But as the reader is likely to suspect, the genre really began a little before that. Modern historians of giallo place its birth with the release of Mario Bava's La ragazza che sapeva troppo (The Girl Who Knew Too Much) in 1963, and Bava's later Blood and Black Lace introduced the cloaked killer. But in fact the genre's roots are also found in the wildly popular German suspense thrillers of the early 1960s, called "Krimi" and usually based on the novels of Edgar Wallace, the popular British writer of the early 1920s and 1930s. Many of these German productions anticipate their Italian offspring in garish colors, relentless villains, and nubile victims. But the German influence was to be even more pervasive in the resultant gialli, with their German shrinks, cops, and castles.

So like Lobachesky's plagiarism, the influence travels from the U.S. to London to Berlin to Rome, whence it turns around and influences the whole world with its stylistics, including the pyrotechnics of the teen slasher film in the United States. The term "giallo," in case you didn't know, means yellow, and alludes to the yellow striped covers of mass produced mystery novels published by Mondadori beginning in 1929 and continuing to this day.

A late example of the "Krimi" is The College Girl Murders [Der Mönch mit der Peitsche] (MPI, 87 minutes, color, 1968, NR, full frame, DD stereo in English, with English subtitles, animated musical menu with 12-chapter scene selection, photo gallery, $14.95, keep case, released on Tuesday, August 30, 2005), starring Joachim Fuchsberger, Ursula Glas, and Gritt Bottcher in a tale, adapted from Wallace, about Scotland Yard investigating girls being cut down at a private school by a mysterious figure in a red hooded robe and a white whip. The suspects are numerous, the '60s sensibility of the teen girls clashes with the straight-laced proprieties of the schoolmasters, and the deaths are frequent. In its small, quiet way, the film, based on something from the 1930s, is attempting blindly to grapple with the class of cultures of the late 20th century, while using the clash to titillate the viewer.

The complex continuing relationship with Germany and German culture may be a subterranean element of gialli popularity in Italy, but for the rest of the world it is probably the music that keeps people coming back for more. The superhumanly prolific Ennio Morricone, and his key musical director Bruno Nicolai, did most of the music for these films, but other composes contributed, including Stelvio Cipriani, The music of these movies gets right to the heart of what makes them special, and how music makes movies special. Working in concert, so to speak, music and image reinforce each other in a way unique in all the art forms. When the filmmakers really, really pay attention to how the music will interact with the visuals, as the gialli directors did, the medium finally has practitioners worthy of it.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage [L'Uccello dalle piume di cristallo] (Blue Underground, 98 minutes, color, 1970, NR, 2.35:1 enhanced, DD mono, 2.0, Surround Ex, DTS, Italian and English language tracks, with English subtitles, animated musical menu with 26-chapter scene selection, two discs, $29.95, keep case in slip case, released on Tuesday, October 25, 2005) has it all. It's the debut of Dario Argento. It has music by Morricone. And it is shot beautifully by Vittorio Storaro, who also supervised the transfer for this edition (which supersedes a previous, 1999 disc from a different company). And there are no less than seven audio options.

If you have never experienced Bird this is the second best way to do it, the first best being on a big screen in a large auditorium with numerous other viewers all in the spirit of the thing watching a new, fresh print. Well, that will probably never happen again. But it is also easy to imagine the thrill of these imaginary viewers, having this ruthless, unpredictable film, so cold and lush at the same time, sprung on them unsuspectingly.

Blue Underground has packed this disc. There is an audio commentary with film writers Alan Jones, a specialist on Argento, and Kim Newman, who writes for Sight and Sound and numerous other publications. Suffice it to say, they know a lot about Argento and this film, including such tidbits as that Argento hated the lead actor, Tony Musante, who was difficult. The first disc also tops out with the international trailer, the Italian trailer, and various TV spots. Disc 2 features "Out of the Shadows," a video interview with Argento, "Painting With Darkness," an interview with cinematographer Storaro, "The Music of Murder," a rare interview with Morricone, and "Eva's Talking," an interview with actress Eva Renzi. All this material comes to about 50 minutes.

After Bird with the Crystal Plumage, any other films in the genre other than those by Argento are apt to seem pallid. But The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion [Le Foto Proibite di Una Signora per Bene] (Blue Underground, 96 minutes, color, 1970, NR, 2.35:1 enhanced, DD mono in Italian, with subtitles, animated musical menu with 24-chapter scene selection, one disc, $19.95, keep case, released on Tuesday, March 28, 2006), released around the same time, manages to take an avenue slightly different, indeed unimaginable from Argento.

