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Category: Roberto Pregadio

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Plot: Angela doesn’t like her new stepmother…

Peccati di gioventù (or Sins Of Youth, released in North America as So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious… for some reason) is one of the better Gloria Guida melodramas. If Guida had never made To Be Twenty (1978) with Fernando Di Leo this, along with That Malicious Age (1975) a year later, would probably be considered some of her finest work. There’s no question that it stands head and shoulders above the futile sex comedies that Guida made a living with. Not only is So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious… better written and beautifully photographed, it actually gives glorious Gloria something to do and the chance to act every once in a while. Guida wasn’t too shabby of an actress when, and if, she was allowed to do more than just take her clothes off. Here she gets that chance. Silvio Amadio was crazy about Gloria and it isn’t hard to see why… So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious… is for those who can’t stomach Gloria’s regular raunchy sex comedies.

As an Italian precursor to French drama The Year of the Yellyfish (1984) So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious… is a prime example of the youth gone bad thriller subgenre that experienced somewhat of a revival with infinitely lesser American imitations as Poison Ivy (1992), and The Crush (1993) and in the new millennium with French director François Ozon and his Swimming Pool (2003) with Charlotte Rampling, and Ludivine Sagnier. So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious… falls smackdab in the middle between the innocuous The Minor (1974), and the equally tragic That Malicious Age (1975). One thing is painfully obvious: Amadio’s best days were clearly behind him. As utilitarian and occasionally beautifully photographed as So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious… is, he was a very long way from the masterclass in suspense and sleaze that was Amuck (1972). Silvio Amadio would work with his muse one last time on The Doctor… The Student (1976). As slick and hyper-stylized as his gialli were so matter-of-fact and stilted are these.

Angela Batrucchi (Gloria Guida) loves her father. She loves her doctor father (Silvano Tranquilli) so much that she’s none too pleased that he has found a new lover in Irene (Dagmar Lassander). She’s so incensed and overcome by incestual longing with the whole situation that she schemes with her boyfriend Sandro Romagnoli (Fred Robsahm) to drive a wedge between the two. Since Sandro moonlights as a gigolo and has an older lover (Dana Ghia, as Felicita Ghia) on the side Angela orders him to seduce Irene. While Sandro is busy doing that Angela decides to dig into Irene’s past to find something, anything that she can use to blackmail her into doing her bidding. With a little sleuthing Angela uncovers that Irene had a lesbian phase in college, and decides to use that to her advantage. She plans to provide Sandro with the perfect opportunity to collect incriminating photographic evidence of Irene’s fluid sexual preferences.

For no other reason than to drive Irene completely mad Angela starts acting erratically and will fly into fits of apoplectic rage without the slightest provocation. Somehow Irene finds a way of dealing with Angela’s unpredictable and sudden moodswings. When Sandro’s plans to lure Irene into bed with him don’t pan out Angela figures that her stepmother’s lesbian inclinations are something worth exploiting. In short order Angela shows her naughty slides from her and her girl friends on vacation, randomly undresses in front of her, and showers with the door wide open. When all of that fails to have the desired effect, Angela invites Irene over to the beach where they engage in heavy petting while Sandro captures everything on photo with his camera. In her desperation Angela tries to drive Irene off the road when she spots her in town. That is the final straw, and Irene’s spirit breaks. After being locked up in her room Angela has a moment of introspection, and realizes how much damage she has caused. By that point Irene has driven off in tears, is there time for Angela to turn the tide?

