Four Flies on Grey Velvet

Four Flies on Grey Velvet (4 mosche di velluto grigio)
Poster art for Dario Argento's Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971)
Directed by	Dario Argento
Produced by	Salvatore Argento
Written by	Dario Argento Luigi Cozzi Mario Foglietti
Starring	Michael Brandon Mimsy Farmer
Music by	Ennio Morricone
Cinematography	Franco Di Giacomo
Editing by	Franco Fraticelli
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release date(s)	1971 (Italy)
Running time	104 min
Country	Italy / France
Language	Italian

Four Flies on Grey Velvet (Italian: 4 mosche di velluto grigio) is a 1971 Italian mystery thriller film, directed by Dario Argento. The screenplay is also by Argento, from a story by him, Luigi Cozzi, Mario Foglietti and Bryan Edgar Wallace (uncredited).

Plot

Roberto Tobias (Brandon) is a drummer in a rock band who has noticed a man following him for the last several days. Angered by this, he confronts the stranger in an abandoned theater to find out what he wants. The man claims he does not know what Roberto is talking about, and pulls a switchblade. The two struggle, and Roberto accidentally stabs the man, who falls into an orchestra pit, lifeless. To make matters worse, someone in a bizarre puppet mask has been hiding in the upper wings of the theater and takes incriminating photographs of Roberto holding the bloody knife. Roberto flees, but the next day he receives the dead man's ID in the mail. It becomes apparent that the masked figure has no interest in going to the police, and instead wants to drive Roberto mad with fear and paranoia. But why?

Cast

Michael Brandon	Roberto Tobias
Mimsy Farmer	Nina Tobias
Jean-Pierre Marielle	Gianni Arrosio
Bud Spencer	Godfrey
Francine Racette	Dalia
Calisto Calisti	Carlo Marosi
Marisa Fabbri	Amelia
Fabrizio Moroni	Mirko
Oreste Lionello	The Professor
Aldo Bufi Landi	Pathologist
Laura Troschel	Maria

Music

Deep Purple was considered for the score but this film was scored by the world famous composer Ennio Morricone noted for his scores in Sergio Leone films (in which Argento co-wrote Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West) and had previously worked on Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, but due to disagreements would not later work with Dario Argento again until the scoring of The Stendhal Syndrome (1996). They collaborated later on the The Phantom of the Opera (1997).

Production

Some of the earlier cast considerations for the main role Roberto Tobias were Terence Stamp, Michael York and even some members of The Beatles. Argento did not want to use the "image caught in the retina" plot device since it was too fantastic for the giallo genre. But once Carlo Rambaldi showed him how the effect would look like in the finished film, he soon changed his mind. This was originally intended to be Argento's swan song to the giallo genre. This would later change once The Five Days did poorly at the box-office. It was Jean-Pierre Marielle's own idea to make his character gay.

Soundtrack

Argento's usual collaborator Ennio Morricone scored the film but had a major argument with Argento over some tracks Argento did not want in the film. As a result, the director and Morricone would not work together again until 1996, and the rock group Goblin would eventually become Argento's regular composers.

Technology

Predating Argento's own Stendhal Syndrome, The Matrix, and numerous Hong Kong films, a slow motion bullet effect is used in the film.

To film a car crash, a camera that could produce a triple digit amount of frames per second and twelve cars were used to get the effect shown in the film.

Availability

This film is the third in Dario Argento's Animal Trilogy in the early 1970s that started with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and The Cat o' Nine Tails. It was not until early 2009 that the film was made available to home video audiences in a legitimate version, both domestically or internationally with the exception of the long out of print obscure French VHS. Digital bootlegs show up on P2P sites with poor quality in image and sound. The rights to this film (at least in America) are owned by Paramount, which had chosen not to release it. Copies of varying quality are available from numerous online conversion sources. In late December 2007, a German PAL DVD surfaced and was released from an outfit called Retro Films. This unofficial release offers a widescreen anamorphic transfer, as well as Italian, English, and German audio options and optional German subtitles. An array of trailers and alternate credits/ending are included. The print is from a slightly cut English theatrical copy and inserted footage from a VHS copy provides the cut footage to bring the running time up to 97 minutes.

It was finally released on German DVD in 2008 with more footage than the bootleg and in anamorphic 2:35:1 widescreen.

MYA Communication released a Region 1 DVD of Four Flies on Grey Velvet on February 24th, 2009. The disc contains an uncut, completely remastered print of Dario Argento's "lost" film, featuring theatrical trailers/teasers, English language opening and ending credits, and an extensive photo gallery. However, the MYA release misses 30–40 seconds of footage (this was due to print damage).

German publisher Koch Media announced an official DVD and Blu-ray-release of the movie for 2011.

To celebrate the film's 40th anniversary and to mark 20 years since it was thought to be lost, Shameless Screen Entertainment released it on Blu-ray and DVD in the UK on the January 30th 2012. This release includes the following special features:

- Introduction to the film by Luigi Cozzi.

- New, exclusive and extensive recent interview on the making of Four Flies On Grey Velvet with writer and assistant director Luigi Cozzi.

- Original English audio remastered in HD exclusively for this Shameless release from the original magnetic soundtrack and available for the first time since the film’s original theatrical opening in the 1970s.

- Shameless re-build edit of the complete version of the film including four inserts of previously missing footage known amongst Argento fans as the legendary “missing forty seconds” (the inserts are in Standard-Definition quality). The Blu-ray will allow for seamless branching of the four inserts giving viewers two versions of the film: one all HD without the re-inserted scenes and one longer version including the inserts.

- Restoration of all individual damaged frames, most notably with respect to the removal of the black diagonal frame line (caused by the film jumping the high speed camera gate) in the final car crash sequence.

- Optional Italian audio version in HD with English subtitles.

- Italian and English trailers.

- Alternate English opening and closing credits.

- Shameless Trailer Park (Blu-ray only).

External links

• Four Flies on Grey Velvet at the Internet Movie Database
• Four Flies on Grey Velvet at AllRovi
• The Official UK release forum