Marking the directorial debut of Luciano Ercoli after many years as a producer (as which he made Kiss Kiss Bang Bang the film from which both Pauline Kael and Photos stars Ercoli's girlfriend Susan Scott (real name Nieves Navarro) as Dominique, the hedonistic best friend of Minou (Dagmar Lassander), the pill-abusing wife of a manufacturer (Pier Paolo Capponi) who makes skin diving apparatus. Photos is set in the premiere world of gialli, that is, among the young rich professionals with time and money to kill. However, Photos lacks other elements that later went on to define the genre, for example there is only one murder, though it is enough to excite Minou into an ecstasy of suspicion about her husband. Ultimately, Photos is more of a Gaslight tale or a Suspicion knock off than a full fledged giallo, though it does show a deeper sympathy for women than Argento's film, and does have some amusing fillips, such as Dominique trafficking in dirty pix that she gets from, of course, Denmark. "Quality is important no matter what the subject." Incidentally, the plot summary for this movie in the reference book Spaghetti Nightmares is off by a mile.

Blue Underground's transfer is excellent and comes with a couple of extras, the theatrical trailer, plus a 15-minute video interview with screenwriter and giallo specialist Ernesto Gastaldi. He seems to be a wealth of information. Photos, it turns out, just happened to be an unused script that Gastaldi had lying around when Ercoli needed one, thus catapulting the writer into the world of gialli. He also reveals that Ercoli vanished with Scott sometime after 1978; Ercoli, according to Gastaldi, inherited some money, and dropped everything to vanish into the mist with his lover.

Ercoli's subsequent Death Walks on High Heels [La Morte Cammina con i Tacchi Alti] (NoShame, 105 minutes, color, 1971, NR, 2.35:1, DD mono in Italian and English, with English subtitles, animated musical menu with 12-chapter scene selection, three discs, $19.95, 16 page insert with essays and pix, two postcards, keep case, released on Tuesday, February 28, 2006) is a more "conventionally" crazy giallo. It stars Scott again, this time as Nicole, a Parisian stripper with a jealous boyfriend (Simon Andreu), and the attentions of a married British eye doctor (Frank Wolff) with a boot fetish. A guy is also terrorizing Nicole with a knife and bright blue eyes who thinks she has something he wants. Again written by Gastaldi, this particular giallo holds some unusual surprises.

High Heels comes in a package from NoShame that also includes a later Ercoli film. The transfer here is excellent, the sound fine, and the extras minimal, two trailers, and a poster and stills gallery.

Less hysterical and slightly more thoughtful, The Black Belly of the Tarantula [La Tarantola dal ventre nero] (Blue Underground, 98 minutes, color, 1971, NR, 1.85:1 enhanced, DD mono in Italian and English, with subtitles, animated musical menu with 24-chapter scene selection, one disc, $19.95, keep case, released on Tuesday, March 28, 2006), which is also more like a policier. The "thoughtfulness" comes from the fact that the main character, Inspector Tellini (Giancarlo Giannini) is experiencing a crisis of conscience, uncertain if he is able to do the job, while his frivolous wife, Stefania Sandrelli, is only concerned with the surface of things, fashion and furniture. Meanwhile, a killer is injecting his victims with a paralyzing fluid, which leaves them helplessly watching as he carves up their bodies. The emphasis is on the scary intruder; the killer's motivation is dispensed with in a quick, Psycho-esque bit of dialogue near the film's ambiguous end. Bond girls Claudine Auger and Barbara Bach also appear.

Behind another fine transfer with fine sound, Blue Underground also offers an interesting supplement. Besides the trailer and a TV spot, the biggest extra is an interview with Lorenzo Danon, the son of the producer, who has a great deal of insight into how the Italian film business worked, and how this film was made. The biggest bit of gossip is that Giannini, though professional, was difficult to work with, but Danon is more interesting when it comes to the facts and figures.

