El vikingo que vino del sur

Italian sex comedy with Lando Buzzanca and Pamela Tiffin

Unfortunately, this wonderfully over-the-top Italo fun never made it to the cinema in West Germany. The film, directed by Steno (director of the Flatfoot films with Bud Spencer), premiered on August 12, 1971 in Italy. In the English-speaking world it is also known as "The Blonde in the Blue Movie".

The busy Sicilian Rosario Trapanese (Lando Buzzanca) has managed to achieve something of a career in his Milan company. He enjoys life with his attractive lover Priscilla (Dominique Boschero), but is happy when his boss (Gigi Ballista) transfers him to the company branch in Copenhagen. In those days, Denmark is the center of sexual permissiveness, as recently the Danish government (the first country in the world) had legalized adult entertainment films. Rosario, who doesn't feel fully sexually exhausted, now hopes to get his money's worth in love matters in a more permissive country than his native Italy. After getting to know his new colleagues for the first time, he jumps into the fray. At a party held by his employee Gustav Larsen (Renzo Marignano, also known as the cigar-smoking lawyer in "Charleston" (1977), who waits stupidly in the office while Bud Spencer calmly beats up the gang boss's henchmen) it comes to fruition by means of spin the bottle partner swapping that has just become fashionable. How good that the cozy living room is adjacent to four bedrooms! But since the good Mrs. Larsen has already had a good drink, the sexually starved Rosario remains uncared for for the time being. But even in the subsequent game of changing trees, the hot-blooded Sicilian repeatedly misses the doors that open and close again. It's great fun to watch the honest Danes work their way from one bedroom to the other while the hormone-stricken southerner comes away empty-handed.

But the next opportunity will definitely come. At a business meeting in a chic Copenhagen department store, Rosario meets and falls in love with the beautiful Danish woman Karen (Pamela Tiffin), who is studying with the respected Professor Grutekoor (Ferdy Mayne). After some Danish-Italian mentality differences and misunderstandings, the two get married, but this soon leads to marital tensions due to their different temperaments. On a business trip to his native Milan, the good Rosario of course has a souvenir from beautiful Denmark with him for those at home from the executive suite: an adult entertainment film, which of course they watch together at the party.

But then Rosario experiences a big surprise. In addition to Carl Gunner (Kjeld Norgaard), a stalwart pioneer of Danish adult entertainment, his wife Karen is actually the absolute star of the film. Completely overwhelmed by so much free spirit, Rosario indignantly confronts his wife, who then confesses to him that she has now signed a contract for another film with producer Bosen (Steffen Zacharias). In order to avoid the impending contractual penalty, the reconciled couple now urgently has to come up with something...

A wonderfully silly film that lets different worlds collide. Not just Southern Europe vs. Northern Europe, but also the challenge of aging machismo through relaxed sexual morals. The shots of Copenhagen, shown at its most beautiful, are absolutely wonderful. The wonderful Seventies clothes and the interior design known from that era are also very beautiful.

The interaction between the stars also works very well. As always, Lando Buzzanca (born in Palermo in 1935) plays the lumbar-controlled picture-perfect Italian, whose over-the-top nature gets him from one crazy situation to the next. There is a great reunion with the enchanting Pamela Tiffin (1942-2020), who is best known in this country from the Billy Wilder classic "One, Two, Three", where she played the hopelessly spoiled Coca-Cola Princess Scarlett Piffl in East Berlin, of all people, she lands a staunch parade communist (Horst Buchholz) as a husband. In this film, made ten years later, she impresses as a model Dane who, with her open-hearted and at the same time ladylike manner, wraps her Sicilian rooster around her finger.

This Italian sex comedy is even more quaint than most 70's Italian sex comedies. To appreciate it you really have to be familiar with 70's Italian sex comedies (in particular the comic stylings of Lando Buzzanca) AND the ambivalent attitudes more repressive countries like Italy had at the time towards more "sexually liberated" Scandinavian countries like Denmark (these attitudes can also be witnessed in the Italian mondo film "Sweden--Heaven or Hell?", which is much more unintentionally funny than this film is intentionally).

An Italian businessman (Lando Buzzanca) comes to Denmark to work on an ad campaign for shoes and is convinced by the locals to use naked models since supposedly no one even notices nudity in Denmark! In his off hours he tries to score with all the sexually liberated Danish women, but the only one he has any luck with (Pamela Tiffin) falls in love with him. He takes her back to Italy, but then he watches a Danish "blue movie" with his friends and realizes his new Danish fiancée is the star (she did it as part of a "research project" when she was college student). After they have a fight, she returns to Denmark and enters the porn industry. He tries to get her out of her contract and the whole thing ends in a very predictable manner.

Buzzanca is always good playing a hypocritical buffoon and blowhard, but this isn't one of his strongest roles. He does have one funny scene where he goes to a swinging party in Denmark where everyone keeps changing sex partners and he keeps ending up the odd man out. It's also pretty funny when he first finds out about his fiancée's "career". Pamela Tiffin is actually American actress (not Danish), who was in the Paul Newman movie "Harper" and the Tenessee William's adaptation "Summer and Smoke". But, kind of like her contemporaries Carrol Baker and Sue Lyon, she also took a lot of roles in Europe that were racier than what was going on in Hollywood at the time even if they seem quite quaint today.

This isn't generally very funny and it doesn't really make it as a sex film. It's not entirely without interest though.

One of those 1970s Italian sex comedies that is sadly neither erotic nor funny. An Italian businessman, Lando Buzzanca, travels to Copenhagen and falls in love with a cute blonde who happens to work in blue movies. He doesn't know this and after various disasters with Danish local women, ends up marrying her. Escapades ensue.

If you are watching for the nudity, then there is a smattering of topless stuff, but that is all. The comedic quality is stilted and predictable. The plot promises much- but simply fails to deliver.

Whilst the film's rescue by RetroMedia from obscurity is to be applauded, this scarcely qualifies as a hidden gem ....