Ennio Morricone Movies
With his peerless versatility and productivity, Ennio Morricone has been one of the most famous and influential film composers since the 1960s. Drawing from classical, jazz, rock, Italian folk, and avant-garde influences, Morricone's 400-plus scores have accompanied every conceivable movie genre; his innovative soundscapes for Sergio Leone's 1960s Westerns, however, were enough to ensure his lasting reputation. His list of directorial collaborators a veritable Who's Who of post-1960 international cinema, Morricone's music has masterfully accompanied the films of most notably Leone, Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Giuseppe Tornatore, Roland Joffe, Brian De Palma, and Warren Beatty.A lifelong Rome resident and classically trained musician, Morricone began studying at the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia at age 12. Advised to study composition, Morricone also specialized in playing trumpet and supported himself by playing in a jazz band and working as an arranger for Italian radio and TV after he graduated. Morricone subsequently became a top studio arranger at RCA, working with such stars as Mario Lanza, Chet Baker, and the Beatles. Well-versed in a variety of musical idioms from his RCA experience, Morricone began composing film scores in the early '60s. Though his first films were undistinguished, Morricone's arrangement of an American folk song intrigued director (and former schoolmate) Sergio Leone. Leone hired Morricone and together they created a distinctive score to accompany Leone's different version of the Western, A Fistful of Dollars (1964). Rather than orchestral arrangements of Western standards à la John Ford -- budget strictures limited Morricone's access to a full orchestra regardless -- Morricone used gunshots, cracking whips, voices, Sicilian folk instruments, trumpets, and the new Fender electric guitar to punctuate and comically tweak the action, cluing in the audience to the taciturn man's ironic stance. Though sonically bizarre for a movie score, Morricone's music was viscerally true to Leone's vision. As memorable as Leone's close-ups, harsh violence, and black comedy, Morricone's work helped to expand the musical possibilities of film scoring. Though he was initially billed on Fistful as Dan Savio, Morricone's name became almost as well-known as Leone's when his more ambitious score for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) yielded a Top Ten hit (despite his avowed disdain for pop music soundtracks).
Even more so than in the first two Dollars films, Morricone's scores for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Leone's epic Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) elevated the action to operatic heights. Reaching crescendos in The Good's famous graveyard shootout and West's showdown between Charles Bronson's Harmonica and Henry Fonda's Frank Booth, Morricone and Leone created set pieces that were as powerful musically as visually, placing music on a par with the image rather than subordinating it. Integrating a spectral harmonica into the theme music for Booth as well as Harmonica, the soundtrack hints at their fateful relationship long before the truth is visually revealed. Morricone's scores were so integral to Leone's Westerns that he had Morricone write and record Once Upon a Time in the West's main themes, and then played them during shooting so that the actors could move to the score's rhythms. Morricone and Leone repeated this for their equally effective collaboration on the gangster saga Once Upon a Time in America (1984).
Even as he was permanently changing the landscape of Western scores, the breadth of Morricone's talent became apparent as he took on more overtly "art" film projects. Morricone's music lent drama to Gillo Pontecorvo's highly regarded, documentary-style war film The Battle of Algiers (1966); that of Algiers and his score for Pontecorvo's Queimada! (1969) were two of Morricone's outstanding, non-Leone 1960s works. Morricone also delved into the remnants of Italian cinema's postwar heritage with Marco Bellochio's unsung, late neorealist film Fist in His Pocket (1965), Bernardo Bertolucci's neo-neorealist second film Before the Revolution (1964), and Pier Paolo Pasolini's parable/farewell to that legacy, Hawks and Sparrows (1966). Keeping pace with Bertolucci's and Pasolini's evolving styles and concerns, Morricone continued to collaborate with the directors into the 1970s. From the Godard-ian Partner (1968) to the coming of age story Luna (1979) and hostage drama Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1980), Morricone enhanced the emotion and drama of Bertolucci's increasingly stylized (and occasionally muddled) imagery, reaching an apex with the somber, grand, and celebratory compositions for Bertolucci's epic 1900 (1976). Morricone's lavish scores for Pasolini's sexy, satirical "Trilogy of Life," The Decameron (1970), The Canterbury Tales (1971), The Arabian Nights (1974), and his notorious final film Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), were one of the few aspects of the films not to provoke controversy.
