Word: mastroiannis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...chief acting burden naturally falls on Christopher Plummer as Pizarro and David Carradine as Atahuallpa. Both performances are stunning. Now there are two kinds of excellent actor. One molds each role into an extension or variation of his own marked personality-like Gielgud, Hawkins, Mastroianni, Robards, Fonda. The other, and greater, is able to obliterate the self and mint an entirely fresh being-like Chaplin, Jouvet, Oliver Guinness, Brando. Plummer belongs to the second type. Having recently seen his Hamlet, Arturo Ui, and Pizarro, I just can't believe they were all played by the same...
...muzzles protrude from her brassiere like iron nipples. As the Chinese slumps, Ursula coolly bends her head to blow the smoke away. Then off she goes in hot pursuit across New York, around Rome's Colosseum and Ostia beach to get her tenth victim, none other than Marcello Mastroianni...
...Mastroianni's crisis begins with an Indonesian airline stewardess (Seyna Seyn). Lured to a hotel rendezvous between planes, the sylph announces at intervals that time is flying, finally swallows a tiny pill and phones downstairs to ask that the desk call back in exactly 38 minutes. Her cool acquiescence chills Mastroianni, and ultimately sends him to a sick psychiatrist whose advice is to love dangerously or not at all. Mastroianni's subsequent Misses and near-Misses include a lady lion tamer (Liana Orfei) who mixes her work with pleasure, an accursed village prostitute (Liana's cousin, Moira...
...liveliest of the film's ten encounters, Director Mario Monicelli (Big Deal on Madonna Street, The Organizer) exuberantly parodies such earthy Sicilian comedies as Pietro Germi's Seduced and Abandoned. Posing as a doctor, Mastroianni offers his protection to a dishonored country girl (Yolanda Modio) and becomes so inflamed by the nearness of her murderous menfolk that he begins biting buttons off her dress. Another stylishly funny sequence, indebted to Fellini, drums up elegant corruption at a villa where a deaf aristocrat's mistress (Marisa Mell) tries to persuade Mastroianni to kill for her. In pursuit...
...bored lover, Mastroianni is superb, now freezing almost imperceptibly over some affront to his fairly rigid erotic code, now quivering with gleeful, guilty passion as he catches a scent of danger. But his solid performance is wasted in fleshing out a hollow comic premise. In the end, Casanova collapses into palaver about murder and morals in a frantic courtroom scene-the customary last stop for a comedy that has lost its case...