lazarillo
Italian director Silvio Amadio is probably most famous for a pair of excellent giallo thrillers "Amuck" and "Smile Before Death" as well some earlier stuff he did in the 1960's. He ended his career though with several inferior but nevertheless entertaining melodramas he made with Gloria Guida (Miss Teen Italy of 1974). This is the last of the films he did with Guida and the one that really crosses completely over into the realm of sex comedy, which was not really the the forte of Amadio, but was the forte of Guida (who Amadio reputedly had become quite infatuated with in real life--and it's pretty hard to blame him).In this film, Guida plays a recent high school graduate who is forbidden from going on a vacation with her friends after her overprotective military colonel father (Jacques Dulfino) has a strange dream about her being raped by savages. Stuck at home, she decides to entertain herself by seducing the handsome doctor/college professor (Pino Colizzi) who lives next door. After he (quite unbelievably) spurns her amorous advances, she decides to sneak into his house and catches him en flagrante with her voluptuous stepmother (Nieves Navarro). She takes pictures of them together and uses them to blackmail, humiliate, and generally take revenge on the adulterous couple.This movie has elements of each of the three earlier sexy melodramas Amadio did with Guida--the weird dream sequences from "La Minorienne", the strip-tease in front of an open window from "Quella Eta Malizia", and, of course, the photography and blackmail plot from "So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious". But this is a much more of a comedy, where Guida's character is more mischievous than malicious and isn't (necessarily) going to get anyone killed. It's not a bad film per se, but it's more on the level of Guida's later "liceale" ("college girl" or "schoolgirl") movies, and it's just not as entertaining as something like "So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious" (and it's definitely not as good as "Amuck" or "Smile Before Death"). It is a good role for Guida since she gets to play a very mischievous character, which gives her a lot more personality than in some of her later comedies where she was sometimes reduced to just kind of a bland piece of nubile ass. (Moreover, at no point does she do any disco singing, a second career Guida unfortunately would take up later). Pino Coizzi as the doctor is pretty weak, but Jacques Dulfino as Guida's military officer father (whose arm is stuck in a cast,unfortunately, in the "heil Hitler!" position) is pretty funny. And if Guida is a little too young for some tastes, Nieves Navarro(as always) makes for a very good MILF (or since she's a stepmother here, I guess she'd technically be a SMILF).This the the weakest of the Sivio Amadio/Gloria Guida films, but it's not bad.
