Huckepack

I only really watched this for catherine spaak and im glad i did. It was sexy and catherine was so gorgeous but the plotline was a bit to daft for me. A widower finds out her husband was a sex pervert and sets out to engage in multipe acts of outrageous sexual adventures herself. I couldnt shake off the feeling that i was just watching a female Confessions of a Window Cleaner film. And thats not good. I would have given this a 7 despite that but then i watched the ending and it was rubbish. Absoulte tosh. So its a 6/10.

PS Do all italian films have such dubbing problems? Its an italian film, everyone is speaking italian, but i swear every character looked like they were dubbed and out of synch. Its weird.

A difficult film to write about because it is so much one of a kind and that it is so much of a certain time and because it has become more problematic recently to be free to separate the notions of sexual fantasy and desire from abuse. Director Pasquale Festa Campanile had a modest film career tending to specialise in Italian sex comedies and is more renowned for his screenwriting, particularly for his work in the early 60s. He did direct the notorious Hitch-Hike (1977) ,however, with Franco Nero and Corinne Cleary and the little seen Check to the Queen (1969) one of my personal faves that has something of the look and certainly shares the BDSM element with the film under discussion. Here a young (although already veteran of some dozen films) Catherine Spaak stars to devastating affect, looking ravishing throughout. But then everything looks pretty good, the set and costume designs are fantastic and there is barely a shot that does not make you gasp and the beauty or audacity. The music of Armando Trovajoli also helps enormously with its constant twinkling delights and sexy sounds. Our young widow peers into the secret past of her late husband and the more strange and awful and bad and taboo his apparent exploits appear the more she is intrigued to have a go herself. The extent to which she indulges and is seen to enjoy those elements of sex and violence is viewed as problematic today but in the late sixties was seen by many as all part of life's rich experience just waiting to be explored. Leaving the sexual politics aside this can be seen as a wondrous garden of delights, clearly influenced by the previous year's masterpiece from Luis Bunuel, and somehow managing to treat the subject more seriously, in that it is proffered as a solution for our heroine but at the same time more frivolously in the way there is all the time a more candy floss look and feel to the proceedings. Good fun for the broadminded though.

Lord, this sucked. There's a particular sort of sexual revolution flick from the 60s that manages to confuse sexual assault with sexual liberation. This film is an example. I lost track of how many times women are slapped, hit, whipped, or spanked in the film. And then there are all the times that women in the film fantasize about being slapped, hit, whipped or spanked (you know they want it, right?). Sometimes it is ostensibly part of safe fetish play-acting. Other times it plainly isn't, but you will wait in vain to see the heroine report to authorities that she has just been raped. Instead we get to hear her being lectured by her rapist about her inability to "let go".

Every scene of this film reeks of misogyny (speaking as a straight, white, married man in his late 30's, not a teenage lesbian women's studies major with a chip on her shoulder, lest you get the wrong idea).

Perhaps the one good thing about this film is that it provides a stark reminder of just how bad things really were for women only a few short decades ago.

If you can suspend your judgement a bit, and not hold this film/story to current-day "morality", this film can be a very enjoyable experience. Watching Catherine Spaak explore and develop her personality and desires is fascinating, and Jean Louis Tritignan's love for her is evident. Interesting that the director cast two french lead actors for an italian film - I wonder why that is. The sets are gorgeous and interesting, the cinematography by Alfio Contini is splendid.

There is a region B (Europe) bluray version available, and it is such high quality that this could have been filmed in the past few years.

Also available is a remastered 2022 version of the soundtrack by Armando Trovajoli at bandcamp - search for "bandcamp La Matriarca soundtrack".

It's many versions of the same theme tune "l'amore dice ciao", and is a lovely atmosphere album. I wonder if any other films have used the same single song to provide the soundtrack for the whole film.

Very cute and erotic movie made in 1969! ;-) I found it on Netflix and was intrigued. The movie has all the stylish glamour of the 60s with lots of sex!

Young widow uses dead husband's bachelor apt for sexual exploration. She sleeps around and ends up falling in love.

Lots of a nakedness and laughs! I'd recommend it!