"Beat at Cinecitta" and other anthologies of Italo lounge music brim over with extraordinary vibes and ditties from films none of us have even heard of, let alone seen. While visiting Bay Ridge in Brooklyn recently , I snagged one of those video titles (along with a couple dozen other ones) just to satisfy my curiosity about what "Lounge Cinema" might actually look like.

The plastic cuteness, the wholesome porn-ness, the critical-mass trash kitsch-ness of this sample film all glow so day-glo dangerously bright that my fillings melt, my eyes bubble and burn, the arrayed rentgen-flourescent analyzers and dosimeters tell me after mere five minute watching spells to burn my protective suit and move somewhere far, far away fast. But I keep getting called back, and getting my fingers burnt by the Pandora's Video box so much like the 'Big Whatzit' in that old Apocalyptic Noir, KISS ME DEADLY.

So after a week of working through, attracted and quickly repulsed, I've seen about a quarter of it. My hair is falling out on clumps, but the perverse Pasquale Festa Campanile pleasure of it all is worth it!

This is beyond good and cheesy, it's just plain wrong, perverted wholesomeness/wholesome perversity without purpose, John Waters as impersonated by Hal 2000 after scanning Luigi Barzini's THE ITALIANS.

Why was this made, who watched this director's uniformly benignly bizarre message movies? I guess plenty of people must have since the regista Pasquale made dozens of these totally synthetic Sexies, was the main pioneer of the softcore mondo-aesthetic wherein sleaze is served up as a kind of liberation politics - as in Emanuelle movies, but much more anime-innocent still, suitable for Saturday morning cartoon watching kids and their bourgeois parents alike.

Woops, I forgot to describe the thing, such is my tonguetied anti-admiration and genuine fear and trembling.

The movie illustrates the song which you may be familiar with, which the star sings about her character, and is illustrated in turn for maximum clarification by a crudely done animation under the titles...answering the question: "Where do you go when you're totally nude?"

Maria Grazia Buccella is the bare one. She's been nude just about everywhere repressed and "no sex please!" males dwell before, and now faces her greatest challenge. Tomas Milian, sporting a Moe Howard haircut and a Jerry Lewis attitude finds her sleeping in his bed. He married her in London (a notoriously swinging place) during a drunken lapse of his nerdy prudence, and brought her back with a baby crocodile as a wedding gift (symbolism for a case of the crabs, fear of castration?). He's now exposed as a man, not the eunuch he aspires to be, through her continuous exposure of self since she freely and Eve-innocently trots her naked charms in front of the window for the all male world to slobber over. The all male clerical class world seems to be a gay/perverted/celibated priestly one partly populated by an underground of closet-heterosexuals who slip out after dark to voyeuristically peer at our heroine and crash their cars while doing so.

Milian is living in a home that's in the heart of Roman Governmental Power (making him all the more vulnerable). The servants are all homosexuals. His boss is a twisted Swedish Massage Freak played by the ubiquitous Gastone Moschin (in the part of corrupt man of the world mentor and mastermind as he was in film after film in the late sixties) who advises his young charge Milian that his role as an employee of the national bank strictly prohibits having even a date with a girl! Propriety at all costs. Tomas, looking rabbity and pratfalling, keeps up his facade for a while, hiding the perpetually naked wife, till old perverted Vittorio Gassman literally knocks it down. In a role he may have wished to forget, he's decked in studded leather S and M gear, wears a silver long hair wig, sports a monocle and uses phallic James Bond spy gadgets (which suddenly go limp at the crucial moment) to get a glimpse of Maria Grazia's booty, only succeeding in knocking down the door...through which Moschin will soon pass, revealing all...

