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Posted: |
Jul 11, 2017 - 11:30 AM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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In the 1955 film THE INDIAN FIGHTER, Kirk Douglas played “Johnny Hawks,” a scout leading a wagon train through hostile Indian country who unwittingly gets involved with a Sioux chief's daughter, “Onahti” (Elsa Martinelli). The casting for Onahti turned out to be much more difficult than first anticipated. Though there were a number of unsuccessful auditions, it wasn't until Douglas' wife, Anne Douglas, the picture's casting supervisor, spotted a model in Vogue magazine that the production knew they had their leading lady. Martinelli was an Italian model on the verge of becoming an international star. Douglas, in his autobiography, describes how he and Martinelli had constant sex during the filming of the movie. Director Andre De Toth shot the film entirely in Bend, Oregon. Franz Waxman scored the film. Reportedly, the title song, by Waxman and Irving Gordon, was written in both English and Sioux.
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Posted: |
Jul 11, 2017 - 5:41 PM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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Martinelli next worked with another of the top leading men in Hollywood, Charlton Heston, in the World War II comedy THE PIGEON THAT TOOK ROME. Set after the fall of Mussolini in 1944, the film finds "Capt. Paul MacDougall" (Heston) and his radioman, "Sgt. Joseph Contini" (Harry Guardino) smuggled into Nazi-occupied Rome to investigate enemy activities, though neither has had any training in espionage. There they meet resistance fighter "Ciccio Massimo" (Baccaloni). Massimo's daughter, "Antonella" (Martinelli), who is friendly with German officers, resents the intrusion of the American spies because the family is hungry, but she changes her mind when she learns that her sister, "Rosalba" (Gabriella Pallotta), is pregnant and in need of a husband.
Melville Shavelson directed the film, which has an unreleased score by Alessandro Cicognini.
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Posted: |
Jul 11, 2017 - 5:52 PM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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Elsa Martinelli co-starred in Orson Welles' filimzation of Franz Kafka's novel of bureaucratic paranoia THE TRIAL. According to fellow director Henry Jaglom, THE TRIAL "isn't that much Kafka, (but) a lot of it's Orson." Instead of depicting protagonist "Joseph K" as tiny, hunched-over and weasel-like, Welles cast the tall, strikingly handsome Anthony Perkins. Instead of setting the film in the small, claustrophobic offices that Kafka described, he used vast spaces that emphasized the character's desolation and helplessness.
Casting Perkins brought another, unspoken element to THE TRIAL. Welles knew that the actor was a closeted homosexual, Jaglom says, and used that quality in Perkins to suggest another texture in Joseph K, a fear of exposure.
"The whole homosexuality thing -- using Perkins that way -- was incredible for that time," Jaglom says. "It was intentional on Orson's part: He had these three gorgeous women (Jeanne Moreau ("Miss Burstner"), Romy Schneider ("Leni"), and Elsa Martinelli ("Hilda")) trying to seduce this guy who was completely repressed and incapable of responding."
Jean Ledrut's score for the 1962 film was released on a Philips LP, which was re-issued on CD by Kritzerland in 2011.
Martinelli was part of an all-star cast in 1963's THE V.I.P.s. She played "Gloria Gritti," the "protégé" of film magnate "Max Buda" (Orson Welles), one of many important passengers fogged in at a London airport. Anthony Asquith directed the drama. Miklos Rozsa's score was last released by Film Score Monthly in their 2010 Miklos Rozsa Treasury box set.
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Posted: |
Jul 13, 2017 - 11:57 AM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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At least one other Elsa Martinelli film bears mention, even though it never played theatrically in the U.S. In 1968, Martinelli starred in a western called THE BELLE STARR STORY, playing the famed female outlaw. Writing the screenplay for the film, under the pseudonym "Nathan Wich," was the soon-to-be-famous Italian filmmaker Lina Wertmuller. In fact, Wertmuller also directed the film, replacing Piero Cristofani after only a couple of days of shooting. That made THE BELLE STARR STORY perhaps the only western directed by and starring a woman. The film's score, by Charles Dumont, was released on one side of a CAM LP, but it has not had a CD reissue. The score includes a song, "No Time for Love," sung by Martinelli over the opening credits. The film is soon to make its American DVD debut, courtesy of Wild East Productions.
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