One image says it all

Gialli's plots explanation or resolution often hides within one key image.

In "The bird with the crystal plumage", it's a painting - bought in an antique shop - which reflects the initial trauma experienced by the murderer.
"The bloodstained shadow" also revolves around a painting which depicts the terrible truth behind a scene the main character was a witness of when he was a child, and that he could not remember in details.

It's a photograph that reveals, when blown up several times, a murder was committed in Antonioni's "Blow-up". A similar treatment applied to a newspaper photograph (by the way, how unrealistic given the usual quality of pictures in papers!) unveils the secret behind the scorpion cuff links in "The case of the scorpion's tail".
We could also mention it's the re-cropping of a photograph which shows that what initially looked like an accident - a man falling under a train in a railway station - was indeed a murder in Argento's "The cat o'nine tails"...

Paintings or photographs, Giallo marks the victory of the visual and symbolic approach over the narrative, litterary explanations which used to prevail in "classic" thrillers up until the late 60s.
In this instance, it illustrates this genre's modernity, reflecting the movement towards the image-based society we all know now.

Milk

When Kathy Adams (Marina Malfati) heard her three cats crying in the kitchen just after she had given them some milk, she realised something wrong was going on.
Indeed, they sounded like desperate baby cries.
She was to find all three of them agonising on the kitchen floor a second later, poisoned by their own milk.

That disturbing scene which makes you feel uncomfortable, because of its clever ambiguous use of the cat's crying sound, is the only one worth noticing from Umberto Lenzi's "Seven Blood Stained Orchids" (1972). It is by the way reminiscent of the "milk glass" scene from Argento's "Cat o'nine tails" released the year before.

Apart from this, a very bland giallo to which Riz Ortolani manages to give some kind of pace, thanks to a nice jazz-soul score with hints of Morriconesque tonalities.

Titles 2 (The bestiary)

Italian giallo titles really sound nice to my ears:
L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo, Una lucertola con la pelle di Donna, Il gatto a nove code, Non si sevizia un paperino, Quattro mosche di velluto grigio, Il gatto dagli occhi di giada, La coda dello Scorpione, Sette scialli di seta gialla.

(The bird with the crystal plumage, A lizard in a woman’s skin, The cat o’nine tails, Don’t torture a duckling, Four flies on grey velvet, The Cat with the Jade Eyes, The case of the scorpion tail, Crimes of the black cat).

Cats, birds, scorpions, lizards, ducks, flies...

In the Middle-Age in Europe, the fear of the Devil being able to sneak into people's bodies led to the idea of the "beast within".

Being possessed, people would lose their judgement and spirituality and would act like animals - led by hunger, envy and rage.
Hence the Devil was often represented as an animal (cat, snake, goat...) or as a hybrid of human and animal.

This shades a new light on the highly symbolic and recurrent presence of animals within the vocabulary of giallo titles, which is a bestiary in itself.

Two interesting books study the relationship between the Devil and animals: "Une histoire du diable", by R. Muchembled (in French) and "The beast within: Animals in the Middle Ages", by J.E. Salisbury.
Read also a previous post about giallo titles.

Ears can see what eyes don't

Dario Argento often says that "The cat o' nine tails" is one of his least favourite movies.
Well I like it.
One reason for this is that again it is playing with the conventions of the genre:
the eye-witness is a key element of a number of giallos.

And here, the plot starts when blind crosswords-inventor Franco Arno (Karl Malden) overhears a conversation between two people one night. It happens that his "eyes" are those of a little girl who lives with him and describes him the scene he's listening to.

Later on, in a crucial and breathtaking scene, Argento ironically puts Carlo Giordano, a journalist who's partnering with our blind hero in his investigations, in a situation where he's litterally blinded as he's locked inside a tomb and all the action is happening outside, between blind Karl Malden and the murderer. Giordano - and we - can only hear this scene, which makes the suspense reach a peak.

This clever twist on giallo's rules was also present in "The bird with the crystal plumage": what does lead the hero to the murderer? Certainly not what he's seen at the beginning of the film, but a very peculiar noise recorded on a tape...

Two insighful links to check out about "Il gatto a nove code" : kinoeye's article and the images website's.