C\'era una volta
Italy / France,
1967, 105 min
Shown in 1981
CREDITS
- dir
-
Francesco Rosi
- prod
-
Carlo Ponti
- scr
-
Francesco Rosi, Tonino Guerra, Raffaele La Capria, Giuseppe Patroni Griffi
- cam
-
Pasqualino de Santis
- editor
-
Jolanda Benvenuti
- cast
-
Sophia Loren, Omar Sharif, Dolores Del Rio, Georges Wilson, Leslie French, Marina Malfatti, Anna Nogara, Rita Forzano
- source
-
MGM
-
COMMENTS
Last-minute substitute for Village in the Jungle. Francesco Rosi in person as subject of a tribute.
OTHER
Francesco Rosi's romantic fairytale fantasy starring Sophia Loren and Omar Sharif has some of the magical silliness and sweetness of de Sica's Miracle in Milan and the Alexander Korda production of The Thief of Bagdad. It's set in 17th-century Southern Italy (dominated by the Spanish), where a Prince (Sharif), refusing to marry one of the seven eligible princesses, goes forth on his white stallion and finds a lusciously ripe peasant girl (Loren). This splashy and beautiful comic tale is set in forests and yellow fields and at locations that include the 14th-century monastery of San Lorenzo at Padula, the 15th-century town of Bracciano and the ruins of the 4th-century Circus of Maxentius. The film also features Dolores Del Rio as Sharif's mother, Georges Wilson as the palace chef and Leslie French as the flying monk, Brother Joseph. An Italian-French coproduction, released here in English, the dubbing is often both funny and charming, especially when the warty old witches speak in voices that seem to come from another planet. (Some of them were actually Italian peasant men dressed as women and some were elderly English actresses.)
—Pauline Kael
FACTOID #95
Later to find fame with the amnesia-tinged film noir update Memento, British director Christopher Nolan was nominated for the SKYY Prize in 1998 for his first feature Following. Nolan shot the film about a writer who stalks strangers, on weekends over the course of a year on a budget of $6,000.
