Carrie Snodgrass is properly restrained as the repressed and anguished Tina Balser in Frank Perry‘s Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970), adapted from a novel by Sue Kaufman. Richard Benjamin is exactly right as her nagging, self-serving husband and Frank Langella does a “natural” job as the arrogant writer Tina accepts as a lover. The movie deplores the depersonalizing of women by men and is rather cynical about the shallowness of human beings.

Diary is a bit too brazen, a bit daring in a bad way. The sins of the men are laid on thick, and people’s insipidness never ends. Though Snodgrass is interesting and has a fine voice, she doesn’t look good in the nude. None of this wrecks the movie, though, notwithstanding I liked Perry’s Doc and probably Last Summer (I need to see it again) better.

To my mind, Italy’s First Love (1978), early on, threatens to be charmless and distasteful, and here and there it is. Charm does arrive, though, as do some laughs; but Dino Risi‘s film is not what it ought to be. It concerns a vaudevillian, Ugo, who stays for a while in a rest home for old artists and becomes amorously involved with Renata, the maid there. The theme is the sad fact of aging.

First Love fails because the character of Renata is thoroughly subverted. Risi and co-writer Ruggero Maccari have no idea what they’re doing with her. The woman who plays her, Ornella Muti, is the most gladdening thing about the film. She is likable and gorgeous, but can’t make much headway with this role. A close second among the movie’s assets is the unbeatable performance of Ugo Tognazzi as Ugo. But I strongly doubt that Primo amore occupies primo place among Risi’s films. It is not as good as The Easy Life. In fact, without Muti it would be strikingly drab.

(In Italian with English subtitles)

A Queen for Caesar (1962) is one of those badly dubbed ancient-history Italian movies. There is not much to say about it except that it’s about Cleopatra and is fun and sexy. And this: in my view, Pascale Petit—initially a hairdresser discovered for the movies—enacts Cleo better than Elizabeth Taylor does in Cleopatra and is even slightly more beautiful than Taylor. She appears in nearly every scene (good), whereas Gordon Scott, who is atrocious as Julius Caesar, appears in only a few scenes (also good). Akim Tamiroff, however, is effective as Pompey. (Available on Tubi.)

Unlike his Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg‘s Amistad (1997) has no bona fide sense of the tragic, but is simply a work of uncomplicated pro-freedom moralism. Here, pro-freedom means anti-slavery—something everyone embraces anyway. The flick features a court trial where it must be determined whether mutinous slaves were illegally transported on the ship Amistad. It glorifies the agitated African leader, Cinque (Djimou Hounsou), who comes to have an emotional connection with the film’s noble whites. Cue the sentimental idealism.

But, oh, these whites! One of them, John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins), avers in the courtroom, “The natural state of mankind is freedom!” Freedom from what? The man speaks nonsense. And Matthew McConaughey‘s Roger Baldwin, a defense lawyer, is so superficially created he is a sheer nonentity of a character. Then again, the other figures are superficially created as well. David Frazoni’s screenplay is virtue-signaling non-art. Amistad was a mistake right off the bat—the kind of mistake to which Spielberg is regularly blind.

(All reviews are written by Earl Dean)