Watching the Arrow set of Deep Red I'm still struck by how interestingly strange and jagged the film is with the fractured editing and scenes beginning part way through or fading out in the middle (and it plays around as much in its soundtrack as with its editing, moving from distant to hyper-close up within scenes). Its very strangely constructed to disorientate and overwhelm the audience as much as the characters, perhaps most obviously in the final explanatory flashback reverie getting literally cut short by the murderer wielding their hatchet! And do many jazz bands practice in mausoleums in Italy? They're making enough noise there to wake the dead!
Also I particularly like the way that many of the extras in the scenes in the bar, or particularly in the walk that Carlo and Mark make from Ricci's apartment, are stood posed like (art deco) mannequins in order to create the
sense of people in conversation or a street with pedestrians in it, more than the actual real thing! The posing of the extras along with the jazz seems to add to that almost late 20s-early 30s-style sense of jaded distance, or decadent ennui, too! It also helps that most of the extras are smoking or at least holding cigarettes as well, that keep smouldering and smoking even while their owners are oblivious and still as statues!
It was also interesting to see tiny elements that seemingly got expanded on in Argento's later films, for instance the introduction to the telepathy conference talking about insects having that kind of telepathic communication crops up again in a much bigger way in Phenomena. And I sort of like to think that the portable garotte/guillotine device in Trauma is a call back to the final death here
(Spoiler for Trauma)
(particularly in the way that it is another killer mother getting her comeuppance! There's also a death by lift in Trauma too, with POV shot of the decapitated head as it falls down the lift shaft!)
The character that Daria Nicolodi plays feels to be one of the most vibrant feeling ones almost in any of Argento's films, one of the few who feels like they have their own independent life beyond the film rather than just existing to service the (spectacular) plot mechanics. I'm also not sure if there are any other giallos which take such an insistent diversion into screwball comedy odd couple banter betweeen our two leads! However I wonder if Nicolodi's character Gianna is a little
too freewheeling and impetuous, driven too much by infatuation with the rather ineffectual male lead. After all she is spending quite a lot of time alone with Mark, who is looking more and more like the killer to everyone else as the story progresses, even taking his word that he just stumbled into a murder scene just after the crime was committed! And even to the extent of making plans to escape the country with him when it seems as if Mark has no ways left of proving his innocence (making me feel she is a little in the same vein as the character Anna Massey played in Hitchcock's Frenzy)! Perhaps it is inevitable that she ends up in great danger when she breaks into the school after dark with Mark! But in a way the presence of Gianna is what keeps the tone of Deep Red much more upbeat and hopeful in a way than it should, especially in a film otherwise defined by brutal murders! Just Gianna getting non-fatally stabbed at the climax feels more wrenching than any number of the previous murders.
I think that for as much as the film keeps raising psychiatric or psychotic killer-based reasonings for the killer's motives, and the Professor's pseudo-psychiatric musings on the killer's compulsion to kill are central to this, I get the impression that the film keeps suggesting this is too flowery an interpretation to put on things. After all the killer has spent decades 'out of the hospital' without murdering anyone
until their dark secrets are uncovered and they have to start, brutally, covering their tracks! (Maybe the child's toys and playthings being used as totems become less about someone trapped in a compulsive cycle that they cannot escape, as they perhaps
had escaped it at one point, and more about someone having to use these items in order to amp themselves up in order to commit the murders, as well as unnerving their victims) OK, so the murderer is rather dumb and at fault as much as anyone for stupidly going to a parapsychology conference about telepathy, which might have suggested that their secret would be uncovered, but I don't see them as blindly lashing out but more focused and targeted, but only on those people that Mark is about to unearth (people like the author who might have had the answers all along but otherwise were not killed until the investigation started in earnest). In a way Mark is perhaps as much responsible for killing the supporting characters by getting them involved when otherwise they would perhaps have remained safely ignorant!
(And that also fits in with the Carlo subplot, which keeps throwing up suggestions that he is tormented by his homosexuality or even mother issues, but really just seems to be about someone who is actually tormented by the idea that he is going to have to sacrifice himself to save his mother at some imminent point. The film leaves it unclear as to whether Carlo was an alcoholic long before the first scene we see him or whether this is a new thing, but it could also be that his mother has just told him that she is about to go up and murder Helga, and he can only respond by getting blind drunk and staying that way throughout the rest of the film. He's already talking fatalistically about death in that very first scene, and perhaps he knows that he hasn't got much of a future ahead of him in quite literal terms as the secret from his childhood is finally getting unearthed. And of course that fits in with his political comment - he's the proletariat who is going to suffer real consequences for the impulsive actions of the bourgeoisie!)
I also found it really interesting to note this time around the way that the mystery investigation branches out into a complete (and literal!) dead end for a couple of characters once Mark finds the book about the myth of the screaming child in the house. He tries to track down the author of the book who will have a concrete answer as to who owned the house and where it is, but that trail goes up in smoke, and indeed perhaps Mark is responsible for then getting the Professor killed by asking him to go to the author's house and investigate to see if she left any clues behind, which perhaps more than anything else is what causes the Professor to get targeted by the killer! And these last two murders occur completely unnecessarily in narrative terms (though their filmic existence is perhaps justified for their spectacular murder scenes of course!), as Mark has in the meantime found the house by other means (the type of plants growing in the picture of it from the book) and his own successfully conclusive narrative branch is proceeding from there.
I had never really thought about it before, but all of the structural seeds of the 'informational relay race' of Suspiria and 'tree trunk single investigation with branching dead ends springing off from it' of Inferno
which we discussed a while back already seem to be there in Deep Red! Along with a general amusing suggestion that 'book learning' is never very good for your health!
Also I kind of love that the medium takes pains to describe herself not to be a magician or trickster in the opening conference scene, and then our heroine gleefully immediately talks of her being "some sort of magician" in the crime scene after her murder! Even the medium has lost control of how her life is being presented!