Italy

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Catherine Spaak, Darling of Italian Cinema in the ’60s, Dies at 77

      by

      Born in France, she moved to Italy as a teenager and began a long acting career, which extended to Hollywood in the movie “Hotel.”Catherine Spaak, a French-born actress who made her name crossing genres in Italian, French and occasionally American films, acting alongside stars like Jane Fonda and Rod Taylor, died on April 17 in Rome. She was 77.Her son, Gabriele Guidi, confirmed her death.Born outside Paris, Ms. Spaak went to Italy as a teenager and began a long film career there. Her first major role in a feature film was as a 17-year-old student who has an affair with a middle-aged man in “Sweet Deceptions,” from 1960 (originally “Dolci Inganni”).Four years later she appeared as a Parisian shopgirl in “La Ronde,” a French drama about marital infidelity directed by Roger Vadim, in which she acted alongside Ms. Fonda (who went on to marry Mr. Vadim). The film, a remake of Max Ophuls’ 1950 version based on an 1897 Arthur Schnitzler play, was released and dubbed in the United States as “Circle of Love.”Ms. Spaak became an onscreen sex symbol as a young actress, winning the attention of many international magazines, including Playboy. With her long, straight hair and blunt-cut bangs, she also became something of a style-setter in the 1960s.Her first film role in the United States came in “Hotel” (1967), an adaptation of the Arthur Hailey novel, starring Mr. Taylor. She played the mistress of an investor (Kevin McCarthy) who wants to buy a landmark New Orleans hotel. Variety called her performance “charming and sexy.”In 1968 she had top billing, alongside Jean-Louis Trintignant, in “The Libertine” (originally “La Matriarca”) playing “a restless young widow” who “skips in and out of various sexual encounters,” as Howard Thompson wrote in an unenthusiastic review in The New York Times.She had another leading role in 1971, in Dario Argento’s murder mystery thriller “The Cat O’Nine Tails,” performing alongside Karl Malden and the television star James Franciscus. In 1975 she took on a different genre playing a prostitute in “Take a Hard Ride,” an Italian-American “spaghetti western” that also starred Jim Brown and Lee Van Cleef.Ms. Spaak pursued a parallel singing career in the 1960s and ’70s, recording a handful of albums. She was often likened to the French chanteuse Françoise Hardy, some of whose songs Ms. Spaak covered.Later in her career she hosted a popular Italian talk show called “Harem.”Catherine Spaak was born on April 3, 1945, in Boulogne-Billancourt, in the Paris area, to Charles Spaak, a screenwriter, and Claudie Clèves, an actress. After moving to Italy as a teenager, she remained there for the rest of her life and became a naturalized citizen.She was married four times. Her first husband was the Italian actor and producer Fabrizio Capucci; her second, Johnny Dorelli, was also an actor, and he and Ms. Spaak recorded music together, including the album “Promesse … Promesse …” (1970). She later married Daniel Rey, an architect, and, in 2013, Vladimiro Tuselli.In addition to Mr. Guidi, she is survived by a daughter, Sabrina Capucci, and her sister, Agnes Spaak. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘For Lucio’ Review: The Voice of Italy for Four Decades

