Casanova & Company

Legendary Venetian lover Giacomo Casanova (Tony Curtis) escapes the prison cell provided him by the Doge and goes on the lam. In the confusion of his escape he encounters a rascally pickpocket/card cheat named Giacomino (also played by Curtis) who is a dead-ringer for him.

His doppelganger is less interested in love and more interested in food and money. Giacomino is willing to pretend to be Casanova (or whoever) to get them.

At first Casanova finds the mere existence of such a person to be disconcerting to say the least. But when faced with the unforeseen problem of erectile dysfunction and a situation in which his services in the bedroom are called for the double suddenly becomes useful in preserving his reputation.

The year before this was made Fellini's take on the Casanova legend hit theatres and very quickly came to be acknowledged as one of the most visually extravagant and breathtakingly avant garde spectacles in modern cinema - a dreamlike utilization of the language of film to tell a legendary story which took audiences to a completely difference place.

Just a mounting of a similar production upon the Casanova legend within the same year was thus pretty bad timing and this one measures up quite poorly against the other in every way that is important.

On the surface it could have looked very much the other way around. The Fellini version boasted Donald Sutherland (hardly a leading man of Curtis's calibre at the time) and surrounded him with Italian actors who were not particularly famous outside their home country.

Casanova & Company however brought together Curtis (a Hollywood legend) with Marisa Berenson (Barry Lyndon), Britt Ekland and Hugh Griffith. It also assembled a bevy of breathtakingly beautiful Playboy Playmates from Europe and was able to win a kind of cross-promotion with that magazine which should have enabled it to get much more of a foothold with mainstream audiences than the Fellini version did. But that did not happen.

This long forgotten paint-by-numbers Euro (Austrian-Italian-French-German) sex comedy got lost quite quickly and deservedly so. But one does sympathize with Tony Curtis who perhaps might have seen this as part of a comeback after a couple of failed network TV series and years back and forth appearing in European film and middle to lower budget American productions.

Curtis was in his early 50s by the time he made this having spent much of 40s appearing in work well below the quality of that which he had been in at peak of his Hollywood stardom in his early to mid 30s. Like many famous talents of greater past fame he attempted to extend his life in sizable roles by going to Europe to star in obscure productions.

His involvement or that of a similarly famous American star in a similar production, offered overseas producers a way of gaining distribution into the lucrative North American movie market. But it also gave a title like this a kind of credibility with domestic audiences in Europe. Moviegoers are happy to embrace parochial film industries when that which is produced by them is not drek.

Having a respected film star from America has often been like a stamp of approval in that way silly as the notion of that may be.

The numerous ties to the Playboy empire made me wonder if they had any role in financing it.

I have watched (i.e. suffered through) any number of 1970's continental European sex comedies, and generally the best of that genre ("best" being a very relative term here) are the "period" comedies like this one about the famous Italian lover Casanova. This movie, though cheap by Hollywood standards, is relatively big-budget for a European sex comedy and features an actual bonafide star in Tony Curtis. Other reviewers may have found it "sad" to see an actor of Curtis' stature in a movie like this, but he looks like he was genuinely having a good time playing two different roles, and surrounded by some of the most sumptuous beauties in Europe at the time. In a way this kind of reminded of Richard Burton's version of "Bluebeard"--it's not a great movie by any means, but it's certainly lively and entertaining.

The infamous lover Giacomo Casanova (Tony Curtis) escapes from a prison along with another petty criminal, "Giacomino" (also Tony Curtis), who looks just like him. The conceit here is that while the legendary Casanova is a master at seducing women, he's not such a master at satisfying them after years in prison. However, "Giacomino", who naturally keeps getting mistaken for Casanova, is the opposite (even though he's far more interested in food than sex). This comes in handy when the beautiful wife (Marisa Berenson) of an elderly Middle Eastern caliph demands that Casanova satisfy her if her husband is to approve an "oil" deal (rose oil actually since this is supposedly the eighteenth century)and threatens to take his manhood if he fails to do so. In the meantime, both Casanova and his double fall into the clutches of various lustful, married noblewomen, played by the likes of Marisa Mell, Sylva Koscina and Britt Ekland, with usually sexy and occasionally funny results.

Naturally, there's a lot of female nudity here, not so much by the leads (with the notable exception of the then-fortysomething but very impressive Koscina), but by many of the supporting actresses including African-American actress Jeannie Bell as a nubian slave (nobody ever accused European exploitation filmmakers of political correctness),and Olivia Pascal and Katia Christian as some not-so-innocent novice nuns one of our heroes accidentally gets locked in a convent cell with. The mistaken-identity plot and bedroom farce comedy generally works pretty well with the exception of some"modern" jokes about "oil" shortages and American Express cards, which really date the movie far more than the 18th century setting. There's also a couple dumb gags referencing Curtis' most famous film "Some Like It Hot" (yes, at one point the faded Hollywood star does cross-dress). Even without the lame jokes though, this probably won't endear itself to serious Tony Curtis fans, but I thought it was OK.

What can one say about a movie only 16 people remember watching. This really is just a soft porn movie that I never would have watched (at age 14 with my father no less!) had either of us had known. Here is the story as I remember it: Tony Curtis (Casinova)sleeps with a woman then runs from the angry husband smiling all the way... Then he sleeps with three woman at once and runs from their husbands, smiling all the way...etc..This is a foreign movie so prepare yourself for some awful overdubbing. Overall, I think the only person who enjoyed this movie was Tony Curtis who wasn't in a scene without at least one topless young woman jumping in his lap.

One might think the life and legend of Casanova would have given the soft porn crazed 1970s European exploitation film industry ample opportunity to produce numerous films on that topic. However, there are surprisingly few. The reason is this film, partly producing the definitive version, and partly showing that the subject is not such a sure-fire winner after all.

The humour is very low brow, sometimes typically Italian, sometimes typically German, and in neither case of the kind that travels very well. Some attempts at inserting contemporary humour went disastrously wrong, because they drag the viewer's mind right out of the picture without being especially funny in the first place. There is also a distinct lack of coherence, the film and especially the acting is underdirected. Some members of the cast are guilty of extreme over-acting (e.g. Jacques Herlin, as usual), others play it much too straight (Marisa Mell). Tony Curtis is more like a spectator who just happens to wander into the picture most of the time. Still, some cast members do find the right tone for this sort of picture: Victor Spinetti, Sylva Koscina (with the most extensive topless scenes of her career) and Marisa Berenson.

But one can enjoy the film on the so-bad-it's good level, with so many faces well known to followers of 70s eurotrash constantly popping up and embarrassing themselves.

The heavily cut US versions (cable TV & video) should be avoided.

This is basically a sitcom-level historic romp with lots of 1970s Hugh Hefner influenced toplessness, lots of bed hopping and silly action and little plot or satiric point to make. Superficially similar to the 1956 Bob Hope romp Casanova's Big Night in that the same plot device is used: Casanova enlists the aid of a feckless nobody as a stand-in to do his wooing for him. Here the lucky dimwit is a gambler; Hope had played a tailor. There is also a lot of farcical running about and jumping in and out of windows to propel the comic action and both movies have nice costumes and furnishings to provide the appropriate period air. Of the two, however, this one is definitely the dimwit cousin. Trivia: the producers seemed to be trying to set some kind of record for casting actresses named 'Marisa'. Marisas Berenson and Mell starred and I counted at least two others in the credits.