Staying close to his genre film roots even as he advanced in art cinema, Morricone provided psychedelic accompaniment for Mario Bava's superhero romp Danger: Diabolik (1968), and crafted a series of evocative scores for Dario Argento's stylized thrillers, including The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1969), The Cat O'Nine Tails (1971), and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1974). Enhancing his international reputation from the 1970s onward, Morricone continued to compose for movies across the artistic spectrum as well as collaborating with an international constellation of directors and stars. Beginning with The Burglars (1971), Morricone devised straight-up action scores for several Jean-Paul Belmondo star vehicles, including Le Professionel (1981); his music also graced the wildly popular French transvestite comedy La Cage Aux Folles (1978) and its sequels. Hired by Don Siegel to give his ironic edge to the Clint Eastwood Western Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), Morricone made his presence felt in American films in the late '70s with his eerie, pulsating music for the otherwise ridiculous sequel The Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). Morricone finally received his first Oscar nomination for his magical, pastoral score for Terrence Malick's spectacularly beautiful Days of Heaven (1978).
Constantly working and easily shaking off such lows as a Razzie nomination for John Carpenter's remake of The Thing (1982), and the troubled fates of Sam Fuller's provocative race drama White Dog (1982) and Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Morricone hit another career peak in the mid-'80s with directors Roland Joffe and Brian DePalma. Merging Brazilian folk and European liturgical traditions through drums, flutes, oboes, chants, and arrangements of "Ave Maria" and "Te Deum," Morricone's majestic score for Joffe's award-winning epic The Mission (1986) garnered another Oscar nomination and became a soundtrack hit. One of Morricone's personal favorites (along with The Exorcist II), he has said of The Mission that it "represents me nearly completely." Morricone earned another Oscar nod the following year for his lushly orchestral, yet edgy, percussion-driven score for De Palma's popular big screen version of The Untouchables (1987). As with his durable associations with Leone, Bertolucci, and Pasolini, Morricone went on to score Joffe's Fat Man and Little Boy (1989), City of Joy (1992), and Vatel (2000), and De Palma's Casualties of War (1989) and Mission to Mars (2000).
Morricone entered into yet another fecund creative partnership in the late '80s with Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso (1988). A favorite of movie music fans, but not one of his Oscar nominations, Morricone's score struck the perfect balance of sentimental, bittersweet nostalgia to accompany Tornatore's paean to cinema. Morricone also scored Tornatore's more downbeat Everybody's Fine (1990), cinema love letter The Star Maker (1995), and earned kudos for his imaginative music for The Legend of 1900 (1998). His work on Tornatore's Malena (2000) earned Morricone his fifth Oscar nomination.
After excursions into Shakespeare with Franco Zeffirelli's version of Hamlet (1990) and the dark side of desire with Pedro Almodóvar's sex comedy Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990), Morricone garnered his fourth Oscar nod for his moody, period-tinged score for Barry Levinson's Bugsy (1991). As prolific in the 1990s as ever, Morricone had a happy reunion with Eastwood for the summer hit In the Line of Fire (1993), provided the violins for Bugsy star Warren Beatty's glossy remake of Love Affair (1994), brought out the horror and romance in Mike Nichols' Wolf (1994), ditto for Adrian Lyne's adaptation of Lolita (1997), and scored a docudrama about his erstwhile murdered collaborator Who Killed Pasolini? (1995). Working again with Beatty, Morricone neatly sent up political platitudes with martial horns, drums, and fifes and hauntingly paid tribute to the senator's spirit with soaring yet funereal strings in Beatty's incisive satire Bulworth (1998), earning a Grammy nomination for his work.
