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“A Whole Lot Of Shirley Going On”

By Raymond Benson

Joseph E. Levine, head of Embassy Pictures, was at one time a formidable producer and studio head who brought us some outstanding pictures in the 1960s and 70s. In 1967, he managed to persuade the great Italian director Vittorio De Sica to do a picture in English with big Hollywood stars. De Sica had just previously done an English-language flick, After the Fox (1966). So, in 1967, he made a comic anthology movie called Woman Times Seven, starring Shirley MacLaine in seven different roles opposite seven different leading men (and others).

Anthology movies are often a mixed bag. In almost every case, there are two or three stories that are good, and two or three that are less so. Here, we have seven tales of a woman’s relationship with a man (or men) with a distinctly European slant (especially in its attitudes...

33rd Israel Film Festival in Los Angeles, November 12th — 26th: Sold-Out Opening Night Gala

Six-time Academy Award winning producer Arthur Cohn and producer Sharon Harel-Cohen receive festival honors.

Incitement has its U.S. premiere

It looked like every Jew in entertainment attended the Opening Night Gala. It was the first time Opening Night was completely sold out a week in advance to a capacity crowd of over 900 guests at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills.

The packed audience greeted the evening’s host, Israel FilmFestival Founder/Executive Director Meir Fenigstein, with a standing ovation in recognition of his outstanding leadership of the Festival for over three decades.

Standing ovations continued as six-time Academy Award-winning producer Arthur Cohn received the 2019 Iff Lifetime Achievement Award from actress Rosanna Arquette and when WestEnd Film Chair and producer Sharon Harel-Cohen was presented with the 2019 Iff Achievement in Film Award by Avi Lerner, Chairman/CEO,...

Peter Baldwin, an actor turned prolific Emmy-winning TV director with credits including The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Sanford and Son, Murphy Brown and The Wonder Years, has died. He was 86.

Baldwin died Sunday at his home in Pebble Beach, California, his son, Drew Baldwin, CEO of Tubefilter and creator and executive producer of the Streamy Awards, announced.

A former actor and contract player at Paramount Pictures, Baldwin cut his teeth behind the camera in Italy when he served as an assistant director under the legendary Vittorio De Sica on Woman Times Seven (1967)...

By Howard Hughes

New to DVD in the UK is ‘Arabella’, an Italian period comedy set in that hotbed of hilarity, pre-wwii fascist Italy. Virna Lisi stars in the title role – known variously in the film as Arabella Danesi and Arabella Angeli – who determines to save her grandmother from destitution by finding ingenious ways to pay off her elderly relative’s crippling tax bill.

The film is structured rather like those 1960s Italian portmanteau comedy-dramas, such as ‘Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow’, ‘The Witches’ or ‘Woman Times Seven’. Such films were intended as vehicles for one female star, be they Sophia, Silvana or Shirley, to demonstrate their versatility in a variety of roles. But instead of separate stories, with different characters, ‘Arabella’ has one continuous story arc, with Lisi’s sexy heroine adopting various costumes, personas and wigs to seduce and blackmail her way through a string of lovers, who are then...

It had been so long since I last saw Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves—the last time being long before I started to become involved with movie posters—that I had forgotten that Antonio Ricci’s job at the start of the film, the job he so desperately needs a bicycle for, is pasting up movie posters.Researching De Sica posters to coincide with the current month-long restrospective at New York’s Film Forum I discovered that De Sica’s most famous film centers—as does the Shawshank Redemption, coincidentally—on a poster of Rita Hayworth. I had hoped that it would be a poster by Anselmo Ballester, who painted Hayworth gloriously many times, but the signature on the top right of the poster is clearly that of one T. Corbella. Tito Corbella (1885-1966) was an artist known for his sensuous portraits of Italian divas since the 1910s. Dave Kehr...

tuesday top ten returns! It's for the list-maker in me and the list-lover in you

The Cannes film festival wrapped this weekend (previous posts) and the most recent Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, The Secret in Their Eyes is still in the midst of a successful Us run. That Oscar winning Argentinian film came to us from director Juan Jose Campanella. It's his second film to be honored by the Academy (Son of the Bride was nominated ten years back). The Academy voters obviously like Campanella and in some ways he's a Hollywood guy. When he's not directing Argentinian Oscar hopefuls he spends time making Us television with episodes of Law & Order, House and 30 Rock under his belt.

So let's talk foreign-language auteurs. Who does Oscar love most?

[The film titles discussed in this article will link to Netflix pages -- if available -- should you be curious to see the films]

Best Director winners Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain) and Milos Forman

(Amadeus and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest)

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