Rossano Brazzi – The Magnificent 60s

Light in the Piazza (1962) ****

Will resonate more strongly today. Never intended as a light-hearted confection, despite the obvious premise of young love catching fire in Italy, this was a bold picture in its day and a more subtle examination of the wider impact of mental illness than those later movies set in institutions such as Lilith (1962) or Shock Treatment (1964). Bold, too, of Olivia de Havilland to take on a role that is so transparently maternal. Instead of her middle-aged character succumbing to romantic opportunity as the billing might suggest, to a holiday affair with a rich handsome Italian, she is first and foremost a mother.

Initially, standard romance meet-cute as young Italian Fabrizio (an unlikely George Hamilton) catches the runaway hat of young blonde Clara (Yvette Mimieux) in a piazza in Florence. His ardent pursuit is thwarted at every turn by Clara’s mother Meg (Olivia de Havilland). At first this appears to be for the most obvious of reasons. Who wants their naïve daughter to be swept away by a passionate Italian with heartbreak and possibly worse consequence (what mother does not immediately conjure up pregnancy?) to come.

Sure, Clara seems flighty and a tad over-exuberant and perhaps prone to tantrums but then back in the day this was possibly just an expression of entitlement by rich indulged young women. Turns out there’s a more worrying cause of her sometimes-infantile behavior. She was kicked in the head by a pony and has the mental age of a child of ten. If she is not protected, she might end up as prey to any charming young man.

Clara needs tucked up in bed with a stuffed toy, and her mother to check the room for ghosts and read her a bedtime story before she can go to sleep. Even when Fabrizio’s credentials check out – his father Signor Naccarelli (Rossano Brazzi) vouches for his good intentions, but, in the way of the passionate Italians, would not want to stand in the path of true love.

Clara’s father Noel (Barry Sullivan) is the one who spells out the reality. That pony didn’t just kick his daughter in the head it “kicked the life out of” his marriage. His wife lives in a dreamland, hoping for a miracle, and if that is not forthcoming quite happy to live with a daughter who never grows up. He wants to send her to “a school,” convincing himself it’s “more like a country club.”

Meg fights her own feelings that she knows better than her daughter and that love will not provide the cure, at the same time as batting away the affections of the elder Naccarelli. When she finally gives in to her daughter’s desire, wedding plans fall apart at the last minute when Naccarelli Snr discovers that his 20-year-old son is marrying not, as he imagined, a woman of roughly the same age or slightly younger, but actually someone six years older. Eventually, the wedding goes ahead. Meg convinces herself she did the right thing in permitting the marriage to go ahead.

But this is one of those happy ever afters that don’t quite wash and you might find yourself wondering exactly how it played out when the husband discovered exactly what kind of wife she had. Her instability isn’t genetic so no danger of a subsequent child encountering the same issue. And having to care for someone other than herself might well bring out the same level of maternity as her mother shows, but equally clearly Fabrizio is unaware of exactly what he’s taking on. How will he feel when asked to read her a bedtime story or scour the cupboards for imaginary monsters.

The movie didn’t do well enough to warrant a sequel – audiences expecting romantic confection were disappointed – and just hope Clara didn’t turn into the kind of inmate seen in Lilith and Shock Treatment.

Still, takes a very realistic approach to the problems of someone with such problems maturing into adulthood.

The Oscar-garlanded Olivia de Havilland (two times winner, three times nominee), in her first picture in three years, clearly didn’t want to see out her maturity in those May-December roles that others of her age fell prey to. She is excellent here, no attempt to dress herself up as a sex bomb, and refreshing to see her approach. Yvette Mimieux (Diamond Head, 1962) is excellent as the confused youngster. George Hamilton (The Power, 1968) lets the side down with his speaka-da-Italian Italian but Rossano Brazzi (The Battle of the Villa Fiorita, 1965), who is Italian, has no trouble with the lingo or with being a smooth seducer.

Director Guy Green (Diamond Head, 1962) adds in some unusual Florentine tourist color, but doesn’t shirk the difficult storyline. Julius J. Epstein (Casablanca, 1942) wrote the script.