      by

      A new documentary pays tribute to Lucio Dalla, a popular and passionate Italian singer whose songs captured the country’s political turmoil.Pudgy and hirsute, favoring floppy hats and round glasses, Lucio Dalla didn’t look much like a pop star. A jazz clarinetist who reinvented himself as a singer-songwriter, Dalla nonetheless became one of Italy’s most beloved troubadours in the later decades of the 20th century. His songs were rhapsodic and discursive, polemical and observant — often within the span of a single verse — and his voice could shift from conversational intimacy to full-throated passion just as quickly.“For Lucio,” Pietro Marcello’s new documentary, offers a portrait of Dalla that is both informative and enigmatic. More an essay film than a standard musical biography, it emphasizes personality over chronology, and dwells more on the work than the life. Instead of assembling the usual squadron of talking heads, Marcello concentrates on just two interview subjects, both of whom knew Dalla well.His manager, Umberto Righi — everyone calls him Tobia — appears alone in the first part of the movie, putting flowers on Dalla’s grave and recalling the early years of their association. Later Tobia is joined by Stefano Bonaga, who knew Dalla when they were children in Bologna. This being Italy, the two men sit and reminisce over a leisurely pasta lunch, pausing to sip wine and light cigarettes. Their conversation sometimes veers into abstraction, and the ways they describe their old friend (who died in 2012, at 68) don’t always paint a vivid picture. We hear that he was unpredictable, brilliant and generous, but there is a curious shortage of anecdotes that might bring those traits to life.More satisfying is the archival material Marcello assembles. We get to see Dalla in concert, on television variety shows, in proto-music-videos and in conversation with journalists. These moments go a long way toward explaining his appeal. They show a plain-spoken intellectual who could be impish, ardent or gnomic, and whose songs captured both the exuberant spirit of Italian popular culture and the country’s political agony and social turmoil in the ’60s and ’70s.Though Dalla released hit records through the ’80s and ’90s, it’s the earlier period that most interests Marcello, in particular the years in the early ’70s when Dalla collaborated with the left-wing Bolognese poet and writer Roberto Roversi. The filmmaker, who has made both documentaries and fictional features (recently, and notably, “Martin Eden”), is fascinated by histories of class struggle, ideological conflict and intellectual agitation. He juxtaposes images of war, poverty and labor unrest with Dalla’s songs to underline their messages and explain their context. A grim climax is provided by the bombing of Bologna’s central train station in 1980, an act of right-wing terrorism that was the deadliest single incident of political violence in an era known in Italy as the Years of Lead.Even when a song’s subject isn’t explicitly political — as in “Nuvolari,” a rambling ballad about a celebrated racecar driver — there is a feeling of urgency and struggle in Dalla and Roversi’s lyrics and in the voice that delivers them. One of the most striking passages in “For Lucio” is a performance, in front of an audience of factory workers, of “Itaca,” a song that evokes Homer’s “Odyssey” from the standpoint of ordinary sailors. That kind of romantic populism links Dalla to the Latin American Nueva Canción movement, while his music incorporates influences from Brazilian bossa nova and tropicália as well as European and North American popular styles.For all his cosmopolitanism, he remains a distinctively Italian figure, and “For Lucio” is a movie preoccupied above all with Italy’s cultural memory and identity. This can make it a bit of a challenge even for Italophiles or students of history, musical and otherwise. This isn’t “Lucio for Beginners” by any means. Nor is it a greatest-hits anthology or a “behind the music” tell-all. It’s a tribute and an invitation to further research.For LucioNot rated. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      Lina Wertmüller, Italian Director of Provocative Films, Dies at 93

