Bread and tulips
Well here's something you don't see everyday - an Italian film set in Venice. It's about a housewife on holiday who gets left behind when the coach carrying her family leaves without her. She decides to return home under her own steam, then she decides on a detour to Venice, then she decides to stay. She meets a waiter who speaks like a book and offers her a room in his flat. She gets a job with an anarchist florist, befriends a masseuse, and rediscovers the sensuality of the accordion. This is an odd film, with an Anne Tyler-type plot, low-key humour, and some dream sequences with more than a tinge of David Lynch about them. But it works, hangs together, involves you, and leaves you smiling; but not feeling manipulated. Venice is a lovely backdrop, without the kind of lingering and worshipful camerawork a non-Italian would indulge in. A rom-com maybe, but with reality and bite - I liked it a lot.

Brideshead Revisited 1981
When Charles and Sebastian visit Venice their gondolas arrive at the Palazzo Contarini-Polignac, but once inside they are miraculously transported to the Palazzo Barbaro (before its recent clean) (see photo above right) and here they stay as guests of Sebastian's father, the interiors being filmed here, including the courtyard where they all have breakfast. There's a pre-cleaned grimy patina about most of the places they visit, in fact, in this lovingly-written and filmed episode. The book and the series contributed more than a little to my mental Venice before I got to see the real thing.
The 2005 UK DVD reissue (with commentaries and a documentary) is said to have better picture quality than the set from a few years before which I bought, but is still not what you'd call good. Similarly the recent (2012) Anniversary Edition Blu-ray was reported to have better picture quality, but to suffer from seriously washed out colours. Maybe one day a respectable restored edition will appear, but as I write, in 2019, there is no version in print.

Brideshead Revisited 2008
By the time I got to see this on DVD my expectations had been made lower than low by the reviews and reports, and so I had little room for disappointment. It's like one of those cut-down versions of famous films done in five minutes with Lego or sock puppets. You wait for famous bits to happen and they all whizz past in imitation of the TV series. The only sustained pleasure and surprise comes courtesy of Emma Thompson who makes Lady Marchmain much nastier here, and her confrontations with Charles fairly fizz with animosity rather than the gentler bemusement of Claire Bloom in the TV Series. The Venice scenes fly by, with the requisite boat ride past loggias and churches and under bridges. Sebastian's father is staying in the Palazzo Contarini (with its garden entrance on the Grand Canal) this time, and rather than Bellini the talk is of Veronese and Canaletto for some bizarre reason. When the conversation turns (yet again) to Charles being an artist his Lordship's mistress (played by Greta Scacchi with an 'Italian' accent) promises to show him the works of these two artists; tricky in the case of Canaletto as his works were all shipped abroad almost as soon as the paint had dried. The actor playing Charles just plays Jeremy Irons playing Charles, the actor playing Sebastian has the ferrety face of a Cockney urchin* and Julia fails to outshine either of them. The scene where Charles visits Sebastian in the Moroccan hospital is well handled and genuinely moving, and so something of a rarity.
*With hindsight this was a little harsh on Ben Whishaw, but he has come on a lot since, with some more suitable roles.

Broadway Gondolier 1935
This one's a musical starring Dick Powell, Joan Blondell, Adolphe Menjou, and the Mills Brothers. Powell is Dick Purcell, a cab driver who sings, in his cab, in traffic and so a producer sets him up with an audition, which he blows, but becomes smitten with a secretary there. played by Blondell. Following more preposterous plot devices he becomes a gondolier and impresses a cheese heiress, who hires him, changes his name to Ricardo Purcelli. He acquires a moustache and an accent and a voice teacher, called Eduardo Da Vinci, played by Adolphe Menjou. Entertaining tosh, it seems, and with no location filming, I imagine.

Le Cadeau (Bankers also have Souls) 1982
The second title is how this was known in the US - it was never released in the UK. It stars Pierre Mondy, a French comedy actor whose fame hasn't travelled well, as a bank employee who gets given a call-girl as a retirement gift. He doesn't realise, of course - thinking that she's just attracted to him. (Dufour, his surname, gets translated as Duffer in the subtitles.) They travel to Venice and all sorts of hilarious misunderstanding ensues, we're told, and a fair amount of hiding in wardrobes and falling into canals and gondolas. I don't feel massively drawn to it, I confess, but I promise I will watch it one day and report.

Canal Grande 1943
The story of a gondolier who sees the way things are going and becomes a vaporetto pilot. Seemingly only ever released in Italy and Portugal.

Capriccio Veneziano 2002
An old fashioned soft-core porno film in which a beautiful young music student arrives in Venice to study at the Venetian Academy of Music where, you guessed it, her tutor, an artist, soon starts to teach her more than music. Directed by Bruno Mattei, whose other works include Mondo Canibale, Women's Prison Massacre, and SS Girls, here using the name Vincent Dawn, which is one of his many aliases. He also directed Desire, also set in Venice and also about a piano student. If the plot set-up makes you think of a floppy-haired aesthete showing a sensuous but nervous dark-haired woman in flat shoes the sexual ropes then good for you. It means you've not seen this film, and are not au fait with the conventions on Planet Porn. Here the 'artist' has an astonishingly over-built body and no neck, making a scene where he's beaten up by two stocky shrimps in gondolier shirts even more ludicrous. And the sneery music student looks like she'd be more confident teetering around Venice shopping  for sparkly frocks than teaching music to speccy girls. There's also a scene where the erotic cliché of the cello clasped between the knees is overblown muchly. And I don't think she'd be able to use her bow again soon after putting it to the use she does. There's plenty of Venice on show, including the actual Academy of Music, and it just goes to show how location porn resembles the real thing that I found myself wanting the camera to pan a bit to the left so, for example, I could get a look at the long-covered façade of the Accademia. I found this online, without English subtitles, but even though I couldn't understand what they were saying, as I skipped through the video file, I knew I wasn't missing much - the universal language of bad acting.
 

