The secret of the black gloves

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Movie
German title The secret of the black gloves
Original title L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo
The secret of the black gloves Logo 001.svg
Country of production Italy , Federal Republic of Germany
original language Italian
Publishing year 1970
length 105 Italian version / 94 German version minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Dario Argento
script Dario Argento,
Fredric Brown (template)
production Salvatore Argento ( Seda Spettacoli )
Artur Brauner
music Ennio Morricone
camera Vittorio Storaro
cut Franco Fraticelli
occupation
chronology

Successor  →
The nine-tailed cat

The Secret of the Black Gloves (international title The Bird with the Crystal Plumage ) is an Italian thriller from 1970. Genre director Dario Argento's directorial debut is one of the films that ushered in the commercially successful phase of Giallos in the early to mid-1970s. Argento screenplay loosely based on the novel The Screaming Mimi (dt. The black statue ) of Fredric Brown .

action

The American writer Sam Dalmas witnessed an attempted murder in Rome: one night when he saw a person dressed in a black raincoat attacking the wife of the gallery owner Alberto Ranieri with a knife in the lighted interior of an art gallery, he wanted to come to the rescue. Separated from the action by a pane of glass, Sam can still scare away the attacker; Monica Ranieri survives injured. According to the police, the attacker was a serial killer who has so far killed three people. After Sam is initially treated as a suspect by the police, he sets out to find the murderer himself. However, his research soon puts him in danger himself: Sam and his girlfriend are attacked in their apartment, but are able to drive the attacker away. Throughout the film, Sam says he missed an important clue in his memory of the observed murder attempt. Finally he realizes that the person disguised by a pinned-up raincoat and black gloves was not the murderer holding the knife, but Alberto Ranieri, who was defending himself against his wife, the true serial killer. In one last attempt by Monica Ranieri to kill Sam, she is overpowered by the police at the last second.

background

In 1970 the genre of Giallos had already been developed as an Italian sub-genre of crime and horror films through Mario Bava's films . In films such as Il rosso segno della follia (Italy 1969), Bava combined simple crime stories with a stylistically extravagant staging and an explicit staging of violence, which, in addition to the Giallo, are also considered pioneers of the American slasher film . The secret was marketed in German distribution as part of the Bryan Edgar Wallace film series . This emerged in the course of the successful Edgar Wallace films , which also influenced the early Italian Giallo.

In addition to his work as a film critic, Dario Argento had worked as a screenwriter for the then successful genres of Italian exploitation cinema - especially the spaghetti westerns - in the 1960s . Bava introduced Argento into the director's work as a mentor and so Argento's directorial debut in the early 1970s was a "stylish Giallo in the tradition of those from Bava".

The secret is often seen as part of a loose trilogy by Argentos, since his two subsequent films The Nine-Tailed Cat (1971) and Four Flies on Gray Velvet (1971) are also attributable to the Giallo, contain similar basic plot patterns and all three films have animals in the film title. The “animal trilogy” only becomes clear with the original or international title of The Secret , which can literally be translated as “The bird with crystal feathers / with the plumage made of crystal”.

reception

Dave Kehr wrote in the Chicago Reader in a review that the film was a surprise success in 1970, which, in his opinion, was due to "some scenes of violence" "which were unusually drastic for the time."

Rockoff describes the film as extremely complicated because Argento "avoids conventional narrative logic and instead creates a world based on random probability and improbable coincidences." Although the mystery is by no means as impressive as Argento's later work, Rockoff continues, the film gives a foretaste this greatness.

In a contemporary review, Roger Ebert compared the main male character in The Secret with the typical Hitchcock figure of the innocent, who is initially suspected and entangled “in a fatal relationship with the killer”. All in all, The Secret is a “pretty good” thriller, even if it “would scare you on a simpler level than [...] a Hitchcock thriller”.

Release history

The secret of the black gloves was co-produced by Artur Brauner's CCC-Film and brought to German theatrical distributors in 1970 in a dubbed version by Constantin Film . This version has been shortened by almost 10 minutes in plot scenes compared to the Italian theatrical version. Toppic's identical releases on VHS for rental and sale followed; In some cases, the original image format was reduced from 2.35: 1. For broadcasts on German television (including on ZDF and RTL II ), the film was further shortened to scenes of violence, but action scenes were added again. The German version on DVD was also shortened compared to the Italian original version.

In other countries, such as Italy, the film was released in the original cut of the Italian theatrical version for the home video market. However, newer Italian and French DVDs contain a transfer of the film which, due to the current preferences of cameraman Storaro, is only available in the wrong image format 2.00: 1.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b c Rockoff, Adam: Going to pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978–1986 . McFarland & Company 2002. Page 36ff ISBN 0-7864-1227-5
  2. ^ Kehr, Dave : The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. Capsule by Dave Kehr. In: Chicago Reader . ( online )
  3. Ebert, Roger : Bird with Crystal Plumage . October 14, 1970 ( online )