Worth a look

Austerlitz (1960) ***

If I’d seen this first, I might well have resisted the publicity tsunami that welcomed in 1981 the restoration reissue of Abel Gance’s silent epic Napoleon (1927). It’s the equivalent of John Ford following up The Searchers (1956) with something as clunky as Cannon for Cordoba (1970).

Oddly enough, the first few minutes are outstanding in telegraphing the French leader’s myriad insecurities. He forces a flunkey not only to break in his stiff new shoes – for fear the master of all he surveys be seen limping along – but also his new hat and then cheats when he undergoes the self-imposed ritual of being measured, pushing up on his toes to elevate his height by two inches from its genuine five foot two inches.

After that splurge of exquisite exposition, it goes not so much downhill as up and down ever narrative pathway possible. No wonder Ridley Scott felt that encompassing this particular life required at least four hours (the length of the planned streaming version) and that Steven Spielberg aims to devote seven hours to the subject when he revisits Stanley Kubrick’s script for HBO.

Mercifully, this part of the Napoleon legend is truncated to just three years, from the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, which purportedly brought peace to Europe, to the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805 when the French commander-in-chief demonstrated his military genius and shredded his opponents. But that battle is an almighty time coming.

In between, we have to put up with endless balls and endless characters shuttling through doors, although following the protocol of the time at least we have a clue who they are since they are announced by another flunkey in advance of their appearance. You would need Google open to check out who exactly they all are and what part they play.

Roughly, the story goes: Napoleon (Pierre Mondy) is attempting to achieve the “unification of Europe” (as would occur by more peaceful means over a century and a half later). The rest of Europe, naturally, isn’t in agreement so when foreign countries are not despatching assassins or reneging on treaties they’re lining up armies against him. Things are just as tough domestically. Even though, by overwhelming public vote, he has been named Consul for Life, he hankers after reviving the old title of Emperor, despite the last owner having his head chopped off.

Plus, there are problems on the romantic front, wife Josephine (Martine Carole) has taken a lover and is jealous of the imminent arrival of his former Italian lover. All in all, it’s a pretty busy affair with countless sub plots, including an attempt to dupe the English into thinking he plans to invade their country via Ireland, and American inventor Robert Fulton (Orson Welles) trying to sell him on the notion of an ironclad steamship and submarine. Even when he gets to war, it’s nothing but chatter and subterfuge, various underlings almost rebelling at his, according to them, lack of military skill and troops disobeying orders.

The battle also lacks that essential ingredient, of the audience being told exactly what’s going on and understanding just how clever a maneuver might be, and although there are thundering horses aplenty it comes nowhere near the scale and grandeur he achieved with Napoleon, nor, it has to be said, the later Waterloo (1970), except for the horses and men disappearing under the frozen lake.

It was the fate of Abel Gance to be ruthless edited, his monster Napoleon chopped by two-thirds for original U.S. release, this one losing one-third of its running time, though I suspect what was cut out was no great loss, assuming it was just more rigmarole and costume drama set around his court, although it might have helped in working out what part his sister Pauline (Claudia Cardinale) and Mlle de Vaudey (Leslie Caron) play in the proceedings. Though we could have done with less of the Austrian General Weirother (Jack Palance with an execrable accent). Pauline has the best line in the whole endeavour, refusing to sit on a couch because its color clashes with her outfit.

Nestling among the all-star cast you’ll find – or not, depending on which version you view – names like Vittorio De Sica (The Shoes of the Fisherman, 1968), Rossano Brazzi (The Battle of the Villa Fiorita, 1965) and Jean-Louis Trintignant (Les Biches, 1968).

Nobody does much to earn their crust and Pierre Mondy (The Night of the Generals, 1967) just looks irritated beyond belief that he got mixed up in this.

Far from director Abel Gance’s finest moment. Little more than an elongated information dump.

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The Adventurers (1970) ***

Class A Trash. Adaptation of Harold Robbins (Nevada Smith, 1966) bestseller goes straight to the top of the heap in the So-Bad- It’s-Good category. Only Alan Badel (Arabesque, 1966) as a double-dealing revolutionary comes out of this with any honors.