Two from The Aspern papers




Avenger of Venice

Book Club

Three from Brideshead Revisited 1981
 

Brideshead Revisited 2008



Le Cadeau

The Comfort of Strangers 1990
When I first saw this film I found it disturbing and confusing, like the book, and didn't like it. Seventeen years on I watched the DVD and liked it a lot more. It's still disturbing, if not quite as much as back then, and I still don't know what it's supposed to be about. Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett play a callow and troubled couple on holiday in Venice, trying to fix and/or understand their relationship, who fall into the clutches of a psycho-couple played by Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren. There's much atmospheric photography of Venice, by day and by night, with repeated use of red-tinged mistiness at night, presumably meant to be suggestive of hell. The book's setting was only implied as Venice, but here all is real and recognisable Venice, except for the palazzo interior of the predatory couple's apartment, which looks like a stage set, maybe on purpose. So it gives good Venice, and has an effectively evoked sense of gathering threat, but it still confuses. I can see that there are post-80s themes of freedom/bondage and liberality/repression going on here, but the ending still does not bring comprehension.
August 2020 update A new 4K remaster on Criterion Blu-ray in the US is reportedly sparkling. But it's expensive, and prohibitively expensive to ship to the UK too. But there is a UK Blu-ray from 2018, which is pretty cheap and includes three archive films: The Glass Makers of Murano (1928), Venice in War Time (1918),  and City Lights (1964). The last two are about the transportation of munitions and coal respectively. Irresistable!
 

A Dance to the Music of Time 1997
An excellent, if somewhat drastically shortened, BBC television adaptation of Anthony Powell's 12-novel sequence dealing with intersecting lives lived and dances danced through the major events of the 20th century. Simon Russell Beale's in it, and there are cameos from John Gielgud, Alan Bennett, Zoe Wannamaker, Michael Williams and Miranda Richardson. It gets to Venice in the last of the four episodes. The Venice sequence, contained in the novel Temporary Kings, is relatively lingered over and it's a good enough palazzo-fix, with an imitation Tiepolo ceiling plot-device telling the same story as Kristin Scott-Thomas told in The English Patient and reflecting the episode's concentration on voyeurism and weird sex generally. Along with much death and some masks, this all goes toward making it a very Venetian experience.
Available on DVD from a few years back, but not for much under £50 now.

Anywhere you've ever visited? Two from Dangerous Beauty





Two from Dr Who - Vampires of Venice




 

Don't Look Now

The Miracoli church sure did need cleaning!
 

Effie Gray
After many years of delays, legal and production-related, Effie Gray finally appeared in 2014, and lo it was deemed to be OK. The casting changed over the years, and another writer said that Emma Thompson had nicked his idea. The fact that this idea was based on a true story makes this challenge seem nonsense, of course. The story is of John Ruskin marrying a much younger woman and then not having sex with her. She then divorces him based on his impotence, and shacks up with the artist Millais. The film stops short of the court case, and is hence really only about the marriage. Effie is sweet and intelligent, Millais is confused and then smitten, and Ruskin is a heartless mother-smothered bastard. The story isn't dumbed down exactly but it's also not stuffed full of nuance. A scene where Effie tries to relate Ruskin's ideas on the architecture of Venice to his feelings for her has a bit of frisson going for it, but art is not really the subject here. The pair get married with a backdrop of snow falling, and then everything is cool and rainy and blue-coloured from then on. It rains, mostly, their home is all blue tones inside, they go and stay in Scotland and it's all misty and rainy and the cottage interior is all...blue and cool. You get the (blue) picture? Venice features for about 20 minutes, and it looks lovely in a well-lit widescreen way. Locations used are mostly pretty canals, views from palazzi and some (love) action that leaps geographically inauthentically from the Doge's Palace to the Miracoli church and the alleys between the Palazzo Barbaro and the music conservatory. Also a picturesque courtyard - the one where Effie does a Busby Berkeley - that I didn't recognise. (Since identified as the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello - thanks to Jonathan) London locations include Osterley House and the ubiquitous Greenwich Naval College. Not insulting, then, but not challenging. Not unenjoyable, but not unpredictable.

Emanuelle in America 1977
Some films dealt with on this page have so little going for them that the Venetian setting is the main appeal. This film is infamous for so many reasons that the partial Venetian setting pales into almost humourous unimportance. It was directed by Joe D'Amato, yet another Italian creator of films full of mutilation, horror and nasty things happening to naked women. It features Laura Gemser, the star of the Black Emanuelle series (she's actually Indonesian) as a photojournalist from New York on the trail of a good story that also features women getting naked. (You'll note that she's Emanuelle with one M, presumably to head off legal action.) Along the way she gets to investigate a rich man's harem and a rich women's equivalent, observe a young woman practicing horse masturbation and observe and film, and participate in, much sex, orgies etc. But hers isn't the unsimulated stuff the film is renowned for. And then there's the snuff films. You can see why this film has a certain reputation. But the Venice-set scenes are fun! There's the usual geographically-impossible gondola ride, a palazzo that seems to move up and down the Grand Canal depending on which window you look out of, and some 'action' in the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory of Music, a location strangely beloved of makers of porn films in Venice. We spend about 20 minutes in Venice, and I confess I've only sample-watched. You don't pay me enough to watch the whole thing.

Emmanuelle in Venice 1993
Features Marcella Walerstein as young Emmanuelle, with ex-Bond George Lazenby and the original Emmanuelle Sylvia Kristel as Old Emmanuelle, which suggests a very Venetian theme of aging and decay. Well no, it's actually about old Emmanuelle flashing back, as it were, to when she helped a young widow overcome her misery and her mother-in-law. She does this using her special mystic-sexual powers, so that she just has to touch a charmed liquid to the cleft between her naked breasts, which results in lightning striking, and the widow goes all peculiar and immediately becomes a better and sexier person. She shows this by stopping whipping her maid and instead teaching her the ways of lesbian sex, and then taking her to Paris to go shopping and eat ice cream. I know, how far-fetched is that - she lives in Venice and goes to Paris for ice cream!? This is probably as far as I'm going to go in my dedication to watching all the Venice-set films I can get my hands on. It was very cheap, but still. The Venice exteriors are pretty much stock shots taken from boats on canals and the interiors are semi-convincing sets. But Venice is just a source of bits of business to intersperse between the tedious plot and the soft-core porn, of course, which is pretty much your standard dry, panting stuff. The only joy being admiring quaint details like, for example, some frantic copulation featuring a chap still glimpsably wearing his underpants. Clever.

Les Enfants du Siècle (Children of the Century) 1999 Diane Kurys
A film about the French writer George Sand's tempestuous relationship with Alfred de Musset. Juliette Binoche plays Sand and Benoit Magimel plays de Musset. (The pair began a four-year relationship whilst making this film.) It's an admirable if not, for me, lovable film. And a  bit long at 137 minutes on the DVD -  the original French theatrical length. The story, of a strong older woman's devotion to an unworthy young wastrel, is not particularly original but is done well enough. The middle 40 minutes gives good Venice. Some odd angles are used, presumably to exclude vaporetti and intrusive modern details, but this film does a fine job of conjuring up Austrian-occupied Venice, with its covered-in gondolas and infestation of uniforms. And evidently the rooms in the Danieli where the couple stayed are the ones used in the film, although the orangey façade of the Palazzo Pisani Moretta stands in for exterior shots. There's also a scene of de Musset pissed in the rain at the film-favourite location by Santa Maria Valverde.

Eva (Eve - UK title) 1962 Joseph Losey
Misery and misanthropy from Joseph Losey as Stanley Baker plays an arrogant working class Welsh lad made good (of course, this film was made in the 60's) whose first novel gets made into a film, which puts him in a black and white Venice for the film festival. He stays on and buys a house on Torcello, which is invaded one wet night by tart-with-no-heart Jeanne Moreau. His obsession with her threatens his relationship with his film's director's assistant, amidst recriminations, revelations and, yes, a gondola funeral. A dated film, to be sure, in its self-conscious 'European' artiness, jazzy soundtrack and rather obvious imagery. But Venice looks fine in the winter and the story, from a James Hadley Chase novel originally set in America, keeps you interested, just about.

Everyone says I love you 1996 Woody Allen
You need to be able to cope with the whole musicals suspension-of-disbelief thing to appreciate this one. Also the way that Woody's blotted his copybook in recent years - personally and professionally - has to not affect you. And the fact that his whole shtick was starting to wear a bit thin at this stage. But apart from that...it's still not a very good film. The plot concerns a family of rich New Yorkers and their various interconnected love-life difficulties. Julia Roberts and Goldie Hawn acquit themselves fine, but the dialogue and the musical numbers just lack much conviction and any spark. Thirty minutes in there's a fifteen-minute Venice episode, which is why I'm writing this of course. Julia R. jogs around Dorsoduro and through Campo Santo Stefano, meeting Woody in Campiello Barbaro (see right). There's some standard fish market action, and a hotel terrace opposite the Salute. Tintoretto is a plot device, as is a visit to the San Rocco Scuola, and then it's back to New York. Not a long Venice fix, then, and not a good film.

Executioner of Venice (Il boia di Venezia) 1963
In 17th-century Venice the Grand Inquisitor is hatching plots to usurp the doge, even including the arrest of the doge's son as he's about to be married, in San Giorgio Maggiore. The ensuing shenanigans feature much political jiggery-pokery, lots of pirates, and the buckling of many swashes. It's an attempt at one of those hands-on-hips swaggering swordfests like Errol Flynn used to star in, and it doesn't make a bad fist of it, despite its low budget. The doge's son is played by Lex Barker, famous for playing Tarzan a decade previously, and the villainous Inquisitor is played by Guy Madison, famous for playing Wild Bill Hickok a lot in the same period. This film was made in Italy, and the dialogue is dubbed in the English version and can get a bit ripe, but is often also surprisingly witty. The acting is variable too, but far from unbearable. There's massed swordfights on Torcello, in front of Santa Fosca, and in the Doge's Palace courtyard. The heroes are the poor and downtrodden masses, who live on Giudecca, described as a den of wickedness and lawlessness but looking a lot like the Rialto fish market to me. Some filming in front of Santa Maria Valverde too, a favourite spot of so many film makers, being picturesque but off the beaten track. Not bad at all.
The DVD I managed to find and buy online is a pretty low-quality copy of a VHS tape, badly pan-and-scanned and probably recorded from a television broadcast long long ago.

