Word: countess
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Quite noticeable was Mrs. A. G., the former countess of Malfi, who was sensationally decked out in a long refugee coat by Mendes, tabbed and belted in webbing. It matched her bermudas matched to the cozy-collared, double-breasted battle jacket. On the lower level she was footed in Emm??? newly-designed shoes, like laced-up tennis sandals on thick crepe soles, in prairie green banded with jonquil yellow. She oohed and aahed the most when Canonero was brought out from his stall and admitted to being wild about all things Latin...
...Countess, Vera von Lehndorff, is one of the world's towering beauties -she is the international model built for basketball and known as Veruschka. In Rome she went to the première of the film Veruschka, Poetry of a Woman with its writer/director, Franco Rubartelli. The movie, originally a token of their long great-and-good friendship, now seems to have become more of a souvenir. After the show was over, he left with another model and she with another friend...
...Ella Todd holds her own as Susanna, with a clear-voiced elegance and presence. Richard Gill's voice is made for Italian opera, and a good makeup and costuming job made a convincing Count Almaviva out of him, while Elizabeth Phinney, who has the commanding character of the Countess down to a science, was the best of the female leads...
...Angela Lansbury, as the Countess, wins honors hands down as the film's principal asset. She not only parades around in a dazzling array of black and/or white costumes, but also dominates several of the most clever scenes in the film. Whether insulting her lesbian attendant, or shrieking for fine strawberries, or flamboyantly embracing the quest for money, Lansbury brings to her part the exaggerated theatricality which came off so well in Prince's Mame. After announcing her engagement to Conrad, she takes her fat daughter aside and says: "I was thinking of pink for the bridesmaids, but really...
...touches: the Fellini-esque Bavarian music-makers who pop up on hillsides and in taverns, the bloated Wagnerian singers who rush at each other on stage as Conrad's eye seeks his victims in the opera balcony, the gaudy wedding cake of a hunting-lodge decked out for the Countess's garden party. And, finally, a surprise ending throws the ultimate psychological confusion into a film which plays bewitching games with violence...