The likes of Candice Bergen (Soldier Blue, 1970), Rossano Brazzi (Rome Adventure/Lovers Must Learn, 1962), double Oscar-winner Olivia de Havilland (Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, 1964), Leigh Taylor-Young (The Big Bounce, 1969) and Ernest Borgnine (The Wild Bunch, 1969) must have wondered how they were talked into this.

And director Lewis Gilbert (Loss of Innocence/The Greengage Summer, 1961) must have wondered how he talked himself into recruiting unknown Yugoslavian Bekim Fehmiu (The Deserter/The Devil’s Backbone, 1970), nobody’s idea of a suave lothario, for the lead.

One of the taglines was “Nothing has been left out” and that’s to the movie’s detriment because it’s overloaded with sex, violence, more sex, more violence, in among a narrative that races from South American revolution (in the fictional country of Corteguay) through the European jet set, fashion, polo, fast cars, orgies, and back again with revenge always high on the agenda. At close on three hours, it piles melodrama on top of melodrama with characters who infuriatingly fail to come to life.

Sensitivity is hardly going to be in order for Dax (Bekin Fehmiu) who, as a child after watching his family slaughtered and mother raped, makes his bones as a one-man firing squad, machine-gunning down the murderers. From there it’s a hop-skip-and-jump to life as the son of ambassador Jaime (Fernando Rey) in Rome where he belongs to an indulgent aristocracy who play polo, race cars along hairpin bends, swap girlfriends and, given the opportunity, make love at midnight beside the swimming pool.

His fortunes take a turn for the worse when his father backs the wrong horse, the rebel El Condor (Jorge Martinez de Hoyos) in Corteguay, and is killed by the dictator Rojo (Alan Badel). In between an affair with childhood sweetheart Amparo (Leigh Taylor Young), life as a gigolo and cynical marriage to millionairess Sue Ann (Candice Bergen), Dax takes up the rebel cause, initially foolish enough to fall for Rojo’s promises which results in the death of El Condor, and then to join the rebels.

But mostly it’s blood, sex, betrayal and revenge. Anyone Dax befriends is liable to face a death sentence. He only has to look at a woman and they are stripping off. It’s a heady mess. It might have worked if the audience could rustle up some sympathy for Dax, especially as he was entitled to feel vulnerable after his childhood experiences. But he just comes across as arrogant and the film-makers as even more arrogant in assuming that because women fall at his feet that must mean he had bucketloads of charm rather than that was what it said in the script. He’s fine as the thug but not convincing as a lover.

Excepting Badel, the best performances in a male-centric sexist movie come from women, those left in Dax’s wake, particularly Candice Bergen as the lovelorn wife and Olivia De Havilland as the wealthy older woman who funds his lifestyle, aware that at any moment he will leave her for a younger, richer, model. Lewis Gilbert is at his best when he lets female emotion take over, not necessarily wordy intense scenes, because Bergen and De Havilland can accomplish a great deal in a look.

The rest of it looks like someone has thrown millions at a B-picture and positioned every character so that they have nowhere else to go but the cliché.

By this point, Hollywood had played canny with Harold Robbins, toning down the writer’s worst excesses and employing name directors to turn dire material into solid entertainment. Edward Dmytryk (Mirage, 1965) had worked wonders with The Carpetbaggers (1964), whose inherent salaciousness was held in check by the censor and made believable by characters played by George Peppard (Pendulum, 1969), Alan Ladd (Shane, 1953) and Caroll Baker (Station Six Sahara, 1963). Bette Davis and Susan Hayward contrived to turn Where Love Has Gone (1964) into a decent drama. Even Stiletto (1969), in low-budget fashion, managed to toe the line between action and drama.

But here it feels as if all Harold Robbins hell has been let loose. Rather than reining in the writer, it’s as if exploitation was the only perspective. Blame Lewis Gilbert, director, and along with Michael Hastings (The Nightcomers, 1971) in his movie debut, also the screenwriter for the end result.

On the other hand, if you can leave your critical faculties at the door, you might well enjoy how utterly bad a glossy picture can be.