The Fifth Cord [Giornata Nera Per l'Ariete] (Blue Underground, 93 minutes, color, 1971, NR, 1.85:1 enhanced, DD mono in Italian, with subtitles, animated musical menu with 23-chapter scene selection, one disc, $19.95, keep case, released on Tuesday, March 28, 2006) is probably one of the best of the genre. It is directed by Luigi Bazzoni, and concerns a troubled journalist (Franco Nero) investigating a series of murders in which he, too, becomes a suspect. The photography is again by Storaro, and the music by Morricone. This film is a lot tighter and less bewildering than most gialli. Giallo is a voyeuristic genre and the subject of this film is voyeurism in all its varieties. The film enjoys an excellent transfer, and for extras includes a 15-minute interview with Nero and Storaro, plus the trailer.

Luciano Ercoli, chronologically speaking, pops up again with Death Walks at Midnight [La Morte Accarezza a Mezzanotte] (NoShame, 103 minutes, color, 1972, NR, 2.35:1, DD mono in Italian and English, with English subtitles, animated musical menu with 12-chapter scene selection, three discs, $19.95, 16 page insert with essays and pix, two postcards, keep case, released on Tuesday, February 28, 2006), the second film in the Luciano Ercoli Death Box Set. In this one, Susan Scott appears again, as Val, a fashion model who "witnesses" a murder while under the influence of an LSD style drug, administered to her by the untrustworthy tabloid journalist Gio (Andreu, again). Among the many peculiarities is Luciano Rossi as a henchman who cackles, or at least his English dubber does, like Peter Lorre, and her boyfriend appears to have been voiced by Joe Spano, of Hill Street Blues. Written by Gastaldi again, along with Sergio Corbucci, among others, the film grows wilder as it goes along and ends with something unusual for the genre, a lengthy fist fight.

Extras for this disc include the trailer, and the 105-minute TV version. The third disc of the set is a CD of 18 cuts of music by Stelvio Cipriani.

Intellectually ambitious for a giallo, Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key [Il Tuo vizio e una stanza chiusa e solo io ne ho la chiave] (NoShame, 96 minutes, color, 1972, NR, 1.85:1, DD mono, Italian and English language tracks, with English subtitles, animated musical menu with 12-chapter scene selection, one disc, $19.95, 12 page insert with essays and pix, keep case, released on Tuesday, September 27, 2005) is set in a static location, the estate of a presumably successful writer, Oliviero Rouvigny (Luigi Pistilli), his neurasthenic wife Irina (Anita Strindberg), and various of his consorts. As per the terms of the giallo, someone starts knocking off his entourage for not immediately apparent reasons. The movie is unusually ambitious because of its "higher" milieu, its focus on sexual and physical politics (as opposed to just lust, demented or otherwise), and certain political issues bubbling on the surface of Italy at the time, which contemporary viewers are unlikely to notice were it not for Richard Harland Smith's introductory essay.

Directed by Sergio Martino, a director of all trades, and loosely based on Poe's "The Black Cat," the film is both more thoughtful than usual, but also a tad rushed, with some crude special effects. It's also notable for the presence of European cult figure Edwige Fenech. It's once again written by Gastaldi.

Under an excellent transfer, the NoShame disc also features "Unveiling the Vice," which includes interviews with Martino, Fenech, and Gastaldi, a poster and stills gallery, and trailers for other Martino films, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (whither the title for this film came from), The Case of the Scorpion's Tail, The Big Alligator River, and Gambling City.

More gothic romance than giallo, Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye [Sieben Tote in den Augen der Katze] (Blue Underground, 95 minutes, color, 1973, NR, 2.35:1, DD 2.0, English, with English subtitles, animated musical menu with 23-chapter scene selection, one disc, $19.95, keep case, released on Tuesday, October 25, 2005) seems like it is based on Poe story, but isn't. It is set in the past, in England, and concerns a disputed will. A cat witnesses each of the murders but has nothing otherwise to do with the film. The murder's revelation is in the spirit of giallo, but there is little else.

However, the film is worth seeing for its star, Jane Birkin. Back in those days, Birkin cast a spell on fans and filmmakers alike, despite looking like someone who could be Mick Jagger's sister. After a bit part in Blow Up, Birkin became a darling of French and Italian filmmakers, and became the highly public lover of the extremely lucky Serge Gainsbourg, an extremely uncomely singer-songwriter who had just come off an affair with Bardot and who has a small part in this film as a cop. You get a taste of what men found so appealing about Birkin from this film, which include an infectious smile, a school girl's posture, and a hypnotizing way of moving. I don't think that anyone else in film quite walked like Birkin. The transfer is fair, and comes with an interview with the co-writer, Giovanni Simonelli, who details the film's genesis. At the end of this interview director Antonio Margheriti explains how he came to have the pseudonym Anthony Dawson. The film's music is by Riz Ortolani.

