Friday, Mar. 22, 1968
The Queens
While Swedish moviemakers are fa.mous for heavy-breathing sex, Italy's cinematic speciality seems to be confecting Decameron-like clusters of shorts that are nothing but spun-out risque jokes--such as Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, The Birds, the Bees and the Italians and Boccaccio '70. The Queens is the latest of this genre, and it compares well with the others--thanks to its girls rather than its gags.
The felicitously feral Monica Vitti, for instance, comes on in a wild dash through wood and field with an aspiring rapist at her heels. She's down, she's up, she's down again and he's got her, she wriggles free, he really has her this time, but look--a passing motorist sees her plight and screeches to a halt.
Rapist flees. Rescuer tucks the shaking Monica under a blanket in his back seat, clucking with fatherly solicitude ("I have a daughter about your age"). What advances did the monster make, he wants to know, and she proceeds to tell him with such undulant explicitness that the next thing she knows, she is running through the fields again with her savior panting behind. Comes a new rescuer, new solicitude, and eventually a new and rather different kind of chase.
The second episode raises the question: How could Claudia Cardinale be so completely delectable and so completely poor? She is, though, living in a picturesque pad on a Roman rooftop and parlaying a series of baby-sitting jobs into an affair with a befuddled pediatrician. Pretending that each baby is her own (it is slightly embarrassing when one of the infants turns out to be Chinese), she invades his clinic, calls him for imaginary emergencies. The poor man is saved from an unthinkable fate when Claudia decamps with a suitor whose minicar inexplicably sports a six-foot swan on its roof. But not be fore she has had a chance to show a good deal of herself--a good deal for both the doctor and the viewer.
Weakest of the four queens is Raquel Welch (dubbed from American into Italian), whose story fortunately depends on the one thing she does best--registering no emotion. Most regal is France's Capucine, in a variation on the joke about the millionaire in City Lights who was Charlie Chaplin's pal when he was drunk but did not recognize him at all when he was sober. Capucine gets plastered at a house party and demands that a hired butler (Alberto Sordi) make love to her. When her husband unwittingly engages him as a valet-chauffeur, Alberto thinks he has it made only to find that his relationship with the lady of the house is discouragingly correct--she even beats him down on his salary. It takes several painful misunderstandings and another drunken party for him to realize that a perfect servant will always be able to find opportunities for service.
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