#Alberto Rabagliati

[sonicandvisualsurprises]

1940

[kseenefrega]

🎶È primavera, svegliatevi bambine

Alle cascine, messere Aprile fa il rubacuor🎶

🎶E a tarda sera, madonne fiorentine

Quanti ricordi diventeranno i prati in fior🎶

🎶Fiorin di noce, c'è poca luce ma tanta pace🎶

🎶Fiorin di noce, c'è poca luce

Fiorin di brace, Madonna Bice non nega baci🎶

🎶Baciar le piace, che male c'è?🎶

BUONGIORNO...🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶

[schlock-luster-video]

On November 23, 1966 The Christmas That Almost Wasn't debuted in the United States.

[perfettamentechic]

8 marzo … ricordiamo …

8 marzo … ricordiamo … #semprevivineiricordi #nomidaricordare #personaggiimportanti #perfettamentechic

2023: Chaim Topol, noto anche semplicemente come Topol, attore israeliano noto per la sua interpretazione del lattaio Tevye in Il violinista sul tetto (1971). Nelle produzioni israeliane, uno dei suoi ruoli più noti è nel controverso Sallah (1964). Topol ha illustrato circa 25 libri sia in ebraico che in inglese. Ha sposato nel 1956 Galia Finkelstein e ha avuto tre figli. Topol muore per…

[alessandro9757]

Silenzioso slow (Abbassa la tua radio) - Alberto Rabagliati

[awesome-shygardencollection-blog]

Alberto Rabagliati canta Vienna, Vienna (Wien, Wien)

[whileiamdying]

THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA

(Booklet Insert)

Writer-director-producer Joseph L Mankiewicz was without question one of the great wits — cynical, literary, but also, on occasion, gorgeously laugh-out-loud funny—ever to grace the cinema. And he was well rewarded for his talents, winning (to give just one astonishing example) four back-to-back Oscars© for both writing and directing A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950). But that didn't keep Mankiewicz from being cranky about his profession—an admittedly difficult one, fraught with art-versus-commerce battles that have to be fought on a daily basis. He would make his displeasure known with The Barefoot Contessa (1954), an excoriating look at the movie business focusing on Maria Vargas (the compellingly dignified—not to mention gorgeous— Ava Gardner), a poverty-stricken but integrity-laden Spanish dancer who becomes an international star thanks to the efforts of a group of mostly exploitative scoundrels who make even our present-day politicians look like pussycats.

The filmmaker had done something similar with All About Eve, giving us a powerful female character (passionately incarnated by Bette Davis) struggling to retain her hard-earned place as a star of the New York, New York theater. Here, though, Mankiewicz retained his affection for the cultural institution he was dissecting. Even his villains, the rabidly ambitious Eve (Anne Baxter), and her cohort, the withering critic Addison DeWitt (George Sanders), are fully rounded personages, their flaws grounded in their damaged psyches and ultimately balanced by their talents and their dangerous charm. The Barefoot Contessa, on the other hand, is a far bleaker affair—not unnaturally, given that Mankiewicz was merely an observer of the theater world and a deeply involved participant in the Hollywood studio system.

Interestingly, this was the filmmaker's first venture as an independent, via his own Figaro production entity. And given the opportunity, he unloaded, populating his narrative with a grand panoply of monsters: the tycoon-turned-movie producer Kirk Edwards (played with terrifying froideur by Warren Stevens and allegedly based on Howard Hughes, who knew it and was incensed/litigious); the sweating, clueless publicity man Oscar Muldoon (Edmond O'Brien, cutting loose with a performance that would win him a Best Supporting Actor The Academy Award©); and Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart), a writer-director and Mankiewicz surrogate who—and we can't help wondering if Mankiewicz fully realized this—is meant to be Maria's stalwart, wise, supportive friend, but who in the end is tragically weak, unable to do anything to thwart her ghastly fate.

That fate derives, in part, from Maria's character—undeniably bold for its era. She's natively intelligent, able to hold her own with the intellectually inclined Harry; she's also an admirably straightforward version of the shrewd peasant-woman, determined to keep herself grounded, quite literally: she tells Harry that she feels "afraid in shoes" and would rather keep her feet "in the dirt." Metaphorically, of course, this is also a reference to her sexual #tastes and #needs. The very fact that she has them is daring—and Mankiewicz goes so far as to suggest that her natural #desires are what undo her in the end. Notably, many people felt that this sexy, unashamed protagonist was based on Gardner, herself (who was the daughter of a North Carolina sharecropper and notoriously unapologetic about her many affairs); Mankiewicz would say that in fact, he had in mind Margarita Cansino, a dancer who rose to sex-symbol status as Rita Hayworth, and married a Prince, Aly Khan.

All grist for the mill; but on screen, Maria Vargas is a curious creature. Even as she prides herself on her sense of honor and talks about yearning for a man "you can look at in the daylight," she moves from #Hollywood to #Europe as the apparent concubine of the revoltingly corrupt Bravano (Marius Goring, so adorable in Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes, so malevolent here), a South American oligarch. The writer-director is quick to let us know that Maria doesn't actually sleep with this swine—"Bravano quit like a dog the first time Maria said no," we're told—but she allows people to think he's had her, so really, aren't we parsing here? Further, she spends her time hanging with Bravano and "the International Set" on the #Riviera, where "they gather the way a fungus does on a tree." It's hard to see how this is in any way admirable.

Although it does, naturally, serve the plot, allowing this barefoot Cinderella to meet her Prince—or, actually, a Count: the alternately suave and gravely mysterious Vincenzo Torlato-Favrini, incarnated by the very beautiful Rossano Brazzi. From the moment he sees her, dancing—barefoot, of course—a kind of #flamenco in a #gypsy camp, the Count is obsessed: this is the life force he requires to bring back his dying family line. And yet, ironically, that's impossible, because he has a dreadful secret, which he somehow manages to keep from Maria until their wedding night: thanks to a ghastly war wound, he's impotent—Jake Barnes disease. His compassionate sister (sympathetically played by the great Valentina Cortese, billed here as "Cortesa") is horrified that her brother would inflict this "most senselessly cruel and destructive thing" on the unsuspecting Maria. But once again, Maria is exploited by the very people who claim to care about her. Even her pal Harry (and Bogart is really wonderful in his uneasiness here), suspecting that there's something wrong, does nothing to stop her from running straight into the arms of #disaster.

Maria's attempted solution, once she learns the truth, leads, of course, to the tragedy we've known was coming all along; the film begins, after all, at her #funeral, with various men in her life taking turns at narrating her story. This seems particularly meaningful: we really see Maria only through the eyes of the men around her. She is completely #objectified, presented only by way of the male gaze, with no opportunity to speak for herself. And so she remains the ultimate #mystery.

Adding significantly to this aura of strange beauty is The Barefoot Contessa's stunning cinematography, brought to us by one of the great masters, Jack Cardiff. Best known for his extraordinary Technicolor work with Powell & Pressburger (A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes), Cardiff had recently shot another film starring Gardner, 1951's Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, a genuinely magical piece of cinematic enchantment. Here, as there, he photographs her tenderly, but also with a certain detachment, as if she is already the marble statue that ultimately represents her: a work of art, yet hardly human. Contessa's score, by the great Mario Nascimbene, has the same effect: it's warm, voluptuous, but somehow distancing. This is, finally, a film that seems to focus less on a real woman than on a "legend."

That is the sadness of Gardner's #character—and perhaps, in #life, of Gardner, herself. Writer-director Mankiewicz seemed to have an inkling of this: at one point, he has the Count's compassionate sister fervently assert, "She's a living woman—have you thought for a moment about her?" For a moment, perhaps, seems to be the answer— but no more. The Barefoot Contessa in some sense seems to commit the same #sin: as #intelligent and #magisterial and stately as it is—and it is—it also gazes down upon its characters from a great height.

