FictionalCities :: Venice films

Avenger of Venice Il ponte dei sospiri 1964 This was made in the 60s and is in colour, but in style it's like an old Hollywood swashbuckler of the 40s - all spectacle and pomp and broad gestures. Our master swordfighter hero even laughs like Burt Lancaster as he disarms an opponent and tips him into a canal. The part is played by Brett Halsey, who went on to appear in everything from The Dukes of Hazzard to Godfather III, but here he is a plotted-against Doge's son framed and arrested for a murder, who escapes by tunnelling out of prison - tunnelling underground always being an interesting activity in Venice, there being no ground to tunnel through. There are a few good outdoor location sequences, mostly around the Doge's Palace and it's courtyard, but also on Torcello and the lagoon. Most of the action, and lots of lengthy exposition and tedious fiendish plotting, takes place in semi-convincing sets, though, which, like most of this film, has an air of authenticity but doesn't really stand up. This is actually a remake of a film made in 1940 (based on a novel called Le pont des soupirs by Michele Zevaco) also in Italian, which may explain its old-fashionedness. Maybe if they'd spent some of the piles of ducats obviously invested in the plush costumes on a better script this might have been a bit less creaky. One for a rainy Sunday afternoon mayhap. 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 - Segal wins his wife back from Kris Kristofferson by raping her, so that 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 good. Similarly the recent (2012) Blu-ray is reported to have better picture quality, but to suffer from seriously washed out colours. Maybe one day a respectable restored edition will appear. Brideshead Revisited 2008 By the time I got to see this on DVD my expectations had been made lower than low by the reviews and reports, and so I had little room for disappointment. It's like one of those cut-down versions of famous films done in five minutes with Lego or sock puppets. You wait for famous bits to happen and they all whizz past in imitation of the TV series. The only sustained pleasure and surprise comes courtesy of Emma Thompson who makes Lady Marchmain much nastier here, and her confrontations with Charles fairly fizz with animosity rather than the gentler bemusement of Claire Bloom in the TV Series. The Venice scenes 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 something of a rarity.	Three screen captures from Brideshead Revisited 1981 from Brideshead Revisited 2008
Canal Grande 1943 The story of a gondolier who sees the way things are going and becomes a vaporetto pilot. Seemingly only ever released in Italy and Portugal. Capriccio Veneziano 2002 An old fashioned soft-core porno film in which a beautiful young music student arrives in Venice to study at the Venetian Academy of Music where, you guessed it, her tutor, an artist, soon starts to teach her more than music. Directed by Bruno Mattei, whose other works include Mondo Canibale, Women's Prison Massacre, and SS Girls. If the plot set-up makes you think of a floppy-haired aesthete showing a sensuous but nervous dark-haired woman in flat shoes the sexual ropes then good for you. It means you've not seen this film, and are not au fait with the conventions on Planet Porn. Here the 'artist' has an astonishingly over-built body and no neck, making a scene where he's beaten up by two stocky shrimps in gondolier shirts even more ludicrous. And the sneery music student looks like she'd be more confident teetering and shopping around Piazza San Marco for sparkly frocks than teaching music to speccy girls. There's also a scene where the implied eroticism of the cello clasped between the knees is overblown muchly. And I don't think she'd be able to use her bow again after putting it to the use she does. There's plenty of Venice on show, including the actual Academy of Music, and it just goes to show how location porn resembles the real thing that I found myself wanting the camera to pan a bit to the left so, for example, I could get a look at the long-covered façade of the Accademia. I found this online, without English subtitles, but even though I couldn't understand what they were saying, as I skipped through the video file, I knew I wasn't missing much - the universal language of crap acting. 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 plays a young Casanova more authentically than Heath Ledger did in the other 2005 Casanova below. As does Peter O'Toole here too, as the clapped-out Casanova at the end of his life. But none of this version 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 how it goes - 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 having a high old time camping it up as the vicious inquisitor from Rome, though, and a good selection or reliable Brit thesps. It all 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 spot of mine, and many film makers. 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 scenes. I've not watched the frock doc. The comfort of strangers 1990 When I first saw this film I found it disturbing and confusing, like the book, and didn't like it. Seventeen years on I watched the DVD and liked it a lot more. It's still disturbing, if not quite as much as back then, and I still don't know what it's supposed to be about. Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett play a callow and troubled couple on holiday in Venice, trying to fix and/or understand their relationship, who fall into the clutches of a psycho-couple played by Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren. There's much atmospheric photography of Venice, by day and by night, with repeated use of red-tinged mistiness at night, presumably meant to be suggestive of hell. The book's setting was only implied as Venice, but here all is real and recognisable Venice, except for the palazzo interior of the predatory couple's apartment, which looks like a stage set, maybe on purpose. So it gives good Venice, and has an effectively evoked sense of gathering threat, but it still confuses. I can see that there are post-80s themes of freedom/bondage and liberality/repression going on here, but the ending still does not bring comprehension. Commissario Brunetti - the TV Series Now has its own page.	Three from Fellini's Casanova Three from Casanova 2005
Three caps from A Dance to the Music of Time	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 .
