Has anyone seen THE BEAUTIFUL SWINDLERS, a.k.a. THE WORLD'S MOST BEAUTIFUL SWINDLERS? A comic-romantic anthology from 1964 about "swindles" in five locations (including Paris, Amsterdam and Tokyo) by five directors, among them Godard, Chabrol and Polanski.

With that level of talent this isn't on DVD? Amazing. A lot of these anthology flicks were missing in action even on VHS. NoShame was kind enough to give us BOCCACCIO '70 and LOVE AND ANGER, but what about LOVE IN THE CITY, THE OLDEST PROFESSION, CAPRICE ITALIAN STYLE, LA MIA SIGNORA, SIX IN PARIS, THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS, or a legitimate release of THE WITCHES (which has a terrific Visconti segment and Clint Eastwood in his only other role for an Italian production outside of the Leone westerns)?

Could anyone weigh in with opinions on some of them? Precious little from the IMDb. :(

LOVE IN THE CITY has been on vhs in the past in the USA. It's a fairly early anthology film (1953, and black and white), an extension of the neorealist newspaper or magazine format employed most famously in Rossellini's Paisan, most literally in Alessandro Blasetti's NOSTRI TEMPI (more on this below), where the artdesign premise is of glossy photoessays on the most up to date subjects in Life-type magazines come to life.

But Blasetti was a 'mere' entertainer giving age old dramas a topical gloss , whereas LOVE IN THE CITY mastermind Cesare Zavattini was a hardcore prophet and theorist of neorealism launching the first neorealist news gazette of the screen, Italy's most promising young directorial talents as journalists. Zavattini talked it up, and promised regular installments, but all the talk was just that, talk, and the run of the periodical was limited to this one issue, a strangely mishapen hybrid of earnest intentions and Mondo legpulling.

Alberto Lattuada's very mondo-esque segment is the one that works best as pure exploitation spectacle AND documentary. The director picked a half a dozen of Rome's dishiest starlets, dressed them up provocatively, and sent them off into the noonday city unaccompanied, and filmed the results with hidden cameras: crass but classic display of rubbernecking ogling and mediterranean macho, even priests not immune to copping a look (if not a feel). Lattuada shoots it in a style Frank Tashlin would probably have approved of: deliriously edited together monumental women in front of Roman monuments, Mad Magazine guys with fogged glasses and tongues hanging on the ground in pursuit.

My other favorite segment is Fellini's, an even more explictly bogus, manufactured docufiction, an urban legend involving a werewolf that's nicely rooted in a concretely real -but predictably stylized- urban milieu, a very pleasing trifle, a shaggy man story, nothing more.

Other sections are either yet more gossamer thin, or strain for seriousness and end up looking trashy or ridiculous. Zavattini's own recreation of a news story is the most so. He insists on using the real protagonists, but the baby of the tale is now a youngster pushing pubescence, and he doesn't fit in his mom's lap as she begs on the corner the way he did when he was six months old, endearingly ludicrous!

I prefer two early anthologies that are more modest in scope, but more fully achieved. SEVEN DEADLY SINS (1952), which you mention, is a story and director of note for each sin, wraparound story with Gerard Philippe as a barker at a Vanity Fair, accent on French talent, but Neapolitan farce-king Eduardo de Filippo's on hand, and Rossellini adds a very solid little adaptation of Colette's novella La Chatte. Among the best is a story by some 'quality' director Truffaut used to beat up on, but whose brand of magic is pretty damn close to what we associate with the J.P. Leaud guy, a tale of a very young woman precociously-too early ready to lose her virginity and intent on stealing her mom the inn keeper's lover man. This is how adult content can and should be handled, we're plunged into a French provincial version of Thomas Hardy's Wessex tales like Tess of the Durbevilles; is there a word like tragicomic to conjoin tragedy and titillation (tragititillation?), that's sort of what's at work here, as well as a very sharp sense of psychology, and a willingness to show kids as seductive and monstrous, deeply innocent and rotten, simultaneously. Tha Autant-Lara episode with Michele Morgan and Francoise Rosay is also first rate.

Forementioned TEMPI NOSTRI ("Our Times"/Modern Times) by Blasetti (1954) is an assured companion piece to his earlier collection ALTRI TEMPI (1952: do you notice a trend here? 1952-1954 made up the first golden age of anthology movies in Europe, many more besides those mentioned, though a fair number were of a semidistinct subgenre: episodic musicals or variety shows of many sorts, usually built around nostalgia and golden oldies at this point, later reincarnated as Mondo 'di notte' adult nightclub flicks; rock musicals; and eventually stand alone music videos). There the stories were all screen adaptations of short fictions by old masters or new fictions inspired by old songs that the Italian period tales were woven around (that musical aspect alluded to above). This one has all the latest Cesare Pavese-type situations, and the usual cavalcade of old and new stars (Mastroianni, Loren, De Sica etc.). Both films were fundamental in setting the formulas used over and over for this kind of omnibus in later decades. There's no bad story here, but by far my favorite features old society sweethearts De Sica and Elisa Cegani reunited when they're reduced to begging work as extras in a Cinecitta period epic, where they end up riding round and round in a coach having rejoined their epoch, circling through their own past romantic itinerary with each take of a wonderfully detailed fake movie production at center made by a bustling crew of all the latest cinecaricatures, including a proto-Lina Wertmuller A.D. in capri pants and cats eye sunglasses, a total anticipation of Fellini in every respect of this aspect, but balanced by the private Ophulsian drama the two old lovers are inhabiting, beautifully, beautifully shot and acted, De Sica the great actor of MADAME DE rather than the amiable clown for hire he so often was (for that aspect of him, it's also on display here in the weakest episode: he pretends to be a passionate proletarian busdriver, a Roman Ralph Kramden, as fake a performance as the other one is profound). I was about to say it's a story worthy of being anthologized, till I realized it already has been! Good luck finding a copy, alas, let alone subbed...one of these days...but if you do see it in Italian-only, the very last bit needs no translation: it's a very funny little pantomime in which actor Toto and Blasetti jointly unveil their beloved discovery Sophia Loren, carted out at the end here as 'coming soon to a theater near you'; amazing from a historical perspective - she's being launched the way a ship is here- and very amusing as satyr Toto chases nymph Loren around through a screen test with a movie camera that holds no film.

I'm a big fan of BOCCACCIO 70 and would recommend it. The only other from your list that I've seen is THE WITCHES, which ran on FLIX or one of the Encore channels several years ago. I was very interested in seeing THE WITCHES but had a tough time with it. It seemed too nonsensical and silly, and the (twist?) ending to one of the episodes just flew over my head--it was like, huh? I didn't get it at all. Maybe a second viewing would up my opinion.

I didn't realize it, but there are two films called THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS--the one from 1952 that James is talking about and another from 1962, with episodes directed by Chabrol, Godard, Demy, Vadim and others. I missed it but TCM ran one of them--I think it was the latter, which I'd like to see. Both are Italian/French co-productions.

Didn't know about the later variation, that's probably what was asked about. I've since discovered there were yet earlier anthologies organized around the same theme, and that old guard Julien Duvivier sought to top the New Wave 7 Sins with his own contemporary 10 Commandments episodic picture! What a zany portmanteau format.