Una breve stagione

In this contrived love story, Johnny (Christopher Jones), a neurotic American working at the stock exchange in Rome, meets an emotionless Swedish girl (Pia Degermark). Although they are supposed to have achieved true love, the only interest they seem to have in each other is simply physical. Flashbacks reveal pieces of their tragic story -- a ridiculous one, at best. The acting is poor.

In a stingy tour de force Christopher Jones plays a man whose common sense has all been spent, but there is love at the bottom of this barrel. Despite the richness of the storyline or perhaps because much of it has been borrowed from the classics the original simplicity of Jones' performance stands out like a panhandler in Beverly Hills, even when a man dies as Jones escapes from jail there is love. "God doesn't pay every Sunday" his character says repeating the axiom of the Italian workman, and some women never do as this film foreshadows Jones' disappearance from the salaried world of commerical drama into a long night of blissful anonymity elsewhere. The character remains with us, five nights a week on prime time television, shrouded in fog and grime, but Christopher Jones' version of him in this film still shines like a new silver dollar.

W. T. Benda