Like a 1930s MGM literary adaptation, this movie begins with an unattached hand opening a tattered copy of D'Annunzio's L'Innocente on a background of crushed velvet, and leafing through it at the rate of a phenomenal speed-reader, or else at the rate of the typical modern reader's impatience with D'Annunzio. Also as in many an old studio production, the garishly overdone decors and costumes appear to be just for show. The late Luchino Visconti, whose last movie this is, has gotten more mileage out of and more meaning into his decors and costumes in such movies as Death in Venice and Conversation Piece. This assault on male sexual arrogance is stagily directed, talkily scripted (the profusion of subtitles diverts the American viewer from the dullness of the image, and gives him an illusion that perhaps more is going on than actually is), and acted with facial expressions like open books. The one strong scene is the infanticide, an idea that D'Annunzio appropriated from a far better storyteller by the name of Maupassant. With Giancarlo Giannini, Laura Antonelli, and Jennifer O'Neill. (1977) — Duncan Shepherd
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