Top Boy - Season 5 - Part Two (2023 Ronan Bennett)

And so it all comes together - who will live and who will die, to the ominous rumblings of Brian Eno? In the midst of a massive (and well staged) riot at Summerhouse, Dushene is finally alone, on the run, scared and powerless, a good way to end, with Sully after him. When that little drama's played out, Stef (Araloyin Oshunremi) finally confronts Sully, with Jamie's gun - Sully says he hasn't feelings any more - and the boy doesn't kill him - "You're not worth it". And Jaq has decided to withdraw from the business.

Kane Robinson (Kano) just seeps sorrow.

DPs are Federico Cesca and Kanamé Onoyama (2) and Bennett wrote the last two episodes himself.

With Christopher Fulford (lawyer), Natalie Athanasiou 'NoLay' as Mandy, Joshua Blissett (Kieron), Adwoa Aboah, Savanah Graham (Stef's GF).

Disorganized Crime (1989 Jim Kouf & scr)

Originally entitled Searching For Salazar, this comedy riff on The Asphalt Jungle has a gang of disparate criminals brought together by the title character, who spends the entire film on the run from the police. Proving they don't in fact need him, the remaining four pool their talents and pull off a splendid bank job.

The four are:

Left to right: Ruben Blades, Fred Gwynne, Lou Diamond Phillips and (sleeping) William Russ.

Incompetent New Jersey cops Ed O'Neill and Daniel Rosebuck attempt to apprehend the criminal (Corbin Bernsen). The ending is good, but the very ending, in which the four decide to bail out Salazar for a million bucks, is just wrong. They should have left him to it.

Anyway, a bit broad and silly but quite fun, well put together by Frank Morriss and Dallas Pruett, assisted by Emma Hickox. Photographed by Ron Garcia, music by David Newman. It was produced by John Badham, who directed the Stakeout films, Bird on a Wire (1990) and The Hard Way (1991).

The Foreman Went to France (1942 Charles Frend)

Not quite sure why comical Tommy Trinder is top-billed as clearly the thrust of the story belongs to Clifford Evans and Constance Cummings; Trinder and army colleague Gordon Jackson don't come into it until later. With Robert Morley (with quite one of the worst French accents on film), Ernest Milton, Charles Victor, John Williams (in one of two films he made back home in support of the war effort), Paul Bonifas, Anita Palacine, Francis L Sullivan, Mervyn Johns.

Story of efforts to bring back from France special machinery through French migration, German attacks and double-crossing is thrilling and well caught - we really feel we're in France. Robert Hamer displays his skill as an editor, particularly in aerial attack scene. Trinder's humorous style counterbalances serious moments.

Written by two of the the three writers of Went The Day Well - John Dighton and Angus McPhail, with Leslie Arliss - based on J.B. Priestley 'narrative' (i.e. what he came up with at the pub one Sunday afternoon); produced also by that film's director Cavalcanti. And shot by the same photographer Wilkie Cooper. Music William Walton.

Ça marche!

The pub referenced, The World Turned Upside Down in the Old Kent Road, sadly closed in 2009.

Top Boy - Season 4 (2022 Creator Ronan Bennett)

Cracking eight part series. The action moves to Spain and Morocco where Dushane needs to reset his supply chain, finds the Spanish volatile and the Moroccans suffering from an internal leak.

Now out of prison, Jamie (Micheal Ward) rejoins the operation, ends up working with Moroccans - great scenes here with him and young beach-dwelling boy who wants to get to Spain to see his sister - and sounds out a deal on his own with the Spanish contact.

Jaq remains our favourite character. She is attacked by some white thugs - the moment she exacts her revenge punishment on one is one of those moments of gratuitous violence that you cheer along with.

In a mad twist in episode beginning with 'Likkle Favour', Sully gets sucked into a drug deal gone wrong with his niece Pebbles (Erin Kellyman). He ends up being kidnapped and messed up by a Peckham gang. Dushane and the gang bloodily secure his release in one of those hugely exciting set pieces. It's the tension of this storyline that kept us watching six 50 minute episodes back-to-back.

Now clearly in debt to Dushane, Sully accompanies Jamie to Spain and in a brilliant scene with a gun taped to the bottom of a biscuit tin, wipes out the crazy Spaniard. But he's realised Jamie was planning to go solo.