A Few Days in September 2007
A CIA agent (Nick Nolte) has knowledge of impending terrorist attacks and so needs to get his daughter, his son, and a French woman he once worked with (Juliette Binoche) to meet him in Venice. They are pursued by a 'poetic psycho' played by John Turturro. They all meet up on September 11th 2001. The reviews weren't great, and so my expectations were modest, but this wasn't as bad as I'd dreaded, just not as good as it thinks it is. The dialogue is quite sharp, the photography too tricksy, and the performances mixed. Juliette B has fun playing the ex-foxy agent whose best pals are her gun and her tortoise, but Turturro's bonkers psycho, who kills indiscriminately and then rings his shrink on his mobile, is more than a little unoriginal. Overall the film's plotting is just not that fresh. The last hour is all set in Venice, though, and the setting is dealt with in an unshowy and 'real' way. No cliché Salute shots, no predictable scenes in San Marco, just recognisable and evocative wanderings and views. And what did happen to the tortoise?

Il Fornaretto di Venezia 1963 (US TV title: The Scapegoat)
A play written in 1846 by Francesco Dall'Ongaro and also filmed in 1939 and 1952. Directed by Duccio Tessari who co-wrote the screenplay with Marcello Fondato, it's set in the 16th century and tells the story of a working-class lad, a baker, sentenced to death for attacking a noble. It stars Jacques Perrin, Michele Morgan and Sylva Koscina, and reportedly gives good Venice.

The Garden of Earthly Delights 2004
As 2018 dawns the number of films set in Venice which remain to be discovered dwindles. The good news about this one is that it's very concerned with art, and Hieronymus Bosch in particular, unsurprisingly, given the title, although a bit unusually. The downside is that it's centrally about someone going to Venice to die, which is a bit of a cliché, and it looks very handheld, shaky and arty. The director is Lech Majewski, who also made The Mill and the Cross, which is basically a - reportedly plotless - film set inside The Way to Calvary, another Bosch painting. We'll see.

Giallo a Venezia 1979
The giallo as a literary genre is pretty much synonymous with the hard-boiled crime thriller. When the term is applied to film you're in for something a bit more juicy. So this one begins with a couple found dead on Giudecca - she's drowned and he's been stabbed in the goolies, repeatedly. A story unfolds of the depraved acts the husband had forced the wife to suffer, and we get to watch them all in flashback, in detail. So it's basically porn bookended with a murder, and with some more gruesome murders in between. To add spice there's a detective who's 'thing' is eating hard-boiled eggs. And some voyeurism in a boatyard involving a spooky Kevin Keegan lookalike. (The tragic 70's hairstyles and 'taches are a feature in themselves.) There's a fair amount of Venetian location action too - mostly ordinary, not to say dull, but one short scene was filmed near the Stucky mill - now a luxury hotel - when it was a building site. I can't really recommend this film, to Venice fans or to sensitive types, but if you have a strong stomach and want to see what the giallo genre has to offer I suppose you could do worse. But you'd have to try very hard.
The releasing of this kinda stuff is erratic and short-term, it seems. I bought it as an 'unofficial' copy from an online supplier. It looked to have been copied from a manky old VHS tape and the image was cropped square from the widescreen original. An American company called Code Red released it on Blu-ray in 2016; and in August 2018 it came out on Blu-ray in the UK, courtesy of Scorpion Releasing, with a commentary by a film historian, even.
 

From Effie Gray



Two from Emanuelle in America




Two from Children of the Century




Two from Everyone says I love you



 
Two from Executioner of Venice

 

Two from The Honey Pot featuring
the exterior of the Palazzo van Axel.




One from In memoria di me.



Two from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

from The L of E G


from The Lost Moment


Two from Marco Polo

Two from Monster of Venice
 


Three from Moonraker

A speedboat has just chopped the obliviously snogging
couple's gondola in half, you see.

 

Lovejoy - Death and Venice 1986
I'll admit I didn't watch any of this TV series at the time: it, and Ian McShane its star, just never appealed. But I may have to admit, 20-odd years on, that I made a mistake. On the strength of this two-part story from series 1 it seems to have been pretty sharply written and humourous in an appealingly low-key way. Also, spookily, the first episode of this pair was first aired one day after my birthday in 1986. It sees shady antiques dealer Lovejoy getting mixed up in a cartel of greedy rich bastards and their plan to own Venice, one artwork at a time. It gives great Venice, albeit with 1980s low-res 4:3 VT quality. There's a lot of filming around Campo Sant'Angelo and a scene in front of the Misericordia church, another of my favourite much-filmed spots. Unusual care is taken to be geographically accurate - once established the palazzo of the baddies stays where it is, for example, no matter how and when it's approached. There's also Haydn Gwynne, appearing in her first TV role, as a sexy Italian tour guide called Cosima. The fashions and attitudes are very 80s, and there are a few dated and trite touches, but this is overall superior stuff and very much a Venetian treat.
The series was adapted from the original novels written by Jonathan Gash, with these episodes taken from one called The Gondola Scam.

