its male protagonist does not change
the fact that he is the protagonist, and the one from whose
perspective we are witnessing the story; this essentially undercuts
whatever critique of masculinity Argento is attempting, as the plot
ultimately requires Marc to be the hero, when on paper the social
commentary that appears to be at work should make Gianna the hero. It
further confuses things that Gianna is a highly comedic character,
and her relationship with Marc is mainly told through almost farcical
comedy; not to mention that Marc often ends up looking like such a
jackass that it seems almost implausible that the feminist Gianna
would actually want to be involved with him.
It
is clear that Argento wants to say something about the fragility and
closed-mindedness of the old-school European masculinity that the
1970s were struggling to leave behind, but it ends up so muddled that
it's hard to discern exactly what that is, leaving us with an awkward
romantic subplot that mostly just doesn't work. As with The
Cat O' Nine Tails,
though, the dated gender attitudes of the film are counterbalanced by
how non-judgmental, matter-of-fact, and (for its day) kind of
progressive the film's attitude towards its gay characters is. This
has lead to the pretty sound interpretation that Marc is a closeted
gay man; a presumably unintended theme which nonetheless gives some
much-needed additional depth to both his weirdly hostile attitudes
towards women and his more general existential crisis and sense of
ennui. Argento almost certainly didn't intend for Marc to be a
repressed gay character (he has said as much in interviews), but that
interpretation makes Deep
Red a
more interesting film, and helps tie together its otherwise somewhat
directionless themes on sex and gender.
Given
how phenomenally hyped up Deep
Red has
become as the ultimate giallo, it almost pains me to have to point
out what an uneven and erratic movie it is on both a narrative and
thematic level, but especially after revisiting Argento's filmography
through the last year's worth of Arrow limited editions, I'm afraid
that it is pretty clearly true. But that doesn't negate the one way
in which the film absolutely lives up to the hype: its breathtaking
style. It really can't be overstated what a gorgeously crafted film
this is, with its bold, kinetic cinematography and its masterfully
eerie atmosphere. While the plot certainly doesn't have the attention
to detail that The
Bird with the Crystal Plumage
does, the style is where we really see Argento's growth from a young
director with an innovative and ambitious eye to a true stylistic
master. And I would be remiss if I didn't comment on how this style
is effectively (if very eccentrically) accented by the iconic
prog-rock score by Goblin; the first of Argento's many iconic
collaborations with the band. Whether Deep
Red lives
up to the hype or not entirely depends on what aspect of the film you
are talking about. The substance? Ironically enough, his first two
features are probably stronger in that regard, as is his subsequent
Suspiria.
The style? It remains pretty unparallelled in his filmography, and
goes a long way to make up for the weaknesses elsewhere. Its classic
status is certainly deserved, though with some caveats.
Score:
The Video:
Given what a visual film Deep
Red is, and given that the
visuals are what does most of the film's heavy lifting, picture
quality is very important to the experience of the movie. As such,
this Arrow restoration is without a doubt the only version that
viewers should watch, if at all possible. Remastered in 4k from the
original negative, this is far and away the best that Deep
Red has ever looked. It's not
just a matter of clarity, although the picture is near-flawlessly
clear and sharply detailed; it's everything else about the
restoration as well. The contrast and color-correction both mark a
major step up over all previous presentations of the film, including
the two previous blu-rays (the US release from Blue Underground and
the original 2010 Arrow UK blu-ray). Both of those discs had a
noticeable yellowish hue, as though the source print had yellowed
over time, or else the transfers were not color-corrected properly.
Both were also a bit on the muddy side. This remaster fixes both of
these flaws, with the color now looking spot-on, and with loads of
added detail where previously there was too much murk. Ironically,
there is at least one point when the picture might even be a bit too
clear: the detail which Marc
sees but doesn't notice at the murder scene is supposed to be one
that the viewer likewise doesn't consciously take note of at the
time, but will be able to recall in a different light later on. In
this pristinely clear 4k restoration, the detail in question is a bit
too obvious, making a certain plot twist a bit of a giveaway if
you're looking closely. But again, since Argento's film isn't about
the plot so much as the style, that's really not the end of the
world; the style looking as great as it possibly can is what really
matters, and I can't imagine it ever looking better than this.
