Tinto Brass

6.5/10 Il Disco Volante (1964)
6.5/10 Col Cuore in Gola (1967)
6.5/10 La Vacanza (1971)

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The Venetian-born Tinto Brass (Italy, 1933), who had worked with Alberto Cavalcanti, Roberto Rossellini and Joris Ivens, debuted with the existential In Capo al Mondo (1963), later renamed Chi Lavora e` Perduto (1963), about youth unrest, whose title is an anarchist slogan valid on both individual and social levels.

The satirical sci-fi farce Il Disco Volante (1964), starring Alberto Sordi and Monica Vitti, set in a small provincial town, intertwines moral and material miseries of respectable people, and paints a fresco of the hypocrisies of everyday life through a parade of provincial caricatures: Sordi's drunken priest on motorcycle, the dull bureaucratic carabiniere, the womanizing accountant seducing the mayor’s wife, the childish and homosexual aristocratic heir oppressed by a tyrannical mother.

The townfolks use a phantom UFO for their misdeeds and miseries, until the Martian really appears. The telegraphist sees the Martian during a night encounter with the mayor’s wife (Monica Vitti) and is therefore committed to an asylum. A widowed peasant woman (Silvana Mangano) with seven children, who has been running a wretched existence for years, captures the Martian and sells him to the heir in exchange for a limousine and a fur coat, but is immediately denounced by the noble mother. The priest, who saw him in the peasant woman’s house, is committed to a sanatorium, after being affectionately farewelled by the parishioners. The brigadier, having arrested a Martian woman during Carnival, becomes convinced of the existence of extraterrestrials, rushes to the palace to arrest the Martian man, but in the middle of an orgy, the old aristocrat throws him out, has the Martian man thrown into a well, and has an influential person call the brigadier, who therefore settles the matter and releases the Martian woman. The brigadier follows the woman into the spaceship, where he receives a message for humanity; but he is committed to the asylum along with everyone else, including the heir who has thrown his mother into the well.

He then assembled Ca ira, il Fiume della Rivolta (1966), a montage film about modern revolutions.

He then directed the spaghetti-western Yankee (1966) and the "giallo" Col Cuore in Gola (1967), adapted from Sergio Donati's "Il Sepolcro di Carta" and influenced by Pop Art and psychedelia.

He continued to explore morbid themes in L'Urlo/ The Shout (1968), banned by the censors until 1974, another surreal fable based on the metaphor of the journey. With an iconoclastic spirit and a fairy-tale-joke tone, Brass flips through the myths of modern civilization like a Homer of the third millennium.

A well-born girl and a vagabond anarchist wander into an abstract landscape; they end up in a hotel frequented by sadomasochists, in a sewer teeming with intellectuals; they encounter a cannibal philosopher and a dwarf dictator; and when she decides to go back, she dies in an accident.

Then came the erotic Nerosubianco (1969).

He harnesses his vivid imagination and linguistic flair in the noir Dropout (1972), in which a madman and the housewife he took as hostage (Vanessa Redgrave) escape through the slums of London to a tragic conclusion (he is captured, she is killed by a jealous husband).

The psychological melodrama La Vacanza/ The Vacation (1971) is a ballad in his Venetian dialect where his rustic anarchism unfolds in tavern chatter and comic-strip vignettes, confirming his passion for the marginalized (Chaplinesque “tramps” and Zavattinian madmen) and his rejection of consumer society.

A peasant woman (Vanessa Redgrave), discharged from the asylum and sold by her family as a draft animal to a miller, escapes with a poacher, but after numerous encounters with other wretches, she is captured and locked up again in the asylum.

Later he turned decisively to erotic cinema with the grotesque Salon Kitty (1976), adapted from Peter Norden's novel about a Berlin brothel, where his style "deteriorates" into college-style parody and vulgar satire. A German brothel is converted by a fanatical SS lieutenant into a secret spy center, and the women kill the lieutenant.

The orgiastic epic Caligola (1979), produced by Bob Guccione of Penthouse magazine and scripted by Gore Vidal, exposes the atrocities of a regime through the depiction of its sexual weaknesses and murderous antics, and descends into "hardcore" pornography.

Action (1980) marks the lowest point of Brass' porno-comic art, featuring a wandering actor reduced to filming porn, a mad actress who believes she is Ophelia and throws him out of a window, and a crazy tramp who believes he is Garibaldi.

The blockbuster La Chiave/ The Key (1983), which transports Junichiro Tanizaki's novel into Venezia/Venice during the fascist era, tells of an English scholar who self-destructs in the erotic rituals of his wife and her lover.

Later he directed: Miranda (1985), a hardly recognizable adaptation of Goldoni's play “La Locandiera”, Capriccio (1987), loosely adapted from Mario Soldati's novel “Lettere da Capri”, Snack Bar Budapest (1988), Paprika (1991), a loose adaptation of John Cleland's novel "Fanny Hill", Cosi` fan Tutte/ All Ladies Do It (1992), a loose adaptation of Lorenzo Da Ponte's opera libretto, L'Uomo che Guarda (1994), adapted from Alberto Moravia's novel, Monella/ Frivolous Lola (1998) Trasgredire (2000), Senso '45 (2002), Monamour (2005), etc.