Director Silvio Amadio was something of a late-bloomer. He worked his way through the obligatory comedy, adventure, peplum, spaghetti western, and melodrama features before he started to develop any sort of recognizable individual style. By all accounts Amadio seems to have been a fairly standard Italian exploitation director until around 1970. Up to that point (the late sixties) Amadio’s oeuvre had contained its fair amount of sex and social dysfunction, but neither came together quite as exuberantly as they did in Amuck (1972) (with Rosalba Neri, and Barbara Bouchet). Amadio had always been a major creative force behind the screenplays for his films, and it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what led to the sudden creative upsurge. One possible reason could be the permissive social mores directly following the sexual revolution, the availability of actresses will doing to do nudity – or, both. Although the latter doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny as Island Of the Swedes (1969) had Catherine Diamant doing pretty much every iconic scene that Gloria Guida would later popularize through her work with Amadio. On first glance it seems Amadio’s entire reputation as a cult director is solely built on the back of the gialli Amuck (1972) and Smile Before Death (1972). The general consensus is that Amadio’s tenure with Guida signaled a creative downslope, something which a cursory back-to-back viewing of Amuck (1972) and Smile Before Death (1972) with any of the Guida titles certainly seems to corroborate. Which amounts to him being interesting for about two years before the inevitable decline.

Even though she was only a fixture in lowbrow commedia sexy all’Italiana for about a good 8 years Gloria worked with some of the absolute best in the business. She debuted in Mario Imperoli’s coming of age tale Monika (1974) and he launched Guida’s world-famous ass to superstardom with his Blue Jeans (1975). However it was Silvio Amadio who showed the world with The Minor (1974) that glorious Gloria could be a dramatic actress provided that the material was written to her strengths. Arguably it was Michele Massimo Tarantini who ensured Guida’s cinematic immortality with La Liceale (1975) and Mariano Laurenti kept her employed through the obligatory sequels. Once again it was Amadio who allowed Gloria to spread her wings in terms of acting a bit. Both So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious… and That Malicious Age (1975) were tragedies disguised as bawdy sex comedies. One thing was clear: Silvio loved la Guida, and she’s on display in full ornate here. Amadio wastes absolutely no time in getting Gloria out of what little clothes she wears, lovingly photographing every inch of her body, and reveling in every moment that she’s in the frame. Which is a really polite way of saying that there’s plenty of naked shenanigans involving our girl Gloria. That doesn’t mean it’s crass, or vulgar – it’s tasteful, and retroactively kind of meta.

The other big stars here are Dagmar Lassander and Silvano Tranquilli. Lassander was a redhead, and a contemporary of Helga Liné, Betsabé Ruiz, Rosanna Yanni, Silvia Tortosa, Cristina Galbó, Erika Blanc, Sandra Julien, and Malisa Longo. Lassander can be seen in Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1970), The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion (1971), The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire (1971), a pair of Alfonso Brescia sex comedies, and The House by the Cemetery (1981). Tranquilli for about a decade was a pillar of domestic gothic horror appearing alongside Barbara Steele in The Horrible Secret of Dr. Hichcock (1962), Castle Of Blood (1964), and the gialli Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971), The Bloodstained Butterfly (1971), and Smile Before Death (1972). In comparison to both Lassander and Tranquilli, Fred Robsahm was a nobody with only the Bud Spencer-Terence Hill western spoof Carambola (1974) (cos only the Italians would make a spoof of a spoof), and the Roger Vadim fumetti Barbarella (1968).

Perhaps Amadio felt ownership over Gloria because he helped shape her career so significantly? It was 1975 and Guida was at the height of her popularity and from here her career, both as a singer and as an actress, could only go downward. She was twenty, and had spurned his advances. How else to recover from that than to make a movie about it? In the most simplest terms So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious… is about a hedonistic socialite who sends a spurned older lover into suicidal despair after rejecting their advances. It all feels strangely autobiographical considering the circumstances, and it’s almost as if Amadio was directly talking to Guida in his script. That Malicious Age (1975) merely changed the settings and cut down the slapstick but it was, more or less, So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious… - and it too ended in tragedy. It was Fernando Di Leo who really distilled the commedia sexy all’Italiana formula candy girls as Gloria Guida and Lilli Carati specialized in, and used the format to deliver a scathing condemnation of the patriarchal – and sexual mores of Italian society at the time. In 1981 Gloria met crooner Johnny Dorelli, and retired soon after. Guida married Dorelli in 1991, and Silvio Amadio, age 69 and 24 films in total, passed away four years later, in 1995.

