Haniet White Movies

Director Mario Bava's second thriller revolves around a fashion salon owned by wealthy Cristina (Eva Bartok) and her greedy lover Max (Cameron Mitchell). The salon is a front for cocaine-trafficking and blackmail, so when model Isabella (Lea Kruger) is viciously strangled, leaving a detailed diary behind, many of the people connected with the salon become very nervous. Isabella's roommate Nicole (Arianna Gorini) finds the diary and soon has her throat clawed out with a piece of medieval armor. Peggy (Mary Arden), who borrowed abortion money from Isabella, is tortured and has her face pressed into a red-hot iron. The bodies continue to pile up until a conspiracy is exposed and the perpetrators start getting their just desserts. Luciano Pigozzi, Massimo Righi, and Claude Dantes are among the cast. ~ Robert Firsching, Rovi

Marred by controversy at the time of its release, this horror fantasy from Italy's legendary horror director Mario Bava centers on the twisted desires of a nobleman's son (Christopher Lee). Lee is ostracized by his father for his dalliances with a servant girl (who later commits suicide), but is allowed to return to the fold by his brother, whose lovely wife (Dahlia Lavi) immediately becomes the object of Lee's mad lust. Lee is later found murdered, along with several other victims from the surrounding village, leading superstitious locals to believe that Lee's evil spirit has returned to destroy them; the twist ending reveals the real evil at work. The kinky, sadomasochistic relationship between Lee and Lavi raised more than a few censors' eyebrows, leading to some harsh cuts. ~ Cavett Binion, Rovi

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, Rovi

Roberto Rossellini's Paisan (originally Paisa) is one of the best-known and most important of the postwar Italian neorealist films; certainly it has one of the finest pedigrees, representing the combined talents of two of Italy's most prestigious filmmakers. The second of Rossellini's "war trilogy" (bracketed by Open City and Germany Year Zero), Paisan is divided into six episodes, each elucidating upon the tenuous relationship between the recently liberated Italians and their American liberators. In the first episode, Joe From Jersey (Robert Van Loon), assigned to guard a taciturn Sicilian woman (Carmela Sazio), tries to communicate with his monolingual prisoner. Next, a black MP (Dotts Johnson) is robbed of his shoes by an impoverished Neopolitan street urchin (Alfonsino Pasca). This is followed by an episode set in Rome, where drunken GI Fred (Gar Moore) is reunited with a streetwalker (Maria Michi) whom he's met before but does not recognize. In Florence, American nurse Harriet (Harriet Medin) and an Italian partisan (Gigi Gori) dodge bullets as they make their way through enemy-held territory in search of Harriet's lover. Next comes a comic interlude involving a theological argument between a Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew and a group of Fransiscan monks. The film concludes with a bloody confrontation in the Po Valley between the OSS and a band of intractable Germans who refuse to surrender. Everyone who's ever seen Paisan has his or her favorite episode: by consensus of opinion, the most popular vignettes are the Naples episode (largely adlibbed by actors Dotts Johnson and Alfonsino Pasca) and the thrilling Florentine vignette with Harriet Medin and Gigi Gori. Giulietta Masina, the wife of Federico Fellini, shows up in a bit role; Fellini himself collaborated on the screenplay with Rossellini and Annalena Limentani. Originally released at 115 minutes, Paisan was expertly edited to 90 minutes for American consumption by Stuart Legg and Raymond Spottiswoode. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi