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• Directors: Dario Argento
• Producers: Salvatore Argento
• Writers: Dario Argento, Bernardino Zapponi
• Genres: Horror, Mystery, Thriller
• Actors: David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi, Gabriele Lavia, Macha Meril, Eros Pagni, Giuliana Calandra, Glauco Mauri, Clara Calamai, Piero Mazzinghi

Profondo Rosso follows music teacher Marcus Daly (Hemmings) as he investigates the violent murder of psychic medium Helga Ulmann (Macha Meril), which he witnesses in an apartment building. Other key characters are introduced early, including Daly’s occasional friend Carlo (Gabriele Lavia), Ulmann’s associate Dr. Giordani (Glauco Mauri) and reporter Gianna Brezzi, with whom Daly begins an affair. Brezzi’s character is played by Daria Nicolodi, who would later become Argento’s partner and the mother of his daughter Asia.

In his failed attempt at rescuing the medium, Daly realises he could have seen the killer’s face among a group of portraits on the wall of the victim’s apartment but is unable to find or recognise it when the police arrive. Later in the film, he also initially overlooks another clue that leads him to discover a mouldering corpse walled up in a derelict house. In typical Argento fashion, one murder leads to a string of others as Daly’s obsession with this vital clue that he fails to understand puts his life and those of everyone he comes into contact with in danger. This inability of a character to interpret or comprehend what he has seen is a common theme in Argento’s films and was used repeatedly in Tenebrae.

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Profondo Rosso is laden with minor details that presage later events. The bathtub murder is foreshadowed by an earlier scene when Daly is lightly scalded by an espresso machine; similarly, Daly explains to Gianni that his psychiatrist once explained that his piano playing is symbolic of him bashing his father’s teeth in, and later in the film Giordani suffers exactly that fate. A child’s doll hanging from a noose and a brief cut to a dog fight (with one dog biting the other by the neck, the other carrying a strange, ghastly gaze) foretell Martha’s aforementioned demise at the end of the film, when the heavy neckchain she is wearing becomes entangled in the bars of an elevator that then ascends, lifting her into the air until she is decapitated. The film also marks the introduction of many of Argento’s key hallmarks: discordant soundtracks, odd angles, rolling cameras and various lighting techniques.

• Directors: Sergio Leone
• Producers: Fulvio Mosella, Bino Cicogna
• Writers: Screenplay, Sergio Leone, Sergio Donati, Story, Sergio Leone, Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci
• Genres: Action, Western
• Actors: Charles Bronson, Claudia Cardinale, Jason Robards, Henry Fonda

The film opens with three outlaws (Jack Elam, Woody Strode and Al Mulock) at an isolated train station in Arizona. The train arrives, and only a man playing a harmonica (Charles Bronson) disembarks. He asks for Frank, but the three men have been sent instead. A showdown ensues. Bronson is the only survivor.

On the remote farm Sweetwater, Brett McBain (Frank Wolff) and his children prepare a feast for the arrival of his new wife, Jill. Frank (Henry Fonda) and his gang emerge from the desert and kill all four McBains.

Jill (Claudia Cardinale) arrives in Flagstone by train from New Orleans and takes a carriage to the McBain farm. In a roadside establishment along the way, she sees the bandit Cheyenne (Jason Robards) after he has a noisy shootout with his prison escort. Seeing Bronson, Cheyenne dubs him Harmonica. When Cheyenne’s men arrive, Harmonica tells of his shootout earlier with three men who wore similar dusters, but Cheyenne denies they were from his gang.

Jill arrives at the farm to find her husband and his children dead. The assembled crowd came to be wedding guests, but she tells them she married McBain a month earlier in New Orleans. As the funeral ends, part of a duster is found (fake evidence Frank planted), and the men form a posse to hunt down Cheyenne. Jill stays and searches the house for anything of value, as McBain told her he was rich. She finds only some miniature buildings, including a model train station.

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Harmonica and Cheyenne say goodbye to Jill. As they ride off, Cheyenne stops and gets down. He shows Harmonica that Morton shot him in the gut. He asks Harmonica not to watch him die, and Harmonica looks away. The work train arrives, and the film ends as Jill takes water out to the rail workers.