Marco Polo
A US drama series, produced by Netflix, which began in December 2014, this deals with the Venetian merchant's early years spent, we are expected to believe, as a servant/slave of Kublai Khan, having been given to the ruler by his father to gain trading advantages. It's all very handsomely mounted, and was rumoured to have cost the same sort of money as The Game of Thrones. The actor playing Marco is actually Italian, but there's probably no-one you would of heard of amongst the impressive racial mixture of actors, except for Joan Chen maybe, who was in Twin Peaks. Lots of location filming, mostly in Kazakhstan and at Pinewood Studios in Malaysia, but there are some pretty CGI-enhanced Venetian scenes before Marco travels. That he does this by stowing away despite his father's prohibition, that he has to learn various martial arts at the Khan's court, and that he falls for a pretty princess gives you some idea of the narrative originality here. As is par for the current course there's plenty of brutality and sex, but no naughty bits on show. And of course, being American, it's all about family relationships. Unchallenging fun.

The Merchant of Venice 2004
Some nice misty Venetian exteriors, but the interiors are somewhat unconvincing with their preponderance of pale frescoes, which just aren't possible in the dampness of Venice's atmosphere. Handsome values overall, though, despite the inauthentic decor - filmed in Luxembourg to save money - and nicely acted. I've never seen or studied the play, so I found Shylock's status as an oppressed victim of prejudice and his eventual humiliation a little confusing. 

Mission to Venice Agent Spécial à Venise 1964
Based on a James Hadley Chase novel, this one stars Sean Flynn, the son of Errol and actress Lili Damita, who was the subject of paternity wrangles his whole life and died at the age of 30 in Cambodia whilst working as a photographer during the Vietnam war, missing presumed killed. He was also the subject of the Clash song Sean Flynn, on the Combat Rock album.

Monday Morning 2002
A film which concentrates on life's rich tapestry rolling by, rather than any kind of strong plot, so you get a film full eccentric characters and droll situations. Such relentless oddity could wear thin, but the depth of the humanity provides firm balance. It's all about a factory worker and family man who one Monday morning decides to bunk off work, go see his dad, and then go see some of the world. His first destination is Venice, where he makes good friends, gets his pockets picked and has some feckless fun. There's some good and real use of Venice, mostly along sunny canals, but also around La Maddalena church. And there's a scene filmed on a rooftop behind San Zaccaria, with vistas to take your breath away. There's also gentle humour, realistic humanity, and a recurring motif of people seen through windows.

from Nero Veneziano


Two from Night Train to Venice



Two from Nosferatu in Venice





Two from Nudo di Donna




Two from The Protectors

 

Passion in Venice 1995
Italian porn, which tells one woman's story as she visits Venice and 'tries to become acclimated to the spontaneous couplings that happen all around her!' And haven't we all been there?

Peccati a Venezia 1980
A love triangle involving cousins, a murder, and an elderly aunt.

Play me something 1989
In which John Berger collaborated with director Timothy Neat to film one of his short stories, about a group of people waiting for a flight to Glasgow on the Hebridean island of Barra. While they wait, Berger himself, playing a mesmerising storyteller, tells them a tale of a peasant on a trip to Venice. The film mixes colour and black-and-white, 35mm and blown-up 16mm footage, and still photographs by Jean Mohr. Sounds arty but interesting. A DVD or a download so far not found.

The Protectors
This was a typically 70s Brit TV series featuring a team of wealthy private detectives who jetted off to glamourous European destinations to right wrongs. There were three in the team:  Nyree Dawn Porter played the wacky-hatted Contessa Caroline di Contini, Robert Vaughn was Harry Rule, and there was a third bloke who everyone has forgotten. The series was created by Gerry Anderson and was his one venture into non-sci-fi live action. There were two episodes featuring Venice.
Season 2 Episode 7: Goodbye George
The Contessa has this episode to herself. She goes solo to Venice to find out why a wealthy American's son who has moved to Venice to develop his art and who previously had made little use of his inheritance is now milking said funds mightily. Blackmail is suspected and the disappearance of his good friend George is suspicious too. Watching this whisks you back to simpler times, when tapping into the post-60s aspirational mood with some added mildly sophisticated plotting was enough. It's not unentertaining, though, and features some solid and realistic use of locations - San Marco, of course, but also the San Trovaso boatyard and Campo San Barnaba (see left). And I have to admit there was a nifty plot twist I didn't see coming. This episode was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg whose other work included directing many Beatles and Rolling Stones videos and most of the TV Brideshead Revisited.
Season 2 Episode 15: Lena
Plot sophistication is sadly missing from this one, though, but Robert Vaughn and Nyree Dawn Porter do both appear. A journalist called Lena, played by Judy Parfitt, is investigating the suspiciously sudden rise of a rich right-wing politician. She's helped by a student activist played by Roger Lloyd-Pack, and the slimy politician is a young John Thaw. The plotting and action is pretty ropey, and Robert Vaughan strolls through the thing like he's on his holidays. But we do get good Venice, from the statutory drinks on a terrace with the Salute as a backdrop to the fish market and also some unusual island action, including a sequence in some overgrown and deserted hospital buildings on the island of Poveglia. See the screen grab with campanile (left). Also some business, and a desperate van chase, on the Pellestrina riva.
 

from The Redhead


Three from Senso





From Shark in Venice.
I'm sorry I couldn't find any scenes of fins breaking the surface of canals.


