General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Four Flies on Grey Velvet

Four Flies on Grey Velvet (Italian: 4 mosche di velluto grigio) is a 1971 giallo (Italian genre of stylized murder-mystery thrillers) thriller directed by Dario Argento, a co-production of Italy and France with a running time of 104 minutes.¹ It is the final entry in Argento's "Animal" trilogy, following his directorial debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) and The Cat o' Nine Tails (1971).² The plot follows Roberto Tobias, a rock drummer stalked and blackmailed by an unknown figure after he believes he accidentally killed his stalker, but the apparent killing was staged and the man, Carlo Marosi, is alive.¹^•⁸

Key fact	Detail
Original title	4 mosche di velluto grigio; also released as Quatre mouches de velours gris and Vier Fliegen auf grauem Samt³
Director / year	Dario Argento, 1971, Italy/France, 104 minutes¹
Trilogy position	Third and final film of the "Animal" trilogy, after The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) and The Cat o' Nine Tails (1971)²
Lead cast	Michael Brandon (Roberto Tobias), Mimsy Farmer (Nina Tobias), Jean-Pierre Marielle (Gianni Arrosio), Bud Spencer (Diomede)³
Music	Ennio Morricone; cinematography by Franco Di Giacomo; editing by Françoise Bonnot³
Italian release	17 December 1971; UK release 11 February 1973; France 21 June 1973¹
Critical standing	67% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 9 reviews; 60% Popcornmeter from 1,000+ audience ratings⁴
Restoration	4K restoration by the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna with Surf Film, from the original Techniscope camera negative⁵

Spoilers

Plot and title

Roberto Tobias, a drummer in a rock band, discovers he is being followed by a mysterious man in dark glasses. He confronts the stalker in an abandoned theater, and during the ensuing struggle Roberto apparently kills him, though the death has been staged.⁸ A masked figure photographs the scene and uses the pictures to blackmail Roberto, though no demand for money follows; instead, photographs of the staged killing turn up in his record collection, the "dead" man's identity card arrives in the post, and a masked intruder wakes him at night with vague threats.¹^•² After the murder of Nina's cousin Dalia (Francine Racette), Roberto enlists the private investigator Gianni Arrosio (Jean-Pierre Marielle) and his friend Diomede, known as God (Bud Spencer), to identify the blackmailer.⁶^•⁷

The title refers to an abstract image resembling four flies on gray velvet, supposedly extracted from the dead Dalia's eye. This invokes optography, the debunked idea that the retina retains a final image at death, a theory popularized in the 19th century by the German physiologist Wilhelm Kühne.⁸^•⁹

Production and style

Argento wrote the screenplay from a story he developed with Luigi Cozzi and Mario Foglietti, and produced the film through Seda Spettacoli with Universal Productions France, with his father Salvatore Argento as producer.³ During production he described the film as a work of unease and "the terror of the unknown," distinct from the nightmare logic of his first film and the violence-centered second, and said he would use every expressive possibility of the camera.³ To shoot the slow-motion climax he obtained a camera capable of 1,000 frames per second, at a time when the normal rate was 24; he stated this was the first use of such slow motion in Italian cinema and that he had to travel to East Germany to find the camera.³

The film was shot in Techniscope and Technicolor, with exteriors in Turin, Milan, Spoleto, and Rome and interiors at the Incir De Paolis studios in Rome.¹⁰ Ennio Morricone, who had scored Argento's first two films, composed the score; a falling out during production meant the two did not work together again until The Stendhal Syndrome in 1996.⁸

Reception and standing. Critics have generally ranked the film below Argento's masterpieces, citing its plot development, less tension than the other Animal films, and comic interludes that many find unconvincing.¹¹ Roger Ebert gave it 2.5 out of 4 stars, finding the retina-image gimmick unbelievable and the conclusion arbitrary.⁴ Other critics praise its set pieces, including the stalking of the housekeeper Amelia through tight alleyways, a slow-motion bullet shot that predates similar scenes in Opera (1987) and The Matrix (1999), and the final slow-motion car crash scored by Morricone.⁸ The film is also studied for its queer subtext and for its treatment of sexuality and gender identity, which amplifies themes present in the two earlier trilogy films.¹²^•¹³

Place in Argento's career

After Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Argento deliberately left the giallo genre, saying that too many Italian directors were imitating his thrillers. He made The Five Days of Milan (Le cinque giornate, 1973), a historical comedy-drama that flopped in Italy, and then returned to the thriller with Deep Red (1975), which reworked some of this film's character and narrative material.¹⁴^•⁵ Retrospective accounts treat the film as a stepping stone between the more realistic early gialli and the increasingly fantastical films that followed.⁸

Home video and restoration

The film long had a reputation as Argento's hardest to find, the result of distribution problems over the years and very few television screenings; before a Sky Cinema broadcast on 26 June 2009, its previous Italian television airing dated to 22 February 1991 on Rete 4.¹⁵ Severin Films issued a limited 4K UHD edition in 2022, including both the uncut version and a slightly abbreviated English-language cut; the restoration was carried out by the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna with Surf Film, starting from the original Techniscope camera negative.¹⁶^•⁵ In 2025 Shameless released separate UHD and Blu-ray editions from the same restoration.¹⁷

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026