Word: countess
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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SOMETHING for Everyone follows a predictable fairy-tale formula for its plot: impoverished Countess von Ornstein and her two children are restored to wealth by a dashing adventurer named Conrad in a fable which ends with a grand wedding. The lubricant of the story, however, is sex: sex perverted, sex sublimated into aggression, sex released in libidinal fantasy. The result of Harold Prince's debut directorial effort for the screen is a minor masterpiece of black comedy...
...parodies of history (knight-errantery, courtly love, etc.); Something for Everyone, through parody of the fairy-tale, slyly parodies history. It unmasks in a Bavarian setting the rise of a parvenn power-maniac, played by Michael York, as a cool mastery of perversion and murder. Angela Lansbury as the Countess von Ornstein nostalgically bewails the passing of "real men"-that stalwart Germanic breed in direct lineage from Attila the Hun and Barbarossa. In a world of "upstarts, the American tourists and plastic dirndls," she craves submission to a genuinely phallic male like Conrad. She also craves money...
Conrad insinuates himself into the Ornstein family circle first by murdering a groom, then by revealing the Nazi obsessions of the stolid head butler. While sexually subduing both doe-eyed, effeminate Helmut and the Countess, Conrad seduces the unprepossessing daughter of a German magnate. The millionaire and his imbecilic wife want to buy a castle and instant social status. Conrad, of course, sees the connection between their ambitions and the Countess' wish to re-open her decayed ancestral fief, Helmut marries the heiress, though he and his bride aspire only to sexual bliss with Conrad. Conrad himself mercy awaits...
...artist (Franco Nero). Tortured by paranoiac and frequently brutal sexual fantasies, the artist persuades his patron and mistress (Vanessa Redgrave) to rent him a long-deserted villa outside Milan-"a quiet place in the country." The villa turns out to have been the trysting place of a nymphomaniacal adolescent countess who was killed during the second World War. While his mistress stays m town, the artist settles down in the villa, only to become haunted, then possessed by the phantom presence of the dead girl...
...into an acceptably wooden snot of a boy (Michael York). He announces that he is a murderer and a pervert, thus letting the other characters know that they are under almost as deep a curse as the audience. He casts some pretty savage spells. Rubbing out two of the countess's loyal stalwarts, he becomes her majordomo. He entices the daughter of a pair of rich social climbers into his amorous clutches while simultaneously achieving equal intimacy with the countess's son. He then ingeniously proposes that his duo of lovers plight their troth to each other...