fictional cities :: venice films

	Blame it on the bellboy 1991 The plot for this one revolves around some three-way mistaken identity involving a hit man out to murder a Mafia don, a lowly worm sent to buy a villa for his abusive boss, and a Lord Mayor out for some extra-marital hanky panky. Their names are confused by an h-dropping bellboy and much 'hilarity' ensues, like birds getting accidentally shot when the hit man is distracted and a fat man wanting to have sex with a skinny woman and getting stuck in revolving doors. The later on some briefcases get mixed up. Sigh! The actors aren't bad: Penelope Wilton, Bryan Brown, Richard Griffiths (Harry Potter's step-father) and Alison Steadman all do their best, and Dudley Moore does very little, in what was to be his last big-screen appearance. From the credit sequence this starts out looking like a slick travelogue, and sounding like a cheesy one - so that every time Patsy Kensit appears the music lapses into that sleazy sax playing that always used to signal 'sexy babe on screen', in case you wouldn't have noticed otherwise. But like a travel video it gives good Venice - and features one of my favourite Grand Canal-side palazzos in the plot (the Palazzetto Stern, pictured left). But apart from that it's really one of the worst most bone-headed comedy films you're ever likely to suffer.
Blume in love 1973 Paul Mazursky George Segal plays a lawyer looking back on his failed marriage and realises he still loves his wife. His looking back is done from the Piazza San Marco and this reportedly gives good Venice and is a quirky gem. Bread and tulips Well here's something you don't see everyday - an Italian film featuring 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 Palazzo Barbaro (before its recent clean) and they stay there as guests of Sebastian's father. The interiors were filmed there too, 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) has better picture quality, evidently, than the set from a few years before that I bought, but is still not what you'd call sparkling or perfect, it seems. Capriccio Veneziano 2002 An 'adult' 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 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. Casanova 1976 (aka Fellini's Casanova) This was all filmed on the Cinecitta soundstages in Rome and so whilst the first half-hour in Venice is very Venetian, it's also very papier-mâché. The opening scene features a bizarre imaginary ceremony on the Grand Canal beside the Rialto Bridge, and with the campanile of San Marco looming over, where the doge cuts a ribbon, a man flies down from the campanile on a wire into the canal, and a metal sculpted head is raised up. Donald Sutherland plays the man himself, dubbed into Italian and then subtitled back at us. The film is based on Casanova's autobiographical writings but liberties are taken, and it paints an unsympathetic picture of the man as not so much a lover of women and a sex machine. Being late Fellini it's all very lush and decadent and camp, but pretty enjoyable and attention-holding on the whole. The sex is not very sexy, truth be told, with shots of our hero's heaving upper body and sweaty face dominating and not much nudity. So it's down to the strange stories, grotesque characters and odd decor and costumes to keep us entertained. And they do. Casanova 2005 Future Dr Who David Tennant in this TV version played a Casanova more authentic than Heath Ledger did in the other 2005 Casanova below. As did Peter O'Toole here as clapped-out Casanova at the end of his life. But none of it was shot in Venice. Casanova 2005 Not as bad as the reviews might have lead us to believe, this is nonetheless a pretty light romp through a pretty standard tale of love won and discussed. You know - the strong and accomplished heroine who hides her light behind a male persona encounters Casanova, thinks him a shallow and deceitful user of women who knows nought of real love... There's lots of pretending to be who you're not and masks and baroque music and standard-strength feminism. What you don't get is much sex, despite the US 'R' rating - not even heaving bosoms let alone nipples or bums. There's Jeremy Irons - many years after Brideshead (above) having a high old time camping it up as the vicious inquisitor from Rome, though, and a good selection or reliable Brit thesps. It very much has the feel of those swashbuckling Dick Lester Musketeer films of the 70s. This one was filmed