More traditionally mixing sex and violence, Strip Nude for Your Killer [Nude Per L'assassino] (Blue Underground, 98 minutes, color, 1975, NR, 2.35:1, DD mono, Italian language track with English subtitles, animated musical menu with 25-chapter scene selection, one disc, $19.95, keep case, released on Tuesday, October 25, 2005) is a true giallo, and set in the world of fashion models and photographers, where a mad killer, garbed head to toe in the black leather of a motorcycle uniform, is on the loose assassinating the models and their friends. It's tame yet racy stuff but director Andrea Bianchi's film has the virtue of the shameless Edwige Fenech in the cast. Extras include the trailer, and "Strip Nude for Your Giallo," an interview with actress Solvi Stubing, a former model who went on to a career as a TV presenter, and co-writer Massimo Felisatti, who criticizes the director for his heightened interest in the crueler aspects of the genre.

A Whisper in the Dark [Un Sussurro nel buio] (NoShame, 100 minutes, color, 1976, NR, 1.85:1, DD mono, 2.0 mono, Italian and English language tracks, with English subtitles, animated musical menu with 12-chapter scene selection, one disc, $19.95, eight page insert with essays and pix, keep case, released on Tuesday, September 27, 2005) is an oblique variation on Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw," and like that story is an intellectual's descent into genre rather than a pure pulpy experience, and therefore likely to disappoint those looking for chills and gore. It's not really a giallo. Set in a large, if crumbling estate, the story concerns a kid and his imaginary friend, Luca, which also happens to be the name his mother (Natalie Delon) gave to the child's stillborn brother. Delon and her husband (an under-utilized John Phillip Law) bicker about what to do about their son, especially as scary things begin to happen and violence escalates. The story ends with some kind of vague exorcism of Luca, implemented by Delon as she runs through the snow at dawn, and then the film ends, as it began, at the breakfast table. I didn't quite get the exorcism or what exactly was happening at breakfast, or the real role of the nanny in all this, but it will probably be clear to others. Joseph Cotten also appears in the middle section as a party magician with what appears to be a sideline in exorcise-therapy. Director Marcello Aliprandi focuses on the mother above all and I fear that the suspense is dissipated as a consequence, as the eerie kid, who looks like an Omen candidate, just sort of stares and smirks menacingly. The music is by Pino Donaggio.

The transfer is fair if slightly dark, and at one point the music begins to waver in that underwater sound for a few bars, though the image stays solid. Extras consist of the trailer, an optional English track, and a 30-minute interview with cinematographer Claudio Cirillo, who sits before the camera on a couch and relays anecdotes from his career.

By the time of The Pyjama Girl Case [La Ragazza Dal Pigiama Giallo] (Blue Underground, 102 minutes, color, 1977, NR, 1.85:1 enhanced, DD mono in Italian and English, with subtitles, animated musical menu with 24-chapter scene selection, eight page insert with comic book version of the true story by Eddie Campbell, one disc, $19.95, keep case, released on Tuesday, March 28, 2006), however, you can see how the genre is starting to fall apart. This one is set in Australia. It borrows a plot from the Swedish Martin Beck novel Roseanne, has unrelenting techno electronic music and some bad songs, and a high grossness quotient, especially when the corpse of an unknown girl found mutilated on the beach is put on display so that someone from the public might be able to identify her (this is based on a true incident, however, but more about that in a second). Ray Milland plays the retired cop coming back in from the cold to solve the case. Dalila Di Lazarro is stunning as the vic (and her eyes even resemble the real life victim's). There are some narrative surprises and the script, by Flavio Mogherini, has an unusual structure. It's directed by Mogherini and the music is by Riz Ortolani again.

Blue Underground has been doing both Italian and Australian films lately, and this particular film blends these two interests into one, because it is based on a real case in Australia in which an Italian immigrant was eventually found guilty. This leads us to one of the two extras (the other is the trailer). It's a short video interview, though also illustrated with archival images and footage, with Richard Evans, the author of a book about the real murder, which occurred in Australia in the mid-1930s. Evans is informed and fascinating as he walks the viewer through the highlights of the case. He distinguishes between truth and theories, has his own big theory, and dissects the movie adaptation and why it had to be made by an Italian rather than an Australian. The movie is not so hot, but this doc is great.

