Mon 13 Apr 2015
A Movie Review by Jonathan Lewis: FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET (1971).
Posted by Steve under Mystery movies , Reviews[4] Comments
FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET. Marianne Productions / Seda Spettacoli, Italy, 1971; original title: Quattro Mosche di Velluto Grigio. Paramount Pictures, US, 1972. Michael Brandon, Mimsy Farmer, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Bud Spencer, Screenwriter-director:: Dario Argento.
Dario Argento’s giallo film, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, is one strange cinematic experience, one best appreciated after midnight. Alternately creepy and surprisingly funny, the movie stars two American actors, Michael Brandon and cult favorite Mimsy Farmer, as a married Italian couple inexplicably plunged into a nightmarish world of murder and paranoia.
The movie has both dark humor and a psychedelic, dreamlike quality buttressed by an early 1970s rock soundtrack. It’s as if Hitchcock, Pink Floyd, and an experimental theater company decided to make a thriller.
The movie wastes little time getting right into the heart of the action. Roberto Tobias (Brandon) is a rock musician who finds himself being followed by a strange man. In an unsettling sequence, Tobias ends confronting the man, killing the lurker with a switchblade knife. Soon after, Tobias and his wife, Nina (Farmer), begin to receive threatening notes in the “I know you killed a man, Roberto,†variety.
But if it’s not money the anonymous stalker wants, then what is it? And why? And what the hell do four flies to do to with it? I’m not going to give away any spoilers, but let me just say this: those little flies are the big elephants in the room. In the end, it doesn’t make all that much sense. But the journey’s the fun part.
Look for both John-Pierre Marielle in a captivating and comedic portrayal as a down-on-his-luck, flamboyantly gay private investigator and for Bud Spencer as one of Roberto’s friends.
April 13th, 2015 at 11:10 pm
This review brings back memories for me when I used to hang out at the drive-in theaters every week in the 1970’s. I saw FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET as part of a drive-in triple feature. For many years I tried to get a copy but it was only recently that the film became available on dvd.
Before video tapes, we had to depend on the drive-in for our bizarre and unusual films. This was too strong for TV back in 1971.
I remain puzzled as to how I ever survived the drive-in years which I wrote about at https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=17790
April 14th, 2015 at 3:31 am
I’m a big Argento fan (well, his early funny films at least …) and like this one a lot, not least for the references it makes to Fredric brown’s THE SCREAMING MIMI (mainly the ‘God’ character played by Bud Spencer), which of course was unofficially adapted by Argento a couple of years earlier as BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE.
April 14th, 2015 at 1:32 pm
Agento as a director seems to have flown well beneath my radar so far. Even by the early 70s, Judy and I had stopped going to drive-ins, which was probably the only way I might have seen this one, nor would she have wanted to see it, I’m sure. But thanks to your tip, Sergio, I just added CRYSTAL PLUMAGE to my Amazon shopping cart.
April 14th, 2015 at 2:35 pm
Like anything else giallo varies in effectiveness, but most of Argento’s films are visually inventive and have twisty if not always cogent plots. I prefer his giallo to his later horror films.
CRYSTAL PLUMMAGE is a fine place to start. Early on a good many name American actors like Tony Musante, James Franciscus, Karl Malden, Tony Franciosa, John Saxon, Cameron Mitchell, and Carrol Baker appeared in these.
Several, including BIRD were available on YouTube.
Argento is better known today as primarily a horror film director, and for his daughter, Asia, who once commented that considering some of the things that happens to her in her father’s films, the nudity, and the sex scenes she needed to review their relationship.
You might keep that in mind in relation to Argento’s often startling films. They certainly push the R rating and are often shown as MA instead or UR on cable. Some of his films like DARIO ARGENTO’S PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (Asia and Julian Sands) have quite blatant sex scenes.