Early in Dario Argento’s first feature film, 1970’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, a handsome American writer strolling around Rome at night stumbles upon a murder that is already underway. The writer, played by Tony Musante, rushes to save the red-haired beauty struggling to fight off a shadowy, knife-wielding assailant inside an overly lit art gallery.

The writer makes it into the vestibule of the windowed gallery space but can’t open the inner door. When the assailant locks the outer door, he is stuck between glass panes, the bleeding woman begging for help on one side and the freedom of the Roman night on the other. Our protagonist is literally and figuratively caught between frames, an unwilling, impotent, but enthralled eyewitness to a brutal and beautiful crime.