Word: viscontis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This sort of time change always has the same effect: it up dates the costumes and jarringly displaces the Elizabethan line. Kahn claims to have based his 1866 version on Luigi Visconti's film, The Leopard. But it lacks any trace of the rich textures of the Visconti settings. No one could look at this tacky Verona for a moment and call it "fair...
Unfortunately, the film lacks real visual unity. It is lavishly lit by Giuseppe Rotunno (cinematographer also for Fellini and Visconti), but the camera seems to move almost haphazardly, framing the characters with less care than they are acted. Besides excellent performances by Gianinni and Polito, there is a feisty characterization of a queenly whore by Mariangela Melato...
...trademark of Italy's most successful commercial cinema. De Sica--whose current illness elicited a message of good cheer from the gathering--was represented by a single film, Pasolini's Orestiad was presented, and Bertolucci's pseudopolitical Before the Revolution was dusted off, but Fellini received no recognition, and Visconti figured only as the object of indignation at news that the director was abandoning professedly leftist views to make his next film for a wealthy rightist publishing concern...
This was perhaps one of the mildest provocations Visconti has offered the festival and the city itself: his latest Ludwig is a disaster excused only by reports that the director's illness forced its completion by a substitute, and Death in Venice, the films, which first marked Visconti's decline from films about decadence into decadent films, was most of all an insult to the city whose landscape and legend he abused...
Cukor juggles stock character types and familiar plot complications with playful expertise. Henry and Augusta, along with her lover Wordsworth, a fortune-telling black African, wind up on a mock spy adventure on the Orient Express as Augusta delivers an illegal $100,000 ranson to Visconti (her wildly romantic first lover) held captive in Africa. Fortified by the belief that love conquers all, Aunt Augusta cajoles, lies, steals, blackmails, and is deported in the course of her mission. When she finally does deliver the ransom, she collapses hysterically in her now aged lover's arms only to find that...