Laura Betti Movies

In one of the most widely seen and acclaimed European movies of the 1960s, Federico Fellini featured Marcello Mastrioanni as gossip columnist Marcello Rubini. Having left his dreary provincial existence behind, Marcello wanders through an ultra-modern, ultra-sophisticated, ultra-decadent Rome. He yearns to write seriously, but his inconsequential newspaper pieces bring in more money, and he's too lazy to argue with this setup. He attaches himself to a bored socialite (Anouk Aimée), whose search for thrills brings them in contact with a bisexual prostitute. The next day, Marcello juggles a personal tragedy (the attempted suicide of his mistress (Yvonne Furneaux)) with the demands of his profession (an interview with none-too-deep film star Anita Ekberg). Throughout his adventures, Marcello's dreams, fantasies, and nightmares are mirrored by the hedonism around him. With a shrug, he concludes that, while his lifestyle is shallow and ultimately pointless, there's nothing he can do to change it and so he might as well enjoy it. Fellini's hallucinatory, circus-like depictions of modern life first earned the adjective "Felliniesque" in this celebrated movie, which also traded on the idea of Rome as a hotbed of sex and decadence. A huge worldwide success, La Dolce Vita won several awards, including a New York Film Critics CIrcle award for Best Foreign Film and the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This Dino De Laurentiis production from 1965 is actually an anthology of five different directors' work, each telling their own stories about witches. The five stories are "The Witch Burned Alive," "Civic Sense," "The Earth As Seen From The Moon," "The Girl From Sicily," and "A Night Like Any Other." Silvia Mangano appears in all five, with Clint Eastwood starring in the last featured vignette. Like many gang-directed projects, this film is also plagued by a lack of continuity and by the pretentiousness of the individual directors. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

Paulina (Bulle Ogier) drifts aimlessly after she leaves her ailing brother. Struggling to find a place for herself in society, she first enters an insane asylum and later winds up in a whorehouse. She leaves the bordello and hooks up with some young revolutionaries as she continues to search for a way out of her disenchantment and find her calling in life. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

Set in a Catholic boy's school, this wearisome tale concerns a group of obnoxious rich students and their pompous headmasters. The film tries hard to be an allegory of the anti-establishment social atmosphere of the early 1970s, evidently attempting to prove that Mankind is basically bestial by depicting all the characters as repulsive and self-serving. There's no highlight to speak of, though the scene in which the students stage a deliberately offensive amateur theatrical is perhaps the most watchable sequence. In the Name of the Father is a dreary exercise in heavy-handedness and repetition. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A family's murderous battle over some bayfront property is the subject of director Mario Bava's bloody horror-thriller, which many have cited as the grandfather of the modern slasher film. Claudine Auger is the scheming daughter of a murdered Countess; her staged suicide forms the basis of the film's plot. In a seemingly unrelated subplot, four hippies arrive in a dune buggy led by Brigitte Skay, who dances the Shake and swims naked before having her throat hacked open with a machete. Skay's boyfriend has his face chopped with the same machete and the other couple has a spear thrust through their bodies as they make love. All of these murder scenes were imitated in Steve Miner's Friday the 13th, Part 2, and the film's style influenced countless American slasher films of the 1970s and '80s. Bava also includes a strangulation by telephone cord, a gory axe decapitation, a man speared to a wall, and five other murders. Antefatto was a trendsetting film, and paved the way for literally hundreds of graphically violent imitations. The film exists in several versions, differing mainly in the extent of the bloodshed. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide

Jed (Tomas Milian) is an unlikely hero in this Italian western. As thoroughly unlikeable a robber as ever walked the West, he nonetheless robs from the rich and gives to the poor. Not only is he a murderous, ill-tempered sort, he is bad-mannered, too. When Sonny (Susan George) decides he should be her man and teach her how to be a proper outlaw, sparks fly. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

In Bernardo Bertolucci's art-house classic, Marlon Brando delivers one of his characteristically idiosyncratic performances as Paul, a middle-aged American in "emotional exile" who comes to Paris when his estranged wife commits suicide. Chancing to meet young Frenchwoman Jeanne (Maria Schneider), Paul enters into a sadomasochistic, carnal relationship with her, indirectly attacking the hypocrisy all around him through his raw, outrageous sexual behavior. Paul also hopes to purge himself of his own feelings of guilt, brilliantly (and profanely) articulated in a largely ad-libbed monologue at his wife's coffin. If the sexual content in Last Tango is uncomfortably explicit (once seen, the infamous "butter scene" is never forgotten), the combination of Brando's acting, Bertolucci's direction, Vittorio Storaro's cinematography, and Gato Barbieri's music is unbeatable, creating one of the classic European art movies of the 1970s, albeit one that is not for all viewers. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

