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.