Jaq's pregnant sister Lauryn (Saffron Hocking) turns up, pursued by her psycho husband Howard Charles (who was reminding us of Genna in Gomorrah a bit), his even worse sister Ava Brennan and their accomplice (in life rapper) Trigga. Whilst Lauryn manages to deal with the husband situation, we were both most disappointed that the sister didn't also get wiped out - in fact imagined a scene when they're both back in safe Liverpool and then they get blown up or summink.

And 14 year old Ats has been murdered and the hunt for his killers is on... And it inexorably links back to Jamie, like (and not the first time I've had this thought in connection with this show) a Shakespearean tragedy.

Brian Eno's still writing the incidental music. Stuart Bentley, Adam Scarth alternate as DPs. Editing, direction, writing all top notch.

We actually prefer this to the similar Gomorrah because you actually care about the characters, who have lives outside of drug dealing, and it touches on important issues like urban regeneration and police brutality.

We really should have watched the whole lot from the beginning like the sensible one in this relationship had suggested.

Hackney is sort of squeezed between Islington and the City.

Had to look up 'Buki' = strange or weird. Liked - no loved - the song that ends episode 8 'Potter Payper' from Gansteritus (feat Tiggs da Author).

In a bit.

The Moderns (1988 Alan Rudolph & co-scr)

I had long wanted to watch The Moderns, which just goes to prove something. It's an interesting film in many ways, but also somehow maddening. After 30 minutes Q asked if there were any likable characters in it, and bailed. I know what she means. 

The plot kept making me think of Casablanca, somehow. We're in 1920s Paris, with the usual array of Hemingways, Gertrude Steins, etc. Jon Bradshaw was the other writer.

The direction and editing are interesting, and the design (though it was very clearly not filmed in Paris). For example in the scene where Keith Carradine drives away with Geraldine Chaplin, it does look like the background through the car's rear window is all painted, as indeed is the view through the gauze curtains of her apartment window. 'The Moderns' refers to the artists who Carradine agrees to copy - Cezanne, Modigliani and er somebody - it's then most amusing when utter shit John Lone burns the real ones thinking they are fake. Also fun is the faked suicide of M. Oiseau (Wallace Shawn) and his reappearance as a woman. The filming is interesting, such as the café opening in which Rudolph is constantly slowly zooming in on the various characters, Altman-like (Altman was his mentor and the film is dedicated to him). The characters are annoying and some of the dialogue you're really not sure how to take (such as "She's as cool as somebody else's cucumber") - with a pinch of salt? Though did like the irony in Shawn's lines "Y'know, Paris has been taken over by imitators of people who were imitators themselves. It's become a parody. It's finished. It's over. Believe me, Hollywood is going to be like a breath of fresh air."

Its device of fading from black and white twenties clips of Paris into colour anticipates Hemingway and Gellhorn - coincidentally both films featuring the writer, this one played by Kevin J. O'Connor. Also involved are waif Linda Fiorentino (After Hours), art dealer Genevieve Bujold, slippery art owner Geraldine Chaplin, critic Gailard Sartain.

The film is filled with music and art and it feels textured and layered, perhaps with a sense of sending itself up.

Much music from Charlélie Couture, who is the singer in the film, as well as Bechet, Josephine Baker and Puccini. Photographed by Tayomichi Kuita and edited by Scott Brock and Debra Smith. Steven Legler is the production designer.

Dumplin' (2018 Anne Fletcher)

To challenge her mother Jennifer Aniston, a former teen beauty queen winner, her daughter Danielle Macdonald enters the show herself, with supportive friends Odeya Rush, Maddie Baillio and Bex-Taylor Klaus (a sort of beatnik rebel type). Luke Benward is the love interest and Harold Perrineau offers charming support as a drag queen.

"Go big, or go home, but either way, do it in a red pair of shoes!"

Edited with her usual skill by Emma Hickox. Glossily photographed by Eliot Davis. Written by Kristin Hahn and Julie Murphy.

Fletcher directed The Guilt Trip, The Proposal and 27 Dresses.

It felt a bit long (an hour 50).

Top Boy - Season 5 - Part One (2023 Creator Ronan Bennett)

Although it's billed as Season 3? That's because there are two seasons of something called Top Boy: Summerhouse which fit in I don't know how. Innit? 

