Four Flies on Grey Velvet

Roberto Tobias, a rock drummer, believes he has accidentally killed the man following him inside a theatre. At that moment someone in a mask photographs it. From then on he is blackmailed, his house is entered and the people around him start dying. The title refers to a police technique at the end of the film, extracting the last image left on a victim's retina. Dario Argento directed. It is the last part of his animal trilogy. Michael Brandon plays Roberto. The real story of the film is its invisibility. Rights disputes with Paramount kept it from any official release for decades; it became the hardest of Argento's films to see and circulated for years only on tapes issued in Greece, France and Belgium. The restoration was done directly on the original negative, untouched for more than thirty years. Two details show the nature of that work: the black diagonal frame line in the final car crash, caused by the film jumping the high-speed camera gate, was removed, and four separate pieces long known among Argento fans as the legendary missing forty seconds were put back. Who it is for: anyone who wants giallo and Argento's early period seen whole. Who it is not for: viewers expecting a coherent thriller. The logic is weak, the comic supporting characters break the tone, and Argento himself does not count this period as his best work.