From The Story of Us

The Redemption of the Fish (La Redempcio Dels Peixos) 2013
A Catalan film directed by Jordi Torrent. The blurb says: Marc travels to Venice in a quest to meet the father he never knew - a rite of passage for a young man seeking to make sense of his own life story - but in the process he discovers his father’s murky past. As he enters the age-old labyrinth of Venice with its temptations and its delusions, its beauties and its deceits - what will he bring away? A wind-up musical gondola toy and a nasty rash, I would guess.

The Redhead (Die Rote) 1962
In this German film, made in black and white, Ruth Leuwerik plays a woman who flees to Venice, from her life as a rich man's mistress, conveniently married off to one of her lover's drier employees. You can see how she might be having a bit of a life crisis. In a dark, damp and misty out-of-season Venice she looks for work, ponders her life and choices, and meets two men. Rossano Brazzi plays a witty writer of history books - a more obtuse and scholarly version of the seducer he had played in Summertime. Giorgio Albertazzi plays an Irish ex-spy, living off his family brewery fortune on his yacht and haunted by his wartime failures, and by Gert Fröbe as his Nazi nemesis. It's all very dark and philosophical, but with a wit that effectively fends off frowns and pretentiousness. And this is the best out of season Venice seen on film this side of Don't Look Now - all mist and glowing lamps and lovingly filmed. Being made in black and white somewhat dilutes the narrative import of her redheadedness though.

Le Retour de Casanova 1992
Casanova now has his own page

Rouge Venise 1989
A French film set in 18th-century Venice, a murder mystery featuring Goldoni and Vivaldi.

The Scapegoat 2015
Three jewel thieves are hiding out in Venice after a job goes wrong, deciding who's going to take the rap. So not a million mils from the plot of In Bruges. Written and directed by  Cathy Beasley who was also responsible for A Venetian Dream, released the same year.

A Secret Affair 1999
A telly film based on a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel. A beautiful business women on holiday in Venice has a thing with a pushy Irish TV reporter and starts to question her hollow money-based lifestyle. I sampled this on my computer to see what it was like. It seems to give good Venice in the first hour but, although she seems good enough, he was very annoying and stiff, even when I was just skimming. I may do it justice, I suppose, one rainy Sunday afternoon.

Secret Passage 2004
Set in 15th-century Venice, the story centres on Jewish sisters fleeing persecution in Spain, and seems to involve the stealing of Murano glass-making secrets. Stars include  John Turturro and his wife Katherine Borowitz, another Coen brothers regular, and amongst the Brits are Tara Fitzgerald and noted thesps Anton Rodgers and Ronald Pickup.

Senso (aka Livia) 1954
This is an earlier Venice-set film from Luchino Visconti, the director of Death in Venice, but it's not a patch on The Leopard. It's set in the final days of the Austrian occupation and tells the pretty predictable tale of a contessa's doomed infatuation with an Austrian soldier. Farley Grainger makes a good handsome heartless bastard, but is ill-served by bad dubbing. Alida Valli shines as the Contessa. There's a mess of heaving bosoms and breathlessness behind veils, with plenty of trousers with stripes up the legs. You get the picture? There's also some good Venice in the first half hour, and the photography is generally pretty special. The film opens with a performance at La Fenice and following the most recent fire enlarged stills from this sequence were used in the restoration. Much footage was cut from the final battle scenes, it is said, by the Italian government to blunt its criticism of the feebleness of the ruling class's commitment to the Italian cause at the time.

Senso '45 (aka Black Angel) 2002
This comes courtesy of Tinto Brass, the director of Caligula, so you'd expect soft-core porn with a thin veneer of European 'respectability'. What you'd not expect is for the Italian arts ministry to consider it 'culturally significant' enough to put 1.6 million Euros into it. The film is truly tosh, and not even that sexy. Based on the same novel by Camillo Boito as Senso above, but this time the setting is time-shifted to the last days of the Nazi occupation.

Shark in Venice 2008
Starring Stephen Baldwin, this is reportedly not so much a Jaws rip-off as a gangster-filled Indiana Jones rip-off. Stephen is not the talented Baldwin and the director, Danny Lerner, is reputedly a safe pair of hands when it comes to B-movies, but is here working much further down the alphabet. The plot involves Baldwin's character searching for his father, who disappeared whilst diving in Venice. His investigations uncover Mafia connections and a search for the lost fortune of the Medici. The sharks seem to be an afterthought. There's filming  in Venice, but Baldwin seems to have been superimposed over it later. At one stage a baddie under the arches of the Doge's Palace keeps an eye on Baldwin and his girlfriend whilst the pair of them are in some kind of generic brick-walled street market, obviously a set. There's also some underground action, despite Venice having no ground to get under. You can watch this on Amazon Prime. By sampling scenes I can confirm that this is indeed tosh, the kind of film where the black-clad baddies can also be identified by how they recklessly barge through crowds,  knocking people out of the way. Bastards!

Shun Li and the Poet 2011
The story of the relationship between a young Chinese woman and an older fisherman from Yugoslavia living in Chioggia. 