Rome Adventure / Lovers Must Learn (1962) ***

Angie Dickinson fans would be entitled to cry foul after the top-billed female star appears to be engaged in a bait-and-switch tactic. After a lengthy wait, when she finally does appear it’s only to high-tail it off to Switzerland leaving behind in Rome lover Troy Donohue. Her departure creates romantic opportunity, her return complication.

And is this the same Delmer Daves, you might ask, who made his name in a series of male-dominated westerns such as Broken Arrow (1950) and 3:10 to Yuma (1957)? Yes, it is, but once Daves had finished applying intense pressure to his male coterie, he did the same, in a different genre, to women.

Young teacher Prudence (Suzanne Pleshette) exerts her independence by quitting her job after being hauled over the coals in Small Town U.S.A. for teaching her pupils a controversial novel. On the boat to Rome she encounters Italian lothario Roberto (Rossano Brazzi), who holds the lofty sexist opinion that only a man can turn a girl into a woman, and the nerdy Albert (Hampton Fincher), both of whom come a-courting, the youngster’s diffidence ruling him out of serious contention.

Roberto is friends with student Don (Troy Donohue) but the minute he is introduced to Prudence he has to rush off to try to persuade artist Lyda (Angie Dickinson) not to leave. Roberto turns gracefully aside after Prudence denies him sex (put more subtly than that of course) and she, finding employment in an American bookshop (speaking the language no deterrent there), embarks on romance with Don, fluent in Italian, who teaches her how to drink strega, takes her to jazz clubs and acts as tour guide.

A good chunk of the picture, it has to be said, is a travelogue, and when neither Roberto nor Don are on hand to point out this or that monument or embark on a potted history, suddenly she discovers an interior monologue to do the job. And at one point it turns into If It’s Tuesday It Must Be Pisa as the couple take off on a longer trip, bouncing from one tourist city to another, the route only complicated by some slight comedy over whether they should share a bed.

*Re-titled in the U.K. and sent out with the most curious support.*

Another decade and sex would most definitely be on the cards and the story would sink under an unplanned pregnancy or a fit of pique and scenes in a bedroom where they are separated by an open suitcase as one or other makes an effort to leave. But it’s the virginal aspects that makes this so sweet and for sure no director has managed to clear entire streets in usually heavily-congested tourist spots to deliver beautiful scenes in such scenic spots.

Actual drama might be light on the ground, but there’s no denying Delmer Daves knows how to apply pressure, this time on the woman, who can either treat romance as a fleeting youthful episode or use it to launch big time into marriage and womanhood. Without a chaperone, unlike the hapless Albert, Prudence has only the example of her predatory employer who takes a male every season.

Just when the romance looks all set, back in Rome she catches Lyda and Don in a clinch and this sparks some good old verbal sparring between the two women as Lyda makes it very clear that Don is no virgin and that Prudence is out of her league.

You can guess how it will end. It’s as lightweight a confection as you will ever watch and yet it is worth watching because the director, close-up at the ready, scarcely gives Prudence a moment’s peace and if ever a director know how to gauge female intent and rely on eyes to express emotion it’s Daves.

Look beneath the façade of the travelogue and you find a woman trapped on the brink, that spark of independence misleading men into thinking she will surrender her virginity, and the woman not wanting to be another notch on a bedpost no matter if that fulfils the dual purpose of achieving womanhood. Daves’ name on the picture should be warning enough this isn’t quite your normal fluffy romance.

If you can ignore the sexism that dictates that a woman’s role is to “anchor” a man, turn his flightiness to one side and by some alchemy make him the best he can be, the narrative edges towards the independence of women, both Lyda and the bookshop owner pick and choose and sometimes abuse their men, and Prudence rejects romance on the rebound with Roberto.

But, of course, if that’s all you want, and you don’t want to hover near consequence, then writer-director Daves delivers a seamless concoction. If there’s an old-fashioned conceit to the whole thing, it’s perhaps because the source material, Lovers Must Learn, was written three decades before and preceded the likes of The Group in presenting a young woman as independent rather than merely yearning for marriage and motherhood.