When Andrea (Luigi Diberti) receives a telegram saying that his father is dying, he and his wife hop into their car and drive back to their hometown. On arriving, he discovers that someone has played a mean-spirited prank on him, and his efforts to discover the source of the telegram lead him on a journey through memories of his youth and adolescence in the town. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Based on a true story, this political thriller/drama explores the ordeal of Linda Murri (Catherine Deneuve), a 19th-century upper-class Italian woman who was caught in an unhappy marriage and who broke the code of behavior for aristocrats by taking a lower-class lover. After her husband was murdered, Murri stood trial for the murder. Her professor father's socialist opinions were clearly the reason for the harshness of the prosecution. The case was widely known throughout Italy at the time, and caused a national furor. Murri did not actually arrange to murder her boorish nobleman husband Count Bonmartini (Paolo Bonacelli); rather, she told her brother how unhappy she was and that she was afraid for her life. He acted on her complaint by taking the drastic step of murder. The trial resulted in her being given a long prison term, along with her brother (Giancarlo Giannini), her lover Carlo Secci (Ettore Manni) and her brother's assistants Pio and Rosa (Corrado Pani and Tina Aumont). The relentlessness of the prosecutor Giudice Stanzani (Marcel Bozzuffi) and the spinelessness of the family patriarch Augusto Murri (Fernando Rey), the professor with the unpopular opinions, are key dramatic features of this complex story. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

The son of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria, Crown Prince Rudolf, is believed to have shot his female lover and himself in a tragic suicide pact in 1882 in Mayerling. Due to Imperial cover-ups, the full story may never be known. This story has been filmed several times, in French in 1935 and in English in 1968. Hungarian director Miklos Jancso recreates those events for his own purposes, continuing his favored theme of the rejection of paternal authority. In the film, which has very little dialog, Rudolf is a good-natured pan-sexual golden boy, who cavorts on his rural estate with a host of beautiful, aristocratic lovers and friends of both sexes. He refuses to leave his country idyll even though he has been ordered to by the Emperor, his father. Despite the fact that for a large part of the film, attractive young people go about unclothed and engaging in erotic encounters, the mood is one of melancholy rather than prurience. The Prince is a political liberal who wishes to arrange things so that the Emperor will arrest him, creating a public scandal which will provide a rallying point for the opposition. Instead, when the expected troops come, Rudolf's sensuous friends loyally ward off the Imperial officers, humiliating them in the process. The result is that the guests, the Prince and a hermaphrodite friend are killed by newly arrived Imperial reinforcements, and the now-familiar official story of murder and suicide is concocted for public consumption. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Bernardo Bertolucci's 255-minute 1900 was a gargantuan undertaking, requiring the resources of three European countries and a trio of American movie studios. Set in the Italian town of Parma, the film's continuity backtracks from Liberation Day in 1945 to the occasion of composer/patriot Giuseppe Verdi's death in 1901. We follow the lives of two men born on that day in 1901, who grow up to be Alfredo Berlinghieti (Robert De Niro) and Olmo Dalco (Gérard Depardieu). Wealthy Alfredo sinks into dissipation, while poverty-stricken Olmo becomes a firebrand labor leader and communist. After WWI, Alfredo is allowed to peacefully retain his land holdings by playing nice with the burgeoning fascists; Olmo, on the other hand, engages in a long-standing battle against the minions of Mussolini. The two protagonists are reunited when Alfredo returns to Parma to preside over Olmo's trial for "political crimes." Co-star Burt Lancaster is cast as Alfredo's wealthy grandfather, who hates to see the old values buried beneath the social travails of the 20th century. Many American prints of 1900 were shortened to 243 minutes, rendering the story hard to follow at times. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The stories that Charles (Robert Stephens) tells his adoring niece are vivid and full of life, as they should be, for he is a professional writer. They all concern a charming ladies man and his adventures. When the tales mysteriously take on a life of their own in the real world, and Philibert (Gerard Depardieu) and his cronies actually begin to wreak their own special kind of havoc, Charles reluctantly takes responsibility for his creation and attempts to send him back into the netherworld of the imagination. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Roland Fériaud (Lino Ventura), on returning from a seaside vacation, discovers a corpse in a room adjoining his. He is abducted by a mysterious group who take him to a clinic of some kind, where he is interrogated. He is shown a small suitcase he has never seen before, and he tries in vain to understand what it is his captors want. Director Jacques Deray specialized in this kind of thriller, which is a typical specimen of the genre. At this time Lino Ventura was at the peak of his stardom, playing silent, stoical heros after the manner of Jean Gabin. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide