FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET (Quattro Mosche di Velluto Grigio)<br /><br />Aspect ratio: 2.39:1 (Techniscope)<br /><br />Sound format: Mono<br /><br />A rock drummer (Michael Brandon) is terrorized by a masked stranger who possesses incriminating photographs of an incident in which Brandon accidentally killed a man. Blackmail and murder ensue...<br /><br />A step up from the convoluted machinations of THE CAT O'NINE TAILS (1970), FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET is little more than a dress rehearsal for the visual flourishes that would distinguish director Dario Argento's later work. The restless camera and flashy editing techniques which lift "Flies" out of its genre rut are mere indicators of the chaotic splendor to come, though here it's largely wasted on a flimsy narrative stretched almost to breaking point. Though reportedly unhappy with Brandon's casting (a role offered to any number of disparate actors, including Tony Musante, Terence Stamp, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Michael York and James Taylor!), Argento draws an effective performance from his leading man as the innocent protagonist caught up in events beyond his control, as a masked figure emerges from the shadows to eliminate anyone who stumbles on his/her identity. The resolution is ripe with Freudian excess, and concludes with a spectacular demise for the psychopathic villain, using state-of-the-art camera-work in typical Argento fashion.<br /><br />As in his first two films, Argento includes a variety of eccentric supporting characters, often to distracting comic effect (eg. a running gag with Brandon's postman, culminating in what amounts to a criminal assault - played for laughs!), and while the horror set-pieces are often vividly realized - most notably, the scene in which Brandon's blackmailing maid (Marisa Fabbri) finds herself trapped in a lonely park with the killer, a sequence which refers backward to a similar scenario in Jacques Tourneur's THE LEOPARD MAN (1943) and forward to John Saxon's final sequence in Argento's TENEBRAE (1982) - the pace is labored and dull, especially during expository dialogue scenes.<br /><br />Mimsy Farmer makes a fair impression as Brandon's nervous wife, while popular Italian character actor Bud Spencer (Carlo Pedersoli) plays Brandon's closest friend, a bad-tempered fisherman who helps him solve the unfolding mystery. Jean-Pierre Marielle camps it up as a gay private detective with a poor track record of catching criminals, a role which borders on caricature and ends ignobly (in a public lavatory, no less!). All in all, a minor entry in the director's filmography, elevated to mythic status by legal problems which have prevented its appearance on home video, and while the film exercises a gamut of stylistic concerns (Argento followed it with an unlikely detour into historical comedy, FIVE DAYS OF MILAN, before cutting loose with his giallo masterpiece DEEP RED), it amounts to little more than a footnote in horror history.<br /><br />(English version)