      by

      She established an idiosyncratic reputation for blending tragedy, farce, politics and sex. She was the first woman nominated for a best director Oscar.Lina Wertmüller, who combined sexual warfare and leftist politics in the provocative, genre-defying films “The Seduction of Mimi,” “Swept Away” and “Seven Beauties,” which established her as one of the most original directors of the 1970s, died overnight at her home in Rome, the Italian Culture Ministry and the news agency LaPresse said on Thursday. She was 93.The culture minister, Dario Franceschini, said in a statement that Ms. Wertmüller’s “class and unmistakable style” had left its mark on Italian and world cinema. “Grazie, Lina,” he said.She was the first woman to receive an Academy Award nomination for best director, for “Seven Beauties” (1975).Ms. Wertmüller, an Italian despite the German-sounding last name, burst onto the cinematic scene with a series of idiosyncratic films that propelled her to the front rank of European directors. All the movies had screenplays written by her, and most relied on the talents of her two favorite actors: Giancarlo Giannini, usually cast as a hapless male chauvinist victimized by the injustices of Italian society and baffled by women, and Mariangela Melato as the always difficult and complicated love interest.In the broad sense, Ms. Wertmüller was a political filmmaker, but no one could ever quite figure out what the politics were. A lively sense of human limitations tempered her natural bent toward anarchy. Struggle was noble and the social structure rotten, but the outcome was always in doubt.Lina Wertmüller on the set of “Summer Night” on the island of Sardinia.New Line CinemaAntiquated codes of honor undo the title character in “The Seduction of Mimi,” a dimwitted Sicilian laborer, played by Mr. Giannini, whose neglected wife stages a sexual revolt. In “Swept Away” (1974), Ms. Wertmüller upended the Italian power structure by giving the humble deckhand Gennarino (Mr. Giannini again) absolute power over the rich and arrogant Raffaella (Ms. Mercato) after a shipwreck.After being dominated and abused, Gennarino turns the tables, and Raffaella becomes his adoring slave — until the two are rescued, and the old order reasserts itself. Feminists objected. With a characteristic bit of obfuscation, Ms. Wertmüller explained that since Raffaella embodies bourgeois society, “therefore she represents the man.”Giancarlo Giannini as Gennarino and Mariangela Melato as Raffaella in “Swept Away.”Kino LorberIn “Seven Beauties” (1975), Ms. Wertmüller again courted outrage by using a German concentration camp as the setting for a grim comedy, with farcical overtones. This time, Mr. Giannini played Pasqualino Farfuso, a craven Neapolitan deserter and two-bit charmer who, determined to survive at all costs, seduces the camp’s sadistic female commandant and, directed by her, murders other prisoners. Critics were divided over the merits of the film, but it earned Ms. Wertmüller the Oscar nomination. Not until 1994, when Jane Campion was nominated for “The Piano,” would another woman be nominated for directing.Ms. Wertmüller’s reputation, always more elevated in the United States than in Europe, remained uncertain. With “Seven Beauties,” the critic John Simon wrote, she ascended “into the highest regions of cinematic art, into the company of the major directors.” The critic David Thomson, on the other hand, ascribed her American popularity in the 1970s as “probably inevitable in a country ravenous for a female purveyor of smart cultural artifacts.”And her brand of sexual politics encountered hostility from critics like Pauline Kael, Molly Haskell and Ellen Willis, who called Ms. Wertmüller “a woman-hater who pretends to be a feminist.”Shirley Stoler as the Nazi commandant in “Seven Beauties.”Tiny and voluble, with a fierce smile and instantly recognizable white-framed eyeglasses, Ms. Wertmüller disarmed criticism by unleashing verbal torrents of explanation in a gravelly alto. Vincent Canby, after listening to her hold forth during a publicity tour for her first English-language film, “The End of the World in Our Usual Bed on a Night Full of Rain” (1978), wrote in The New York Times that she spoke “with enthusiasm and at such length and so articulately that (to vary an old Hollywood joke) it seems Warner Brothers might do better to scrap the film and distribute the director.”Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmüller von Elgg Spañol von Braueich was born in Rome on Aug. 14, 1928, to a family of noble Swiss ancestry. Her mother was the former Maria Santamaria-Maurizio; her father, Federico, was a successful lawyer and a domestic tyrant with whom she quarreled constantly. After obtaining a teaching certificate, Ms. Wertmüller hedged her bets by enrolling simultaneously in law school and a Stanislavskian drama academy in Rome. Theater won out.During the 1950s, she toured with a puppet theater, wrote musical comedies for television and worked as an actress and stage manager. Her best friend, married to Marcello Mastroianni, introduced her to Federico Fellini, who hired her as an assistant director on “8½,” a life-changing experience that opened the world of film to her.Ms. Wertmüller with Mr. Giannini, who starred in many of her films, at the Algonquin Hotel in New York in 1975.Meyer Liebowitz/The New York TimesIn 1963 she directed her own film, “The Lizards,” a study of provincial life in the vein of Fellini’s “I Vitelloni.” It was followed by the quirky “Let’s Talk About Men” (1965), a study of sexual politics that foreshadowed her later explorations of the subject.Ms. Wertmüller’s long collaboration with Mr. Giannini began in television, when she directed him in the musical “Rita the Mosquito” (1966) and its sequel “Don’t Sting the Mosquito” (1967), whose art director, Enrico Job, she married in 1968.Mr. Job died in 2008. Ms. Wertmüller adopted Maria Zulima Job, her husband’s child with another woman, shortly after Ms. Job’s birth in 1991. Her daughter survives her.The 1970s presented Ms. Wertmüller with two of her richest subjects: the changing sexual politics brought about by feminism, and increasing political turbulence in Italy, as old social structures and attitudes buckled under the pressures of modernity. “The Seduction of Mimi,” chosen as an official entry at the Cannes festival in 1972, immediately established her as an important new filmmaker. “Love and Anarchy” (1973), with Mr. Giannini playing a bumbling country boy who tries to assassinate Mussolini, and the social satire “All Screwed Up” (1974) solidified her reputation for idiosyncratic political films blending tragedy and farce.Somewhat paradoxically, her career went into steep decline after the Academy nomination, although in 2019 she received an honorary Oscar for her work, and in 2016 she was the subject of a documentary, “Behind the White Glasses.”“The bubble seemed to burst,” the British critic Derek Malcolm told The Guardian, adding that “she could do nothing right.”The titles of the films grew even longer, and the critical response more uniformly hostile. “The End of the World,” with Candice Bergen as an American photographer and feminist engaged in marital struggle with an Italian communist played by Mr. Giannini, was roundly dismissed as raucous and incoherent. Each succeeding film seemed to bear out Michael Wood’s observation, in The New York Review of Books, that Ms. Wertmüller’s work displayed “a stunning visual intelligence accompanied by a great confusion of mind.”Ms. Wertmüller during filming of the documentary “Behind the White Glasses.” Emanuele Ruiz/Kino LorberBy the early 1990s she had qualified for inclusion in Variety’s “Missing Persons” column. “Ciao, Professore” (1994), about a schoolteacher from northern Italy mistakenly transferred to a poor school near Naples, suggested a return to form, but on a small scale, and with an unexpected sweetness. For perhaps the first time in her career, Ms. Wertmüller faced the charge of sentimentality.To this, as to all criticism, she responded by invoking the ultimate authority: herself. Her films, she liked to say, were made to please an audience of one, and her methods were intuitive.“I am sure of things only because I love them,” she said. “I am born first. Only then do I discover.” More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Renato Casaro’s Posters Capture Films’ Essential Moments

