A summit meeting of great Italian directors of the era, Boccaccio '70 is an antipasto platter of vintage sex symbols and naughty material. Cooked up and bankrolled by Carlo Ponti and American producer Joseph E. Levine, the four-part film was meant to tap the international smash of Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita, which gave audiences some refreshingly, you know, "mature" subject matter. Four directors were hired to create segments ostensibly based on the tales of Boccaccio: Fellini himself (in the lull between La Dolce Vita and 8-1/2), Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica, and Mario Monicelli.
Before becoming the poster child for the extreme arty, slow paced foreign films of the '60s, Michealanglo Antonioni actually developed his craft on very straightforward, neo-realistic films. Story of a Love Affair (1950) was Antonioni's first feature-length dramatic film, and much to his critics' chagrin, it is extremely linear, it has limited drawn out, "real time" shots, and his actors actually project more emotion than the typical "Antonioni apathy." Enrico (Ferdinando Sarmi) is an extremely wealthy and jealous husband who suspects his young, beautiful bride, Paola (Lucia Bosé), is unfaithful. Instead of confronting her directly, he hires a private detective (Gino Rossi) to investigate her past. While checking up on the mysterious death of Paola's friend, the private... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Michelangelo Antonioni DVD Release Date: Released the 28 June 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Vittorio De Sica's delightful anthology comedy from 1963 pairs joined-at-the-hip costars Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in three funny stories about sex. The first finds Loren playing an impoverished woman with a jail sentence hanging over her head. A unique loophole in the law, however, keeps her out from behind bars: pregnant women and new mothers cannot be incarcerated. Forestalling her date with the pokey, this incredibly fecund felon keeps bearing children. Her lucky but exhausted accomplice is played by Mastroianni, who can't resist her siren call between deliveries. The middle vignette finds the two actors playing secretive lovers having an affair. Shot mostly from within and around his car, the pair self-consciously quibbles and keeps having comic mishaps that slow their... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Sophia Loren - Marcello Mastroianni Director(s): Vittorio De Sica DVD Release Date: Released the 26 April 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Film noir is such a rich cinematic zone that second-tier specimens compel nearly as much fascination as the classics. At a glance, Volume 2 of Warner Bros.' (ever-expanding, we hope) Film Noir Collection is a distinct step down from Volume 1--inevitable when you've launched your series with five landmark titles, including three outright noir masterpieces (The Asphalt Jungle, Gun Crazy, Out of the Past). But linger beyond that first glance, because the second set is a flavorful mix of sleazoid iconography (two vehicles for B-movie bad boy Lawrence Tierney), an offbeat outing for a major director (Fritz Lang in his Howard Hughes RKO period), Poverty Row production circumstances that encourage aggressively peculiar, verging-on-radical filmmaking (the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Claire Trevor DVD Release Date: Released the 05 July 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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