Word: viscontis
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Great Prince. Currently, Giannini can also be cast down about work just completed (the starring role in the new Luchino Visconti film) and jobs offered, including several from Hollywood that tempt him because "my nature is to court glory or invite disaster...
...vita turned really dolce for Marisa in 1971, when Luchino Visconti signed her for her first film as the elegant young mother in Death in Venice. Bob Fosse then hired her to play the German-Jewish department store heiress in Cabaret. Both parts required Marisa to appear both remote and vulnerable. She is very good...
...nearly 70, Visconti has been seriously ill for several years. Conversation Piece, made entirely in a studio, as if to spare the director the rigors of working on location, is about losing touch with life...
...Then Visconti assumes a more somber tone. Konrad turns out to be a person of radical political persuasion. Helmut Berger is a conspicuously unreliable man to get close to in a locker room, much less in a demonstration; he is nevertheless required to convince us that he "threw himself into the student movement." This background, which is about as likely as Jean Cocteau in his youth going three rounds in the Golden Gloves eliminations, rather diminishes the credibility of Visconti's entire enterprise...
More seriously, Visconti forsakes the wit of the opening for a kind of tongue-tied general valedictory. He is interested not so much in exposing his characters as having the Professor embrace all of them, opening his arms to their indulgences and sanctioning their moral impotence. "You could be my family," the Professor tells them all almost longingly, weighing his cloistered life against their wasted ones and finding that his own is wanting. For both Visconti and his protagonist, it is the conclusion of a numb and desperate...