Cinema: Every Italian a Stallion?

Boccaccio ’70 claims, ingenuously or disingenuously, to be the sort of thing the great Florentine would have written had he had to add an Eleventh Day to the Decameron in Italy in 1970. But Directors Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica, each contributing a story to this motion picture triptych, give moviegoers not so much the unself-conscious bawdry of Boccaccio as the neopagan body worship that a witty Vatican editorialist recently styled “erotic vagrancy.”

THE TEMPTATION or DR. ANTONIO (Fellini ) thumbs the well-worn psychological text that outward prudishness masks inward prurience. Prim, black-suited Dr. Antonio (Peppino de Filippo) is a self-constituted one-man vice squad who sees signs of obscenity everywhere. One sign that puts him into a puritanical dither is a huge billboard featuring a slinkily gowned, reclining platinum blonde who holds a mammoth glass of milk in her hand and endorses the consumption of that beverage. “Take her down,” says Dr. Antonio to snickering city officials and discreet church fathers. One night, as Dr. Antonio tramps obsessively around the sign, the poster girl (Anita Ekberg) comes down and offers to be his, all 50 ft. of her. Like a huge cat, she toys with her ankle-high mouse. She lifts him to the glacier-like promontories of her bosom, and poor Antonio drops his umbrella into the crevasse. She plucks it out disdainfully, like a black toothpick, and darts it at him. As the fantasy continues, Dr. Antonio dons medieval armor to tilt against this she-devil whom he must kill for fear of loving. Next morning, white-coated asylum attendants pry the demented doctor loose from the top of the billboard.

THE JOB (Visconti) probes the boredom and despair of the very rich. A handsome young Milanese count (Thomas Milian) has created a front-page scandal by associating with $1,000-a-night call girls. He fears that the father of his German-born wife Pupe (Romy Schneider) will cut him off without funds. As husband and wife debate their dilemma and their relationship, the camera feels its way like a sybarite over the textures of the setting and the people. The props are excruciatingly chic, ranging from Aubusson tapestries and Canaletto paintings to Actress Schneider’s Coco Chanel clothes. At one point, Pupe manages to wriggle out of these clothes with one hand while telephoning with the other in what is surely one of the more provocative stripteases to be recorded on film. The scene proves a heady aphrodisiac to the count, and they settle on a deal whereby the count can have his wife, instead of a call girl, at $600 a night. In the story’s sardonic finale, Pupe tearfully prepares for her “job” as the count waves a check in the bedroom air to dry the ink.

THE RAFFLE (De Sica), a raffish tale of peasant lust, tries the least and succeeds the best. The owner of a shooting gallery attached to a traveling carnival has coaxed Zoe (Sophia Loren) to be the bed prize in a $5-a-ticket Saturday night raffle. In a smouldering curve-hugging red dress, Zoe can, and in one funny scene does, make a bull blink. The local farmers do the same when the timid town sexton (Alfio Vita) wins the raffle, but Zoe is suddenly stirred by a young motorcycle cowboy (Luigi Giuliani). Actress Loren is diverting as a comedienne, but she handles the romance perfunctorily, as if the flash of a social smile were the language of the heart.

Boccaccio ’70 is a myth-transforming film. It reshapes the Love Goddess into the Sex Goddess, abandons the philosopher’s eternal feminine for the sculptor’s finite female form. Technically, the film strains against the cramping conventions of a dying realism. Fellini’s episode, especially, with its ear-bruisingly inane drink-more-milk jingle (“Every Italian can be a stallion”) and its massive billboard that is as hallucinatory as the giantess herself, displays a brilliant sense of how the surreal now impinges on, and modifies, the real. Meander though he does, Visconti produces the most hauntingly lingering image. He shows the death of love, which, paradoxically, may be the true subject of this erotic film.