As a sign that Italian cinema is enjoying something of a renaissance, on disc at least, more police crime films are also finding their way into the stores. How to Kill a Judge [Perché si uccide un magistrato?] (Blue Underground, 111 minutes, color, 1974, NR, 2.35:1, DD 2.0, English, with English subtitles, animated musical menu with 23-chapter scene selection, one disc, $19.95, keep case, released on Tuesday, October 25, 2005) strays into the realm of the policier, a genre that evolved shortly after the birth of giallo, lasted a lot longer, and also allowed for more action, gun fire, and political commentary. Franco Nero plays Giacomo Solaris, a filmmaker whose drama about a corrupt judge attracts the attention of the actual magistrate (Marco Guglielmi) on whom the script may be based, as well as his assistant, and his wife (Françoise Fabian). The judge is serene about the similarities, to the extent that he invites Solaris to a party at his house, but the assistant is terribly worried, and so is his wife, to whom Solaris ends up trying to prove her husband's guilt. When the judge is assassinated, Solaris is partially blamed for his demise.

Though it starts out as a police-oriented political drama, by the end it is clear that it is "just" a giallo but that is part of the trick of the plot, so I won't go into detail. This is also the kind of movie that can make you think that you don't understand foreign films. Though Solaris is a filmmaker, you never see him with movie people, only with newspaper reporters and editors. You scratch your head as you think that maybe they do things differently in Italy. Also, the movie within the movie (as so often in movies, go figure) doesn't seem much like a movie. It certainly doesn't feel like the movie it's in. It's more like a Fellini fantasia, with ethereal figures in surrealistic landscapes.

Somehow Blue Underground manages to get candid interviews with its subjects. In this disc's extra, Nero talks frankly about his frustrations in keeping up his collaboration with director Damiano Damiani. The other extras include two theatrical trailers. Music for the film is again by Riz Ortolani.

A slightly more modern tale on a similar theme is La Scorta [The Bodyguards] (Blue Underground, 92 minutes, color, 1993, NR, 1.85:1, DD mono in Italian and English, with subtitles, animated musical menu with 20-chapter scene selection, one disc, $19.98, keep case, released on Tuesday, February 28, 2006), translated variously as "The Escorts," or "The Bodyguards." Set in Trampani, Sicily, and based on a true story, it concerns a replacement magistrate (Carlo Cecchi) for an assassinated judge investigating corruption or collusion, between the mafia and the government over, basically, water rights. Joining his team of bodyguards is Angelo (the exotic if bulky Claudio Amendola, who looks like a handsome Clint Howard, and who throws a convincing left). A carabinieri who is part of the bodyguard task force, Angelo's job is to drive the judge from home to office and back without getting the judge killed. But Angelo is a volunteer. He is originally from Trampani, and the dead judge was a close friend of Angelo's who taught him everything he knows. Angelo is instantly at odds with his boss (Enrico Lo Verso), a family man trying to get ahead, which is why he has been funneling info to the judge's bureaucratic enemies. Confronted by Angelo, he has a change of heart, and thenceforth, they are friends, and with the two other bodyguards, form a close team, which warms up the at first rather chilly magistrate. When the corrupt bureaucracy tries to isolate the judge, the team members soon become investigators in their own right.

La Scorta starts off really well with lots of team tension, good car chase scenes, suspenseful moments, and a sense of pervasive, hopeless corruption that let's you trust no one. It hews so closely to the actual source story, however, that at the end there is no resolution, and there is little potential for changing the system. If you are curious about what "happened" next, the 28-minute retrospective making of fills in the blanks, and the feature also gives a full background to how and why the film was made. It's worthwhile to view this before the audio commentary track in which Blue Underground founder Bill Lustig plays host to director Ricky Tognazziand producer Claudio Bonivento, which is highly informative and which takes you behind the scenes, especially about the clashes among the actors in the early days of filming.

In contrast to How to Kill a Judge, which is shot in the conventional brightly lit style of the times, La Scorta is very well shot (by Alessio Gelsini Torresi), sometimes using the magic hour for effect, shooting inside cars unusually effectively, and exploiting the moving camera (or the steadi-cam) well. The opening scene is a beautiful mood setter in which an old man carefully prepares a meal, only to hear the telltale sounds of gunfire that, to him, can only mean one terrible thing. At the end, one of the last shots is a bravura Scorsese-style shot that tracks through the bureaucracy that has obstructed the magistrate, as one of the escorts reads aloud the directive essentially firing the judge on a technicality, the camera coming upon the disputatious element of the bureaucracy just as the words of the directive touch upon it as a cause of his dismissal. I don't think I put this clearly but it will make sense when you see it. La Scorta is a vivid, fascinating film well worth viewing and perhaps even re-making in an American context.

