Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Original Screenplay 1965

The Contenders:

Casanova 70
Darling (winner)
Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines
The Train
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

When Danger is Boring

Film: Casanova 70
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on rockin’ flatscreen.

I really wanted to like Casanova 70. I really did. I think I can be forgiven for thinking that it would be in the same vein as films like Divorce, Italian Style and Marriage, Italian Style. After all, all three of these films are Italian sex comedies from the 1960s starring Marcello Mastroianni. Casanova 70, as the third in that trio, had to have what the others did, but more and better, right?

Actually, not so much. I realized pretty quickly that I had more or less seen this as a short a number of years ago. Woody Allen remade this as one of the scenarios in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex. One of the vignettes in Allen’s film is about a woman who can only achieve an orgasm when she has sex in public. Allen plays the husband and has the entire thing filmed both in Italian and in the sort of style used for this film. It’s a direct nod to this sort of sex comedy, because in this film, Mastroianni’s character can only find himself interested in sex at all if there is a serious hint of danger involved. No danger, no sexy times.