Anywhere you've ever visited? Two from Dangerous Beauty	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.
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 frustratingly thin commentary by the director. The new thing is a pointless compressed version of Don’t Look Now made by Danny Boyle.	The Miracoli church sure did need cleaning!
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 tempestuous relationship with Alfred de Musset. Juliette Binoche plays Sand and Benoit Magimel plays de Musset. (The pair began a four-year relationship whilst making this film.) It's an admirable if not, for me, lovable film. And a bit long at 137 minutes on the DVD - the original French theatrical length. The story, of a strong older woman's devotion to an unworthy young wastrel, is not particularly original but is done well enough. The middle 40 minutes gives good Venice. Some odd angles are used, presumably to exclude vaporetti and intrusive modern details, but this film does a fine job of conjuring up Austrian-occupied Venice, with its covered-in gondolas and infestation of uniforms. And evidently the rooms in the Danieli where the couple stayed are the ones used in the film, although the orangey façade of the Palazzo Pisani Moretta stands in for exterior shots. There's also a scene of de Musset pissed in the rain filmed at the film-favourite location by the old Scuola della Misericordia. 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?	Three below from Children of the Century Two from Everyone says I love you Two from Executioner of Venice 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.
Two from The honey pot featuring the exterior of the Palazzo van Axel. One from In memoria di me. Two from Infanzia, vocazione ...	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 Hayward, 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 Now I'm the first to condemn shallow action films where nothing much happens in a fast-edited blur, but at the other end of the scale...the pace of this film demands patience, but it also rewards it. The 'action' concerns a group of men training for the priesthood and how the solitude and group dynamic affects them and their beliefs. It's as dense a film as it sounds, with many static (but beautiful) shots of corridors and cloisters, but the craft and the commitment shine through. The Venice interest is that the monastic surroundings are filmed in the ex-monastery on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, and in the church itself; and very handsome they look too, especially at night, with atmospheric lighting. There's no filming in Venice itself, but the DVD contains a very enlightening 'Making of...' documentary which does give a lot more Venice. Two questions, though. Why the jarring Strauss music on the soundtrack and in the refractory? And one of the silhouetted figures walking mysteriously about at night is obviously a young woman. How? Why? Infanzia, vocazione e prime esperienze di Giacomo Casanova, veneziano (The Childhood, Vocation and First Experiences of Giacomo Casanova, Venetian) 1969 The key word here is authentic. Based on his memoirs, this film takes us from Casanova's childhood up to his renouncing his religious training for the life of a libertine. It gives good and authentic Venice from the start, also giving good gondola, with authentic period felze detailing, and trouble is also taken with lamp carriers and superstitions. There's a realistic squalor, too, to the streets, the religious politics and to the dubious doctors and their lethal operations. Which is not to say it doesn't do opulence and grandeur later on. It's qualities make it hard to understand why it was never released in English - the subtitles for the copy I found are amateur but acceptable, and were only created in December 2012. The older Casanova of the second half of the film is played by Leonard Whiting who was Zeffirelli's Romeo. There's also a dubbed Wilfred Bramble, aka Albert Steptoe, as Senator Malpiero; with Lionel Stander, an old face most well-known as Hart to Hart's Max, as a priest. The interior used for the church of San Samuele isn't the actual church (see screen grab below left) but if it's just a set it's a handsome piece of work. As is this film, and its obscurity is very not deserved. The subtitling may lack elegance and clarity in places, but it makes up for this with my favourite witch's spell in a long time, to cure Giacomo of his nose bleeds... cat and sorceress colour of hard bread, dried in a shed sweat of matchmaker and fat of grasshopper teeth of a frog and hairs of a hog will soon make the chow that the blood will disallow and it works!