Even as he began to collect lifetime achievement awards, including a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1995, Morricone continued going strong into the new millennium. Maintaining his presence in European and American cinema through his work with Joffe, De Palma, and Tornatore, Morricone also revisited another past creative relationship when he reunited with The Cannibals (1971) director Liliana Cavani for her adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game (2002). ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
- 1985
In this fast-paced actioner, mobsters fight each other as well as the law with no one clearly winning either way. Judge Falco (Franco Nero) has been sent to Palermo under heavy-duty security to investigate mob bosses. Older Mafiosos are in a deadly war for power with the up-and-coming younger men, and in the middle of all of this, Judge Falco is supposed to bring law and order. When a gang member in New York makes his way back to Palermo to confront some of the Dons about monies due him, his sidekick Vanni (Tony Musante) considers testifying before the Judge's tribunal -- if only to indict his own enemies. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Franco Nero, Tony Musante, (more)
- 1984
In this docu-drama that defends a faith in "one God" against the real or perceived evils of consumerism, war, unbridled sex, drugs, and nonconformists, director Jacqueline Manzano has a resonant male voice intone comments such as " ...by killing God we kill ourselves." The Pope is seen in various encounters with worshipping Catholics around the globe, and the epitome of evil is shown in clips of dictators or rulers as diverse as Hitler and Gamal Abdel Nasser. Rather silly enacted scenes fill the space between docu clips. Devoutly religious viewers will be the most supportive audience for this film, while atheists, agnostics, and Buddhists might take exception to the perspective of the director. In the same vein, the intermixing of documentary footage and acted scenes was an excellent concept, but it was spoiled by the artificial, stilted nature of the fictional segments. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
Though some viewers might be put off by its length, graphic violence, and absence of likable characters, Sergio Leone's final film is also a cinematic masterpiece. Spanning four decades, the film tells the story of David "Noodles" Aaronson (Robert De Niro) and his Jewish pals, chronicling their childhoods on New York's Lower East Side in the 1920s, through their gangster careers in the 1930s, and culminating in Noodles' 1968 return to New York from self-imposed exile, at which time he learns the truth about the fate of his friends and again confronts the nightmare of his past. The acting, the re-creation of the time period, the cinematography, and the music are all superb. However, even more important is Leone's ability to make the film work on so many different levels: it's both a criticism of gangster-film mythology and a continuation of the director's exploration of the issues of time and history. Strange as it may seem, the violence and gore in the first half of the film turn into a sad elegy about wasted lives and lost love. The film's strengths emerge only in its full 229-minute version -- the 139-minute and other edited versions don't make nearly the same impact. ~ Yuri German, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Robert De Niro, James Woods, (more)
- 1984
The oddly backward attitudes of a remote Alpine village are highlighted in this story about Bohme (Franco Nero) a stranger who arrives in town one day and creates suspicious looks and queries among the villagers when he appears to have some secret or another. Two disparate brothers, one shy and the other not, are curious about the stranger for their own reasons. Eventually, Bohme lets the townspeople know that he is actually investigating the murder of his mother who lived in a nearby village. As the evidence against the killer grows, Bohme's life is in jeopardy, but the villagers do not seem to be greatly affected one way or another with either his quest or its outcome. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Franco Nero
Gregory Peck had made scattered television appearances before, but the 3-hour Scarlet and the Black was his first starring assignment in a made-for-TV movie. Peck plays Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty, a real-life cleric who, during World War II, rescued thousands of escaped POWs from the Gestapo. Christopher Plummer co-stars as the Rome-based SS official who tries to catch O'Flaherty in the act. The film won several industry and religious awards, and earned three Emmy nominations. Based on J. P. Gallagher's book The Scarlet Pimpernel in the Vatican, The Scarlet and the Black premiered on February 2, 1983. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1983