      by

      Renato Casaro’s hand-drawn art has hooked movie audiences around the world since the 1950s. Tarantino and Stallone are big fans. One secret to his success? “You can’t cheat.”TREVISO, Italy — Renato Casaro was taking a trip down memory lane, a long journey in a career that extends from the 1950s, when Rome was known as Hollywood on the Tiber, to the last decade when Quentin Tarantino asked for his help on the 2019 film “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.”“I constantly adapted,” said Mr. Casaro, who is a few days short of his 86th birthday. “That’s why I kept working when others stopped.”Over more than six decades, his hand-drawn movie posters have hooked audiences into theaters, acting as abridged portends of the delights to come.“The important thing was to capture the essential: that moment, that glance, that attitude, that movement that says everything and condenses the entire story. That’s the hard part,” Mr. Casaro said, adding an admonishment: “You can’t cheat. You can’t promise something that isn’t there.”The essential might translate into the tender embrace he depicted on the poster for a 1955 Russian ballet version of “Romeo and Juliet.” Or it could be a terrified eye lit by a candle for the 1969 thriller “The Haunted House of Horror.” Or maybe an impossibly brawny Arnold Schwarzenegger brandishing a sword as “Conan the Barbarian” in 1982.Although his art has been seen by untold millions, Mr. Casaro himself is mostly invisible, his work largely uncredited (save for his neatly printed signature discreetly tucked in a margin). He is known primarily to collectors, and to the many producers and directors who sought him out to plug their pictures.The Santa Caterina complex in Treviso, one of the venues for the exhibition of Mr. Casaro’s work.Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times“It’s a bit of a sore spot,” Mr. Casaro said during a recent interview in Treviso, the northeastern Italian city where he was born and where he returned to live a few years ago. As far as he knew, he said, he’d been credited in the end titles just once, in 1984, by Sergio Leone for his work on “Once Upon a Time in America.”But now Mr. Casaro is getting his moment in the limelight as Treviso celebrates his art through an ambitious retrospective: “Renato Casaro. Cinema’s Last Poster Designer. Treviso, Rome, Hollywood.”“We’re very proud to celebrate the maestro who gave emotions to so many people,” said Treviso’s mayor, Mario Conte. Many of Mr. Casaro’s posters had become icons, “forever lodged in our memories,” he said.The show’s title traces the trajectory of Mr. Casaro’s career — from crafting movie posters as a teenager in exchange for free tickets to Treviso’s Garibaldi Theater, to the days when extravagant sword-and-sandal films set in ancient Rome were shot in the modern Italian capital, to his brushes with A-list Hollywood actors.Mr. Casaro said he’d been “born with a paintbrush in my hand,” a natural talent who got better “with a lot of experience.”He moved to Rome in 1954, just as it was becoming a favorite of international filmmakers, who took advantage of the city for its unparalleled setting, the production expertise at Cinecittà Studios and the allure of rising local stars like Sophia Loren.He found work at a well-known advertising design studio specializing in movie posters.Mr. Casaro, who is about to turn 86, working in his studio this month in Treviso.Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times“You learn on the job,” said Mr. Casaro, who eventually went out on his own. “You have to be able to draw everything, from a portrait to a horse to a lion.”It really was la dolce vita, he recalled.“We’d come out of the trauma of the war, and Rome was full of life,” he said, with movie stars and tourists swelling the swanky restaurants of Via Veneto. He was out of that league, but he tried to sneak into the hottest places.“We lived on the margins, but come on, it was marvelous to be young and go to Rome and discover this world,” he said in the deconsecrated church of Santa Margherita, one of the venues for his exhibition. His mother, he noted, was less thrilled with his vocation and location. Growing up in provincial Treviso, Rome might as well have been on another planet. “She thought Rome was the city of perdition,” he said. “She cried, she fretted, ‘I’ve lost my son.’”In Rome, he worked constantly. Roberto Festi, the curator of the exhibition, estimated that during this first phase of his career, he was making about 100 posters a year.To better understand the mood of a film, Mr. Casaro often went on the set. Sergio Leone wanted him in New York to witness a key moment in “Once Upon a Time in America.”