totally in Venice, but with copious computer generation of, for example, gondola-filled distances and the city by night from a hot-air balloon. Amongst the interior locations you might notice the Scuola di San Rocco and the Doge's Palace. The exteriors include a market set up on the Fondamenta della Misericordia, in front of the Nuove Scuola Grande, a favourite photo and loitering spot on mine. Towards the end there's also a hasty getaway from a gallows in St Mark's Square in a horse-drawn carriage - has that ever been possible? It all looks very handsome, as do the leads, and has quite a clever liberty-taking twist at the end to confound all us smug types who might be thinking that our knowledge of Casanova's later life might rob the end of the film of any element of surprise. Extras on the US DVD include a few documentaries. The one about Venice, which lasts two and a half minutes, heavily features the tasteful effect of a montage of stock photos of Venice sliding over the tasteful background of an antique map of ... Holland! There's a slightly more interesting location report, and one quite interesting unused extra scene. I've not watched the frock doc.	Three screen captures from Brideshead Revisited Three from Fellini's Casanova Three from Casanova
Three caps from A Dance to the Music of Time Anywhere you've ever visited? Two from Dangerous Beauty	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 suggestive of hell. 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. 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 last Century. It gets to Venice in the last of the four episodes. The Venice sequence, contained in the book 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 did 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. Now out on DVD in the UK . Dangerous beauty (aka The Honest Courtesan) Based on the true story of Veronica Franco, a woman of wit with few options open to her if she is to continue to develop her mind, and her relationship with Marco Venier, a member of a patrician family with a dynastic marriage planned for him. So her Mother trains her in the family trade of high-class courtesan, and she sets about bedding and besting the - universally handsome - men of Venice, and getting her poems published. Catherine McCormack impresses mightily as Veronica, the film holds the attention and Venice looks nicely like Venice. True the wider views all look faked - more like a painting on velvet than a Canaletto - and the canalside scenes seem have been filmed on one set. The plotting and dialogue have some mundane patches too, but overall it's an attractive and intelligent film featuring some nicely ambiguous sexual politics. The best scene has some important wives, who lack our heroine's access to the centre of things, summoning Veronica to tell them of the fate of their men in the war with the infidels. One of them angrily asks what she has that they don't, that their husbands are so smitten with her, and she demonstrates, with a little Latin and a wicked way with a banana. The film is based on the current standard work on Veronica Franco, by Margaret Rosenthal, who also wrote this page http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/IWW/BIOS/A0017.html The Region 1 DVD has some notes on the cast and the story, and a very trailerish trailer. It is also rumoured to be a full screen print trimmed top and bottom to look like a wide screen version. Death in Venice Not a book I'd read, or a film I'd seen, before I bought the DVD. Dirk Bogarde plays a composer haunted by death and failure who comes to Venice to recover from an illness, only to find there's cholera on the wind. Staying at a hotel on the lido he becomes obsessed by a pretty boy, with whom he is soon exchanging meaningful glances. The action, if pining and hesitating can be called action, takes place mostly on the Lido, so there's not much Venice flavour, indeed the camera seems mostly to wilfully exclude sweeping views and full-on glimpses, but what little there is tends to be ravishing or fragrant. The pace is stately, the hats are huge and the flashback arguments with Alfred about the nature of art and beauty are laughably overwrought. It's very much a film of its time and just about rewards your patience. The DVD extras include Visconti's Venice and Views of Venice, but these are an 8 minute contemporary location report and a sequence of black and white stills respectively. A bit of a con, in other words.
