Asfalto Molhado

I have always eschewed dubbed movies. This may be the first one I've ever seen. The dubbed dialog includes a lot of forced sounding laughter and is highly reminiscent of inaccurate subtitles. Probably when the Unites States exports action movies that make hundreds of millions of dollars abroad, the dubbing is slicker.

The plot involves a young man token out of prison to assist a well known journalist. The young man is played by Horst Buchholz, surely one of the handsomest men ever to work in major movies. The journalist and his young female ward are unknown to me and it's difficulty to comment on their acting under these circumstances.

I have the feeling, which could be wrong, that the Buchholz character is meant to be a little like the Terrence Stamp character in Pasolini's "Teorema" -- that he is attractive to all who encounter him.

In any case, it's interesting to me that this movie was released a few years before "One, Two, Three." That is probably the movie for which most Americans know Buchholz. The plot is similar to that of Wilder's earlier "Ace in the Hole," in that it involves cynical, exploitative journalists.

I am not a fan of One, Two, Three," though I like almost everything else Wilder did in this country enormously. This project, with the same young male lead, might have been a more interesting undertaking for the man who made not only "Ace in the Hole" but also "A Foreign Affair."