La mujer escarlata

i found a copy of this on the old fletcher video label its a lost classic engaging story fantastic acting monica vitti looks stunning as is the photography lovely lighting editing nothing to offend anyone just a film you can sit back and watch and enjoy pity they can't make them like this no more a euro classic.

Like anybody else who watches this film, it is for Monica Vitti and not because it has the awful US title; The Bitch Wants Blood or even the far more charming Italian; La Donna Scarlatta. She is lovely throughout, in various costumes and the late 60s décor and tempo help a lot. The rather amusing notes on my DVD include; '….will surprise those who know her only from the grim existential parables of Michelangelo Antonioni…' which is not only a bloody cheek but somewhat ironic. This is by no means a particularly sombre and thoughtful piece but does not really warrant the 'comedy' description and does actually have something of an existential theme and a very fine Anotonioni inspired sequence when she revs her car up and the street signage flashes by as we hurtle as if to oblivion. Seriously though this is for the most part a delightful, colourful and amusing Sunday afternoon movie with the serious added bonus of the lovely Vitti.

French-Italian co-production (in French with subtitles) stars Monica Vitti as a perfume factory owner in Paris who loses everything to her scheming lover and commercial manager. She contemplates suicide before deciding killing him might be more satisfying. A featherbrained piece of fluff from director Jean Valère, sexy at times and great eye-candy, but nothing more. Vitti--who, from some angles, resembles Barbra Streisand in a blonde wig--is charming picking up a strange man on the street and telling him her plans over lunch at the Eiffel Tower; however, her sojourns with members of a rock group (dancing and getting high) are silly and just take up time on the clock. ** from ****

Monica Vitti thinks she's a good businesswoman. Then she discovers her manager/lover, Robert Hossein, has stolen her business. She flies to Paris to commit suicide, then decides on a better plan. Hossein will be in Paris on Friday. She steals a gun, planning to kill him. First, though, she tells Maurice Ronet, then vanishes from his ken. While he is searching desperately for her, she is cutting a swath among the news reporters and the British band they are interviewing.

Jean Valère's ultimately standard romantic comedy is powered in large part by Miss Vitti's moody, disinterested performance, and a set and costume design that features a lot of bright red clothes and draperies. M. Ronet also gives a fine performance as the moral young man who does not even recognize he loves this woman who invited him to lunch on the Eiffel Tower. It's a very 1960s looking movie. There's a bit of satire on the propensities of rock-and-rollers. but this is never a farcical comedy. It is, however, constantly engaging.

Lightweight but colorful fluff about an attractive Italian young woman (Monica Vitti) who is jilted by her French lover/business partner (Robert Hossein) and goes away to Paris with the intention of committing suicide but then thinks better of it and decides to bump the latter off instead. In the meantime, to curb her boredom, she picks up a marine salvage expert (Maurice Ronet) but immediately dumps him after divulging all her plans to him during a romantic dinner atop the Eiffel Tower. Somehow, while posing as a Swiss journalist, she gets entangled with a New York correspondent (a woefully wasted Claudio Brook), a shady Spaniard and the dope-addled manager of a French beat group; the latter perform a couple of awfully dated pop tunes and Brook's presence in a nightclub immediately brought to mind the similar but infinitely more wicked sequence which brilliantly concludes Luis Bunuel's SIMON OF THE DESERT (1965) in which Brook had the title role.

Frankly, I had never heard of this one before it was pointed out to me at the local DVD rental store (via an Italian-dubbed version on R2 DVD) but the eclectic cast and a promise of a dash of psychedelia enticed me to give it a chance. Well, while it's certainly nothing I'd call remotely essential, it's quite a nice way to kill 90 minutes: Monica Vitti's classical beauty and charm is the film's ace card as she's in virtually every scene in various fetching Christian Dior outfits, but Michel Colombier's bubbly Morriconesque score (including a recurring mournful ballad) also makes quite an impression. While the names in the credits of his regular producer (Andre Genoves) and screenwriter (Paul Gegauff) should perhaps have alerted me to it, director Claude Chabrol's amusing uncredited cameo as a lift attendant on the Eiffel Tower took me completely by surprise.