Don't look now Dark Venice comes convincingly to the screen. A film full of 70s spookiness and sex, it keeps you disturbed and unsettled from beginning to end. This is set in the real and cold out-of-season Venice, rather than the warm and glowing high-season version, with plenty of torn posters and rubbish sacks. Also good for scenes of Venice by night. The famous love scene was filmed in the Hotel Bauer Grünwald and the film loses its heart without it, as was proven by the version the BBC broadcast years ago with the scene cut out. This is not just one of the best films made in Venice, it's a great film made in Venice. The church which Donald Sutherland is restoring is San Nicolo dei Mendicoli in Dorsoduro, out by the docks, which actually was being restored at the time of filming. Emmanuelle in Venice 1993 Features Marcella Walerstein as young Emmanuelle, with one-time-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 granted her, so that she just has to touch a charmed liquid to the cleft between her naked breasts, which results in lightening 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 - she lives in Venice and goes to Paris for ice cream! How believable is that?! 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 visibly wearing his underpants. Clever. Les enfants du siècle (Children of the Century) 1999 Diane Kurys A film about the French writer George Sand's relationship with Alfred de Musset which was, as the DVD box tells us, 'terribly tempestuous and passionate'. Juliette Binoche plays Sand and Benoit Magimel plays de Musset like a French Sean Penn. It's an admirable, if not lovable, film - a bit long at 137 minutes, with the 20 minutes of additional footage, as the box tells us, making it up to the original French theatrical length. The story, of a strong woman's devotion to an unworthy wastrel, is not particularly original but is done well enough. The middle 40 minutes gives good Venice, though. 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. Eve 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, keeps you interested, just about. Everyone says I love you 1996 Woody Allen 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 on September 11th 2001.	The Miracoli church sure did need cleaning! Three caps above from Don't Look Now and three below from Children of the Century
Two from The honey pot featuring the exterior of the Palazzo van Axel.	The honey pot 1967 (aka Mr Fox of Venice) Rex Harrison plays millionaire Cecil Fox, who goes to see a performance of Ben Johnson's Volpone at the Fenice and gets an idea. He writes to three of his ex-mistresses telling them that he's dying, and invites them to his palazzo in Venice with the promise of inheriting his wealth. This is quite a clever, but wordy, film with lots of long stretches of dialogue in rooms betraying its theatrical derivation. The rooms and garden are obvious sets but there is some location filming. The approach to the Palazzo van Axel, near the Miracoli church, is made to look like a private calle with the addition of a couple of dozing gilt lions and some plants (see left). There's some walking around at night, taking of tea in one of the San Marco cafes, and gondola-taking too, in a wet winter in Venice. Nice to see Maggie Smith in an early and vaguely sexy role too. An enjoyable film then, with a satisfyingly twisty plot, and with time and deception featuring as two meaty and Venetian plot concerns. At one stage this was going to be called Anyone for Venice? No, really. In love and war 1996 Richard Attenborough The adventures of the young Ernest Hemingway (played by Chris O'Donnell) in Italy during WWI leave him injured and put him in a nearby hospital run by American volunteer nurses. A still on the imdb features his nurse/love-interest Sandra Bullock posing on the Palazzo Barbaro balcony just like the lads in the Brideshead still above, but it's deceptive, as there's very little Venice here - about three scenes taking up less than a minute. It's an old-fashioned film heavy on horrors-of-war and with no small amount of gore, but the uniforms and laundry are mostly kept spotless and the emotions rarely other than black-and-white.
from The L of E G These screen caps are from Monster of Venice Three from Moonraker A speedboat has just chopped the snogging couple's gondola in half, you see. from Othello	Identificazione di una donna 1982 Antonioni (aka Indentification of a woman) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 2003 In which various characters from fantastic Victorian fiction do battle with unspeakable evil. The first of the film's fiendish plots involves the destruction of Venice, achieved by placing bombs in the looming and ornate catacombs beneath the city. These catacombs don't exist of course, and so neither do Leonardo's drawings of them, obviously. Other liberties taken with Venetian reality are the bridges over the canals being four stories up, to facilitate the passing of huge baroque-detailed submarines (left), and the car-wide streets of Venice to facilitate car chases involving a large matching baroquely-detailed car. Despite these inventions it's all handsomely done and this adaptation of a smart graphic novel is not half as disappointing as reported. A little romance 1979 George Roy Hill The Lost Moment 1947 A somewhat loose adaptation of Henry James' The Aspern Papers, I missed this on TV recently but it's supposed to be a pleasingly gothic little number set in a somewhat cardboard Venice. Lovejoy - Death and Venice 1986 I'll admit I didn't watch any of this TV series at the time: it, and Ian McShane it's 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 appealing low-key way. Also, spookily, the first episode of this pair was first aired the 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 spots. Unusual care is taken to be geographically accurate - once named and visited 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. 