
Films featuring Venice are not rare - James Bond, Indiana Jones,
Nikita and Lara Croft have
all dropped in - but usually all you get is some stock footage of The Grand
Canal and St Mark's, followed by a scene with someone advancing the plot on a
Venetian-interior set. The Fred Astaire
musical Top Hat created Venice seemingly out of sheets of white paper.
Blume in love
1973 Paul Mazursky Capriccio
Veneziano
2002
Casanova 2005
The Lost
Moment 1947
The Merchant of Venice 2004
Monster of Venice
(aka: Embalmer) 1966
Period drama rather
dominates and some nasty modern murders, well nasty 1970s murders mostly. There are also a fair few films that might politely be classified as erotica,
and some pretty sloppy rom-coms.
Skimming through DVDs in search of screen captures it occurs to me to ask the question: 'Is there
even one
film or TV series that features Venice and doesn't have an
establishing shot of the Salute church?'

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.
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.
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.
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
OthelloIdentificazione
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
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.
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.
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