Martinelli and Wayne in "Hatari!" (1962)

Elsa Martinelli, who gravitated from modeling to a successful acting career in the 1950s, has died at age 82. Martinelli was a popular model in her native Italy when she was discovered by Kirk Douglas and his wife Anne. The Douglases decided to cast the unknown as an Indian maiden in Kirk's 1955 hit Western "The Indian Fighter". The film raised eyebrows at the time for presenting an inter-racial love affair between their characters. The movie helped successfully launch Martinelli's screen career in European cinema but it would be years before she starred in her next major Hollywood production. In 1962 director Howard Hawks cast her as the female lead opposite John Wayne his big budget African adventure "Hatari!". The film was a sizable hit and Martinelli began to appear in more American studio productions. She starred opposite Charlton Heston in "The Pigeon That Took Rome", with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in "The V.I.Ps", which was also a major success and opposite Robert Mitchum in the thriller "Rampage" . From the mid-1960s on, however, Martinelli worked almost exclusively on European film and TV productions. She had a long and esteemed career that ended with her recurring role in the acclaimed Italian TV series "Orgoglio" in 2004-2005. For more click here.

BY TIM GREAVES

Dario Argento – whose directorial career has now spanned almost 50 years, positioning him as a genuine icon of terror cinema – is probably best associated with his clutch of intoxicatingly imaginative chillers, each of them ornamented with brutal (and increasingly graphic) murder scenarios, stylishly lurid lighting schemes and wildly inventive camerawork.

Throughout the second half of the 1960s Argento had found a degree of success in writing stories and screenplays for movies; he most famously worked alongside Sergio Leone for 1968's Once Upon a Time in the West. But it was taught 1970 thriller The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (o.t. L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo) that marked his debut in the director’s chair and set him on the path to becoming the Godfather of the giallo.

Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante), an American writer currently residing in Rome, walks past a brightly lit art gallery late one night and sees inside a shadowy figure, clad in black, stabbing a woman. Attempting to intervene, Dalmas manages to get himself trapped in the entrance between two sets of locked sliding doors, unable to prevent the assailant from fleeing and helpless to assist the woman left bleeding to death on the floor. Fortunately, aid arrives and the woman – Monica Ranieri (Eva Renzi), wife of the gallery's owner – survives. It transpires that Monica was the almost-victim in a series of attacks that have left several beautiful women dead. Dalmas becomes obsessed with the case, replaying what he saw over and over in his head, convinced that he's missing a vital clue to solving the mystery. But in getting involved he inadvertently sets himself up as a target for the killer.

Argento not only directed but also wrote The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (basing it thematically on a 1949 pulp novel, “The Screaming Mimi”, by Frederic Brown). He would go on to make better movies but for a debut feature this really is an exemplary piece of film-making, bearing many of the embryonic flourishes – clearly influenced by the works of Alfred Hitchcock and Mario Bava – that would later become his trademark; specifically the faceless, black-gloved killer whose nefarious activities are often shot POV and, on a more cerebral level, the misperception of a witnessed moment, with characters struggling to retrieve a clue buried in their subconscious, the significance of which failed to register upon them when initially glimpsed. These recurrent themes would play out to varying degrees of success in many of Argento's later films, most significantly Four Flies on Grey Velvet (o.t. 4 mosche di velluto grigio, 1971), Cat o'Nine Tails (o.t. Il gatto a nove code, 1971), Deep Red (o.t. Profondo rosso, 1975, considered by many to be the greatest of all the Italian gialli), Tenebrae (o.t. Tenebre, 1982), Phenomena (1985), Opera (1987), Trauma (1993), The Stendhal Syndrome (o.t. La sindrome di Stendhal, 1996), Sleepless (o.t. Non ho sonno, 2001), The Card Player (o.t. Il cartaio, 2004), Do You Like Hitchcock? (o.t. Ti piace Hitchcock, 2005) and Giallo (2009).

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage itself is a masterpiece of sustained suspense. The escalating tension during a scene in which the hero's girlfriend (Suzy Kendall) is menaced by the killer – who uses a large kitchen knife to methodically chip away at the lock on her apartment door – is as perfect an example as one could wish for as to why Argento is often referenced as the Italian Hitchcock. The violence – notably an out-of-shot vaginal stabbing – was transgressive for its day, and in spite of the fact that far more shocking atrocities have been unflinchingly splashed across the screen in the decades since, several moments in Argento's fledgling offering still pack quite a visceral punch.