That's where I left off. Sorry for the length of this, but I HAD to put this down in writing to establish for my own sanity's sake that this is not all an hallucination! The sickest part, dear Doctor Mobius, is I'm starting to enjoy it. I picked it up again, and now Tomas, after fleeing from his wife (now scantily clad and in a Liza Minnelli wig, she begs him to "Rape me now! Just a little rape, pretty please!" while unzipping his pants) has ended up in London (a place of flashing Cinzano signs and Hammond organ montage music), and pays a call on a bisexual David Hemmings-type sybarite photographer in feather boas and tight jeans clicking nude lovelies with grotesque Fellini-look makeover hairdos and makeup.

Has anybody else seen this one? Can you explain and cure the illness that addicts me to this awful stuff? Wait a moment! I don't think I want to be cured, too far gone for that ;-) But any old feedback would be appreciated.

I saw this film many years ago and all what I remember is a lot of fun and Maria Grazia Buccella.

If I'm not wrong, at that time Maria Grazia was the lover of Vittorio Cecchi Gori, son of Mario Cecchi Gori, the Italian producer. This film had to launch her as a sexy starlet. She looks so much naïve.... One cannot understand if it's the character or the actress!

An interesting side note is that director Pasquale Festa Campanile also did HITCH-HIKE (AUTOSTOP ROSSO SANGRE) a tense crime/thriller with Franco Nero, Corrine clery and David Hess more or less reprising his LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT persona. Talk about contrasting works...

Quite right about contrasts, and Francesco's spot on about Maria Grazia's innocent sweetness. Sort of like Goldie Hawn in those days when one wondered if her freshly hatched chick act was really for real...

She's also a sort of sixties Italian Marilyn Monroe, as her self-sung theme suggests (it's in the tradition of MM's breathy baby voiced musical numbers)

The movie turns into a good vehicle for Dad Cecchi Gori's mistress-in-law, once one adjusts to the bizarre alternate universe she inhabits (a little like visiting Cicciolina's fairytale world where dirty is clean), and the plot clicks into reliable Italian sixties farce mode. It's actually remarkably clever and nicely timed for low comedy (like Blake Edwards on a good day) with deftly understated pop art product placement in the mise en scene (a big Campbell's soup can which gets fortuitously replaced with a can of red acrylic paint that's then ladled onto the spaghetti- true Italian pop art food). I guess one could ascribe models like THERE'S A GIRL IN MY SOUP and WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT?, but the foreign perspective on the Brit swinging farce genre as cross bred with an earlier decade's Madison Avenue Gray Flannel Swingers that Festa Campanile brings and enacts is refreshingly odd (at least from my own foreign perspective)

Just as another side note, Maria Grazia Buccella was also in After the Fox, another one of those What's New Pussycat style swinging sixties comedy / pop art films that came in the wake of the spy boom. It was made in 1966, so a few years before this, and she's very good in it, too.



(plug, plug - just posted a review of After the Fox just here)

Matt B

Thanks, Matt, for the view. As the pic reveals, besides the view, Maria Grazia is not always as innocent as she seems in DOVE VAI. Further proof in the worldly wise comedienne department is her sterling cameo in L'ARMATA BRANCALEONE (a truly classic comedy adventure set in the Middle Ages, one of the high points of mid sixties Italian film) She's "The Widow" there, who distracts pillaging Vittorio Gassman with her seductive call of "Cu-Currucu", and gets him half undressed (and with mutually chewed grapes all over his face) before revealing just why she's so hot top bed him.

But even Buccella has to take second place in this particular film to Barbara Steele, who has one of her very finest five minutes here. Fellini's costumer-art director Gherardi makes her up to perfection as purple and pale Byzantine empress Theodora who has a taste for the whip. Perfection (and about as 99 percent nude as Barbara gets). Though, truth be told, Catherine Spaak may just win out as Mathelde (looks awfully good as an ex-virgin in a habit). This film, in the female aspect, has one huge advantage in the What's New stakes over the one under discussion: it reminds us that the swinging 60s -of whatever century- should be filled with many attractive 1960s possibilities as far as costars are concerned (few if any of them realized, of course, per the rules of the genre, and life itself...the better to sustain movie dreaming, and not slow down the more, more. more of everything typical of that moment).