One of Mastroianni’s most unusual and forgotten films. Immediately after the international successes of the De Sica-Ponti films with Loren, the actor returned to a Neapolitan setting, this time with an international star like Raquel Welch by his side. The director was the very symbol of Naples, Eduardo De Filippo, but commercially the operation (legendary production manager Pietro Notarianni’s first film as a fully-fledged producer on his own) was a disaster. Normally careful with cinematic adaptations of his work, Eduardo this time took great liberties with his play Le voci di dentro. He let film prevail, and the kind of cinema he chose as a model was the musically and visually excessive Sixties Italian pop cinema of Fellini, Mario Bava, Vittorio Caprioli, certain films by Alberto Lattuarda, and Elio Petri’s La decima vittima. Here an implausible Mastroianni plays a vaguely pop sculptor and painter. The film is enjoyable for its eccentricities, with Raquel Welch dubbed with a Piedmontese accent, Rota’s soundtrack mixing references from Funiculì Funiculà to La dolce vita, and Enrico Job and Gianni Polidori’s sets and costumes. However, the lack of realism, which nowadays may recall Fellini (half-way between 8½ and Giulietta degli spiriti), eventually becomes tiring and the ultimately claustrophobic final result rings like the paradoxical revenge of its theatrical origins over the musical and visual collage.

Emiliano Morreale