from The L of E G from The Lost Moment 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.	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 (see 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 and Hollywoodish adaptation of Henry James' The Aspern Papers, this stars Robert Cummings, Susan Hayward and Agnes Moorhead. Cummings plays the publisher who worms his way into the palazzo of an old woman (played, in deep shadow, by Moorhead) who once loved a famous poet and who might have some very desirable letters from him. Susan Hayward glowers and glows as Tina, the suspicious niece who has trouble separating the lifeless present from her aunt's lively past. The plot progresses more in the style of an Edgar Allen Poe story than one by Henry James - all gothic romance and deep shadows. Venice is well-evoked but totally fake - sets and painted backdrops stand in for the rare exteriors and the palazzo interior set, where most of the action takes place, is not at all Venetian but does loom and wind well with much wrought iron and many odd corners and lost rooms. But Venetian inauthenticity aside this is a well-made and acted bit of gothic romance and well worth a watch. 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. Mission to Venice Agent spécial à Venise 1964 Based on a James Hadley Chase novel, presumably See Venice and Die, this one stars Sean Flynn, son of Errol and actress Lili Damita, who was the subject of paternity wrangles his whole life and died at the age of 30 in Cambodia whilst working as a photographer during the Vietnam war, missing presumed killed. He was also the subject of the Clash song Sean Flynn, on the Combat Rock album. Monday Morning 2002 A film which concentrates on life's rich tapestry rolling by, rather than any kind of strong plot, so you get a film full eccentric characters and droll situations. Such relentless oddity could wear thin, but the depth of the humanity provides firm balance. It's all about a factory worker and family man who one Monday morning decides to bunk off work, go see his dad, and then go see some of the world. His first destination is Venice, where he makes good friends, gets his pockets picked and has some feckless fun. There's some good and real use of Venice, mostly along sunny canals, but also around La Maddalena church. And there's a scene filmed on a rooftop behind San Zaccaria, with vistas to take your breath away. There's also gentle humour, realistic humanity, and a recurring motif of people seen through windows. 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. 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 her, 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 later succumbs to his charms, of course. (She spurns him sharply early on on the Fondamenta della Misericordia (see left) in front of the Scuola.) 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 (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 Brazilian monastery, but which was shot in the Monastery of San Nicolò 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.
