SUBJECTS

Adultery -- Drama, D'Annunzio, Gabriele, 1863-1938. Innocente -- Film and video adaptations, Husband and wife -- Drama, Triangles (Interpersonal relations) -- Drama

The Innocent

(L'innocente)
(The Victim), (The Intruder)

Imported 35mm Print

featuring

Giancarlo Giannini, Laura Antonelli, Jennifer O'Neill, Massimo Girotti,

A book lying on red satin sheets serves as an appropriate opening image for Visconti’s last work, a film bursting with the abstractions of nineteenth-century philosophy and the concerns of twentieth-century political thought, yet fashioned with all the luxuriant beauty and operatic decadence the master filmmaker could muster. Freethinking aristocrat Tullio (Giancarlo Giannini) seems too concerned with his self-congratulatory atheism, fastidious looks, and gorgeous lover to ever notice his innocent wife. Fortunately for her, a young novelist arrives not only to entertain but to impregnate her. This shock paradoxically makes Tullio finally love his wife, but his lovemaking isn’t enough to get her back, leading him to more extreme—and eventually brutal—means. Visconti-the-intellectual tosses his Nietzschean superman of a hero into an entertainingly Dostoyevskian whirlpool of overwhelming jealousy, while Visconti-the-artist creates a film as giddily baroque, and wonderfully anachronistic, as anything in modern cinema.

Jason Sanders
FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Luchino Visconti
  • Suso Cecchi D'Amico
  • Enrico Medioli
Based On
  • the novel by Gabriele D’Annunzio

Cinematographer
  • Pasqualino De Santis
Language
  • Italian
  • with English subtitles
Print Info
  • Color
  • 35mm
  • 129 mins
Source
  • Cinecittà
Permission
  • Intramovies
CINEFILES

CineFiles is an online database of BAMPFA's extensive collection of documentation covering world cinema, past and present.

View The Innocent documents  

Luchino Visconti: maestro of the movies (program note), Brooklyn Museum, 1992

Luchino Visconti: a retrospective (program note), Walker Art Center, 1979

Luchino Visconti's legacy (review), Village Voice, Andrew Sarris, 1979

The innocent (program note), Pacific Film Archive, 1979

The innocent (program note), Sheldon Film Theater, James McCourt, 1979

The innocent (review), New West, 1979

The Innocent stilted, wooden (review), Gazette, Edward Guthmann, 1979

If you must (ugh!) dub, say so (article), Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, Ernest Schier, 1979

Paddling around in Visconti's redux soup (review), Reader (Los Angeles, Calif.), Myron Meisel, 1979

Innocent is bliss (review), Daily Californian (Berkeley, Calif.), Doug McKinney, 1979

Displaying 10 of 13 publicly available documents.


View all The Innocent documentation on CineFiles.