Rossella Falk Movies
Director Dario Argento, best known for his stylishly bloody horror films, revisits the style and themes of his early directorial efforts in this tense crime thriller. A prostitute (Barbara Lerici) discovers one of her customers has a taste for much rougher sex than she's willing to give him; trying to sneak away from her john, she accidentally walks off with one of his scrapbooks, from which she discovers her client apparently committed a series of unsolved murders almost 20 years earlier. The john tracks down the prostitute and murders her to insure her silence; this awakens in him the desire to kill again, and soon he's once again leaving a bloody swath across Italy. Ulisse Moretti (Max Von Sydow), the police detective who investigated the earlier wave of killings, is brought out of retirement when clues link the new murders to those committed in the early '80s, and the aging cop finds his sometimes foggy memory jolted back to recognition by the growing number of bloody victims. Meanwhile, Giacomo (Stefano Dionisi), whose saw his mother being killed by the murderer as a boy, learns that the killer is back at work, and sets out to investigate the case on his own. Non Ho Sonno features an original musical score by the rock band Goblin, who also wrote music for a number of Argento's best-known films. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Max von Sydow, Stefano Dionisi, (more)
- 1996
Unceremoniously dumped by her lover Roberto, bitter Marcella is determined to win him back at any cost. Such is the basis of this frothy Italian comedy. Roberto has since gone on a Tunisian vacation with his voluptuous new love Alessia. Meanwhile Marcella enacts an elaborate scheme to get him back. First she hires the devastatingly handsome, but dim rookie escort Francesco to accompany her to Tunisia. Neither Alessia and Francesco realize that Marcella and Roberto were once lovers and this creates even more problems. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- 1983
In a revealing documentary about one slice of film history, directors Francesco Bortolini and Claudio Masenza interview eight Italian actresses who attained fame in the U.S. through films they made in Hollywood. Most of the eight agree that performers are treated better in Hollywood than in Italy, and that U.S. efficiency and organization impressed them -- but that in Italy, they had more challenging roles than was allowed in the U.S. Virna Lisi was made over to look like another Marilyn Monroe, Gina Lollobrigida was employed like the others for her sex appeal -- and left after a few films --, and Claudia Cardinale, for inscrutable reasons, was meant to be another Doris Day. Unfortunately, even though great stars are included among the eight, the most obvious and inexplicable omission is Sophia Loren, well-known to American audiences. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Gina Lollobrigida, Sylva Koscina, (more)
- 1972
Alberto De Martino (L'anticristo) directed this standard Italian giallo thriller, the story of an actress named Eleanor Lorraine (Anne Heywood) who has developed amnesia since the murder of her husband Peter, and faints when she spots professional hit man Ranko (Telly Savalas). When she awakens, the increasingly hysterical Eleanor cannot recognize her new husband, George (Giorgio Piazza), or remember the story of how Peter died in a car accident. Eleanor's sister, Dorothy (Willeke Von Ammiroy), replaces her in a play at the behest of Peter's sister, only to be murdered by Ranko when he mistakes her for Eleanor. Eleanor herself is nearly delirious by this point, but has visions of Ranko killing Peter, so she rushes to tell George, only to find Ranko murdering him. The ruthless assassin follows Eleanor to the theater, where some secrets are revealed in the tense climax. Rossella Falk co-stars with Antonio Guidi, Leonardo Scavino, and Ada Pometti. Cinematographer Aristide Massaccesi went on to make dozens of his own films (including some inventive gialli) under the name "Joe D'Amato." ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide
This frightening horror-thriller stars Giancarlo Giannini as Inspector Tellini, chasing a killer whose victims are paralyzed with a poisoned acupuncture needle, forcing them to watch helplessly as their stomachs are ripped open with a sharp knife. This method duplicates the habits of the black wasp in slaying tarantulas, explaining the title. Much of the film is spent on a wild goose chase involving Silvano Tranquilli, the husband of the first victim (Barbara Bouchet). All of the suspects soon turn up dead and Giannini turns his attention to an upscale health spa, frequented by each victim, which is a front for blackmail and cocaine smuggling. The mystery itself is fairly obvious, but director Paolo Cavara includes a good deal of action and Ennio Morricone's score is effectively chilling. Among the cast are such genre favorites as Annabella Incontrera, Stefania Sandrelli, Claudine Auger, Rossella Falk, and Giancarlo Priete, and --as in many Italian thrillers of the period -- voyeurism is the primary motif. Barbara Bach and Carla Mancini appear briefly. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide
Luigi Bazzoni (Le Orme) directed this outstanding giallo thriller starring Franco Nero as a hard-drinking newspaperman who gets involved in a string of brutal murders. After he investigates the first, he becomes a suspect himself but eventually manages to unravel a complex plot involving blackmail, adultery, and private sex shows. Wolfgang Preiss plays a creepy doctor, and Edmund Purdom is around as well. The impressive score is by Ennio Morricone, and the film looks great thanks to cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, on his way to his triumph with Last Tango in Paris. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide
- 1968
Film star Lylah Clare is dead, but her legend lives on. Movie-producer Barney Sheean (Ernest Borgnine) hires Elsa Brinkmann (Kim Novak), the living image of the late Lylah, to star in a film based on Ms. Clare's life. Barney hires director Lewis Zarkan (Peter Finch), Lylah's former husband, to transform the talentless Elsa into a facsimile of the deceased screen queen. Elsa not only learns to imitate Lylah but, at crucial junctures, becomes the dead woman. While restaging the accident that killed Lylah, the obsessed Zarkan deliberately drives Elsa to her doom -- and in so doing reveals his complicity in the death of his wife. The film ends with Lylah's onetime housekeeper (Rosella Falk), gun in hand, lying in wait for Zarkan to return home while her TV blasts forth a grotesque (and possibly symbolic) dog-food commercial. A trash masterpiece, Legend of Lylah Claire works so hard at vilifying the Old Hollywood (there's even a vicious Hedda Hopper caricature) that it's a wonder the actors could keep a straight face. The film was based on a 1962 Dupont Show of the Week TV drama co-written by Wild in the Streets creator Robert Thom. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Kim Novak, Peter Finch, (more)
- 1967
Made in Italy is a multistoried film, set...in Italy, of course. An all-star cast appears in brief seriocomic vignettes about rich and poor, tourist and native. Director Nanni Loy exhibits the realistic and somewhat earthy technique he'd used on his earlier documentaries, with heavy emphasis on ironic punch lines. Filmed in 1965 by a Franco/Italian production team, Made in Italy received the best possible exposure upon its 1967 American release when clips were showcased on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. Best bit: The "give to the poor" poster in an impoverished Italian mountain village. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Anna Magnani, Marina Berti, (more)
A popular British comic strip series served as inspiration for this light-hearted espionage adventure, which if nothing else certainly shows the marks of its origins in the mid-1960s. A large departure for director Joseph Losey, better known for brooding interpretations of Harold Pinter works (The Servant, Accident), the film is emphatically bright and colorful, taking on at times a nearly psychedelic feel. The strangeness is emphasized by the unusual casting, including Italian star Monica Vitti in her first English-speaking role as the title character and Dirk Bogarde, playing against type as her arch-nemesis. Essentially everything is played for its camp value, including the rather convoluted, James Bond-like plot, which concerns the hijacking of a shipment of diamonds heading for the Middle East. Like its mod-era sets and costumes, this unusual, inconsistent effort is certainly intriguing and attractive, but might seem rather dated to some. ~ Judd Blaise, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Monica Vitti, Terence Stamp, (more)
Fresh off of the international success of La Dolce Vita, master director Federico Fellini moved into the realm of self-reflexive autobiography with what is widely believed to be his finest and most personal work. Marcello Mastroianni delivers a brilliant performance as Fellini's alter ego Guido Anselmi, a film director overwhelmed by the large-scale production he has undertaken. He finds himself harangued by producers, his wife, and his mistress while he struggles to find the inspiration to finish his film. The stress plunges Guido into an interior world where fantasy and memory impinge on reality. Fellini jumbles narrative logic by freely cutting from flashbacks to dream sequences to the present until it becomes impossible to pry them apart, creating both a psychological portrait of Guido's interior world and the surrealistic, circus-like exterior world that came to be known as "Felliniesque." 8 1/2 won an Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, as well as the grand prize at the Moscow Film Festival, and was one of the most influential and commercially successful European art movies of the 1960s, inspiring such later films as Bob Fosse's All That Jazz (1979), Woody Allen's Stardust Memories (1980), and even Lucio Fulci's Italian splatter film Un Gatto nel Cervello (1990). ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, (more)
- 1960
This standard action-chase film stars Renato Salvatore as Antonio, a man on the run from the Mafia, and the soon-to-be-famous Claudia Cardinale as Grazia, a woman who joins Antonio in his escape attempt. Antonio lives in Sicily and receives orders from the Mafia on the island to assassinate a man. Since Antonio has never done anything like this before and is more an ordinary bloke than a killer, his nerve snaps as his morals take over and he cannot do the foul deed. Never an organization to accept this type of behavior, the Mafia starts to chase down Antonio with mayhem in mind and he takes off. While on the run, he picks up Grazia and the two of them continue to try to elude their murderous pursuers. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Renato Salvatori, Claudia Cardinale, (more)
