This highly entertaining masterpiece is now available on DVD (region 2). Admirers of writer Dennis Potter's other masterpieces, "The Singing Detective" and "Pennies from Heaven" (the British TV series, not the Hollywood remakes) should not hesitate to buy this long forgotten gem, which goes far beyond all the known clichés of Casanova to create a penetrating and intense portrayal of a man who is at one and the same time a prisoner of his obsessive desire and liberated by them. To achieve this, Potter has Casanova's time in a terrifying Venetian prison cell (just a few pages in his ten volume autobiography) form the center of the action, with flashbacks and flash-forwards to other episodes of his life. This jumping back and forth in time was new and experimental in 1971 and proved too much for audiences then, but it works brilliantly from today's point of view, creating suspense and adding new layers of meaning, just like it does in "The Singing Detective". Frank Finlay, once the Iago to Olivier's Othello, delivers the performance of a lifetime as the haunted hero, backed by a supporting cast of the usual British high caliber. Although it does show occasionally that this is a 1971 video production, as a whole it's quite simply beautiful to watch.