Besides the yak track with Tognazzi and Bonivento, there is also a lengthy retrospective making of, "Judging La Scorta, featuring interviews with Tognazzi, Amendola, co-writer Graziano Diana, co-writer Simona Izzo, producer Bonivento, and cinematographer Gelsini. Also on hand are the U.S. trailer and the Italian trailer.

Media Notes From All Over

Over the past several months I've become increasingly fond of David Kehr and his weekly DVD column in the New York Times. He manages to pack into a compact space a great deal of insight while often highlighted the least expected of that week's offerings, such as Desert of the Tartars for example. But I've had to virtually stop reading his column because, great minds thinking alike, I've found him anticipating ideas that I was brooding on and bruiting about in my ever-late column. Desperate to get a larger, substantial fix of Kehr, whose columns in the Chicago Reader and the Tribune I'd never had a chance to read (and which haven't yet been collected into a book), I turned to all that is available, two books on movie posters (he also has a recently started blog .

The Independent Movie Poster Book published in 2005 (Harry N. Abrams, 176 pages, $29.95, ISBN 0 8109 9190 X), and co-manufactured by Spencer Drate and Judith Salavetz, is a survey of film posters from the mid-1960s to now drawn from the Posteritati Gallery in New York, a merchant of movie art. Kehr's contributions consist of explanatory paragraphs to accompany the artwork, which he turns, consciously or not, into referendums on the quality of various directors, not unlike the manner of his (and my) hero Andrew Sarris in The American Cinema. Like Sarris, he has the knack for summarizing the gestalt of a director in few words. I had a bunch of quotes from the book on my computer but they seem to have vanished, so suffice it here to say that his summaries of numerous indie directors are quite good.

But diverting and appealing as Kehr's remarks are, in the end, the Independent Movie Poster Book is … just a poster book, with all that that implies about coffee table habitats. This is not to denigrate the project. It's great to have all those poster images in one spot, finely reproduced. But the hunger I was seeking to sate was for more of Kehr's prose. To that end I turned next to Italian Film Posters (The Museum of Modern Art, 160 pages, $39.95, ISBN 0 8707 0692 6), from 2003, the catalog for a show at the Museum.

This book offers an array of some 125 posters for films ranging from Cabiria, arguably the most influential film of its time, through the Italian versions of Warner and Columbia films, to the westerns The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, A Fistful of Dollars, and others, and odd one offs such as Screaming Mimi and The Long Haul. After a foreword, Kehr's remarks are reduced to the shortest of snippets all too often simply telling you what you are already looking at anyway. However, Kehr, who is a poster fanatic with a special interest in Italian film posters, is highly sensitive to subtle differences in the techniques and styles of the main poster artists for the bulk of the 20th century, Anselmo Ballester, Luigi Martinati, and Ercole Brini, men who had to work fast, lush, and with accuracy, despite the fact that often they hadn't seen the films for which they were advertising.

But, sadly, there is technically even less of Kehr's prose in this book than in the other. Thus I call out for a publishing firm, Da Capo or Limelight, to gather up as much of Kehr's old columns and essays as possible into one good, solid volume.

Meanwhile, back on the poster beat, Black Dog has come up with Mel Bagshaw's more up to date The Art of Italian Film Posters (213 pages, $39.95, ISBN 1 9047 7231 5). This is a book that combines a survey of Italian film history with its chronically through its posters. It overlaps with Kehr's book but also extents further into the modern era. Kehr's book is arranged by genre; Bagshaw's goes chronologically in its first half, and then goes by genre.

The Italian film industry, which for a short time at the beginning, was the film industry, had a head start in making film posters because of the tradition of opera posters. The craftsmen took pride in their work, and posters in Italy continued to use paintings, rather than photographs, long after the rest of the world had converted to the photo image. This work is beautiful, vivid, and deliciously pulpy, like old mass-market paperback covers.

