All Slights Deserved

Seven Beauties is a film I feel I ought to have liked, or at least appreciated, more than I did. It's an epic, picaresque satire that touches upon subject matter that was still sensitive at the time, but there's an ugliness to it which I found difficult to reconcile. After an introduction that soliloquises ironically about the rise and fall of Mussolini and the indignities of the Second World War over old wartime footage, the story begins in somewhere in Germany shortly after the collapse of Italian fascism. Pasqualino (Giancarlo Giannini) and Francesco are two Italian soldiers fleeing the Nazis. During conversation Pasqualino reveals that he killed a man before the war and the narrative shifts into flashback of his earlier life as a hustler and dandy in Naples, where his life revolved around protecting the honour of his seven sisters. After killing a man who attempted to pimp one of these 'beauties' (they're anything but beautiful) he evades execution by feign...

Welcome to the sleepy English village of Unspecific, a veritable Babel of different dialects where apparently there are some "ruins", the local policeman's face is adorned with a prodigious caterpillar, and a worrying number of people have been dying violently and inexplicably. Patrick Magee is also a resident, which is never a good sign. Given his rapacious scenery chewing it's probably wise that the locals keep their distance, but they're naturally suspicious why he spends so much time lurking around the cemetery. Magee plays Dr Robert Miles, a medium obsessed by communicating with spirits who resides in a grand gothic pile in the company of an aggressive black cat with whom he has a strange love/hate relationship. The cat may or may not embody the spirit of Magee's dead son, but either way it has an uncanny habit of being in the vicinity when anything nasty takes place. Very loosely adapted from Poe's classic short story, Fulci's entertaining ...

In R.D. Laing 's classic study of schizophrenia The Divided Self he relates the case of a woman patient suffering with the condition who underwent a remarkable transformation after she became fixated with Federico Fellini 's film La Strada . Through identifying with Giulietta Masina's character and the physical and emotional brutality she suffers at the hands of Anthony Quinn's strongman, the woman was able a process of reassessing her own values and thoughts and begin turning her life around. It's testimony to the heartbreaking performance given by Masina, an actress often content to live in the shadow of her husband Fellini, but occasionally cast in his films to great effect. Such a work is Giulietta degli Spiriti ; a notch or two beneath the maestro's best but ket together by Masina's charismatic turn and with enough trademark flourishes and visual opulence to satisfy fans of the director. Masina plays - fittingly - Giulietta; a middle-aged housew...

A few weeks back I found myself sitting in a pub discussing Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship & Videotape , a documentary released last year about the absurd furore that preceded the implementation of the Video Recordings Act in 1984. Having been only seven/eight years old at the time of the controversy it had largely passed me by and I was asked how I felt about the subject - and the censorship debate it sparked - retrospectively. Being something of a woolly liberal I instinctively adopt an anti-censorship stance. It's not that I disagree that there can ever be grounds for banning or censoring work, but rather in the vast majority of cases I fail to see what's actually being achieved. Provided that children are protected from extreme material - that responsibility surely lies squarely with the parents/guardians - then mature adults should be trusted to make their own decisions. Isn't that the basis of any democratic society? Yet the subject continues to gnaw a...