Born in 1888, or 1892, depending on your reference source, Francesca Bertini was, and now is again, one of the most arresting, smouldering-eyed presences of Italian cinema. L'Ultima diva is a tribute to her, at ninety (plus or minus), so keen to see her old movies that she will even put on her glasses. The sharp old lady of the celluloid camelias chatters to the movie, scolds her new director for not knowing all her work, and breaks off to remark, "Wasn't she pretty?" at an old closeup. Gianfranco Mingozzi's cunning documentary ends with a clip from Sunset Boulevard, and certainly Bertini is in the high-octane class of Norma Desmond and Gloria Swanson. But there's nothing about her that's out of control, except the slight tremor in her lower lip as she watches her former beauty and murmurs wistfully about the burden of the years. What we see here is Bertini in one of her greatest hits, Assunta Spina (1915), and in Odette (1934), directed by Marcel L'Herbier. The former (which she says she directed herself) is a melodrama shot in a rather stiff but still appealing forerunner of the neorealist style. The latter is a part Bertini had played nineteen years before, so Mingozzi shows her looking at both versions. L'Ultima diva is a fascinating piece of history and a reminder that Italian movies in the age of Griffith had a life and inventiveness that inspired Birth of a Nation. David Thomson, San Francisco International Film Festival '84