A mystery with a comical bent set in Turin’s high society based on a best-selling novel by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini. A man is killed with a giant dildo. Inspector Santamaria (Marcello Mastrioanni), polite, middle-aged, Roman, with a structured life which includes having sex on Sundays with women he doesn’t care to have stay until Monday, is the detective. Jacqueline Bisset, at the peak of her beauty here and very glamorous plays Anna Carla Dosio, so uppity she’s turned in by her servants, and is the first suspect. Her best friend is super-rich closet-case Massimo Campi (Jean-Louis Trintignant). Richard Dyer does a wonderful intro where he remarks that whilst there’s nothing to mark Campi out as gay, that’s not quite the case with his lower-class lover Lello (Aldo Regianni), and had he seen the film when it came out he would have found that depiction homophobic, whereas now, in the context of greater representation, he finds the characteristics attributed to Lello – a homebody who likes exotic vacations, a dress sense that is on the too-much spectrum of elegance, his relative ‘effeminacy’, loving, loyal, rather hysterical,  living his follie d’amour in a frenzy that sometimes embodies his boyfriend – endearing. In the end, the case is not about art or sex but, even in Turin’s high society, crude cash. There’s an interesting twist too in that Mastrioanni becomes Bisset’s Sunday Man whilst she continues to reap all the benefits of being married to her rich industrialist husband. Lovely film, that adds to my appreciation of  Comencini’s work with actors and control of tone . Radiance has produced a lovely disc of it which I see many friends have worked on.

Jose Arroyo