You can't read anything about Dario Argento without someone
spouting the rhetoric that he is the "Italian Hitchcock". While both of these directors made an
impressive number of films and broke new ground in filming techniques and
visual aesthetic, if you really sit down and compare their careers side by
side, you'll see it isn't good comparison or even an adequate comparison. I was prompted to look deeper in to Argento's
career when I decided to watch Dracula 3D, an unbearable budgeted badly made
scary movie. Previous to that I had seen
Suspiria and Inferno, definitely 2 of his best films. Bigger than those old films with strong
contrasting colors and delicate, luxurious imagery that fills your eyes to the
brim with texture and color. D3D had
some of that, but lacked more noticably in aspects where Argento had a
previously bad track record in like plot, character development, and the
ability to act.
As the movie went on, it became very apparent that Suspiria
and Inferno were not an indication of where he had taken his career. Generally great directors are only given
larger and larger budget as even their very name draws ticket sales. But this movie, Dracula's green screened
castle was flat and brightly lit and monster transformations would look scarier
if they were a hand puppet. No money to
even afford an aesthetic, his hallmark and what made him famous. If you sum up his career in a scatter plot
based on production budget and box office earnings, you get shapes like this:
The blue line is the quickly cresting and dipping budgets,
while the slouching red L is the money his movies took in over the years. Not at all flattering. Compare that to hitchcock, who made movie
studios ungodly amounts of cash, with the ridiculously peaking Psycho making
inflation adjusted earnings of $476,516,129, that's almost half a billion
dollars.
The graph for Hitchcock STARTS
with one extra zero on the first number of the Y-axis.
Next take a look at scores based on Rotten Tomatoes
scoring. Again, pay attention to the
trend lines that give voice to each man's career. In both sets of graphs Argento is red &
blue and Hitchcock greys.