Score:
The
Audio:
As
with most of these Italian films from this era, Deep
Red
was shot with a mixed cast of English and Italian-speakers, so no
matter which language you watch the film in, some of the cast is
going to be dubbed. I always tend to watch the track in the language
that the film's lead actor is speaking, so we can hear the film's
star using his own voice – in this case, British character actor
David Hemmings' English – but it's basically down to personal
preference. Arrow's disc presents both the English and Italian tracks
in their original mono, restored to sound as great as they possibly
can. Dialogue is clear and understandable, sound effects are
effective, and Goblin's score packs a punch. In this case, though,
Arrow has also provided the Italian track artificially mixed out to
5.1 surround sound. Personally, I prefer the mono which was the
original audio format mixed by Argento, but those with surround
set-ups will surely appreciate the option, which neither their Bird
with the Crystal Plumage
nor Cat
O' Nine Tails
limited editions gave us.
However, there is one big, unfortunate caveat which we have to
discuss when it comes to the English-language audio track: all of the
dialogue for the film (English or Italian) was re-recorded in
post-production for European films of this era, rather than on set,
and the film's distributor made the unfortunate choice to only record
the English dialogue for the 20-minutes-shorter UK theatrical cut
(which is on disc 2 of the limited edition, although it's missing
enough that I would not recommend it). As such, when you watch the
film with the English-language track, during those 20 minutes of
scenes exclusive to the director's cut, the audio switches over to
Italian with English subtitles. It's a bit of a jarring experience,
and as a result some viewers may wish to just watch the film in
Italian instead; but again, I'd rather watch it with the lead actor
speaking his own dialogue for only most of the film, rather than none
of it. It's a bit of a pick-your-poison situation, but it's certainly
not Arrow's fault, and the audio sounds as good as it is
realistically ever going to.
Score:
The Extras:
Arrow's
limited editions always come with plentiful bonus materials, and Deep
Red
certainly does not disappoint. The package starts with a hard outer
box containing a book, a poster, a set of lobby cards, and two
blu-rays, the second of which, the shorter UK theatrical version, is
exclusive to the limited set; the main disc will be re-released in a
non-limited-edition standard case likely in a few months. The special
features contained on the main disc are excellent – although while
all of them are Arrow Video originals, most of them are actually not
new. As I mentioned earlier, Arrow released Deep
Red as
one of their earliest blu-rays back in 2010, and while that early
disc's transfer of the film isn't great by modern standards, it was a
stacked special edition with extras that remain quite impressive, and
which put the subsequent almost-bare-bones Blue Underground disc to
shame. All of that earlier disc's special features are ported over
onto this edition: three interviews averaging about 15 minutes each
with Dario Argento, star Daria Nicolodi, and composer Claudio
Simonetti from Goblin, plus a tour of the Deep Red shop in Rome
hosted by filmmaker Luigi Cozzi, and a commentary track by Argento
scholar Thomas Rostock. Since that is the bulk of the features on
this box set, collectors who already have the 2010 Arrow limited
edition will have to ask themselves whether little else but a new
transfer is enough to make a double-dip worth it; however, if you
don't have that older set, that list of extras matches the quality
and quantity of most of Arrow's new releases, so just because they
are eight years old is not in itself any kind of a negative. There is
only one new extra on this set, but it's a very good one: a half-hour
visual essay/appreciation/analysis of the film which is excellent for
putting the film in context and unpacking its themes and stylistic
choices. It's a deep dive into the film which will genuinely expand
your appreciation for it. Most of the extras may be recycled from the
past release, but they're all excellent, and all Arrow originals, so
it's safe to say that it adds up to a spectacular package all the
same. Plus, that 2010 blu (while region-free) was a UK-exclusive, so
for most American viewers these will all be new anyway. I can't
imagine a more thorough array of extras documenting this film.
Score:
Overall, Deep Red may be a more uneven a film than its stellar
reputation might have you believe, but it is still a very good one.
It may be style-over-substance in certain regards, but the style is
so triumphant and original that it is hard to be truly upset about
it. With what a visual film it is, it is a no-brainer to want to see
it in the most gorgeous quality possible, and I have no doubt that
this Arrow limited edition is the last word on the subject. Between
the beautiful 4k restoration, the great collectible packaging, and
the excellent extras, this is a fantastic special edition well worth
picking up – at least if you don't have that 2010 Arrow release
with the near-identical extras to create a double-dip dilemma.
Overall Score:
- Christopher S. Jordan
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