“They were filming the scene where the youngest boy gets killed,” Mr. Casaro recalled, an image that eventually evolved into the movie poster. “It was stunning, and the highlight of the first part of the film.”At the exhibition in Treviso. Conan and Bond were among Mr. Casaro’s subjects. Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesThe turning point in his career, which brought attention outside Italy, came when Dino De Laurentiis hired him to make the poster for the 1966 blockbuster “The Bible: In the Beginning…” It was the start of a long-lasting collaboration with Mr. De Laurentiis, and the friendship helped put him in Hollywood’s sights.Mr. Casaro drew the posters for the Conan trilogy, breakthrough films for Mr. Schwarzenegger, who in 1982 was known mostly as a bodybuilder. For the first film, Mr. De Laurentiis, one of the producers, told Mr. Casaro to focus on the actor’s face, not just his muscles. “Dino wanted to launch him,” Mr. Casaro said. “He knew that Schwarzenegger would explode as an actor.”Another big star of the day, Sylvester Stallone, loved how Mr. Casaro had depicted him in his role as the troubled Vietnam vet Rambo. “Stallone said that I had entered into his soul,” Mr. Casaro said.Mr. Casaro’s early style, which he described as “impressionistic,” became increasingly realistic in the 1980s when he began using an airbrush. That made his technique more photographic but also “more magical,” he said.A poster for Rambo III. Mr. Casaro said Sylvester Stallone told him he had “entered into his soul.”Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times“When he began working in hyper-realism, that was the big change,” said Nicoletta Pacini, the head of posters and movie memorabilia at Italy’s National Museum of Cinema. “That was pure Casaro, and others began to copy him.”The artist isn’t sure how many movie posters he created in total but estimates it’s close to 2,000.“He always understood the spirit of the film” creating images that were “special and distinctive,” said Carlo Verdone, one of Italy’s most famous comedic actors and directors who hired Mr. Casaro to make posters for several films. Mr. Casaro stopped making posters in 1998, when the taste for hand-drawn images had waned in favor of digital and photoshopped renderings. Not for him, he said.He shifted his focus to African wildlife drawings — and elaborate re-workings of famous Renaissance paintings populated with movie stars.In a reimagining of Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment,” Marilyn Monroe holds court. “She’s always been the ultimate myth for me,” Mr. Casaro said. “With all her weaknesses, she still represents a special moment in the history of cinema.”Mr. Casaro showing a drawing of Marilyn Monroe. “With all her weaknesses, she still represents a special moment in the history of cinema,” he said of her.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesThen, out of the blue, Mr. Tarantino called, asking for posters in a vintage spaghetti-western style for “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” the director’s love letter to 1960s Los Angeles.He designed two posters featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays an on-the-way-out actor who goes to Italy to make spaghetti westerns and revive his career. One of the posters is for a fictional film called “Kill Me Now Ringo, Said the Gringo.”“Those films always had incredible titles,” Mr. Casaro laughed.Mr. Tarantino sent him a signed photo of Mr. DiCaprio posing for the poster with a message that reads: “Thanks so much for your art gracing my picture. You’ve always been my favorite.”For Mr. Casaro’s admirers, the Treviso exhibition is long overdue.“The history of art has tended to marginalize posters because they were conceived for the masses, and the illustrators were seen more as craftsmen,” said Walter Bencini, who made a documentary about Mr. Casaro. “But movie posters can be popular art in the true sense of the word, because they’re part of the collective imagination but also evoke so many personal feelings tied to specific moments.”The feelings evoked in his poster for “The Sheltering Sky,” lushly filmed by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1990, make it one of Mr. Casaro’s personal favorites. “It captures the mystery,” he said, “the notion of immersing oneself in the desert.”If movies are primarily about entertainment, then Mr. Casaro’s summary of his career is apt.“I had fun,” he said. “A lot of fun.”Mr. Casaro in his studio. “I constantly adapted,” he said of his long career.Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      Nino Castelnuovo, ‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’ Star, Dies at 84

