The social secretary and kept mistress (Nieves Navarro) of an older powerful industrialist falls in love with the college-age fiancée of the industrialist's adult daughter, who fancies himself as some kind of left-wing revolutionary, even though he is marrying into this very capitalist family. Much social turmoil and romantic tragedy ensues.
Director Ferdinand DiLeo is more well known for his top-notch Italian crime thrillers than his social dramas, but even compared to the two other dramas of his I've seen, "La Seduzione" and "Being Twenty", this is pretty weak tea. This isn't very effective as a tragedy since the protagonist pretty much starts out as a prostitute (albeit a high-class one) and thus doesn't have very far to fall. As a social drama it's also kind of muddled. It's pretty hard to believe that an experienced, voluptuous man-eater like Navarro's character would fall for such a pretentious, naive douchebag like the fiancée to begin with, let alone jeopardize her station in life (This would have been far more believable if the naive college student had fallen obsessively in love with HER rather than vice versa).
Nieves Navarro is pretty miscast here, but nevertheless she is what really makes the movie. She has only brief nude scenes (that is mostly left up to Michaela Pignatelli, who plays the daughter), but she is very sexy and appealing. Navarro (aka Susan Scott) was kind of like Italian cult actress Mariangelo Giordano in that she started out in bit parts in Spaghetti Westerns (like "the Big Gundown") and other 60's Italian flicks, and ended up as basically a softcore porn star by the time she hit her forties (appearing in even stronger stuff than Giordano did, like Joe D'Amato's "Orgasmo Nero"). Like Giordano she definitely had the voluptuous body for porn, but she was actually quite a good actress. In the early 70's, she was kind of a second-string Edwige Fenech, appearing in the superior gialli of her director husband, Luciano Ercoli, and starring with Fenech herself in a couple of films, including a role as Fenech's sister in Sergio Martino's "All the Colors of Darkness". This is definitely not one of DiLeo's better movies, but it is an interesting role for Navarro(her miscasting aside).