Some of the slang is on websites helpfully translating it for American audiences.

Q tells me the production team are very good at hiring black crew in apprenticeships to try and help them into the notoriously white-top-heavy film industry.

Sully (Kane Robinson) has taken over the drugs business. Dushane (Ashley Walters) is happy to take a back seat and fund Shelley's nail shops venture (Little Simz). But the drugs business is hijacked by an Oirish fellow - none other than Barry Keoghan (as it looks 'Kee-o-gan'), and Dushane's £15m has done a runner.

Meanwhile Jaq (Jasmine Jobson) is still efficiently running the dealers ("Say less"), but young Stefan (Araloyin Oshunremi) is feeling the loss of his big brother.

Fabulous set piece in episode 3 of a shoot out in an old people's home, has something of a hint of The Godfather to it, somehow. (And of course you can't help thinking generally about shows like The Wire and Gomorrah. Do you think the Neapolitans and the Londoners keep watching the other's shows?)

And the sequence involving the Summerhouse community refusing to let one of their own be deported, is - Q reckons - a reference to the Windrush scandal.

To answer my opening question, it appears that when Netflix picked up the series in 2017, they labelled the first two four-episode seasons, which were made by Channel 4 and broadcast in 2011 and 2013 Top Boy: Summerhouse. It was while researching this that I realised we hadn't seen last year's season 4 yet, so we had to abandon this ship until we had.

Five by Five (2017 Kate Herron)

Five linked 5 minute short films with different writers for each, examines moments in a day, featuring Ben Tavassoli, Sope Dirisu (His House, Gangs of London), Ruth Madeley, Mawaan Rizwan, Idris Elba, Georgina Campbell, Jasmine Jobson (Top Boy's Jaq).

The Woman in the Wall (2023 Joe Murtagh)

This fictional story was inspired - says writer Murtagh - by 'a sense of outrage... In order to tell a story about Magdalene Laundries, I wanted to tell it in such a way that it would reach as wide an audience as possible. And so, I leaned away from doing a straightforward drama or social-realist peace, and I wanted to kind of blend it with genre, partly because that’s also my natural sensibilities as a writer. That’s the kind of stuff I like to write and the kind of stuff that I like to watch. But it also felt like an interesting challenge to try and tell a compelling ‘whodunnit’ crime drama, not just in a way that would sort of get the issues we explore out to as many people as possible, but in a way that it would hold its own too.'

Murtagh wrote Calm with Horses too.

The acting's fabulous too, and not only Ruth Wilson, who often doesn't even seem like her. Daryl McCormack's also great, who we knew from the Emma Thompson film Good Luck to You, Leo Grande but was also in Pixie and Bad Sisters. Then I don't know where they found this other crop of great Irish actors including Garda Simon Delaney and Cillian Lenaghan, Abby Fitz (younger Wilson), Philippa Dunne (pregnant friend), Hilda Fay (the other messed up one), Helen Roche and Anne Kent (older friends), Mark Huberman (old school friend), Michael O'Kelly, Ardal O'Hanlon, Frances Tomelty (evil nun), Dermot Crowley.

We can't hold a single director responsible for the ensemble either as in current BBC style it had several (and had a writer's room beside). But we can and should definitely praise the great Si Bell who photographed four of the six episodes (and Steven Ferguson who did the other two  in the same style).

Si does great stuff with flashlights:

Steve did these two:

Good sound design (Robert Brazier) and music (David Holmes, Brian Irvine).

The Inheritance (2023 Aschlin Ditta)

Three siblings - Gaynor Fay, Jemima Rooper and Robert James-Collier - expect to receive daddy's house and proceeds on his death but it turns out he's bequeathed it all to a woman he's married that they have no idea about (Samantha Bond). Daddy is Larry Lamb, and there's lots of repeated home videos that seem significant but don't add anything.

Into this mix is menacing loan shark Kevin Harvey, who's Fay's son's father, and Rooper's husband Adil Ray, who turns out to be a shit.

In nice twist ending, Harvey saves the three from a mad man's arson. Hurray! For a Channel 5 4-part series it actually wasn't too bonkers and quite watchable. 

Well, it was quite bonkers, now I come to think about it.

Targets (1968 Peter Bogdanovich)

Targets is an amazing debut. It came from Roger Corman, who had Boris Karloff available for two days' filming, and told Peter to make a film utilising footage from the AIP picture The Terror (1963, with Karloff and Jack Nicholson). Peter instead chose to make a film about Karloff playing an elderly, disenchanted actor, a version of himself. Into this was mixed Polly Platt's idea, based on a true story, about a random murderous sniper. Then Peter took the script to Sam Fuller, who was helpful with ideas (the ending - two Karloffs) and construction.

It's brilliantly well directed and edited (not credited) and we marveled again at the way Verna Fields assembled all the silent action scenes with sound. Also benefits enormously from being filmed by the then relatively inexperienced Laszlo Kovacs. The last shot of the film is stunning.

It's also lovely see a great performance from young Peter the actor. With Tim O'Kelly, Nancy Hsueh, James Brown, Arthur Peterson.

As to the killer himself, Peter didn't want to give any explanation to his behaviour, judging that made it even more tense. But the subject matter is even more relevant today than it was then.

I was interested to read in interview that the dropping of the gun down the grate was an unconscious reference to Strangers on a Train, but the shot of the killer running away from under the tank was a specific reference to North By Northwest - Grant running out of the UN building. Otherwise he tried to keep it as straight as possible, no symbols, tricks or references.

Bad Moms (2016 Jon Lucas, Scott Moore & scr)

They did The Hangover and some of this is similarly gross, but it's quite refreshing in the difficulties of being a mum and the pressures emanating from school, work and families. Mila Kunis, Kathryn Hahn, Kristen Bell, Christina Applegate, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Annie Mumolo, David Walton (New Girl, TV's About a Boy), Clark Duke.

Liked this interchange between mother and son (Emjay Anthony):

Mum: You're going to actually start doing your own homework from now on.
Dylan: I'm a slow learner, remember?
Mum:  You're not a slow learner. You're just entitled. Do you even know what entitled means?
Dylan: No - because I'm a slow learner.
Mum: It means that mummy and daddy have been spoiling you, and now you think the world owes you something, but it doesn't. And if you don't learn how to work hard now, then you're just going to grown up and becomes another entitled white dude who thinks he's awesome for no reason. And then you'll start a ska band, and it'll be awful, you'll be me too girls, and you'll grow this ironic moustache to look interesting but you won't actually be interesting, and I'm not OK with that. So can you please, please, just do your own homework.

It was edited by Emma Hickox and James Thomas (Borat films, Grimsby, Hot Tub Time Machine), and the two had to fight with the writer-directors to create that opening montage scene which explains how tough Mila's life actually is (and thereby resolving the reaction of the preview audience who found her too 'perfect').

Photographed by Jim Denault.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (1991 Jon Avnet)

Kathy Bates and Jessica Tandy are wonderful. Mary Stuart Masterson and Marie-Louise Parker fine. With Cicely Tyson, Chris O'Donnell, Stan Shaw (Big George), Gailard Sartain, Tim Scott (Smokey), Lois Smith (mother).

Fannie Flagg's Alabama novel was adapted by herself and Carol Sobieski. Great early score from Tom Newman. Nicely photographed by Geoffrey Simpson (Green Card, Shine, Under the Tuscan Sun). Production designer Barbara Ling (Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood) is also an associate producer. Edited by Debra-Neil Fisher. There is also a credited Bee Wrangler!

Loved Harper Lee's comment on the novel: "Idgie Threadgoode is a true original: Huckleberry Finn would have tried to marry her!"

Having been watching Tarantino, when the KKK show up, I wanted to see them all being bloodily executed by machine gun. The blood against the white would have been a pleasing image, I feel.

Inglourious Basterds (2009 Quentin Tarantino & scr)

Packed with so many Ennio Morricone music cues it's almost like a revenge western supplanted to Nazi occupied France. Idea of elite troupe of Jewish soldiers killing and scalping Nazis brilliant, as is the way the stories converge  - the revenge plot of cinema owner Mélanie Laurent, involvement of Jew hunter Christoph Waltz, sabotage attempt from Michael Fassbender, German double-agent Diane Kruger, story of young war 'hero' Daniel Brühl and the Basterds themselves. Moment of Hitler and Goebels being machine-gunned to death by two Jews is wonderful indeed, and as history-defying as Quentin's take on the Sharon Tate murders.

But also a film buffs' film - though we are of course horrified by the destruction of 300 classic (and probably mainly French) films - with its German film stars, cinema and film plots (the war hero becomes a film star, and there's a film-within-the-film), references to German films and filmmakers. Max Linder was a lesser known but enormously popular silent comedy actor; Emil Jannings did return to the Nazis in the war; L'Assassin Habite au 21 is a 1942 comedy thriller from Henri-Georges Clouzot, etc.

Woltz is particularly brilliant at going from dangerously charming to ruthlessly evil in a second, won Best Supporting Actor Oscar and BAFTA. Well acted film throughout. Scene with Woltz and Laurent brilliant. Full of brilliant scenes, in fact. With Brad Pitt, Eli Roth, Til Schweiger, Sylvester Groth (Goebbels), Martin Wuttke (Hitler), Rod Taylor (Churchill), Léa Seydoux, Jacky Ido.

The second credit after Quentin's is editor Sally Mencke - it was her final film with him. She was Oscar and BAFTA nominated (lost to The Hurt Locker, Bob Murawski and Chris Innis). Photographed by Robert Richardson in Panavision and on celluloid, production design David Wasco.

I hadn't seen it since 2010, and that is inexcusable.

Shot at Babelsberg Studios near Berlin and in Paris.

Went the Day Well? (1942 Cavalcanti)

Well covered here. Brilliant, surprisingly brutal film for its year, summarised in the scene normally cheerful Muriel George, a music hall and singing star, despatches a Nazi with an axe (and note her sob at having to do this) only to be brutally shot in the back. Many memorable moments include murder of traitor by woman who fancied him, reaction of girl to have shot a German - slight disgust (but in a wonderful moment of British humour undercutting that, her friend says 'Oh well you're one up on me - we'd better keep score').

Much British pluck in evidence.

Someone, somewhere noted that as the Battle of Britain has been won and the threat of invasion diminished, the audience didn't respond to it as they might had it been released earlier.

The BFI / Lottery have done a lovely job restoring it.

Graham Greene's story was adapted by Angus McPahil, John Dighton & Diana Morgan. Shot by Wilkie Cooper, with D. Slocombe credited as 'reporter cameraman'.

Leslie Banks (traitor), Elizabeth Allan, Basil Sydney (Major), Mervyn Johns, Marie Lohr (lady of the manor), David Farrar, Thora Hird, Frank Lawton (useful sailor), Valerie Taylor, Edward Rigby, C.V, France (vicar), Muriel George, Norman Pierce.

Midnight Lace (1960 David Miller)

Doris Day is terrorized in 'London' by a man with a 'sing song voice'. She's actually something of a wet blanket, descending into hysteria far too easily and not simply having the gumption to tell the nuisance to fuck off. Luckily it's an amusing film, as I remembered who the culprit was from the go. Clearly Doris is nowhere near London but on Universal sets, where she's accompanied by her husband Rex Harrison, aunt Myrna Loy and best friend Natasha Parry. Possible red herrings come in the shape of menacing Roddy McDowell, too nice to be true John Gavin, sinister Anthony Dawson and shady Herbert Marshall, but good old reliable John Williams is there to set things right. With Hermione Baddeley and Mrs Miniver's Richard Ney (knew I recognised that voice).

Williams, I realised while watching it (and simultaneously not being able to recollect the name Górecki) I had never seen in a British film. He started out in British theatre but moved to America in the 1920s, where he had a career primarily as a stage actor. He won a Tony Award for his role in 'Dial M For Murder' and when he acted in the film version, it changed his career into that of a film and TV actor. He was in fact in two British wartime films, Ealing's The Foreman Went to France, edited by Robert Hamer, and The Goose Steps Out, a Will Hay anti-Nazi comedy.

Williams aside, fake British accents abound, underscored by Frank Skinner, but this is Universal and Russell Metty shoots everything in his trademark colours of total unrealism but gorgeousness, daring to keep faces in shadow whenever it pleases him. (Ross Hunter for a change has a co-producer in Martin Melcher.) It was written by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts from the play 'Matilda Shouted Fire' by Janet Green, which is essentially Gaslight again.

Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970 Frank Perry)

Eleanor and Frank Perry's film is not an easy watch as poor Carrie Snodgrass (Oscar nominated) is verbally abused by her horrible husband Richard Benjamin (good) only to take up with equally horrible lover Frank Langella. Her husband is just awful - he gives her lists of tasks to do, denigrates her appearance and behaviour and treats her like a skivvy - and her children are also horrible - it's amazing that she hasn't lost her sanity (or killed her husband).

She manages to survive the affair, but then when Benjamin confesses he's lost all their money and has had an affair himself, she forgives him. The sting in the tale is a brief end scene in which she's in a therapy group (Featuring Peter Boyle briefly) where all the other members accuse her of having had an easy life and betraying her husband. Damned in every single direction, in other words. In a subsequent interview Eleanor said "I'd write the ending differently. I'd show Tina liberating herself, but not through a man. She'd get a job, or go back to school or whatever."

So the Perrys (from a novel by Sue Kaufman) are shining a painfully bright light on what it is to be a certain woman in a supposedly enlightened age. (They made The Swimmer and Last Summer together.)

A dreadful dinner party is I suppose the highlight.

I thought I probably wouldn't watch it again but now I'm not so sure.

In a sad footnote, Frank ditched Eleanor the next year and she found it hard to work solo in Hollywood, writing a novel 'Blue Pages' about it. 

And as a fascinating aside, it seems that the Neil Young song 'A Man Needs a Maid' was written following a screening of this film, and he and Carrie became an item for a while. 'Harvest' is supposedly a record of their romance, and the follow-up 'Homegrown' (not released until 2020) is about their break-up. (Thanks to the Indicator Blu-Ray booklet for this info.)

Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood (2019 Quentin Tarantino & scr)

A beautifully worked out script won the Oscar.

In the scene above there are three big lights creating the window shafts. Inside the light is bounced through muslin to soften it. Leo's close-up has a 'low glow' bounce off the floor. Robert Richardson's key team comprises key grip Chris Centrella, gaffer Ian Kincaid and camera assistant Gregor Tavenner. Richardson is his own operator. If you look at this article from American Cinematographer magazine, so much work went into the lighting of this film - even the Freeway at night had giant lights on it, and the hardest scene was apparently the Mansons in the car in very very low light...

According to ASC: 'Nine 80' condors help to illuminate a stretch of freeway that the production closed down from dusk to dawn.' Amazing!

On reflection I do love Brad Pitt's performance, tough and easy-going. The Academy perhaps gave it to him over Hanks as the latter had won it twice. (Pitt also won an Oscar as one of the producers of 12 Years a Slave.)

How About You (2007 Anthony Byrne)

A feel-good film, if ever there was one. Young Hayley Atwell (great) is left alone by her sister (Orla Brady) to look after the remaining unruly care home inhabitants at Christmas. She makes them mellow, of course. They are Vanessa Redgrave, Brenda Blethyn, Imelda Staunton and Joss Ackland.

A shallow film, to be sure, to be sure, but most enjoyable. Edited at a lively lick by Emma Hickox.

Best line related  by dying Doreen Keogh, something like "It's time you started noticing people's actions - it's what they do, not what they say, that counts."

East Side, West Side (1949 Mervyn LeRoy)

James Mason seems to be happily married to Barbara Stanwyck, but his past philanderee Ava Gardner comes back into his life and 'like an alcoholic' he can't seem to leave her alone. After a nightclub melee, Mason is sheltered by sweet young thing Cyd Charisse, who's about to pick up with childhood sweetheart Van Heflin. Heflin meets Stanwyck and your merry pot now just needs seasoning and a pinch of Beverly Michaels and a dash of William Conrad. Slow cook for one hour and 48 minutes, and garnish with a Miklos Rozsa score.

A handsome MGM production photographed by Charles Rosher, written by Isobel Lennart from a novel by Marcia Davenport. Enjoyable melodrama, Van Heflin at his most zingy, quite open-ended.

Lo Straniero (1967 Luchino Visconti)

Perfect version of famous Camus novel, written by Visconti, Georges Conchon and Suso Cecci D'Amico. Marcello Mastroianni just right as existential hero Mersault. Anna Karina his girlfriend, George Géret as pimp friend, Bernard Blier defense.

Directed with much use of zoom, photographed by Giueseppe Rotunno. Good music by Piero Piccioni.

Looks like it is finally available on DVD in Italy - almost certainly not subtitled though.