Pietro Germi's Divorce Italian Style (1961)

Long ago, I watched the Italian movie Alfredo, Alfredo (1972) starring Italian-dubbed Dustin Hoffman in the title role. He impulsively marries his girlfriend but should have put more thought into it because it was the late '60s and divorce was illegal in Italy. They could legally separate, but he could go to prison if he got caught with another woman.

Divorce Italian Style was made eleven years earlier by the same director. Marcello Mastroianni as a down and out Sicilian nobleman who wants to marry his teenage cousin, which is weird enough in itself. He's already married. There's no divorce in Italy but, at least in Sicily, if a husband finds his wife with another man, he can murder her and receive a light sentence for committing an honor killing. All he has to do is manipulate his wife (Daniela Rocca) into sleeping with another man and he's home free. But would you want to be that guy's second wife?

I didn't find it hilarious. We see him fantasizing about his wife being boiled to death, fired off in a rocket, drowning in quicksand or being gunned down by the Mafia. Sicily looked beautiful but I wouldn't want to live there.

Available on The Criterion Channel.

There are used copies of Alfredo, Alfredo available on dvd.

A Knife for the Ladies (1974)

This is going to be short. A not-very-good western crossed with a not-very-good slasher movie. In fairness, it was made before slasher movies really took off in the '80s so it didn't have anything to model itself on. A private detective arrives in a small western town to investigate a series of knife murders of prostitutes. A 10-year-old played by the director's son is a witness but extrapolates on what he saw and gets an innocent man lynched. 

I assumed the wealthy town matriarch was using cocaine or heroin, both perfectly legal at the time, but, whatever her problem was, she was buying large amounts of a drug that was also used to treat syphilis. I won't give it away here, but there were some questions about her late son.

It wasn't very good. They should have let Jack Elam clean himself up. He was playing the sheriff. Let him have some dignity. Did he have to be an alcoholic?

There wasn't that much blood and no gore, really, which is okay with me. It was rated R in its day.

Picks up a bit at the very end.

Free on Tubi.

I don't know what's wrong with me. There was a time when I only watched arthouse movies. 

Walter Hill's Dead for a Dollar (2022)

I started watching the movie thinking about how idiotic westerns were and wondering how they were ever popular. But it got better as I started to relax and accept it. I turned it on because I had been watching old episodes of The New Adventures of Old Christine and Hamish Linklater was in both. In Dead for a Dollar, he plays a very bad man who hires a bounty hunter to find his (white) wife who had run away with a Black Army deserter. 

There's a dedication to Budd Boetticher in the closing credits. He made a series of westerns in the 1950s and this movie had some elements of the formula his movies followed. You had a woman who had some monetary value, there being a reward out for her and her being the subject of a ransom demand. 

Hamish Linklater was great.

Free on Tubi.

Numero zero (France, 1971)

 

A documentary. The director, Jean Eustache, talks with his grandmother, Odette Robert. She sits at a table wearing sunglasses and talks fast about her life. She must have been born in 1900 and was only 71 when this movie was made. She led a difficult life. Her mother died when she was seven, she had an abusive stepmother, she married a guy who turned out to be a swinger. She mentions men in her family who fought in World War One and later, World War Two. One was put in a concentration camp. There were tragedies in her family, deaths of children and old people. It sounded like she was related to some terrible people but a lot of that was due to unwise marriages.

I tried to picture my old hillbilly relatives doing this. The ones I knew are almost gone now, but as far as I know they led happier lives or at least got along with each other. I'm closer to the grandmother's age than the director's. If it were me, I wouldn't have had nearly as much to tell.

An hour and fifty-two minutes. Available on the Criterion Channel. 

Carl Erik Rinsch arrested

Director Carl Erik Rinsch was arrested for defrauding Netflix of millions of dollars that was supposed to go to a science fiction series he was making. They spent millions, then he asked for another $11 million to finish the series but instead invested the money, lost half of it, then invested what was left in cryptocurrency and did pretty well. But he then bought several Rolls Royces and a Ferrari and a large amount of high priced furniture.

I never heard of him. He directed TV commercials and the movie 47 Ronin which had a $144 million budget. I looked him up on Wikipedia and it sounds like the poor guy was out of his mind or at least had an amphetamine addiction. Good luck to him.

The story should be inspiring to film students and those who wish they were. An inexperienced director got $144 million to direct a movie. It wasn't very good, but Netflix still gave him millions more to make a TV series. I'm also amazed how much he made investing in crypto "currency".

That Kind of Girl (UK, 1963)

A very blond Austrian au pair working in England goes out with a number of men and picks up a venereal disease.

"What do the Austrians think of Hitler?" a young fellow cheerfully asks her. 

It was only 18 years after Hitler offed himself. It wasn't an unreasonable question. 

According to the certificate they show at the beginning of British movies, it was rated X. No one under sixteen admitted. No real sex or nakedness although we do see relatively young people swim in their 1963 English underwear. 

The movie looked beautiful, black and white, recently restored. We see swinging London with crowded streets and nightclubs. The girl joins an anti-nuclear march but wears inappropriate shoes and leaves early. She misses the bus back to London and a guy in an MG gives her a lift. She goes out with that guy later and is attacked by her jealous middle-aged boyfriend when he sees him drop her off. An English bobby chases the assailant. He gets away, but it was a good thing he attacked her because she goes to the police station where a policewoman insists she go to a health clinic where they find out she has syphilis. She's already spread it to another guy who's given it to his pregnant fiancee and thus to their unborn child.  

77 minutes. Free on Tubi.

Veronika Voss (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982)

Set in 1955. I read that it was based loosely on the case of a German actress named Sybille Schmitz. 

About a washed up Nazi-era German movie star. She meets and starts sleeping with a newspaper sports reporter who wants to write an article on actors in her shoes. He discovers that she's being "treated" by a doctor who keeps her hooked on morphine so she can exploit her wealth. These things happen in a country full of "former" Nazis.

I looked up Sybille Schmitz on Wikipedia and surprised at how closely the movie followed her story. They kept saying it was "loosely" based on her but it wasn't as "loose" as I assumed.

In black & white. With a surprising amount of American country music. 

I've been looking at IMDb as I watch movies and have noticed how fleeting movie careers can be. Actors should prepare emotionally for having their careers grind to a halt.

I looked Sybille Schmitz up on IMDb and was surprised that I've seen three of her movies, G.W. Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), a silent movie starring Louise Brooks, Carl Dreyer's Vampyr (1932) and the Nazi version of Titanic (1943). 

Veronika Voss and Vampyr and maybe some others are available on The Criterion Channel.