“I’m gonna take a bath!”
I know, I know, but that’s what I think whenever I see the above shot, which of course is not from Duck Soup but from Dario Argento’s delightful 1980 Inferno, the excellent new U.K. Blu-ray of which is considered in this week’s Foreign Disc Report, at The Daily Notebook.
I remember watching that opening 25–30 minutes of Inferno thinking it might just be Argento’s greatest. Cheap and obvious to say “it feels like a dream”, but you float from undermotivated flooded-basements-in-the-middle-of-nowhere to library basements with monster furnaces with curious, no-question-asked ease. It’s dazzling, and a whole film of it would be great. But no. Curious, but this whole section I remember vividly (even if I’m not describing it particularly well) but from the last hour, well, all I can remember is the cat attack in the park (an ill-staged piece of hokum) and the end, when after some particularly baffling exposition, a mirror shatters and the evil presence reveals itself to be someone dressed in a skeleton suit. And then they run away from…the Inferno?
If ever there was a filmmaker to move from greatness to awfulness in the space of scene, it’s Argento.
Anyway, good article Glenn, especially the distinction between what a “disappointing” Argento film meant then vs. now. I haven’t seen The Card Player, but Mother of Tears was excruciating for me. Reading Nathan Lee’s gushing praise for it made me feel nuts – was I missing something? There’s curiously underwritten Argento + awesome set pieces and disquieting mood, and then there’s ineptness so pronounced it seems like some kind of audience challenge.
“If ever there was a filmmaker to move from greatness to awfulness in the space of scene, it’s Argento.”
And therein lies Argento’s problem: he’s simply not a good enough filmmaker to get away with not being interested in trying to make sense. “Suspiria” is the one film in which he actually succeeds in making style overwhelm concern about lack of substance.
Tim Lucas wrote a great piece on the dream properties of INFERNO. I can’t find the VW issue it was in (was it online? Did I dream it?) or I would quote from it, but it helped me to realize just how dream-logical that movie is beyond the obvious, more imagistic stuff–like when the guy promises to keep talking so that the girl knows he’s okay, then never utters another word!
Very much agree with Adam R’s post. Went on an Argento spree too many years too late for him to have been “formative,” and during this belated catch-up was slightly disappointed by most of the big guns (Suspiria, Phenomena, Tenebre) I was seeking out.
Then I got to Inferno and that opening 15 or 20 minutes, and thought, finally, this is what people see in this guy. But, yeah, the thrill was gone almost immediately thereafter, as of course it turned into the typical Argento opera gloves-and-shrieking cat fest.
But, on the plus side, the “leading man” is the main dude from HAMBURGER: THE MOTION PICTURE, Leigh McCloskey. So if you get bored with Inferno you can always replay in your mind that awesome bit where he goes down on Randi Brooks under a restaurant table while she loudly orgasms while sucking on hot wings, until Dick Butkus gets wise to it and faceplants into the table.
Glenn, great pick; I have the Arrow disc and it’s excellent. Too bad about the lame illustrated cover, but hey, it’s reversible! I know the Suspiria release was a disappointment, but if you haven’t seen the Bird With The Crystal Plumage BR disc from Blue Underground yet, get it asap – it’s a stunner.
I love Inferno, and it wasn’t until I had started going through Mario Bava’s films that I learned how much he and his son worked on the movie, especially that first, amazing sequence starting in the basement. It seems like such a long-shot to me, that the pairing of these two incredibly stylistic directors could actually live up to the promise and result in such a mesmerizing stretch of film, but there it is. With Argento, the things his detractors cite as problems tend to be what I love most about his films. His first 10 are aces, but that said, I have a hard time defending anything past Opera 🙂
While I agree that the opening act of Inferno is probably the film at its strongest, I feel the need to throw some love at the Nabucco scene. I love in insert shot referencing Suspiria, and the graceful way the whole sequence is cut to the music: the expanding of the paper dolls, Gabriele Lavia stepping into the frame with the…well, you know if you’ve seen it.
Scenes like this reinforce my opinion that Opera would have been a whole hell of a lot better if Argento had used, you know, >opera in the murder scenes instead of bargain bin eighties Euro-metal.
Among post-Opera Argento, I’m willing to defend Trauma, Stendhal Syndrome, and, to a lesser extent, Mother of Tears, but even the best of those isn’t in the same league as Inferno, which I think I like better than you do. It’s among the clearest pieces of evidence that the whole Argento-is-the-Italian-Hitchcock line is just nonsense, and that’s he’s lot closer to being the Italian Powell-Pressburger. (And as others have suggested over the years, the whole chronology of Argento’s aesthetic decline and fall indicates that those golden years movies should probably be referred to as Argento-Nicolodi productions.) I always thought Suspiria and The Red Shoes would make a lovely double bill, and I think I’d pair Inferno with Black Narcicuss, Argento’s New York having the same sensational kind of hyperreality as Powell-Pressburger’s India.
Does anybody know if Argento has ever commented on Michael Powell? I know his old friend and collaborator George Romero is an admirer, though the only film where I detect a direct influence is Creepshow.