Ottavia Piccolo Movies

A young soldier is brutally raped and attempts to bring the culprit to justice in this Italian drama. The victim is 20-year-old Saro, a naïve young man who has left his tiny mountain village to join the Airborne Assault force. His first real friend is sergeant Tricarico who shows Saro around the local dance clubs. At first Saro doesn't realize that his sergeant is a homosexual, but when he figures it out he takes off and gets a ride back to the base with Scarpa, the owner of the town car dealership. Poor Saro doesn't realize that he is no safer with Scarpa who is in cahoots with the sadistic, bisexual Capt. Roatta who is concealed in the back of Scarpa's car. Sure enough it is during the ride that Saro is attacked and raped. He doesn't see the attacker's face, but he does recognize the man's watch. Roatta is slated to marry the town mayor's daughter so when Saro attempts to get him convicted of rape, he orders Tricarico to do all he can to break the young man's spirit. Saro's life becomes a living hell, but this does not stop him from pursuing the justice he deserves. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

The seemingly endless chain of assassinations of judges who seek to end (or at least curtail) the pervasiveness of organized crime and deep corruption in Italian political life, is the topic of this political thriller. As the film opens, Carla (Carla Gravina) is the gynecologist wife of a judge (Jacques Perrin) who is determined to prosecute the country's gang lords with the help of an informant. His life is constantly under threat. Despite the pervasive presence of police bodyguards, the inevitable happens, and he and his informant are killed. Carla, infused with his mission and angry at his death, takes the notes he had hidden and contacts the widow of the informer. With that material, she produces a television documentary featuring the widows of assassinated judges. Of course, this puts her and many others in danger also. Despite this, it begins to appear that she has roused the women of the country to action. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

It's pretty clear that the people who are attending the tenants' management meeting for the low income housing unit they live in are there unwillingly. They don't care about much except their own lives -- certainly not maintaining their building. When a new tenant, Carlo Delle Piane, arrives at the meeting dressed in a suit and looking like a kind of boss, the tenants' association immediately appoints him as the apartment administrator. To their astonishment, he takes his responsibilities seriously, and at least a little in their lives begins to improve. Vignettes in the lives of the tenants flesh out this dark comedy, as some experience hardship and suffering, and others gain reason for a bit of hope. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Before Penny Marshall brought Big to the big screen, an Italian director, Franco Amurri, released this body-changing movie. In his story, Marco (Ioska Versari) is a bedwetter whose mother scolds him one time too often, and his classmates tease him one time too often. The finishing touch is that his father neglects to bring him a Lego set for his birthday. He promptly puts all his heart into wishing he were big and not subject to these indignities. The result is that he bursts through his clothes in the guise of a middle-aged man (Renato Pozzetto) and seeks refuge in the house of his former schoolteacher. Mentally, he is still eight years old, and it's a puzzle what to do with him until someone discovers that he has an uncanny rapport with children. Then he becomes a full-time babysitter -- at least, until he is suspected of abducting the by-now long-missing child Marco. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Michel Piccoli plays Simon, a French businessman reluctantly venturing into middle age. As he deals with his own midlife crisis, Simon becomes virtually oblivious to the social changes around him. The businessman tries to counter advancing age with an increased sex life, but finds that women aren't the same compliant creatures he remembers from his youth. Though the material is rife with opportunities for "radical" camerawork, director Claude Sautet chooses an austere, near-classic cinematic style, allowing us to concentrate more on the people in front of the camera rather than the person behind it. Featured in the cast of Mado is actress Romy Schneider, a Sautet favorite. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The internationally produced Zorro is set in South America instead of the California locales of the series. Alain Delon stars as the newly appointed governor who immediately butts heads with corrupt Colonel Huerta (Stanley Baker). To rescue the peasants from Huerta's despotry, the governor becomes the caped-and-masked do-gooder Zorro. The film never really takes itself seriously, not even during the final, well-staged duel between Zorro and Huerta. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Simone Signoret plays the title role in this dark melodrama from writer/director Pierre Granier-Deferre. The Widow Couderc is based on a novel by Georges Simenon. Here Signoret (who also starred in Le Chat, an earlier Granier-Deferre adaptation of a Simenon novel) plays a bitterly independent middle-aged widow; she is a farmer who takes in a handsome young drifter, Jean (Alain Delon), who turns out to be recently released from prison. Jean does odd jobs for the woman, who lives with her elderly father-in-law, Henri (Jean Tissier), who pretends to be deaf when it suits him, and surreptitiously has an intimate relationship with Couderc. It's Henri's house, and when Jean moves in, it gives the widow's resentful sister-in-law, Françoise (Monique Chaumette), the excuse she's looking for to get Henri to leave the house so she can sell it. The widow and Jean have a modest dream of using an incubator to raise chicks and make a decent living, but their plans are further complicated when Françoise's promiscuous teenaged daughter, Félicie (Ottavia Piccolo, who would go on to star opposite Delon again in 1974's Zorro) comes around with her infant son. Félicie clearly has eyes for Jean, and to the consternation of the widow, who holds his fate in her hands, Jean has trouble resisting the younger woman's charms. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide

In this French crime thriller, Marty (Jean-Claude Bouillon) is a small-time criminal who wants to give up his life of crime. He goes on a robbery with Tom, a friend of his with similar feelings, and things go sour. As the police kill Tom, wound Marty and prepare to finish him off, Marty kills the cop in self-defense. He is assisted by a sympathetic nurse in the hospital, and is able to stave off another police attack and make his escape from the hospital. He intends to try to protect his girlfriend and to stop a crooked lawyer from framing him for a crime he didn't commit. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Metello (Messimo Ranieri) is the son of an anarchist who shares his father's passion for justice. After he is introduced to love by the young widow Viola (Lucia Bose), he falls in love and marries Ersilia (Ottavia Piccolo). Labor unrest leads to a strike by workers, and Metello is thrown in jail. Upon his release, he lies to officials when he says he will abandon political causes. He tries to balance his family life and remain true to his ideals in the changing political climate in Florence at the turn of the 20th century. Ennio Morricone provides the music for this feature that appeared at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

Serafino (Adriano Celentano) is an illiterate shepherd who lives in the bucolic splendor of the Abruzis mountains. He takes frequent and amorous forays into the village below where he experiences all the pleasures his solitude cannot offer. He is quickly drafted into the military but is dismissed just as fast when he fails to adapt to the rigid discipline and his urban surroundings. He once again takes comfort in the arms of many females eager to make him forget his army life. An uncle dies and leaves him some money and property, but it is claimed by greedy relatives and he gains nothing. In a desperate attempt to survive, Serafino is forces to marry a woman of ill repute who is the mother of four children. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

Arguably Luchino Visconti's best film and certainly the most personal of his historical epics, The Leopard chronicles the fortunes of Prince Fabrizio Salina and his family during the unification of Italy in the 1860s. Based on the acclaimed novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, published posthumously in 1958 and subsequently translated into all European languages, the picture opens as Salina (Burt Lancaster) learns that Garibaldi's troops have embarked in Sicily. While the Prince sees the event as an obvious threat to his current social status, his opportunistic nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) becomes an officer in Garibaldi's army and returns home a war hero. Tancredi starts courting the beautiful Angelica (Claudia Cardinale), a daughter of the town's newly appointed Mayor, Don Calogero Sedara (Paolo Stoppa). Though the Prince despises Don Calogero as an upstart who made a fortune on land speculation during the recent social upheaval, he reluctantly agrees to his nephew's marriage, understanding how much this alliance would mean for the impecunious Tancredi. Painfully realizing the aristocracy's obsolescence in the wake of the new class of bourgeoisie, the Prince later declines an offer from a governmental emissary to become a senator in the new Parliament in Turin. The closing section, an almost hour-long ball, is often cited as one of the most spectacular sequences in film history. Burt Lancaster is magnificent in the first of his patriarchal roles, and the rest of the cast, especially Delon and Cardinale, become almost perfect incarnations of the novel's characters. Filmed in glorious Techniscope and rich in period detail, the film is a remarkable cinematic achievement in all departments. The version that won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival ran 205 minutes. Inexplicably, the picture was subsequently distributed by 20th Century Fox in a poorly dubbed, 165-min. English-language version, using inferior color process. The restored Italian-language version, supervised by cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, appeared in 1990, though the longest print still ran only 187 minutes. ~ Yuri German, All Movie Guide