Aldo (Lino Ventura) is a worker in a Canadian goldmine who escapes being murdered by a gang of marauding bandits as they kill off everyone in the camp except Aldo and two Native American workers and then nab the gold stores. The three survivors manage to kill off the assassins and discuss dividing the gold between them, but Aldo soon catches on that the other two intend to keep the gold for themselves. Aldo practices a little one-up-manship, escapes with the two heavy cases of gold, and then when his canoe goes over some rapids he loses it all. Not one to give up easily, Aldo recruits a wheelchair-bound friend and the friend's wife to help him retrieve the golden treasure from the turbulent waters of the river. With the additional help of Aldo's love interest (Claudia Cardinale) and another friend, the group salvage the gold -- but then have to face some stalwart competition in the form of the two Native Americans who have returned looking for their share of the treasure and a third party who also wants in on the take. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Lino Ventura, Bernard Giraudeau, (more)
In this mystery, a vengeful husband goes looking for the six people who tortured him and then killed his wife. The husband is a WW II vet and one of the killers is now a high-ranking German official. The plot is based on a Mario Puzo story. The film is also titled Seven Graves for Rogan. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Edward Albert, Rod Taylor, (more)
- 1983
In another typical Jean-Paul Belmondo vehicle, the French action hero plays a policeman prone to advancing the cause of justice by any means necessary. On his agenda is a powerful drug cartel working out of Paris and Marseilles, with a drug lord (Henry Silva) who is essentially inaccessible -- but not immortal. Stunts (performed by Belmondo) and chase scenes on land and water enliven the story, but the scenes with Belmondo's love interest are rather marginal themselves. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jean-Paul Belmondo, Henry Silva, (more)
- 1983
Sam Fuller (1911-1997) directed this rather mediocre crime story about a Bonnie-and-Clyde couple -- how they got together and how they are pursued for a murder they never committed. François (Bobby Di Cicco) and Isabelle (Veronique Jannot) meet in an unemployment office, a likely place to find others in their profession: he is a cellist and she, an art historian. While there, Isabelle gets into a nasty incident with one of the clerks, and François helps her out of the office with the end result that the two continue meeting and eventually fall in love. They try to make money as street musicians, though nothing seems to work out. Isabelle then suggests they rob the three unemployment office personnel who were the most obnoxious to them, a suggestion that leads to their breaking into an apartment in which the occupant accidentally falls to his death. At first both Isabelle and the police believe she pushed the man out the window -- and the chase is on. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Véronique Jannot, Bobby Di Cicco, (more)
- 1983
Although it is based on an intriguing premise -- Dale (Brooke Shields), disguised as a man, takes the place of her late father in a 1927 car race through the Sahara -- this film perversely falls flatter than a blow-out, and just as quickly. After starting the race and because of tribal warfare, Dale winds up a prisoner of the thug Rasoul (John Rhys-Davies) but is appropriately rescued by a dashing sheik (Lambert Wilson). Then after she is back in the race, she is captured and thrown into a leopard's cage by another desert villain. The Indy 500, this is not. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Brooke Shields, Lambert Wilson, (more)
In this routine, violent, and often trite female version of Conan, Hundra (Laurene Landon) is an Amazon whose tribe is slaughtered one day while she is away hunting, now it is up to her to find a suitable mate and begin to create a new tribe of little Hundras. Hundra's search takes her to a walled city, but before she finds the ideal male (he is a doctor), she has a lot of head-bashing and sword brandishing to do. Energetic but not exactly fast-paced, this may be an interesting film for feminists, or it may not. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Laurene Landon, John Ghaffari, (more)
John Carpenter's The Thing is both a remake of Howard Hawks' 1951 film of the same name and a re-adaptation of the John W. Campbell Jr. story "Who Goes There?" on which it was based. Carpenter's film is more faithful to Campbell's story than Hawks' version and also substantially more reliant on special effects, provided in abundance by a team of over 40 technicians, including veteran creature-effects artists Rob Bottin and Stan Winston. The film opens enigmatically with a Siberian Husky running through the Antarctic tundra, chased by two men in a helicopter firing at it from above. Even after the dog finds shelter at an American research outpost, the men in the helicopter (Norwegians from an outpost nearby) land and keep shooting. One of the Norwegians drops a grenade and blows himself and the helicopter to pieces; the other is shot dead in the snow by Garry (Donald Moffat), the American outpost captain. American helicopter pilot MacReady (Kurt Russell, fresh from Carpenter's Escape From New York) and camp doctor Copper (Richard Dysart) fly off to find the Norwegian base and discover some pretty strange goings-on. The base is in ruins, and the only occupants are a man frozen to a chair (having cut his own throat) and the burned remains of what could be one man or several men. In a side room, Copper and MacReady find a coffin-like block of ice from which something has been recently cut. That night at the American base, the Husky changes into the Thing, and the Americans learn first-hand that the creature has the ability to mutate into anything it kills. For the rest of the film the men fight a losing (and very gory) battle against it, never knowing if one of their own dwindling number is the Thing in disguise. Though resurrected as a cult favorite, The Thing failed at the box office during its initial run, possibly because of its release just two weeks after Steven Spielberg's warmly received E.T.The Extra-Terrestrial. Along with Ridley Scott's futuristic Alien, The Thing helped stimulate a new wave of sci-fi horror films in which action and special effects wizardry were often seen as ends in themselves. ~ Anthony Reed, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, (more)
- 1982
- PG
In this 3-D adventure, a knock-off of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a mercenary history professor and his crack team of commandos head out to retrieve four stolen crowns said to possess the power of good and evil. It will not be an easy task as the crowns are being held by a mad cultist. The second three dimensional collaboration between Tony Anthony, Gene Quintano, and director Ferdinando Baldi, this follow-up to Comin' at Ya! was not nearly as successful as their first outing. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Ana Obregon, Gene Quintano, (more)
- 1982
Sebastien Grenier (Lino Ventura), a former French spy, is working as a financial analyst in Zurich and cultivating an on-going relationship with Anna Gretz (Krystyna Janda), a German teaching at the university. Then his peaceful existence starts to disintegrate when he is recruited by a top French intelligence operative (Michel Piccoli) to discover how one of their own secret agents was found out and executed in broad daylight by a gang of terrorists. Sebastien starts to work but is immediately put off by the fact that his contacts are being murdered before he can reach them. As he gets deeper and deeper into the case, he comes to realize that he is being used in an elaborate political scheme, a scheme that leads to the death of Anna and a vow to get the killers who have now ruined what is left of his life. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Lino Ventura, Krystyna Janda, (more)
- 1982
Thirteen months and ten million dollars were lavished upon this ten-hour, four-part TV miniseries about legendary globetrotter Marco Polo. Newcomer Ken Marshall played the title character, a 14th century Venetian explorer who, among other accomplishments, firmly established the "silk route" between Europe and the Orient, introducing such precious commodities as spaghetti and fireworks to the Occidental world. In addition to featuring the usual polyglot of major British and American stars in cameo roles (including Denholm Elliott, Anne Bancroft, John Gielgud, Leonard Nimoy, and Burt Lancaster), the production represented the first Western production to be filmed on location in China since WWII -- not to mention the first English-language appearance of celebrated Chinese stage and film actor Ying Ruocheng, superbly cast as the mighty Kublai Khan. An American-Italian-Austrian-French-British co-production, Marco Polo received its first U.S. showing when it was telecast by NBC from May 16 through 19, 1982. A "condensed" version, running approximately 270 minutes, was later made available in Europe and South America. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Ken Marshall, Denholm Elliott, (more)
A little-seen film, suppressed by Paramount studio executives and never released theatrically in the U.S., this drama is a powerful saga about racism. Julie Sawyer (Kristy McNichol) hits a handsome white dog with her car one night and then nurses it back to health. One day, the theretofore mild-mannered dog saves her life by viciously attacking and killing a rapist who breaks into her home. Lucy discovers that the dog has been trained to attack black skin. She consults an animal trainer, Carruthers (Burl Ives), who urges her to have the dog exterminated. But a maverick black trainer, Keys (Paul Winfield), who has tried before to break the training of such dogs but never succeeded, steps in. Director Sam Fuller had made other controversial films, but this one frightened studio executives, who deep-sixed it. It was hailed by critics when it was released in Europe. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Kristy McNichol, Paul Winfield, (more)
- 1982
Craig has a psychic link to Keith, and travels from his home in the United States to Hamburg, Germany, after telepathically sensing details of his brother's gruesome crimes. After bludgeoning an aging boxer (Cameron Mitchell) to death, Keith -- who can also sense his brother -- traps Craig by telling the dead fighter's daughter, Christine (Sarah Langenfeld), where he is. Naturally, Craig and Christine begin an affair, only to have Keith drug Craig and murder Christine after his impotence prevents him from raping her. Craig ends up in jail for the murder and Keith continues his bloody killing spree until Craig's girlfriend (Penelope Milford) shows up from America. And that's when the film starts getting extremely nasty. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Michael Moriarty, Penelope Milford, (more)
Tong Wai Shing directed this 1982 martial arts film from the Shaw brothers. Starring Wong Yue as a young kung-fu master working at a funeral parlor while maintaining a gambling habit, The Young Avenger tells the story of what happens when the two worlds collide. Attempting to create a balance of action and comedy, the film features fast-paced martial arts fight scenes as well as a sprinkling of slapstick humor. Co-starring Tong Shang, the picture boasts a score by renowned composer Ennio Morricone, borrowed from Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dynamite. ~ Matthew Tobey, All Movie Guide
Trinity series star Bud Spencer returns to the Wild West in director Michele Lupo's comic tale of an outlaw drifter, Buddy, who is mistaken for a doctor after his Indian companion inadvertently steals a bag of surgical instruments. When a band of murderous outlaws attempts to overrun the small town Buddy is passing through, the presumed medico shows that his true talent is cracking skulls. Music is composed by Ennio Morricone. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
- 1981
- PG
After his son disappears, an Italian cheese manufacturer is threatened by political terrorists who will supposedly kill the son if he does not pay a large ransom. Unsure if they really have his son and if the son is still alive, he has to decide if he should or should not sell his business to afford the sum. ~ Kristie Hassen, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Ugo Tognazzi, Anouk Aimée, (more)
Pia Zadora stars in an over-cooked melodramatic adaptation of the 1946 James M. Cain novel that is every bit as smutty and sleazy as Zadora's vampish character of Kady. The location of the novel has been switched from Appalachia to the barren lands of Arizona and Nevada in 1937. Stacy Keach plays Jess Tyler, a desert hermit who has spent years guarding an abandoned silver mine. Suddenly, Jesse is confronted by his very grown-up and sexy daughter, who, when she was a baby, had been taken away from him by his wife, Belle (Lois Nettleton). Kady, it so happens, hasn't come home for a family reunion -- she has just been dumped by a rich young man who is the father of her illegitimate child and whose family owns the very silver mine that Jess is guarding. Kady hopes to use her feminine wiles to seduce Jess and reopen the mine and extract the money from the earth that she feels is due her from the family. As if his seductive daughter walking around bare-breasted in front of him isn't enough, Jess must also deal with the sudden return of his older daughter, Janey (Ann Dane), who appears with Kady's son; Belle, who comes back to Jess dying of tuberculosis; and Moke Blue (James Franciscus), the man who stole Belle away from Jess years ago. Also squeezing his way into Jess's shack is Wash Gillespie (Edward Albert), the father of Kady's child, who now wants to marry her. Butterfly also features Orson Welles as Judge Rauch. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Stacy Keach, Pia Zadora, (more)
- 1981
- R
Trying to recreate the screwball comedy success of his collaborations with Peter Bogdanovitch, actor Ryan O'Neal headlined this sporadically funny mixture of light farce and social satire. O'Neal stars as Bobby, an intellectual English professor who leaves his job when his father Jack (Jack Warden) appeals to him for help. A garment manufacturer, Jack is in serious debt to humongous loan shark Eddie (Richard Kiel), and he desperately needs his business to provide the capital to pay Eddie back. Completely by accident, Bobby invents the solution to his dad's problem: see-through denim blue jeans with strategically placed holes in the rear that expose one's backside. The fickle public goes mad over the "sexy" new style, and the money starts flowing in, but Bobby exacerbates his father's problems greatly when he falls for and begins dating the amorous Lira (Mariangela Melato), whose husband is none other than Eddie. So Fine was the feature directorial debut of popular Blazing Saddles (1974) writer Andrew Bergman, who would wait eight years before getting behind the camera again with the much more successful The Freshman (1990). ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Ryan O'Neal, Jack Warden, (more)
- 1981
In the original story of Camille by Alexandre Dumas, Jr. La Dame aux Camelias, a beautiful Parisian courtesan, Marguerite Gautier, (called "Camille" because of her love for camelias) is supported by a series of aristocratic lovers, but does not fall in love until she meets Armand Duval. Armand's father lets it be known that Camille would ruin Armand because of her "low" past, and she leaves to save his reputation, saying she does not love him anymore. She soon contracts tuberculosis, and Armand hears that she is dying. He rushes to her side, finds out she has loved him all along, and she dies knowing he has always loved her. The True Story of Camille uses the ploy of Alexandre Dumas, Jr. doing his version of "Camille" at the turn of the 20th century, as a means of introducing a flashback to the "real" story behind the "real" Camille, Alphonsine Plessis. In the film, Alphonsine (Isabelle Huppert) - a country girl - was sold by her father to a wealthy neighbor, which starts her off on a round of living in expansive palaces and keeping company with wealthy aristocrats and eventually, Alexandre Dumas, Jr. himself. But that trajectory did not happen all at once. Alphonsine first survives, barely, as a seamstress in Paris. Then she becomes a prostitute, after which a Count Peregaunts (Bruno Ganz) marries her, then more or less disappears, leaving her to become a high-class courtesan. As she makes her way from one handsome, aristocratic client to the next, a noble protector, Count Stechelberg (Fernando Rey) keeps her out of harm's way. By the time she and Dumas meet, she has become infected with tuberculosis - and she has created the inspiration for Dumas' story of Camille. Her father comes along at this point, however, ready to trounce Dumas for romanticizing his daughter's wretched life - the same father that sold her off in the first place. If the viewer can remember that the characters of Marguerite Gautier (Carla Fracci) and Armand Duval from Dumas' story of Camille have been given their "real" personas as Alphonsine Plessis and Dumas in this film, then the story within a story make more sense. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Isabelle Huppert, Gian Maria Volontè, (more)
Joss Beaumont (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a French spy given the assignment of killing an African dictator, and when he arrives in Africa to do so, he is captured and put in prison. The political winds had changed - the dictator is now an ally - and the best way to handle the agent is to keep him in jail. Naturally at odds now with his former bosses and with an ax to grind for his own incarceration, the agent escapes after two years in prison and heads back to Paris where he announces that he is going to finish his assassination job during the coming diplomatic visit of the African leader. Once aware of his intent, the French government sets up one trap after another, but to no avail - the agent remains free and there is no doubt that he has the full capacity to do exactly what he says. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jean-Paul Belmondo, Michel Beaune, (more)
- 1981
The stage comedian Carlo Verdone directed and stars as the three main characters -- Furio, Mimmo, and Pasquale -- in this classic Italian comedy. All three men are driving back to their hometowns to vote on election day, and each has a different story and a different though easily recognizable personality type. Furio drives his wife nuts with his unceasing chatter -- in a switch of gender stereotypes -- and is obsessed with perfection. When his car gets a flat, he dashes off to phone the Automobile Club for help, but then finds that in his brief absence his tire has already been changed by a generous motorist. Perfectionist to the letter, he takes off the good tire and replaces it with the flat one so the Automobile Club will get the flat they expect. Mimmo is a Mama's boy from Trastevere who rides along with his oversized Grandmama, and the third character, Pasquale, suffers from socialization never succeeded in taking firm hold. As he re-enters Italy, driving back from Munich where he now lives, parts of his car get stolen one by one. The moral seems to be that Italy is filled with all types of people, from those who will replace your tire to those who walk off with it. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Carlo Verdone, Elena Fabrizi, (more)
