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Films
featuring Venice are not rare - James Bond, Indiana Jones, Nikita
and Lara Croft have all dropped in - but often 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 large sheets of white paper.
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? Even Don't Look Now, with it's famous
out-of-season concentration on the real Venice.
Commissario Brunetti - the TV Series now has its own page.
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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 as he wanders around Piazza San Marco wearing a bad beard. This was reported to give good Venice and to be a quirky gem, but the reports lied. There's little Venice beyond the Piazza, and the film is pretty much your standard 70s sub-Woody Allen relationship movie. Promiscuity, talking mystical tosh, doing meditation, strumming folky music, visiting shrinks, eating humourous vegetarian food, spouting right-on politics...it ticks all the boxes, but it just ain't sharp or funny. Marsha Mason is the only person you don't want to slap, and then there's the ending! Spoiler warning. He wins his wife back from Kris Kristofferson by raping her, so she gets pregnant, and they have a romantic reunion, in Venice! A sick-making Hollywood ending, and a deeply dubious message. 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 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 sparkling or perfect, it seems. 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 smiling bemusement of Claire Bloom in the TV Series. The Venice scenes zip 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 a rarity. |
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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. 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. (He is played by Rufus Sewell, later to star as Michael Dibdin's Venetian detective Aurelio Zen in the BBC's TV adaptations.) So her Mother trains her in the family trade of high-class courtesan, and she sets about bedding and besting the - unfailingly handsome - men of Venice, and getting her poems published. Catherine McCormack impresses 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 the one set. The plotting and dialogue have some mundane patches too, but overall it's an attractive film featuring some gently challenging sexual politics. But you just know that when the films was being pitched the word 'feisty' featured a lot. 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 Turks. 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 standard work on Veronica Franco, by Margaret Rosenthal, who also wrote this page 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. And there is a cropped look sometimes (see below left). 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. |
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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 misty 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. And the occasional location liberties are balanced by scenes which display almost pedantic geographical accuracy. 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, and probably Nicholas Roeg's best film. The church which Donald Sutherland is restoring is San Nicolo dei Mendicoli over in Dorsoduro, out by the docks, which actually was being restored by Venice in Peril at the time of filming. The new (mid 2011) blu-ray looks probably the best Don't Look Now has ever looked outside of a cinema. The extras are mostly the same as the recent Special Edition DVD. The highlight being a short and quite enlightening documentary, the disappointment being a rambling and frustrating commentary by the director. The new thing is a pointless compressed version of Don’t Look Now made by Danny Boyle. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 taping, 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 Salute shots, no scenes in San Marco, just recognisable and evocative wanderings and views. And what did happen to the tortoise? Giallo a Venezia 1979 The giallo as a literary genre is pretty much synonymous with the hard-boiled crime thriller. With regard to the film genre you're in for something a bit more juicy. So in this one there's a murder to begin with. A couple are found dead on Giudecca - she's drowned and he's been stabbed in 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 soft-core 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. All the time. 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 when it was a building site. I can't really recommend the film, to Venice fans or 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. I bought it as an 'unofficial' copy from an online supplier. It looks to have been copied from a manky old VHS tape and the image seems to have been cropped square from a widescreen original. |
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The honey pot 1967 Joseph L. Mankiewicz (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 vast wealth. (In the book that the film is based on, Thomas Sterling's The Evil of the Day, two of the inheritance-hopefuls are men.) Susan Heyward, Capucine and Edie Adams play the old girlfriends, with Adolfo Celi as the policeman needed later on. 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 (built at Cinecittà in Rome) but the interiors looks so Venetian they are almost too Venetian, with their brustolon figures and bits of Veronese. 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 in front of San Zanipolo, taking of tea in one of the San Marco cafes, and nocturnal gondola-taking. Nice to see Maggie Smith in an early and vaguely sexy role, and a considerable one too. An enjoyable film, it's witty rather than humourous with a satisfyingly twisty plot and with time and deception as its two most Venetian plot concerns. This film comes in many possible lengths, with the director said to be most unhappy with the heavily cut version that the studio released. At one stage this was going to be called Anyone for Venice? No, really. Identificazione di una donna 1982 Antonioni (aka Indentification of a woman) About 5 minutes of Venice towards the end, mostly in a hotel, but the Salute is seen in the background, of course, as they arrive. Otherwise one of those films where the characters do unlikely things whilst spouting unconvincing pseudo-philosophical gibberish. Looks good though. Mostly set in Rome. 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. In memory of me
(In memoria di me) 2007 |
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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 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 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. 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 |
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Nudo di Donna |
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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. 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 shifted to 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 big rocks. Their attempt to salvage something involves a short trip to Venice - no more than ten minutes. Nice, but short, it involves a gelateria fridge miraculously appearing in Campo San Vio (see left) 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 discussing 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 looks a bit weird. Did she have work done (on her lips?) in the 90s? 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 inexperienced American woman getting a good romancing from Rossano Brazzi in Venice. It's a thin story - adapted by Lean and H. E. Bates from a play by Arthur Laurents called The time of the Cuckoo - 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. This is not just a fictional hotel, it is a miraculous hotel. Its entrance is near San Marco, our heroine's room overlooks the Salute church and 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 all through the film, 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, a dress shop is created in front of the church of San Gregorio 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, Venice's churches are all covered in grime, and small children smoke cigarettes, so allowances must be made. For a whole page devoted to Summertime location-finding click here There's some fascinating background info here too. Tempesta
2004 La Venexiana |
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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 was Edgar Allan (Wer war Edgar Allan?) Michael Haneke 1985 A German TV film directed by Haneke early in his career, taken from a novel by Austrian author Peter Rosei which doesn't seem to have been translated into English. It's described as a 'post-modern thriller' in which 'an art history student becomes obsessed with and mysteriously linked to an American'. 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. 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 looking 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. |
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1978