from Nero Veneziano Two from Night Train to Venice From Nosferatu in Venice from Othello	Nero Veneziano (aka: Damned in Venice) 1978 A fourteen-year-old blind boy and his sister have to move in with their uncle and aunt when their granny dies. They go to live with them in their dilapidated hotel on Giudecca. The boy starts to 'see' things, the relatives continue dying and so the scenes filmed on San Michele start to rack up. The sister gets pregnant even though the mysterious stranger only felt her up. The priest (who seems to keep heads in jars in his baptistery) starts behaving oddly, especially when asked to baptise the child. Is the brother deluded. Is the child the antichrist? Do we care? This is far from the worst film set in Venice I've seen, but it's no masterpiece. Watched only a day or so after Giallo a Venezia it sparkles a bit in comparison, and has a certain creepy something. The photography and the script ain't bad at all, and the music does the spooky discordant thing pretty well. It also gives good Venice - one of the many funerals starts off outside Santa Maria Valverde, a favourite spot of mine by the Scuola della Misericordia, as pictured (see left) and behind the snogging couple in the still from Moonraker (see above left). There's a runaway-pram scene filmed in the San Trovaso gondola repair yard and we get a birth, a fire, a baptism and a decapitation, all on vaporettos. The typeface on the vap stops looked much more stylish back in the 70s, even if the clothes didn't. There's a fair amount of sex and stabbings too. Nest of Vipers 1977 The original Italian title is Ritratto di borghesia in nero which translates as Portrait of the Bourgeoisie in Black. I've not seen it but it's the story of a music student in Venice in the 1930's and involves nudity and sex, Senta Berger and Ornella Muti. With Capucine appearing too. A 70s-era babe fest, by the look of it, but possibly not much more. Night Train to Venice (aka Train to Hell) 1993 Hugh Grant is a journalist catching the Orient Express to Venice. He seems to have written a book about Neo-Nazis and has an appointment to meet someone from the Inferno publishing house. On the train he does his usual shy and floppy-haired Englishman routine (although with an occasional Scottish accent) and so begins his frequent shagging of an actress travelling on the train with her daughter. Malcolm McDowell is also on the train and everything goes all weird and slow and odd music plays whenever he appears and he says things like 'I know all of your fears'. So you're supposed to think he's the devil, right, especially as he has a walking stick which he holds up a lot and which has the head of the devil on it. Upon arrival in Venice our Hugh shacks up with the actress in her palazzo, visits the publishing house, which is based in a run-down and tatty corner of the Arsenale, it's deserted, Neo-Nazi skinheads chase him in a truck (he's on a motorbike) they crash, he gets amnesia, the actress nurses him back to health, he doesn't remember who she is, but shags her anyway. She finds his floppy disc, he goes all funny, runs to the palazzo, falls through a pane of glass and catches her falling daughter who was walking along a balustrade. The music swells, a camera swoops around Venice, more shagging, The End. There - you don't have to see it now, and you don't want to. I have never seen such a poorly written, badly edited, downright insulting piece of filmic poo in all my born days. Some nice shots of Venice though. And the little girl who got caught by our Hugh then grew up to become the winner of Big Brother in 2008. I'm losing my will to live. Nosferatu in Venice 1986 Christopher Plummer is the vampire expert summoned to Venice by a princess to investigate the tragic aura and history of her palazzo. Later there's a séance, and she summons Nosferatu, played by Klaus Kinski. He arrives, there's a carnival, he attacks women whose woefully badly-buttoned tops fall off, choral music plays, blood flows...you get the picture? Yes, this is a pretty trad and old-style vampire film, where the vampire is neither young nor cute, but with the added thrill of some well-filmed Venice. The look is authentic and crumbly and foggy and mostly with that blue-filtered night-time look. The interiors don't look like sets and the exteriors aren't just the tourist spots. There are some inauthentic notes, though. Three exorcising priests get thrown from a window at one stage and are impaled on the spiky railings around a well head in a palazzo courtyard. Not sure why a well would need railings. Also the plot resolves itself around the 'fact' that a vampire will die if he is loved by a virgin. Actually this is interpreted as him dying if he has sex with a hot naked virgin on a four-poster bed amongst peeling frescos and sexy ripped curtains, but either way: a new vampire fact on me. Another entertaining element is the music that plays whenever our heroine is in danger, which sounds like a very cheesy ringtone. But I admit I found this an entertaining and amusing Venice fix. Not a great film, or even a good one, but enjoyable and not as bad as it could have been, given its rocky production history which involved the hiring and sacking of four directors. I acquired my DVD of this from cinema-de-bizarre.com as it's not generally available. The picture is fine, but the sound is a bit manky, I think due to the copying process, but not so bad as make it unwatchable by a long shot. Nudo di Donna (aka Portrait of a Nude Woman) 1981 A Roman couple suffer from the husband's midlife crisis during Carnevale. 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!' And haven't we all been there?