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. 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. 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. Monster of Venice (aka: Embalmer) 1966 Young women with lacquered hair are disappearing from a black and white 1960's Venice at an alarming rate. Except the police are not alarmed, of course, because they don't suspect that a maniac wearing a wetsuit and a monk's robes is murdering the women and taking them to a crumbling and slimy sunken monastery to preserve their beauty forever. So it falls to our hero, a fearless and handsome reporter who's no respecter of authority to...well, you get the picture. The acting and the music are hammy and over the top, with some clever bits and lots of stupid bits, and it's all very much of its time. But it's also pretty fascinating trying to identify bits of Venice, as well as bits of good dialogue beneath the crap dubbing. As usual the walks and vaporetto trips defy actual geography, but there's lots of location filming, and it's not all the obvious places. I enjoyed this film lots, on an American DVD. Moonraker 1979 This is not a great Bond film, being one with Roger Moore as 007. By this time the tone had become well and truly playful, except for the death toll, which includes one of the women that lets 007 have sex with them, so the dubious sexual politics are here to be admired too. Bond's obligatory CIA colleague this time is a woman though, called Dr Goodhead. So she still gets lumbered with another 'humourous' double-entendre name. She at first fends him off, but latter succumbs to his charms, of course. She spurns him sharply early on on the Fondamenta della Misericordia (below left) in front of the scuola. Because this film does feature a fair bit of real Venice, unlike other Bond films which rely on back-projections. James visits a glass shop to the left of San Marco, with a workshop out back, but the workshop would have had to have been on Murano as glassmaking has long been banned from Venice itself due to the fire risk. There's a location-jumping chase (but it's mostly filmed around the South Western bit of Dorsoduro) involving a funeral barge, of course, and a gondola that changes into a speed boat, and then a hovercraft (top left). The chase also features a passing appearance on a bridge by legendary Brit comic actor Alfie Bass, and someone who looks a lot like Douglas Adams in Piazza San Marco. Later there's a scene supposedly in a South American monastery, that looks to me like the San Marco complex in Florence, but which the imdb tells us was shot somewhere on the Lido. Add some suitably broad spoofing of Star Wars and Close Encounters and there you have it: entertainment of its time that just about cuts it in ours. Just about. Nero Veneziano (aka: Damned in Venice) A fourteen-year-old blind boy living with his sister in Venice starts to have visions of the coming of the antichrist. A bad Italian Omen, evidently, with gratuitous nudity. Available from xploited cinema, but only in Italian, with Italian subtitles. Nosferatu in Venice 1986 Starring Klaus Kinski - of course - Donald Pleasence and Christopher Plummer, but reputedly not very good. Nudo di Donna (aka Portrait of a Nude Woman) 1981 A Roman couple suffer from the husband's midlife crisis during Carnivale. Othello 1955 Orson Welles's take on Shakespeare's play, filmed in black and white, with much location filming in Venice, including the Moor's marriage to Desdemona in the Miracoli church (left). 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!'
Three from Senso Three from Summertime	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 film were used in the restoration. Much footage was cut from the final battle scenes, it is said, by the Italian government to blunt it's criticism of the feebleness of the ruling class's commitment to the Italian cause at the time. Released on DVD in the UK in July 2007, but clocking in at 116 minutes it's not the rumoured restored version. 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. Truly tosh, and not even that sexy. Based on the same novel by Camillo Boito as Senso above, but this time the setting is the last days of the Nazi occupation. 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. The story of us 1999 Rob Reiner Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer play a couple whose relationship has hit rocks. A picturesque trip to Venice is used as a (desperate?) plot device. A reviewer on Amazon describes this as both shallow and moving, which is intriguing if not very encouraging. Summertime 1955 David Lean made this film, known in the UK as Summer Madness, two years before he made Bridge on the River Kwai. It stars Katharine Hepburn as an American virgin doing Europe and getting a good romancing to from Rossano Brazzi in Venice. It's a thin story - adapted from a play by Arthur Laurents by Lean and H. E. Bates - of a lonely woman looking for love and not knowing how to deal with it when it takes pushy and suave grey-templed form. Venice glows, though, and is the main reason for watching. The hotel where Kate H. stays is called the Pensione Fiorini in the film, but is now known as the Pensione Accademia. But the terrace of the hotel seems to have been specially built on Campo San Vio. This is all filmed on location, but there are some outrageous liberties taken with geography, with the turn of a corner often taking the action instantly