Turin like Paris. Villa Rey set in the hills of Turin as an elegant boarding school of the ‘Hirondelles’ for garrulous school girls. The pitiable music teacher, with wig and top hat, is also a brilliant vaudeville artist with a leading lady lover. The devout pupil and fiancée of an unknown officer (amazing what a screen can do!) is also a lively singer and later the lauded replacement of the capricious leading
lady in a joyful musical comedy. Did someone day boarding school! In Santarellina everything revolves around mistaken identities. The young girl’s energy, the light heartedness of theatre and the camaraderie of the barracks stand in stark contrast with the religious and military characters, which are nevertheless both sacred and untouchable. Had this early twentieth-century comedy been scripted by a contemporary, laid-back Frusta, we would have been seeing an abbess who was a well-fed Nun of Monza and the officer and his dapper comrades as lascivious apaches in shady nightclubs.