Two from The Protectors	The Protectors This was a typically 70s Brit TV series featuring a team of wealthy private detectives who jetted off to glamourous European destinations to right wrongs. There were three in the team: Nyree Dawn Porter played the wacky-hatted Contessa Caroline di Contini, Robert Vaughn was Harry Rule, and there was a third bloke who everyone has forgotten. The series was created by Gerry Anderson and was his one venture into non-sci-fi live action. There were two episodes featuring Venice. Season 2 Episode 7: Goodbye George The Contessa has this episode to herself. She goes solo to Venice to find out why a wealthy American's son who has moved to Venice to develop his art and who previously had made little use of his inheritance is now milking said funds mightily. Blackmail is suspected and the disappearance of his good friend George is suspicious too. Watching this whisks you back to simpler times, when tapping into the post-60s aspirational mood with some added mildly sophisticated plotting was enough. It's not unentertaining, though, and features some solid and realistic use of locations - San Marco, of course, but also the San Trovaso boatyard and Campo San Barnaba (see left). And I have to admit there was a nifty plot twist I didn't see coming. This episode was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg whose other work included directing many Beatles and Rolling Stones videos and most of the TV Brideshead Revisited. Season 2 Episode 15: Lena Plot sophistication is sadly missing from this one, though, but Robert Vaughn and Nyree Dawn Porter do both appear. A journalist called Lena, played by Judy Parfitt, is investigating the suspiciously sudden rise of a rich right-wing politician. She's helped by a student activist played by Roger Lloyd-Pack, and the slimy politician is a young John Thaw. The plotting and action is pretty ropey, and Robert Vaughan strolls through the thing like he's on his holidays. But we do get good Venice, from the statutory drinks on a terrace with the Salute as a backdrop to the fish market and also some unusual island action, including a sequence in some overgrown and deserted hospital buildings on the island of Poveglia. See the screen grab with campanile (left). Also some business, and a desperate van chase, on the Pellestrina riva.
Three from Senso From The Story of Us	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.

Three from Tempesta Two from The Thief of Venice	Tempesta 2004 This is based on a novel I quite liked, but it 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 old 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 Thief of Venice (Il Ladro di Venezia) 1950 Grand Inquisitor Scarpa (Massimo Serato, later to appear as the Bishop in Don't Look Now) has his sights set on becoming the next Doge. He poisons the incumbent, steals mightily from the official coffers, and sends a pitiful small fleet commanded by his enemies to face a massive Turkish one. But a single galley makes it back, and Lorenzo Contarini (Paul Hubschmid), when Scarpa's treachery becomes obvious, sets about toppling the villain, with the help of the common people, led by tavern-keeper Tina. This is an Italian-American co-production starring Maria Montez (in her final film) as the tavern keeper. The story and dialogue strike almost no false notes, and get an awful lot right. It's all filmed in Venice too, from the slimy streets to the big finale - a huge ceremonial wedding complete with processions across the Piazza and huge barges, and everything. It was directed by John Brahm, who also directed Hangover Square and The Lodger in the 40s, and episodes of The Man from UNCLE in the 60s. It was made in black and white, and the copy I watched, which will in all probability be the same one you get to see, if you can, is pretty rough. It has a very jumpy start and is dark throughout, but it's very watchable and the darkness adds mystery, especially to the night-time sword fights, where you have absolutely no idea what's going on. An enjoyable romp, then, and well worth tracking down and watching, for getting so much right. The Tourist This film got such bad reviews when it came out that I shouldn't have been surprised at how truly awful it is. But I was. It's the worst film I've seen in ages, and I speak as the man who recently watched Nero Veneziano and Giallo a Venezia for reviewing on this very page. I watch them so you don't have to! Angelina Jolie is the girlfriend of a very wanted man who is instructed by said wanted man to board a train to Venice and to chummy up to a random chap so the police will think that this chap is the wanted man after much expensive plastic surgery. The random chap is played by Johnny Depp and she and Angelina have as much chemistry as a maths lesson - they act like they're acting the whole time. The plot plods by on the way to a surprise I'll not reveal because it would insult your intelligence to suggest you hadn't guessed it already. Also annoying is the way that every man that Angelina sashays past HAS to then watch her departing swaying bottom with that phwoar! look on his face. The Venetian locations look nice and sparkly, but the liberties taken with geography are extreme. The worst two are having the Doge's Palace opposite Santa Lucia railway station and the airport on the Zattere opposite the Redentore church on Giudecca. But really even for us location-porn addicts the odd recognition of of a favourite palazzo or campo just isn't enough to make this a worthwhile watch. Avoid. The extras on the DVD/Blu-Ray include Tourist Destination-Travel the Canals of Venice, a 3 minute documentary about Venice, and a director's commentary that is more engaging than the film, but that's hardly a feat. Unforgivable (Impardonnables) Directed by André Téchiné and shown in the Director's Fortnight section at the 2011 Cannes film festival, but reputedly a stinker. André Dussollier plays a writer who goes to Venice to work on a new book and there embarks on an affair with an estate agent who'd previously had a lesbian affair with an alcoholic private eye, so he employs her to search for his daughter who's disappeared with an aristocratic drug dealer, and then gets the PI's son to spy on his wife. Can it be as bad as it sounds? I am soon to find out as I've just (January 2013) acquired a copy, so I'll be watching and reviewing soon.