It seems odd for Angie Dickinson to be relegated to the supporting cast but possibly having already done her Vespa-riding number in Jessica (1962) she preferred a stab at a more mature role, though she had already gone down that route in The Sins of Rachel Cade (1962). Maybe she upset someone in the studio. Maybe her role was bigger but ended up on the cutting room floor when Daves realized the talent he had uncovered in Suzanne Pleshette (A Rage To Live, 1965).

Daves worked again with Rossano Brazzi on the director’s final picture The Battle of the Villa Florita (1965) and Pleshette had a short-lived marriage with Troy Donohue.

The Battle of the Villa Fiorita (1965) ****

One of the few romantic dramas of the 1960s to resonate today. Neglected wife Moira (Maureen O’Hara) abandons her two children to fly to the eponymous villa on Lake Garda in Italy to take up with composer Lorenzo (Rossano Brazzi). While husband Darrell (Richard Todd) accepts the fait accompli, kids Michael (Martin Stephens) and Debby (Elizabeth Dear) set out to bring her back. Although Disney had created a hit on a similar theme with The Parent Trap (1961) – also starring O’Hara – The Battle of the Villa Fiorita failed to find an audience at the time primarily because it sailed too close to comfort regarding the reality of the effect of separation and impending divorce on children.

Nor are these kids Disney cute. While Debby occasionally calls upon her internal winsome to tug at heartstrings, both she and Michael are made of sterner stuff. Unwilling to use comedy as a means of bringing the errant adults to heel, the movie gets deeper and deeper into darker territory, as the kids embark on a war of attrition, disrupting the cushy love-nest and forcing their mother to accept her maternal responsibilities. And the ending is far from what you would term happy.

Moira injects some nascent feminism into her role, determining that she is entitled to happiness rather than merely fulfilling the part of a good mother, running a household, looking after her offspring and enjoying the life of a well-to-do matron married by a husband too often away on business and the too-familiar company of boring respectable friends. A Disney picture would have seen the kids relying on the kindness of strangers or harmless subterfuge to make the trip from Britain by boat and train to Italy. Here, they fund the journey by selling Debby’s horse. The trek is not only dull but on their miserable budget they spend most of the time famished, unable to afford food on the train, resigned to watching adults in their compartment stuff their faces (Disney would have had the grown-ups share out the tasty fare).

Arriving at the palatial villa, where Moira is waited on hand and foot, spoiled by presents and ardently wooed, the children are under no illusion about the uphill battle they face especially when Moira is not immediately stricken enough by conscience to give in to their entreaties. Lorenzo’s initial solution is to fly the children home. Adult fortitude begins to waver when the English pair join forces with Lorenzo’s estranged daughter Donna (Olivia Hussey) on a hunger strike. Lorenzo shows a sharper side to his temperament, Moira a weaker. The children’s solidarity is also, however, sorely tested by their own differences.

That there is no easy solution – the kids perhaps joining their mother full-time in Italy or some kind of child-sharing scheme – is what gives this movie its power. The classical idea of a repressed woman finding redemption in the arms of an Italian lover (as with Summertime, 1955, also starring Brazzi) is turned on its head as reality intervenes. It’s as well the kids don’t kill us with cuteness, but instead present a realistic example of what it’s like for adoring children to be abandoned. As the film progresses, and the children turn the screw, they soon face adult realization that, even if they win, the mother they will bring back will not be the mother they knew.

After turns with James Stewart (Mr Hobbs Takes a Vacation, 1962) and John Wayne (McLintock!, 1963), Maureen O’Hara had regained her marquee appeal, and although feisty enough in those outings, this was a different, and more courageous, performance than her fans might have expected. Her conflict is mostly internalized and especially when her children fail to see her point of view, that feistiness vanishes from sight replaced by a more somber, thoughtful individual. Brazzi is excellent as the lover whose paternal responsibilities he takes lightly compromised by a woman forced to come to terms with motherhood. Martin Stephens (The Innocents, 1961), Elizabeth Dear (The Pumpkin Eater, 1964) and, making her debut, Olivia Hussey (Romeo and Juliet, 1968) make convincing, conniving, children still dealing with their own hormonal and emotional growth.

Adapting the bestseller by Rumer Godden (Black Narcissus, 1947), this proved to be the final movie for veteran director Delmer Daves (3:10 to Yuma, 1957).