The Siege of Venice (Caccia alla Vedova) 1991
A Russian film in which Isabella Rossellini plays a woman widowed on her wedding day who thereby becomes very wealthy and so is plagued by suitors, and the Republic of Venice who fear that her money will go abroad if she marries a foreigner. It's based on a Goldoni play called The Sly Widow and it's pretty broad unsubtle stuff. I laughed maybe three times. It features Tom Conti with an accent and performance seemingly based on Manuel in Fawlty Towers, and James Wilby as a cold Englishman. What it doesn't feature is Venice, as this was all filmed on sets in Moscow. But it's short and it looks good.

Solamente Nero 1978 Antonio Bido
A giallo which went under the English title The Bloodstained Shadow, which somebody must have thought was clever. Reportedly as gruesome as you'd expect but not as good as you'd want. Mostly filmed in a misty wintry Venice.

The Story of Us 1999 Rob Reiner
Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer play a couple whose relationship has hit big rocks. Their attempt to salvage something involves a short trip to Venice - no more than ten minutes. It involves a gelato fridge miraculously appearing in Campo San Vio (see right) and the obligatory meal on the hotel terrace opposite the Salute. On the whole this is not a film I can recommend, or want to see again. It lacks conviction and spark and originality. I can best describe it as one of those films where the troubled couple goes from calm discussion to shouting in no seconds flat, in a frown-inducingly unconvincing way. Bruce Willis looks uncomfortable without a gun in his hand and Michelle Pfeiffer just looks a bit weird. Did she have work done (on her lips?) in the 90s?

Summertime 1955

Three from Tempesta
 

Two from The Thief of Venice


 

The mystery campo in Venice in Us,
and a strange hilly Venetian alley.

Veneciafrenia 2022
A Spanish slasher about a party of hard- partying young Spanish tourists whose time in Venice is somewhat spoiled by their getting bumped off in various gory ways by locals, dressed for carnevale, resentful of disrespectful tourists. One way of solving the problem I suppose. They swear a lot and don't seem keen to visit any churches at all, so death's too good for them, I think. Looks nasty.
 
The Venetian Affair 1967
I had read somewhere that this film, based on a Helen MacInnes novel, was one of those arch late-60s spy spoofs, but it plays pretty straight, at least until about an hour in, and even then I'm not sure that the hokeyness is intentional. Robert Vaughn stars as an ex-CIA agent with a past and a drink habit, sent to Venice to investigate an exploding diplomat at a peace conference. The ensuing plot involves mind control drugs (always a convenient solution for lingering plot holes), plush sets, double agents aplenty and a Lalo Schifrin score, of course, featuring bossa nova dulcimers. It also has Carl Boehm playing his usual cold Eastern European slime ball, Elke Sommer playing Vaughn's past, Boris Karloff in one of his last films, and Edward Asner. The Venice we get is unglamourous and often wet and nicely filmed. There are a couple of puzzling interiors - one is supposed to be the inside of San Zanipolo, but isn't. This film was banned in Finland, was never released in the UK, and evidently the tagline on the publicity for it was Vaughn! Venice! Vooom! Entertaining enough, but I wouldn't say special.

The Venetian Affair 2008
A film of the Andrea di Robilant book has been 'in development' for years.

Venetian Bird (aka The Assassin) 1952
Not a film I'd heard of or a book I'd read when, in 2013, I got told about the film, read the book (which had only just been republished as an ebook) and then the film came out on DVD. The film follows the book's plot very closely, not surprising as author Victor Canning wrote the script too. I won't repeat the plot as I cover it in the book review. It is not without its conveniences but also has some snappy dialogue and zips along in a roughly believable fashion.  John Gregson is Edward Mercer, our hard-bitten hero, with Eva Bartok the icy love interest and old standbys like Sid James, George Coulouris and Miles Malleson giving their Italian accents a work out. (Eva Bartok had married a Nazi at 15 to save her life, had starred with Burt Lancaster in The Crimson Pirate around this time, went on to marry Curt Jurgens, was cited in a Mountbatten's divorce case and had a love child she claimed was Frank Sinatra's). Director Ralph Thomas is more famous for directing the Doctor films. Lots of Piazza San Marco scenes, as usual, but the rest of the filming is mostly around Dorsoduro - the Salute, of course, but Campo San Vio (used for the hotel terrace in Summertime a few years later) features as the campo in front of the villain's plush art gallery, and the entrance to the cloister beside Santa Maria della Visitazione stands in for a Murano glassworks. The Maddalena church gets named and darkly and mistily used early on too. This is lived-in Venice rather than touristy Venice, which is refreshing, but there's another rooftop chase finale and the usual liberties with topography are taken.

Venetian Dream 2015
Written and directed by Cathy Beasley who was also responsible for The Scapegoat, released the same year. But I can't find a plot for this one.

Venetian Honeymoon 1959
Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, who was also responsible for several 1940s Ealing gems, like Went the day well? and Nicholas Nickleby. An Arab prince turns out to be an impostor, there are jewels to be stolen... Loosely based on the novel Les noces vénitiennes by Abel Hermant, this Italian/French production looks only to have ever been released in France and Italy.