The Venetian Affair 1967 I had read somewhere that this film, based on a Helen MacInnes novel, was one of those arch late-60s spy spoofs, but it plays pretty straight, at least until about an hour in, and even then I'm not sure that the hokeyness is intentional. Robert Vaughn stars as an ex-CIA agent with a past and a drink habit, sent to Venice to investigate an exploding diplomat at a peace conference. The ensuing plot involves mind control drugs (always a convenient solution for lingering plot holes), plush sets, double agents aplenty and a Lalo Schifrin score, of course, featuring bossa nova dulcimers. It also has Carl Boehm playing his usual cold Eastern European slime ball, Elke Sommer playing Vaughn's past, Boris Karloff in one of his last films, and Edward Asner. The Venice we get is unglamourous and often wet and nicely filmed. There are a couple of puzzling interiors - one is supposed to be the inside of San Zanipolo, but isn't. This film was banned in Finland, was never released in the UK, and evidently the tagline on the publicity for it was Vaughn! Venice! Vooom! Entertaining enough, but I wouldn't say special. The Venetian Affair 2008 There have been reports of a film of the Andrea di Robilant book being in the offing, but the IMDB has nothing. Strange. Venetian honeymoon 1959 Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, who was also responsible for several 1940s Ealing gems, like Went the day well? and Nicholas Nickleby. This one looks only to have ever been released in France and Italy, though. La Venexiana Italy 1986 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 was obtainable, without subtitles, until they went out of business. Italy 1998 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 listed on the site so she must be a talented performer.	from The Venetian Affair The Venice Project 1999 Dennis Hopper plays an avant-garde artist living in Venice, California whose sister, played by Lauren Bacall, is living in the family palazzo in Venice, Italy. Their father, The Viscount, played by John Wood, is near to death and announces that he's going to bequeath the family home and its art treasures to the nation. All this against the backdrop of the Biennale. It also stars Linus Roache, Ben Cross, Dean Stockwell, Stockard Channing, and Mia Maestro (Sydney's sister in the TV series Alias). Why did we never get a chance to see this, 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.
Venice: Theme and Variations 1957 A 28 minute documentary made by James Ivory (of Merchant Ivory fame) as his master's thesis at the University of Southern California film school. 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 This is 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 concerns an art history student living in Venice whose studies seem to consist of sketching putti. He lives on takeaways, cigarettes, cocaine and double espressos. He meets a mysterious American called Edgar Allen who seems unduly concerned by (and possibly with) some recent local murders. Time passes, rain falls, bottles break, mist drifts...the plotting and dialogue have the enigmatic qualities you'd expect, plus some very impressive photography that might be less expected. This one gives ravishing Venice, whether it's misty night-time chases or stonework in daytime raked by strong light. This look is tempered somewhat by the somewhat fuzzy copy I found, which looks to have been VHS'd off the telly. I think that the subtitles are the work of a fan and, whilst adequate, they could be better. Let's hope that this one gets a proper release one day, then, as I'd love to see it sharper, and to watch it again in the hope of figuring out what it's all about.	Two from Who was Edgar Allan?
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.	Scenes in the derelict Stucky Mill from Who saw her die?
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.