Disturbing yet enthralling

I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

It always amazes me that some reviewers can give a movie a really splendid write-up and hail everything about it from the acting to the photography, from the writing to the direction -- and then give it a rating of five out of ten! I know I'm hopeless at maths, but to me a rating of five out of ten implies that the film was either a very mediocre offering or that it had passages of great interest mixed up with scenes that were seriously flawed, or maybe scenes that promised a lot of conflict but ended up as damp squibs -- like the scene in this movie in which the deceased's mistress joins the funeral procession but nothing happens, either positive or negative! And that it why I would normally have given it 5/10. But I've given is 6/10 because there is a scene of a road accident early on in the movie which is the most spectacular I've ever seen -- and as a professional film critic who averaged ten movies a week, I've seen over 20,000 movies in my time. So this one, plagued by scenes that promise a lot but deliver little, gets a six.

Someone gets a call in the middle of the night. Someone finds out that someone else had a heart attack. Confusing ? It gets even more confusing, but then if you have the patience to hang with it, it does start making more sense. Anita (Goldie Hawn) meets some guy (Giancarlo Giannini), the ex lover of her roommate, and catches a ride with him. Much like Chevy Chase's Vacation, everything that can go wrong DOES go wrong. It's a grand adventure of a road trip, and they have some ups and downs along the way. Lots of writers listed on this one, so if it seems a bit disjointed, it has good reason to. Goldie made this one just after Foul Play. Giannini had also been nominated for an Oscar. The trivia says this was going to be a Fellini project, so as odd as it is, its probably more normal than if HE had done it! This was finally directed by Mario Monicelli, who had been nominated for two Oscars for best writing in the 1960s. Overall, its pretty good; just a shame that Sophia Loren couldn't make it way back when. IMDb thinks the run time is 120 minutes, but the DVD from DML is only 95 minutes, so this version is missing a whole chunk. i will try to add this run time to IMDb.

Giancarlo Giannini plays Guido Massacesi, a successful advertising promoter in Rome. At first, you think the movie is going to be like Three Coins In The Fountain. It turns out to be the opposite. Guido, a sex graving, middle aged man, pairs up with a beautiful, blond American named Anita (Goldie Hawn) on a drive to Pisa. Instead of being the dumb, blond, Anita turns out to be a lot harder to figure out than he imagined.Guido reveals that he is impulsive, temperamental, and really troubled. He stops at his hometown and reveals his guilt about being the one successful son in the family - saved from having to slave his whole life away in a chemical factory. Guido also reveals his hypocrisy by refusing to allow his family to meet his new girlfriend. He fears, rightly, than they will just consider her a foreign prostitute.This movie is filled with good satire. He causes a car accident, blames everyone else, but while at a hospital is moved by the permanent patients fated to live lives as paupers and confined. Suddenly, he feels a lot of guilt for who he has become - successful, spoiled, and arrogant. He also brings her to a tourist island, but because it is off season everything is closed. Lastly, there is a funny scene at the end, during the funeral of the father, that everyone reveals their spites, suspicions, and jealousies. All in all, it wasn't the typically romantic Italian movie. It was filled with social satire about the real state of Italy in the late 70s.

Knew nothing of this film when I put it in the player, except that Goldie Hawn was central to it. I see the original film ran over 120 minutes, my disc says 96. It should have been even less. The plot is predictable - Italian male professional, married with family has to leave town because of a family crisis. When he can't persuade a woman with whom he had an affair a year previously to come with him on his trip, he takes in her place an American woman (played by Hawn) who happens to be staying with the first woman. The story is an attempt to develop the relationship between Hawn and Giannini. Some of the element of unbelievability comes from the unbelievable boorishness of the latter. Some of it is contributed by the jumps in continuity. And the poor color control of my disc did not help. Oh, and did I mention the dubbing? There were some interesting insights into Italian family life, and there were some revelations in the last quarter of the movie that in a better director's hands would have portrayed some aspects of Italian family life to much greater effect. The funeral becomes a very interesting occasion.There is brief nudity near the start and near the end of the film.