La Venexiana (The Venetian Woman) Italy 1986
This film has the reputation of being soft-core porn, but it really isn't. The acting is solid, the dialogue quite witty, the camera work, design and costumes impressive, and the Ennio Morricone music is amongst his best, even sounding like Chi Mai in places, and without the screechy children's choir he sometimes favours. In fact there's something almost Shakesperean (no, really) about the much to do there is here, about nothing more than two older women wanting to shag a handsome foreigner, new in town. There's even some jaunty and unconvincing cross-dressing. The stranger is played by Jason Connery, just months before his career-defining turn as Robin Hood on TV. You don't get to see his willy, of course, and actually there's more location porn action here than the other sort. Lots of filming around San Zanipolo, the Miracoli church, and Palazzo van Axel, with some scenes around the Misericordia too. All places not unknown in Venice-set films, but all looking very grimy and unkempt. Not bad at all. Available on DVD in Italy.

La Venexiana Italy 1998
The second film with this title features the adventures of the daughter of a Venetian patrician family in, it looks like, the 18th century. Casanova's ghost also puts in an appearance.

Venice, the Moon and You (Venezia, la Luna e Tu) 1958
Directed by Dino Risi and starring Alberto Sordi, the latter being big in Italy but not so well-known elsewhere. He plays a gondolier about to marry his childhood sweetheart, she having insisted he give back all the gifts given to him by his gondoliering conquests, and that he stop transporting attractive tourists. But then along come a comely pair...

Venice: Theme and Variations 1957
A 28 minute documentary made by James Ivory (of Merchant Ivory fame) as his master's thesis at the University of Southern California film school, which makes it his first film.
Update 2023 Still not available on DVD or to stream.

The Venice Project 1999
Dennis Hopper plays an avant-garde artist living in Venice, California whose sister, played by Lauren Bacall, is living in the family palazzo in Venice, Italy. Their father The Viscount, played by John Wood, is near to death and announces that he's going to bequeath the family home and its art treasures to the nation. All this against the backdrop of the Biennale. It also stars Linus Roache, Ben Cross, Dean Stockwell, Stockard Channing, and Mia Maestro (Sydney's sister in the TV series Alias). Why did we never get a chance to see this, it being so star-studded, and why has it never made it onto DVD or any streaming platform? The fact that some sources give Hector Babenco - who also acts in the film - as the director, and the imdb has Robert Dornhelm, may give some clue to some problems in the making.

Venice/Venice 1992
Director Henry Jaglom is in Venice, Italy for the film festival, where a gorgeous French journalist/fan takes his fancy and something develops. Later she comes to Venice, California where he lives, to stir up his life. This is one of those pseudo-real jobs, where people talk a lot about reality and fiction and love and life and compare their lives to films. It's a bit like Woody Allen with less laughs, but mostly it's solid involving stuff. Most of the Venice, Italy content is around the Lido, but there are a couple of quite nice trips down canals in Venice itself. One for fans of Jaglom rather than fans of Venice, I think, but it has whetted my appetite for more of his work.

Welcome Venice 2021
An Italian film in which two brothers in conflict embody Venice's past and future, one being a fisherman and the other keen to embrace the prosperity offered by tourism. As of July 2022 it's only been released in Italy, Poland and the Ukraine. The names of all involved are new to me, but the film looks to give authentic Venice. I can't find English subtitles but sampling  through it it looks to be full of real-life, dialogue, natural-light photography and small crabs.

A Whisper in the Dark (Un Sussuro nel buio) 1976
Straight off I need to say that this film has about 5 minutes of Venice in it. The blurb says that the action's set in a 'decadent Venetian villa', but it's actually the Villa Condulmer in Mogliano on the mainland. But to fend off my feelings of foolishness at having bought the damn thing I'm reviewing it here, and telling you it's a treat for the eyes and torture for the ears, much like Who saw he die? below. Bad dubbing, cheesy music and dialogue, and a children's choir going 'la la la' at regular intervals is set against some notably opulent design and good camera work.

Who saw her die?
Directed by Aldo Lado, this is an Italian film starring worst-Bond-ever and chocolate advert star George Lazenby, sporting some tragic 70s facial hair, as an artist hunting the killer of his daughter in a tastefully misty winter Venice. It's kind of like Don't Look Now - kind of - except that this one has some soft-core porn, is a bit more nasty, and has a soundtrack featuring a screechy kids' choir written by Ennio Morricone. The photography is actually pretty good, with some good use of locations, including a memorable pursuit through the then-derelict Molino Stucky on Giudecca - see below. (It's now a luxury hotel, but the windows remain the same.) The film has a washed out look, though, which may be intentional, or the fault of an old print; and some of the the dubbed dialogue is truly atrocious. I doubt there's a subtitled version available - I watched a cheapo video available from www.salvation-films.com Easy on the eye, but hard on the ears, this one's well worth a look, then, if you too see it in a bargain bin. 
Update This is now available on DVD and streamable on Amazon, and it turns out that the washed-out look was down to the video, as the picture quality of the DVD is first rate and sharp. This helps accentuate what's good about this film, but the not-so-good acting and ropey dubbing remain. Still, this gives great Venice, using backstreet locations and looking really real. The DVD extras often include a short interview with the director in which he reveals he grew up in Venice and wanted to show a non-touristy and grimmer side of Venice. Mission accomplished.
 

From Veneciafrenia


From The Venetian Affair 1967


Two from Venetian Bird



Two from La Venexiana



From Welcome Venice



 

The Wings of the Dove