It's admirable to see Dario Argento direct something this unexpected at this early stage in his career, as this is a historical dramedy, and though it can be violent, it's far from a traditional horror movie. I was on board with it for the first few scenes, kind of liking the odd tone and the unique way it was handling a story within a recounting of events that, to some extent, actually happened...
...But it gets less engaging as it goes along, and its two-hour runtime felt a good deal longer to me. It makes it probably for the best that Argento returned to the horror genre and kept at it, developing his signature style further and then arguably peaking in the late 1970s/early 1980s.
This is a strange and somewhat interesting detour within his filmography, but I wish it had been either a bit less repetitive or a good deal shorter, because it's very one-note for something that runs as long as it does. And not that two hours is always long for a movie, of course - it's just here, you feel that two hours more than in many other films of a comparable length.