Bagshaw does an excellent job of summarizing Italian film history and what makes the posters unique. Perhaps his opinions are a little in the "museum catalog" style of received opinion, but he covers the right directors, and says accurate things about them. I can think of no better introduction to the scope of Italian cinema than this book. The range of cover art itself is stunning, and well reproduced. I do wish, however, that the similarity of the art for the poster of Shock to the famous paperback of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle had been pointed out.

D. K. Holm's 2006 Film Diary (Otherwise Known as a Blog)

Tuesday, 28 February, 2006 On Scrubs tonight, D. J. mentions how much he loves Grey's Anatomy. It was a funny bit, given how similar the two shows happen to be — interns, soap opera elements, narration, montages, carefully selected music — and it made me wonder if any other show had acknowledged its mimic ever in the past, the way commercials sometimes cite rivals.

Tuesday, 1 March, 2006 In the theater to see The Hills Have Eyes more on that next time), I suddenly realize that both Harrison Ford (Firewall) and Bruce Willis (16 blocks have action movies out at the same time. A few years ago I thought The Rock, Matt Damon, and Owen Wilson were going to inherit the mantle of these old codgers. And Ford has been grumpy in the media lately about his status and the fate of some of his more misguided movies. It's clear that once you are established, which is hard to do (it took Willis six movies to convert from TV to screen star) you're there for life. Or at least that's the view of the moguls, who keep foisting these guys on us. Or maybe it's the view of the stars themselves, whose own production companies usually put forward these action films.

Friday, 3 March, 2006 The only standby is that celebrity deaths come in threes and ever since I first heard that bit of modern urban wisdom, I've been monitoring the situation. My findings, not written down or codified or input into a date base, are that it doesn't quite work out like that. Sometimes the deaths are in twos. Sometimes they do come in threes but then by the end of the weekend, there is a fourth or maybe a fifth. It gets messy. And what is a "three" anyway? Three of what? Isn't "celebrity" a fairly large category? What if Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Chuck Barris, and Gwyneth Paltrow all died in the same 48-hour time span? Aside from the possibility that maybe they were on the same plane that crashed, what else do they have in common?

So when Don Knotts died on February 24th, I got out my mental "three's company" software and waited for the other two shoes to drop.

In fact, they did so with some alacrity. First Darren McGavin tumbled on February 27th (though everyone thought he was already dead anyway). And then Dennis Weaver passed on March 2. More than the coincidence of their neighborly deaths, this trio was similar in their career trajectories and post career esteem. All got started in the 1950s. All three rose to prominence via TV shows. All three were "peculiar" in a way that prime time TV could accommodate but not the big screen. And all three were "in the news" recently in tangential ways. A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine told me she wanted to write a biography of Don Knotts. A remake of Night Stalker aired, only to be cancelled. And according to the new Class of 1984 DVD, Weaver was up for a major role in that film, but passed (and the first season of McCloud just came out on disc). Now that's a threesome.

Knotts-McGavin-Weaver will live on for centuries if for no other reason than as the definition of a "death comes in threes." Threes company, indeed.

Monday, 6 March, 2006 I have only two things to say about last night's Oscar ceremony. The first is that the French guys winning for March of the Penguins, with them hopping around on the stage like the cast of Hill Street Blues at the Golden Globes, is a fraud.

The film that won was the one utterly reedited and revised, with new footage and new narration by Morgan Freeman (glimpsed backstage as they stormed the stage). Shouldn't the folks at National Geographic and Warner Independent be the ones flinging stuffed penguin dolls all over the stage?

The second thing is that for the first time in my life I won an Oscar pool, getting only for categories wrong.

And incidentally, if you are interested in KILL BILL, you might find my new book, KILL BILL: AN UNOFFICIAL CASEBOOK useful. It is now available in fine bookstores everywhere, or from Amazon.

Not only that, I've got a new book out on an aspect of film noir I call film soleil, titled simply FILM SOLEIL. It is sure to alter film criticism as we know it to its very core. Order it now!

And if you are interested in what I sound like, I can be heard on KBOO radio (90.7 FM) the second and the fourth Wednesday of the month, at 9 AM in the morning (Pacific Standard Time) on Ed Goldberg's show MOVIE TALK along with Dawn Taylor. It's available via streaming audio (in 20 Kbps Stereo). The next broadcast is Wednesday, March 22, at 9 AM, with the critics' ten best lists.

COMING SOON: The Hills Have Eyes,, a package of Hitchcock movies and TV shows, REMINGTON STEEL and other TV mystery shows, many STAR TREKS, the third annual DVD Tray of Horror, and more!

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