La decima vittima

As a wonderful example of 60s pop art filmmaking, Elio Petri has taken many of the decade's most popular culture crazes (the Bond films, Courreges fashions, discotheque jazz, etc.) and used them with great success to give a plausible look to a highly improbable (in 1965!) future world. Petri's digs at Mad Ave advertising and humanity's relentless pursuit of fame and money (no matter the price) are on-target, and his delight in mocking societal idiosyncrasies (the sun worshipers) is priceless. However, at the heart of The Tenth Victim is the old-fashioned battle-of-the-sexes plot (still very popular in the mid-60s), and yet Petri has the upper hand by his spoofing of the romantic-comedy genre and giving us instead a deliciously amusing trifle that is fun to watch for its joking attitude towards everything it depicts, including Marcello and Ursula! To one reviewer who found it outdated, it must be remembered that this film was made 35 years ago and so it naturally has nothing to do with today's standards - and why should it? That's like dismissing Griffith's Intolerance because it's a silent film!