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From the start a pall hangs over "la vita avventurosa," the protagonist's downfall is sealed before the titles in a fateful foreglimpse. (The proper omen comes courtesy of a gypsy fortune-teller, who peers into her crystal ball and sees blood-stained riches.) Long before she was Milady de Winter, the maiden (Yvette Lebon) scrubs floors at the convent and rolls her eyes at Mother Superior's fable of "Christian resignation." Her escape involves seducing a young lieutenant (Armando Francioli), whose disgrace is sworn to be avenged by his brother (Jean-Roger Caussimon), the resolute face behind the executioner's mask. Her shoulder branded with the fleur-de-lis, she marries Athos (Rossano Brazzi) when he was still a romantic nobleman. "Extraordinary woman. I wouldn't want her against me." "I would." A lambent dash of swashbuckling revisionism, just the thing for expanding a Dumas villainess into a Vittorio Cottafavi heroine. She flagellates herself for an officer's sympathy and fakes a suicide to get out of prison, one does what one must to endure in this landscape, the camera remains as non-judgemental as Preminger's in Forever Amber or Ulmer's in The Strange Woman. She's surrounded by luxury one moment and floating down the river the next, from countess to wench under a witchy innkeeper. ("When you have a body like yours, it's better not to cover it up," says the crone, helping herself to her fancy gown.) The Musketeers turn up in the last fifteen minutes to curtail a promising career in espionage, nothing left for Athos in the end but to mourn and behold Milady in all her guile and sorrow. "Scuola italiana. E adesso proviamo con la scuola francese," cf. Tavernier's La Fille de d'Artagnan. With Maria Grazia Francia, Nerio Bernardi, Enzo Fiermonte, Franco Balducci, Renato De Carmine, Vittorio Sanipoli, and Raymond Cordy. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |