#francesco maselli

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A Fine Pair (1968)

[gatutor]

Rod Steiger-Shelley Winters-Paulette Goddard "Los indiferentes" (Gli indifferenti) 1964, de Francesco Maselli.

[mabohstarbuck]

“I delfini” Francesco Maselli 1960 - with Claudia Cardinale and Sergio Fantoni

[davidhudson]

Francesco Maselli, December 9, 1930 – March 21, 2023.

Photo by Alessandro Dobici.

[theunbearablelightnessofbein]

Fu una cosa breve, di quelle che finiscono all'alba, col primo sole che filtra dalle finestre socchiuse.

[sslimbo]

Monica Vitti in "Fai in fretta ad uccidermi... ho freddo!" (1967)

[resplendentprestidigitation]

Fai in fretta ad uccidermi… ho freddo! (1967)

[mauvais--sang]

Goliarda Sapienza in Francesco Maselli's Gli sbandati (1955)

[sonimage1965]

Fai in fretta ad uccidermi... ho freddo!

dir. Francesco Maselli

1967

Monica Vitti

[unateoriadegliautori]

la terrazza (1980)

[albertserra]

Rod Steiger in Gli indifferenti / Time of Indifference (1964) dir. Francesco Maselli

[falsenote]

Time of Indifference (1964)

[signorinaclaudiacardinale]

Hey! 👋 I was wondering if you know where I could find a list of which of Claudia's films she wasn't dubbed in? I feel like every time I look one up it turns out she was dubbed and I want to hear her real voice!! 😂

Hello! Thank you very much for asking 😊 I actually looked for a specific list but there is none on the net, but since I saw most of her films I put the list here.

Note: In her first appearances in Italian films, Claudia had few lines but they always had to dub her because she still had a French accent.

List of films with CC's own voice:

1.- Upstairs and downstairs (1959)

British film directed by Ralph Thomas, her appearance is short, she plays an Italian called Maria.

2.- Les Lions Sônt Làches (1961)

Here Claudia was in all her glory and was her first film as the protagonist. French film directed by Henri Verneuil, Claudia played the Parisian Albertine Ferran and we can hear her with her own voice.

3.- Cartouche (1962)

French film directed by Philippe de Broca and again Claudia in all her glory plays Venus in her own voice.

4.- 8 1/2 (1963)

Italian film directed by Federico Fellini and by his orders he wanted Claudia's natural voice without dubbing, in fact, Claudia plays herself. It is Claudia's first Italian film where her voice is not dubbed.

5.- La ragazza di Bube (1964)

Italian film directed by Luigi Comencini, it was a great success in Japan. Claudia plays Mara Castellucci.

6.- Circus World (1964)

American film directed by Henry Hathaway. Claudia plays Toni Alfredo.

7.- Gli indifferenti (1964)

Italian film directed by Francesco Maselli, script by Alberto Moravia. Claudia plays Carla.

8.- Il Magnifico Cornuto (1964)

Italian film directed by Antonio Pietrangeli. Claudia plays Maria Grazia.

9.- Sandra (1965)

Italian film directed by Luchino Visconti. CC plays Sandra Dawdson.

10.- Blindfold (1966)

American film directed by Philip Dunne. CC plays Vicky Vincenti, an Italian showgirl.

11.- Lost Command (1966)

American film directed by Mark Robson. CC plays Aicha Mahidi.

12.- The Professionals (1966)

American film directed by Richard Brooks. CC plays Maria Grant.

13.- The Queens (1966)

Scene from 'Le Fate: Armenia', directed by Mario Monicelli. CC plays Armenia.

14.- Una Rosa Per Tutti (1966)

Italian film shot in Brazil, directed by Franco Rossi. CC plays Rosa.

15.- Don't Make Waves (1968)

American film directed by Alexander Mackendrick. CC plays Laura Califatti.

16.- A Fine Pair (1968)

Italian-American film directed by Francesco Maselli. CC plays Esmeralda Marini.

Here is a forum where they discuss about CC's dubbing in "Once Upon a Time in the West" (1968 directed by Sergio Leone) and I can personally say that it is not CC's voice, Leone shouldn't have dubbed her 😐.

From the 70's onwards, CC's movies are with her original voice. All these movies can be found on VK or OK.RU.

[denastudio]

Monica Vitti in Kill Me Quick, I’m Cold (1967) dir. Francesco Maselli

[monkeyssalad-blog]

Virna Lisi by Truus, Bob & Jan too! Via Flickr: Italian postcard by Rotalcolor / Rotalfoto, Milano, no. N 63. Seductive Italian actress Virna Lisi (1936-2014) appeared in more than 100 film and TV productions and was internationally best known as a tempting blue-eyed blonde in Hollywood productions of the 1960s. But she proved to be more than a pretty face. Later she had a career Renaissance with three-dimensional character parts in various Italian and French. A triumph was her portrayal of a malevolent Catherine de Medici in La Reine Margot (1994) for which she won both the David di Donatello and the César awards. Virna Lisi was born as Virna Lisa Pieralisi in Ancona, Italy in 1936. Her brother, Ubaldo, later became a talent agent. Her sister was actress Esperia Pieralisi. Virna began her film career as a teenager. Two Neapolitan producers (Antonio Ferrigno and Ettore Pesce) discovered her in Paris. Her debut was in La corda d'acciaio/The Line of Steel (Carlo Borghesio, 1953-1958). Initially, she did musical films, like in E Napoli canta/Napoli Sings (Armando Grottini, 1953) and the successful four-episode film Questa è la vita/Such is Life (Luigi Zampa a.o., 1954), with the popular Totò. Her looks were more valued than her talent in some of her early films, like in Le diciottenni/Eighteen Year Olds (Mario Mattoli, 1955) with Marisa Allasio, and Lo scapolo/The Bachelor (Antonio Pietrangeli, 1955) with Alberto Sordi. She incarnated more demanding roles in Il cardinale Lambertini/Cardinal Lambertini (Giorgio Pastina, 1954) opposite Gino Cervi, La Donna del Giorno/The Doll That Took the Town (Francesco Maselli, 1956), the Peplum Romolo e Remo/Duel of the Titans (Sergio Corbucci, 1961) featuring musclemen Steve Reeves and Gordon Scott as the two legendary brothers, and Eva/Eve (Joseph Losey, 1962) starring Jeanne Moreau. In the late 1950s, Lisi played on stage at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, and appeared in 'I giacobini' by Federico Zardi, under the direction of Giorgio Strehler. During the 1960s, Lisi played in stage comedies and she also participated in some very popular dramatic television productions. On TV, she also promoted a toothpaste brand, with a slogan which would become a catchphrase amongst the Italians: "con quella bocca può dire ciò che vuole" (with such a mouth, she can say whatever she wants). In the 1960s, Hollywood producers were looking for a successor to Marilyn Monroe and so Virna Lisi made a dent in Hollywood comedies as a tempting blue-eyed blonde. She first starred opposite Jack Lemmon in George Axelrod’s satirical How to Murder Your Wife (Richard Quine, 1965). At IMDb, reviewer Mdantonio takes his hat off for her performance: “What most everyone fails to mention in the comments is the incredible skill of Virna Lisi. She is a natural mixing it up with Lemmon, (Claire) Trevor and the other veterans like she had been making movies for years. I have watched many movies in my day and I must say that Virna Lisi is right at the top, not only in beauty and sexuality but in carrying her role as good as anyone else could have. Ms. Lisi, my hat is off to you.” She also gained attention with the March 1965 cover of Esquire magazine on which she was shaving her face. The following year she appeared in another comedy, Not with My Wife, You Don't! (Norman Panama, 1966), now with Tony Curtis. She also starred with Frank Sinatra in Assault on a Queen (Jack Donohue. 1966), with Rod Steiger in La Ragazza e il Generale/The Girl and the General (Pasquale Festa Campanile, 1967), and twice with Anthony Quinn, in the war drama La vingt-cinquième heure/The 25th Hour (Henri Verneuil, 1967), and The Secret of Santa Vittoria (Stanley Kramer, 1969). To overcome her typecasting as a sexy, seductive woman, Lisi sought new types of roles and found these in such Italian comedies as Le bambole/Four Kinds of Love (Dino Risi a.o., 1965), Signore & signori/The Birds, the Bees and the Italians (Pietro Germi, 1966) and Le dolci signore/Anyone Can Play (Luigi Zampa, 1968), and Roma bene (Carlo Lizzani, 1971) with Senta Berger. At AllMovie, Robert Firsching reviews Signore & signori: “Pietro Germi's funny anthology combines the standard sex comedy format with some unexpectedly subtle observations about village life. The film centers on three stories exposing the sexual secrets of the Italian town of Treviso. (...) Signore e Signori won the Best Film award at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival.” In the early 1970s, Virna Lisi decided to focus on her family, husband Franco Pesci and her son Corrado, born in 1962. In the later 1970s, she had a career renaissance with a series of major Italian films, including the Nietzsche biography Al di là del bene e del male/Beyond Good and Evil (Liliana Cavani, 1977) starring Dominique Sanda, Ernesto (Salvatore Samperi, 1979), La cicala/The Cricket (Alberto Lattuada, 1980), and I ragazzi di via Panisperna/The Boys of the Via Panisperna (Gianni Amelio, 1989) with Andrea Prodan and Mario Adorf. Prodan’s brother Luca is the singer of an Argentinean band, which later made a song for Lisi. A Brazilian rock band, Virna Lisi, is even named after her. Her greatest triumph was the French film La Reine Margot (Patrice Chéreau, 1994) in which Lisi played a malevolent Catherine de Medici, ordering assaults, poisonings, and instigations of incest. Karl Williams writes at AllMovie about the film: “The historical novel by Alexandre Dumas was adapted for the screen with this lavish French epic, winner of 5 Césars and a pair of awards at the Cannes Film Festival. Isabelle Adjani stars as Marguerite de Valois, better known as Margot, daughter of scheming Catholic power player Catherine de Medici (Virna Lisi).” For her magnificent portrayal, Lisi won not only the César and Best Actress award in Cannes but also the David di Donatello award, the Italian equivalent of the Oscar. From the late 1990s on, she did several successful dramatic TV productions, including L'onore e il rispetto/Honour and Respect (Salvatore Samperi, 2006) with Gabriel Garko and Giancarlo Giannini. In 2002, Lisi starred in Il più bel giorno della mia vita/The Best Day of My Life (Cristina Comencini, and her final film was Latin Lover (Cristina Comencini, 2015), which was posthumously released. In 2014, she passed away in Rome at the age of 78. Virna Lisi was married to architect Franco Pesci and they had three grandchildren: Franco, Federico and Riccardo. Sources: Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Gary Brumburgh (IMDb), Glamour Girls of the Silver Screen, Wikipedia and IMDb. And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

[fibula-rasa]

Favorite New-to-me Films—April ‘24

(listed in order pictured above, L to R)

READ on BELOW the JUMP!

They Came to a City (1944)

[letterboxd | imdb | tubi (US)]

In a thought experiment about post-war Britain brought to life, nine strangers from different backgrounds are spirited away to get a glimpse at a socialist utopian civilization. Their reactions are, as expected, varied.

A film adaptation of the J.B. Priestley play of the same name, They Came to a City isn’t thoroughly translated into something cinematic. The sets are visually interesting, but the film never escapes stagey-ness. Regardless, it’s an interesting film worth watching for its candor on social/political attitudes in Britain in the 1940s and the great character writing and acting. (BTW, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Googie Withers give a performance that’s any less than stellar.)

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Love in the City / L’amore in città (1954)

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This Italian documentary anthology dives into love, in many forms, in the city of Rome. Six directors each give an angle on life in the city. Carlo Lizzani provides a portrait of the lives of sex workers. Michelangelo Antonioni profiles women who attempted suicide over love gone wrong. Dino Risi captures a fleeting glimpse of dance hall life. Federico Fellini goes farcical, recounting a story of a “werewolf” applying to a marriage agency. Francesco Maselli and Cesare Zavattini share a sympathetic narrative of a mother who abandoned her baby. Alberto Lattuada provides a satirical look at men ogling (and harassing) women on the street. 

As with all anthologies, the quality varies. Fellini’s segment was unsurprisingly my favorite (the same happened with Spirits of the Dead (1968)). I also deeply appreciated Antonioni’s tackling of such a sensitive topic and Maselli and Zavattini’s attempt to give a more humane spin on Caterina Rigoglioso’s story.

(If you live in the US, the film might be free to watch on kanopy with your library card!)

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Two Monks / Dos monjes (1934)

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When a new monk arrives at a monastery, he is unexpectedly attacked by another monk with a large crucifix. The other monks try to get to the bottom of this insane and seemingly random act of violence and uncover a tragic story of romantic rivals.

Stylistically, Dos monjes doesn’t completely live up to the outstanding gothic-expressionist monastery scenes—the bulk of the film recounting the monks’ past is shot and constructed less adventurously. However, I do think that the execution of a single story told from two different perspectives was strong.

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Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza (1973)

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Edited together from footage shot by a French news crew, Scenes is a short documentary on the conditions in Gaza following the devastating events of 1967. While an important film historically, it is short and very specific in its subject, so I can only properly recommend it in its historical and political context. That is to say, this film might be lost on you if you aren’t already well-versed or currently educating yourself in the history of Gaza and Palestine. More information about the film can be found on the Tokyo Reels website (info in English is on pages 19-20, the rest is in Japanese and Arabic).

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Poplar Tree / Тополя (1996)

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Gorgeously stop-motion animated under the direction of Valentyna Kostylieva, Poplar Tree interprets the Taras Schevchenko poem of the same name. It’s a short story about a woman coping with lost love when those around her wish her to move on.

There is a lovely digitized copy on the Ukrainian animation channel, with no subtitles. However, an English translation of the poem is available here. If you read the poem first, you’ll be good to go!

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Night of the Seagulls / La noche de las gaviotas (1975)

[letterboxd | imdb | tubi (US)]

A doctor is assigned to a small, seaside village, but when he and his wife arrive, the welcome they receive is ice cold. The doctor and his wife, with the help of their assistant and an abused disabled local, uncover a tradition of sacrificing young women to an undead, demon-worshiping cult of Templar knights.

Night of the Seagulls is technically part of a series, but the films don’t have an overarching narrative, so it doesn’t matter if you’ve seen any of the other films. I have a penchant for supernatural stories that have to do with the sea, so years ago, with no context, I watched Ghost Galleon (1974). My feelings on that film were mixed, but I saw others online recommend Seagulls as the best of the series. I did like this film more, but my feelings are still mixed. A lot of the scenes with the disabled villager are rough to watch and his character on the whole could have been handled much better. The special effects makeup for the skeleton knights was fantastic. I appreciated that the doctor does not dismiss his wife’s concerns off-hand, which is atypical in this kind of story. I also liked how imminent the threat was—the demon knights are already here, so what are the outsiders supposed to do?!

Unique use of crabs.

As an aside, I was struck by how many similarities Seagulls had with the Thriller episode “A Place to Die” especially as they came out within a few months of each other!

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Hercules in the Haunted World / Ercole al centro della terra (1961)

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Hercules’ betrothed, Dianara, has been overtaken by dark forces. Her only hope is for Hercules, his best buddy Theseus, and their new friend Telemachus to travel to the underworld and capture the stone of forgetfulness. However, it’s Dianara’s own guardian, Lico, who is behind the plot.

Maybe my favorite new-to-me film I watched this month, Bava’s Hercules is a colorful nightmare and Christopher Lee is pitch perfect as the villain.

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The Sisters / Le Sorelle (1969)

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Diana, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, decides to visit her sister, Martha, at her home in the country. They haven’t seen each other in years, and we learn quickly that their relationship is extremely sordid and neither has dealt with the psychological or emotional consequences of that. It does not end well for either of them.

This was a genuinely strange movie. All things considered, I do think The Sisters would have perhaps worked a bit better/been more meaningful if they were not biological sisters but rather just grew up together (which at points I thought might actually be the case). Great execution of the awkwardness and tension around the men in the film, Martha’s husband and Diana’s suitor, and their slow realization of how profoundly messed up Diana and Martha’s past was. The film touches on so many heavy topics, I don’t freely recommend this. I didn’t even enjoy it, but it was such a unique film, I’m glad I checked it out. It’s definitely going to stick with me!

That said, The Others / Le Altre (1969), which Alessandro Fallay also worked on, I do recommend freely. That one is a sweet dramedy about a lesbian couple in Rome trying to have/raise a baby—essentially the polar opposite queer film to The Sisters.

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Slayers: The Book of Spells / スレイヤーズすぺしゃる (1996)

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Also: Slayers Excellent (1998) & Slayers: The Motion Picture (1995)

The Book of Spells is an anthology/OVA set of three adventures of Lina Inverse and Naga the Serpent, her companion and/or rival, depending on the day. In ��The Scary Chimera Plan,” Lina tries to avoid getting chimerized by a crazed wizard, but gets ten extra Nagas for the trouble. In “Jeffry’s Knighthood,” Lina and Naga accept a job as bodyguards for an anemic prince with notions of becoming a knight. In “Mirror, Mirror,” Lina and Naga uncover a rogue magician’s plot to find a long-hidden magic mirror that creates mirror-image dopples of whoever gazes into it.

We watched a whole mess of Lina and Naga movies/OVAs this month. I’ve only seen some of the Slayers TV show and so only really knew about Naga via osmosis. Now, the sound of eleven Nagas laughing in unison will live forever in my nightmares.

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As always, if any of these films catch your eye, but you need specific trigger/content warnings, don’t hesitate to ask for them!

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This past month the blog quickly took on a Natacha Rambova theme.

The research I did for my closet cosplay of Rambova, raised so many questions for me about the production and release of her independently produced film, What Price Beauty? (1925), that it became the subject of my next installment of Lost, but not Forgotten.

Cosplay the Classics: Natacha Rambova

Lost, but not Forgotten: What Price Beauty? (1925)

This unplanned theming also informed what gif and still sets I made:

Salomé (1922) 

[This one I actually gif-ed for reference for my upcoming cosplay of Nazimova, which my generous supporters on ko-fi and amazon have made possible! Nazimova cosplay is coming up as the next installment of Cosplay the Classics!]

Camille (1921)

Why Change Your Wife? (1920)  

Forbidden Fruit (1921)

Twilight Q: Time Knot: Reflection (1987) 

[This one had nothing to do with Rambova BTW]

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As for this month, I hope to highlight some silent stunt spectaculars as I finish putting together the pieces for my Salomé cosplay.

Happy viewing!

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