to somewhere miles away. A shoe shop appears next to the Salute where no shops are and Katharine H. falls into a suspiciously clean canal in Campo San Barnaba. This is a film made in more innocent times, though, where sex is suggested by fireworks going off, and so allowances must be made. Tempesta 2004 This is based on a novel I quite liked, but didn't get released in the UK, and is currently only available on DVD in Germany, where it's called Der Venedig Code, presumably in an attempt to pick up the Da Vinci Code audience. Bearing all that in mind my hopes weren't high, but the DVD was pretty inexpensive. On the plus side it gives very good Venice, with lots of arty photography and 'creative' dissolves and much fine footage of Venice in the winter in the rain. There is also a recurring scaffolding motif throughout, for some reason. The plot features some standard art world corruption and forgery shenanigans, with a good body count and Malcolm McDowell doing his tanned and reptilian creep thing again. The film-makers try hard to make art-authentication sexy, mostly with the use of some unconvincing hi-tech laptop wizardry and intrusive techno music. The art-history stuff is mostly pretty convincing, with the names dropped mostly fitting in and the technical stuff sounding authentic. I'd class it as pretty solid entertainment, then, if you don't expect too much. The Thief Lord 2005 Adapted from a book I liked this went straight to video in the US. strange that it wasn't better promoted to ride the Harry Potter wave, because it ain't that bad. It tells the story of two orphans who escape a gruesome Uncle and Aunt and flee to Venice to join a gang of urchins lead by the Thief Lord, who wears a pointy-nosed mask and steals to keep the gang in food and living in a disused cinema. Add a cuddly private detective hired by the Uncle and Aunt and a sexy older woman who's the detective's friend and you can probably see where this is going. But it gets there with neat twists and magical business, of course, and some solid Brit acting. It's all very British, with irate boat-owners shouting Oi, you there! and only the occasional bit of chucked-in Italian to add flavour. There are some cringe-worthy bits, true, but some clever pieces of business too. And it all looks pretty stylish. The location filming is an attractive mixture of the sparkling and the real, the night-time romance and the graffiti. Bits are filmed in Luxembourg, of course, as there's not a Venice film that hasn't been filmed there too in many a moon. The DVD just contains some OK deleted scenes and trailers, along with some annoying and unskippable anti-piracy propaganda. This has the magic, the atmosphere, the loveable tykes and the suggestions of teen romance that go to make a Harry Potter, plus Venice. What more do you need to know? The Venetian Affair 1967 Based on the Helen MacInnes novel, this is one of those late-60s spy spoofs, with Robert Vaughn this time sent to Venice to investigate a suicide bombing. Also starring Elke Sommer, Boris Karloff and Edward Asner. It was banned in Finland. La Venexiana Italy 1986 Italy 1998 One title - two different erotic films made twelve years apart. The first is set in sixteenth century Venice and tells of Giulio, a foreign gentleman, who spends a memorable night with 'two of the sexiest women of 70's/80's Italian cinema' according to xploited cinema.com from whom this is obtainable, without subtitles. The second (available from the same source, but with English dialogue this time) 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. It features Erika Bella, who stars in ten more films on the site so she must be a talented performer.
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 very wonderful Alias). Why did we never get a chance to see this, and why has it never made it to DVD? 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 good 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. 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 above right. (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. DVD update - this is now available on DVD in The Giallo Collection from Anchor Bay in the US, 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 looks really real. The DVD extras 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. The wings of the dove Based on a typical Henry James novel. Helena Bonham-Carter plays Kate Croy who has been placed in the care of her rich aunt (Charlotte Rampling) by her dissolute father. The aunt disapproves of Kate's relationship with lefty journalist Merton (Linus Roach, introduced to us ranting about the rich with his mates in a pub) and threatens withdrawal of care and funds should the relationship continue. Into this drops Milly Theale, a very rich American indeed, who becomes enamoured of Kate and Merton and invites them to Venice, where things get complicated. Venice has never looked more gorgeous on film - blimey even London looks fine and Edwardian with lots of grey stone buildings and a period tube station. The Palazzo Milly rents, called the Palazzo Leporelli in the book, is here stood-in-for by Palazzo Barbaro, where Henry James famously stayed many times. Our heroines enter the palazzo, go up the stairs in the courtyard, and walk through the central sala to the windows overlooking the Grand Canal in exactly the same way as Charles and Sebastian do in Brideshead Revisited above, but at night. The photography, the emotional stuff and the frocks gave me goose pimples, damp eyes, and an unusual admiration, respectively. A lovely and moving film and yes, there is a gondola funeral.	Scenes in the derelict Stucky Mill from Who saw her die? from Wings of the Dove