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A 1972 crime film directed by Steno and starring Enrico Maria Salerno. Set during Italy’s tumultuous anni di piombo (“Years of Lead”), the film obtained a great commercial success.
Italian film historian Roberto Curti stated that many critics have consider Execution Squad to be the initiator of the “poliziottesco” film genre. Curti opined that Execution Squad was just a logical continuation of Damiano Damiani’s Confessions of a Police Captain.Read More »
Summer Night is Lina Wertmu ller s outrageous, and outrageously funny, response to her own Swept Away, updated with the politics and conspicuous consumption of the 1980s. Mariangela Melato (Swept Away) stars as Signora Bolk, a self-made tycoon interested in ecological preservation. She is fed up with the terrorists who poach Italy s rich beauty, and as part of a crazy retaliation scheme she hires a former CIA agent to abduct the number one violator, Giuseppe Beppe Catania (Michele Placido). Catania is taken to her villa on a private island where he insists that as a man, he cannot go without sex. She relents and hires two prostitutes to pleasure him. Blindfolded and chained, Beppe realizes that the third woman is none other than the woman who kidnapped him and agrees to pay the $100 million but only with a twist.Read More »
A raro video with a great interpretation of Mariangela Melato
In the summer of 1943, during the war, Francesca, widow mother of three little girls, leaves Bologna to go to in a country house, where he finds an old love Guido and other friends, all displaced people like her.
The young woman has a great passion for America and his music (she told to the daughters that their father lives in the States).
One day an American man named Ray, pilot of reconnaissance aircraft, is forced by breakdown to land near the farmhouse.Read More »
The Spanish Civil War, as experienced by the town of Villa Ramiro. The local count and his Fascist nephews ally with the rebels; the count’s son, indifferent to politics at the outset, later makes a choice; the town’s teacher, Antonio Garcia, a pacifist, tries not to take sides but to inspire the children with ideas; a beautiful eccentric woman, Vandale, brings leadership and strength to the town; dwarfs long for equality. The fictive story of Villa Ramiro is inter-cut with archival footage of the war itself. The town is near Guernica, and the local Republicans draw inspiration from its freedom tree.Read More »
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Nino Manfredi and Mariangela Melato are a couple who teach at the same elementary school and are dying to have a child of their own. At this school all the little students wear uniforms that make them look like miniature Austin Powers’. They also accompany the soundtrack with insipid songs that tell you what you are looking at. Whether you understand Italian or not, it soon gets on your nerves.Read More »
Michael is the younger son of a middle-class family, a strong-willed and free-thinking fellow, who is off in some distant country fighting for a revolutionary cause. Everyone in the family writes to him, describing the events of their lives, as they drift into a kind of conventionality which would perhaps have horrified them earlier. Only Michael’s girlfriend Mara (Mariangela Melato), the mother of his child, retains her independence, even though it is through the help of Michael’s increasingly conventional friends and family that she survives. (allmovie)Read More »
Mimi is a Sicilian dockworker who loses his job when he votes against the Mafia candidate in what he thinks is a secret ballot. He leaves his wife behind and goes to Turin, where he meets and moves in with Fiore, a street vendor and Communist organizer. They have a child, he works non-union jobs, and again he comes to the Mafia’s attention. This time they’re impressed, promoting him to a supervisor’s job back in Sicily. He must keep Fiore and the child a secret, which is fine with Fiore, as long as he never makes love to his wife. He doesn’t, and when she becomes pregnant, he knows he’s a cuckold. His personal revenge and the Mafia’s tentacles then intertwine in tragicomic ways. (IMDb)Read More »
Description
Set at an indeterminate time in the near future, this routine, well-acted drama by Elio Petri tackles favorite Italian topics: religion and politics. A bit of macabre fantasy is added to the mix, but the end product remains somewhat muddled. Don Gaetano (Marcello Mastroianni) is a priest who is supervising a group of Christian Democrats on a religious retreat. The objective is to help these politicians purify their past wrongdoings, no matter how large or small, and live closer to God. The retreat takes place in a concrete bunker with plenty of small rooms for contemplation and icons set here and there to offer inspiration. Once the retreat begins, the politicos alarmingly begin to die off one by one. Don Gaetano wants them to get closer to God but did he mean that close?Read More »