Antonio Pietrangeli’s IL MAGNIFICO CORNUTO is a marital comedy that plays kind of like a sixties Italian EYES WIDE SHUT — it’s all about fidelity, there’s an exchange of fantasies/affairs, the complacent male is thrown into a whirlpool of angst, there are scenes in a hotel and a big country house… Ugo Tognazzi (you remember the child-catcher in BARBARELLA who takes off his big fur coat to reveal an even bigger, furrier chest?) cheats on his impossibly gorgeous wife, Claudia Cardinale, and is tormented, not by conventional guilt, but by impotent fantasies of her cheating back.
The climactic, is I may use the word, fantasy, is a prolonged and luminously atmospheric striptease, with Cardinale stripping away her seven or so veils according to the results of an erotic tombola. Yes.
Presenting, a new and exciting, if somewhat mythical, Shadowplay Project.
For a while I was fascinated by Marina Vlady in CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT. Well, actually I still am. But when I saw La Vlady in Godard’s TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER, something seemed different. The voice, of course. Welles was happy to use Jeanne Moreau’s own hoarse, sexy tones for her characterisation of Doll Tearsheet (with the logic that, since the British were always fighting the French, and armies have camp followers, there would be a lot of French tottie knocking around Merrie England) but Vlady plays the lady wife of Henry Hotspur, and had to sound plummily English.
So, somebody else provided the voice, and for once Welles couldn’t do it himself (I imagine he’s responsible for Fernando Rey’s and possibly Walter Chiari’s dubbing in this film). The question that vexes me is, who?
The throaty vibrato has a slight air of Fenella Fielding about it, and this is lent weight by the fact that we know Fielding has done a spot of revoicing in her time: she dubbed Anita Pallenberg as the Black Queen in BARBARELLA. But this voice isn’t quite AS extreme. I’m thinking Joan Greenwood, who perhaps is more Shakespearian.
But I don’t know! And it frustrates me.
Nor do I know for sure if that’s the voice of TV comedy legend Richard Briers issuing from beneath the mustache of Jean-Pierre Cassel in Richard Lester’s THE THREE MUSKETEERS. It sure sounds like him (and Briers had worked with Raquel Welch in FATHOM) but it could conceivably be Ian Carmichael. But neither one has any certain connection with Lester. (NB — the IMDb confirms Briers as the voice artist responsible.) Nonetheless, I am morally certain that’s Michael Hordern providing vocals for the captain of the musketeers, played externally by Georges Wilson.
Lester’s films are full of overdubs — the Greek chorus narrating THE KNACK… AND HOW TO GET IT certainly seems to include Dandy Nichols, who appears briefly, and Arthur Lowe, who doesn’t. Both would later perform in THE BED SITTING ROOM.
Fellini’s English language movies contain similar mysteries: in CASANOVA that’s certainly Robert Stephen’s uniquely fluctuating fruitiness emanating from the aristo who hosts a shagging contest in his court. Which makes me suspect that at least one of the crystal-sharp lady’s voices in the film stems from his significant other, THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW’s Patricia Quinn. Several of them sound like her.
Film history is full of anonymous voices whispering slyly from the lips of faces famous and infamous and unfamous. And the few people who know the truth aren’t getting any younger. So, without any resources or any free time to devote to the problem, I’m nevertheless launching the Vox Project. All I want is for anyone who knows anything about famous dubs to let me know so I can put it on the record. It would be particularly interesting to hear from people in the industry with direct knowledge of this. Let’s not let this important and sexy information disappear from history.
BARBARELLA was, as I recall, the only film my mum refused to let me watch as a kid. I mean, there were lots of films which were on too late, like the second half of the monster movie double bills, which meant that I saw DRACULA at age ten but didn’t see FRANKENSTEIN until years later. But BARBARELLA was banned purely on grounds of content, or imagined content, since I don’t think anybody in my family had seen it.
A while later, the prospect of my watching DRACULA AD 1972 provoked an earnest discussion, with my Dad agreeing to sit up and watch the film with me and my brother to make sure there was nothing too unsuitable. There wasn’t — a wrist-slitting black mass, lots of vampirism, a stake through the heart — but no nipples. So that’s OK.
It seems kind of foolish of Roger Vadim to begin the movie with a striptease which is more fleetingly revealing than anything else in the film, starting it on an erotic high that it can’t quite live up to. Still, it’s an iconic, much-swiped moment, and it’s eventually followed by THIS:
The Excessive Machine, which should really have been called the Orgasmatron, only nobody thought of it. (Woody Allen did, later, in SLEEPER.) Here is my own Orgasmatron:
It’s for scalp massage, which is either a disappointment or a relief depending on how weird you are.
Jane Fonda’s erotic ordeal is a perversly innocent bit of sadism in a film which flirts with the sick (Barb getting nibbled by clockwork dolls in front of an audience of feral children sounds worse than it plays) but doesn’t seem to cross any lines of taste, somehow. Apart from casting Marcel Marceau in a role that requires him to do nothing but talk. That really shows up Vadim’s particular brand of anti-talent.
What holds the fragmented, inept shambles together is the design and casting — Vadim may have not known what to do with the talents on display, but he attracted enough of them so that some entertainment almost inevitably results. And Fonda’s Alice-in-Wonderland line readings — “A lot of dramatic situations begin with screaming!” — are crucial to preserving the air of innocence that stops the thing getting mired in pervy Euro-misogyny. What Robert “will this do?” Rodriguez’s proposed version would be like is anybody’s guess, although I predict lacklustre CGI banality might form approximately 99.9% of the experience, but it seems at least conceivable that Rose McGowan could contribute some Fonda-esque charm. She’s got something, that girl.
Vadim story: Arianne Ulmer-Cipes, daughter of the great Edgar Ulmer, worked as a voice artist in Europe: she was the Italian voice of Elke Sommer, which sounds like a splendid job to have. She once auditioned for Vadim, and ofound him sat upon a magnificent THRONE, weaing a short bathrobe, and splaying, physically. “I just ignored it. I knew it was some kind of test — he wanted to see if I’d be shocked. I mean, he wasn’t fiddling with himself or anything.”