      by

      Mr. Castelnuovo, who brought an incandescent charm to the screen, became famous during a golden age of Italian cinema. But his breakthrough role was in a French film.Nino Castelnuovo, a popular Italian film and television actor who found success beyond his home country when he starred alongside Catherine Deneuve in the soaringly sentimental French New Wave musical “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” died on Sept. 6 in Rome. He was 84.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his representative, Simone Oppi.Mr. Castelnuovo, who brought an incandescent charm to the screen, became a star during a golden age of Italian cinema. He collaborated with leading directors like Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica and acted alongside greats like Alberto Sordi and Claudia Cardinale.If he achieved international notice with “Umbrellas,” he did not truly attain fame in Italy until 1967, for his role as Renzo in a television series based on Alessandro Manzoni’s 1827 literary epic, “The Betrothed,” which takes place during a plague in the 17th century. Such was that show’s popularity, Mr. Castelnuovo once said, that Pope Paul VI became a fan and requested to meet him. (“Castelnuovo, I wish you to be as good, wise and respectable as your Renzo,” he recalled the pope telling him — to which he said he replied, “Likewise.”)Mr. Castelnuovo became a fixture in Italian living rooms in the 1980s as the athletic middle-aged spokesman for Olio Cuore, a brand of corn oil. In television commercials for the product, he vaulted over a fence to display his good health.“He’s one of the excellent underrated Italian actors,” Antonio Monda, who teaches a course on Italian cinema at New York University and is the artistic director of the Rome Film Festival, said in a phone interview. “He was praised abroad, especially in France, but was somewhat overlooked in Italy. His curse was doing that infamous oil commercial.”Mr. Castelnuovo secured his place in the international film canon for his performance in “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” Jacques Demy’s 1964 New Wave romance in which all the dialogue was sung, almost as though it were a cinematic opera. (Michel Legrand wrote the music; Mr. Castelnuovo’s voice was dubbed.) The movie was awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and received five Academy Award nominations, including one for best foreign-language film and one for the song “I Will Wait for You.”“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” set in a Normandy port town, recounts the youthful love affair between a garage mechanic named Guy, played by Mr. Castelnuovo, and Geneviève, the daughter of an umbrella shop owner, played by Ms. Deneuve. Their romance ends when Guy is drafted into the Algerian war. Geneviève soon discovers she is pregnant with Guy’s child. When they finally meet again, they have married other people, and their love is a bittersweet memory.Revisiting the film in 2011, The New York Times critic A.O. Scott called it “one of the most romantic films ever made.” “The romance between these young lovers was not meant to be,” he added, “but our romance with this incomparable film will last forever.”Mr. Castelnuovo in Paris in 1966 with Christine Delaroche, his co-star in the Vittorio De Sica film “A New World.”Keystone/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesFrancesco Castelnuovo was born on Oct. 28, 1936, in Lecco, Italy. His father, Camillo, worked in a button factory. His mother, Emilia Paola (Sala) Castelnuovo, was a maid.Growing up, Francesco held jobs as a mechanic and a house painter to support himself. He often found refuge in the darkness of movie theaters and idolized Fred Astaire, whose films inspired him to become a gymnast and a dancer in his teens.In 1955, he moved to Milan to study at the Piccolo Teatro repertory theater. He also found work as a mime on a children’s television show about a magician named Zurli. He made his film debut in 1959 with a small part in Pietro Germi’s crime thriller “The Facts of Murder,” and he appeared the next year in Visconti’s acclaimed “Rocco and His Brothers.”Among Mr. Castelnuovo’s other films were “The Hunchback of Rome” (1960), which was notable for featuring the director Pier Paolo Pasolini in an acting role, and De Sica’s 1966 drama, “A New World.” He appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s segment of “Amore e Rabbia” (1969), a series of short stories directed by various cinema luminaries. He reunited with Deneuve in Agnès Varda’s film “The Creatures” in 1966.He is survived by his wife, Maria Cristina Di Nicola; his son, Lorenzo; and his sister, Marinella.In 1996, at the age of 60, Mr. Castelnuovo played the archaeologist D’Agostino in Anthony Minghella’s “The English Patient.” He continued acting into his 70s, performing in productions of works by the Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni and playing a judge on the television series “Tuscan Passion” from 2013 to 2015. He also worked to raise awareness of glaucoma, from which he had long suffered.In interviews, Mr. Castelnuovo often reflected on the glorious era of Italian cinema that he had witnessed firsthand. He sometimes complained that Italian films had become less, well, Italian.“I come from a cinema that is very different from now,” he said in a Roman television interview in 1999. “It was a time when Italian film was the most respected cinema in the world.”“We’ve decided to follow the Americans and other big nations,” he continued. “We’ve lost sight of just how much talent we Italians have.“We’re a country of marvelous people. Marvelous in the sense that, without our imaginations, we cannot live. We’re not very good realists, which makes us very imaginative people.” More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      The Enduring Appeal of Italian Composers’ Dramatic ‘Library Music’

      by

      Compositions made from the 1960s through the ’80s to soundtrack films and ads have found new homes on hip-hop tracks and compilations. New artists have been inspired, too.One day in the summer of 2011, Lorenzo Fabrizi rode with a friend to an abandoned warehouse far outside of Rome. The custodian of the building, who said he had bought it for around $100, let them inside to look at its contents: 10,000 vinyl LPs, by Fabrizi’s estimate. They were welcome to take as many they wanted, the owner said; he was brewing beer in the space and had no use for them. More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      Kevin Spacey Cast in Italian Film After Being Sidelined in the U.S.

      by

      He will play a detective in the movie, directed by Franco Nero, in what is believed to be his first film since sexual assault allegations started surfacing in 2017.Kevin Spacey has been cast in a film in what is believed to be the first time since accusations of sexual assault against the actor started surfacing more than three years ago, prompting several court cases and unraveling his onscreen career. More