Published on Leave a comment on The Minor (1974)

Plot: good girls go to heaven, Valeria goes everywhere…

Silvio Amadio was a promising director that helmed two interesting giallos with Amuck (1972) and Death Smiles On A Murderer (1973) that saw him working with some of Italy's finest leading ladies Rosalba Neri, Barbara Bouchet and Ewa Aulin. Compared to them Gloria Guida was but a starlet, willing and able to shed fabric if required, of questionable acting talent. Obviously Amadio’s best days were truly well behind him and not even Guida’s ascent in the commedia sexy all’Italiana could pull him from the morass of mediocrity. Amadio would work with Guida on another three occassions with So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious... (1975), That Malicious Age (1975), and The Doctor... The Student (1976) but suffice to say no amount of Guida in the buff can mask how routinous and daft these are. The Minor was the last hurrah of a director well above this kind of daft melodramatic swill. There’s only so many ways for Gloria Guida to undress until that grows stale too.

The Minor was only glorious Gloria's second feature and the follow-up to the rather innocuous Monika (1974). Guida was a year removed from Blue Jeans (1975), the feature that would launch her legendary derrière to Eurocult superstardom, and her role as everybody's favorite promiscuous Catholic schoolgirl or la liceale in Michele Massimo Tarantini’s La Liceale (1975). That Gloria couldn't really act was manifest in her debut outing but at least she's given something to work with here. In her scenes with veteran actor Corrado Pani he does most of the heavy lifting for her. Guida's non-acting is charming at first but tends to grow tedious the farther one progresses into her filmography. While it stands to reason that la Guida did more than just taking her clothes off in Blue Jeans (1975), and That Malicious Age (1975), it wouldn't be until To Be Twenty (1978) a few years later that she proved that she could actually act. It's true that Gloria Guida was handed terrible scripts banking heavily on her willingness to shed clothes, but even with a good screenplay she wasn't exactly an Edwige Fenech, Barbara Bouchet, or Femi Benussi. Let alone that she was able to match ubiquitous bedroom farce queen Laura Antonelli. 

To its credit at least The Minor attempts to do things a little differently in its opening 15 minutes. Just like Mario Imperoli’s Monika (1974) and Blue Jeans (1975), The Minor opens with a pair of legs in the shortest blue skirt imaginable. The skirt and the legs in them, of course, belong to everybody’s favorite raunchy comedy darling Gloria Guida. From there it takes a page from the Christina Lindberg romp Exponerad (1971) as she’s chased, surrounded and then raped by a gang of bikers. We learn that Guida is Valeria Sanna and she’s summoned to the doctor’s office for a medical check-up. Right when the doctor is about to get naughty with her, her class mates burst in, wearing colorful corsets, and Valeria punishes the medic with castration. By this time sister Angela (Nicoletta Amadio) has found the schoolgirls in the woods and Valeria attempts to corrupt the good sister with some sapphic seduction. In her next flight of fancy Valeria finds herself topless and crucified by evil men and women of the cloth until a band of schoolgirls and nuns come to her rescue. She’s brought before the court of the headmaster (Giulio Donnini) and is instructed to return home for the summer and spent time with her dysfunctional family.

