Hollywood sul Tevere

Those were the days as the saying goes. The movie stars were glamorous. Italy was the place to be. Production costs were low, profits were high, everybody was making money and the Italian cinema industry was booming. You had American actors in Italian movies. They were having fun. They were all on the top of the world. Life was good. Everyone was laughing; they were eating, drinking, playing, doing it all, living the life of real "Hollywood stars," when the term meant something. And of course they had their adoring fans and the paparazzi, just as pesty than as they are now. And all this was happening in Italy just a few years after the war. One can only marvel at the high level activity as some of the most well-known movies in history were made, not in Hollywood, but in Italy. Those were the days.

While the topic of the making of American movies in Italy in the 50s and 60s could be quite interesting, this documentary is not the place to go. Made up of old newsreel film of stars wandering aimlessly on the back-lot or being mobbed by photographers, there is absolutely no structure to this - it is just thrown together, totally out of chronological order, with no interviews, no proper narration and, in the version I saw on World Movies/SBS in Australia, some of the most amusingly awful subtitles in existence. Either the original Italian narration is incomprehensible and absurd, or someone in the translation department was having a bad day. Hard to tell if the narration is current with the documentary - 2009 - or just a retelling of the original from the breathless newsreels of the time. This is like watching a bad "new faces" act - amusing because it's so bad, but ultimately frustrating.