Things take a turn towards well-charted and rather daft commedia sexy all’Italiana and melodramatic territory when Valeria returns home. Her absentee father (Marco Guglielmi) has an office affair with his secretary. Her young and attractive mother (Rosemary Dexter) has an affair with wealthy entrepreneur Carlo Savi (Giacomo Rossi Stuart, as Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) while their in-house maid Carlotta (Gabriella Lepori) is in a tryst with Valeria’s constantly horny brother Lorenzo (Luciano Roffi). Valeria herself is the object of everybody’s attention as she can’t sunbathe topless without being spied on from nearby boats and no less than twice do a gang of schoolboys break-and-enter into her house to watch her undress. One day while wandering the beach she makes her acquaintance with Spartaco (Corrado Pani), a middle-aged sculptor living in a shack. An unlikely bond develops between the two and soon Valeria finds herself torn between interest in boys of her own age and her growing affection towards the cultured and worldly social pariah Spartaco. In a scene towards the end Giacomo Rossi-Stuart’s Carlo has Valeria dressing up as a internment camp prisoner while he poses as a Nazi officer and tries to lure Valeria in bed. At that point her mother enters the room and she’s none too pleased with her lover. It is then that Valeria realizes that she’s no longer interested in the adolescent boys that cause her so much grief, but in old Spartaco instead.

There are far and few Gloria Guida commedia sexy all’Italiana that are truly mandatory. The Minor is too routine and by-the-numbers to warrant recommendation outside of the opening 15 minutes that have Gloria partaking in various of daydreams. The Minor offers ample opportunity for Guida to shine as she’s put in (and out of) various alluring garments; be it the schoolgirl outfit with a skimpiest blue skirt and diaphanous knee-high socks, miniscule see-through lingerie and the blue bikini that features in most of the beach scenes. Seeing Guida is always a delight but no amount of bare skin can mask just how hideously banal The Minor truly is. Guida never shied away from nudity and The Minor has enough of Gloria in the buff to satisfy anyone’s cravings, the plot however is as trite as many of these comedies were wont to be. Gloria Guida might not have been the most gifted of actresses, but her shapely derrière and her willingness to shed clothes allowed her a steady career in bawdy commedia sexy all’Italiana. Obviously not all of her comedies and melodramas were created equal, but at the very least most were enjoyable in the basest sense of the word.

Granted, Gloria Guida was no Barbara Bouchet, Femi Benussi or even Evelyn Kraft. If The Minor proves anything it is that even Guida was too good to waste on mediocre swill like this. The creativity that it manifests and the goodwill that it generates in the first 15 minutes is too easily squandered as The Minor is yet another coming-of-age melodrama that banks entirely on miss Guida’s willingness to generously disrobe in front of the camera. The screenplay by Piero Regnoli has nothing significant to add to the genre – and not even the on-screen romance between Guida and Corrado Pani was all that novel by this point. Guida had been romancing men old enough to be her father before and after in Mario Imperoli’s Monika (1974) and Blue Jeans (1975). That The Minor plays out almost exactly like the earlier Scandinavian Exponerad (1971) proves just how moot the entire exercise was, even if it’s livelier than its Swedish predecessor. The opening 15 minutes alone manifest more creativity than the remainder of the feature can ever be bothered to muster. The Minor is far from director Silvio Amadio’s best, but it more than signifies that his best days were very well behind him now. While Guida’s ass was at least as famous as Benussi’s, Femi possessed a kind of vibrant versatility that Gloria never quite got a hold of.

Whether one can stomach the average Gloria Guida commedia sexy all’Italiana is entirely dependent on one's tolerance for Benny Hill slapstick shenanigans from buffoons as Lino Banfi and Alvaro Vitali as well as the usual amount of tragedy that was obligatory in these features. Nobody in the right mind watches these things for the story and the reason why everybody is here is to see Gloria Guida in the buff. The Minor is slightly more creative than the usual fare that Guida found herself in, but it is never able to consolidate that initial and early promise. Each and every excuse is still good enough to have glorious Gloria undress but it hardly guarantees an engaging, let alone compelling experience. Thankfully Gloria would be soon become a superstar with her role as the luscious la liceale in Michele Massimo Tarantini’s La Liceale (1975) (released in North America as The Teasers) and the controversial satire To Be Twenty (1978) with Lilli Carati. The Minor isn’t necessarily terrible – but it’s not good enough to warrant recommendation either. It’s a commedia sexy all’Italiana on auto-pilot, and it shows.