— Julie Kirgo

CAST: Humphrey Bogart ... Harry Dawes Ava Gardner ... Maria Vargas Edmond O'Brien ... Oscar Muldoon Marius Goring ... Alberto Bravano valentina cortese ... Eleanora Torlato-Favrini (as Valentina Cortesa) Rossano Brazzi ... Count Vincenzo Torlato-Favrini Elizabeth Sellars ... Jerry Warren Stevens ... Kirk Edwards Franco Interlenghi ... Pedro Vargas Mari Aldon ... Myrna Alberto Rabagliati ... Proprietor Enzo Staiola ... Busboy Maria Zanoli ... Maria's Mother Renato Chiantoni ... Maria's Father Bill Fraser ... J. Montague Brown John Parrish ... Mr. Max Black Jim Gérald ... Mr. Blue (as Jim Gerald) Diana Decker ... Drunken Blonde Riccardo Riolo ... Gypsy Dancer Tonio Selwart ... Pretender Margaret Anderson ... Pretender's Wife Gertrude Flynn ... Lulu McGee John Horne ... Hector Eubanks Bessie Love ... Mrs. Eubanks Robert Christopher ... Eddie Blake (as Bob Christopher) Anna Maria Padoan ... Chambermaid (as Anna Maria Paduan) Carlo Dale ... Chauffeur

Available exclusively at:

www.screenarchives.com www.facebook.com/twilighttimemovies www.twilighttimemovies.com

Released 30 SEP 1954 (USA)

[thebutcher-5]

Musica Maestro (1946)

Benvenuti o bentornati sul nostro blog. Nello scorso articolo siamo finalmente tornati a parlare del genere che più amiamo, l’horror, e l’abbiamo fatto con Daisy vuole solo giocare. Un film horror decisamente interessante che narra di una bambina considerata dagli abitanti del villaggio una changelling, ossia la figlia di una fata scambiata al posto di un neonato umano. Una storia molto…

[mst3kproject]

1113: The Christmas that Almost Wasn’t

I’ve been saving this one, too – not because I particularly dislike the movie but because I wanted to do it close to Christmas, and here we are! In fact, I kind of like The Christmas that Almost Wasn’t, to the point where I’m going to enjoy watching it again.

For years now, Santa Claus has been living rent-free at the North Pole with the permission of the Inuit, but now that land has been bought out from under him by the Scroogish Phineas Prune!  Prune wants rent money or he will seize the toys instead, and so to save Christmas, Santa has to get a job.  He lands a gig as a department store mascot, but then Prune buys the store, too.  Looks like there won’t be a very merry Christmas this year, unless some kind of last-minute miracle can happen.  Fortunately, last-minute miracles are what Christmas movies are all about!

So… why do I like this movie?  It’s not exactly festive – as Max points out, there’s nothing very jolly about Santa hiring a lawyer to deal with his landlord.  The animated title sequence is kind of charming, but the actual opening scene in Mr. Whipple’s office is claustrophobic and dark, and both it and the scene where they confront Prune at the North Pole drag a bit. The songs aren’t catchy (although the nonsense one the elves sing about Prune is fun), and the dealings with rent, lawyers, and evictions are probably way over the heads of the target audience of children.  The depiction of Santa’s workshop as one little hut in the middle of the snow, where about nine elves must make all the millions of presents, is pretty depressing. And of course there’s the downright nightmarish plush animals in the department store.  The screaming giraffe is my favourite.

In general, though, I like the movie’s aesthetic.  It’s set in a nonspecific but vaguely Victorian past with just a hint of fantasy on top, and a lot of the sets have something to say about the people who spend time in those spaces.  Santa and his wife in their north pole hovel are simple people who care far more about others than about themselves.  Whipple’s office is comfortable but not large or fancy, and shows us a man who is reasonably successful but not pretentious.  Prune’s cobwebby house tells us, even before Mrs. Claus brings it up, that he is a man who doesn’t look after himself.  The characters' names speak to similar ideas, such as Mr. Prim the very proper department store owner.  It’s true that this is all quite simplistic, but in a fable for children that’s okay.

The costumes do a similar job, equally well.  It’s not that hard to get Santa Claus or a Dastardly villain right, of course, but enough movies manage to fail at it regardless that I feel The Christmas that Almost Wasn’t has earned a kudo or two. Like the sets, the costumes tell us about the characters.  Mr. Whipple the lawyer, in his tidy but plain suit and festive mittens, is a professional but doesn’t like sticking out in a crowd.  Mr. Prim’s mustache-hair tells us he’s very fussy.  Mrs. Claus, always apparently dressed in her pajamas, is a homebody. Somebody took the trouble to dress all the elves slightly different, so that even though we never really meet them we can tell they’re individuals.

The main characters, furthermore, all have more than one layer! Santa Claus loves children but is worried what they’ll think of him, and his isolated life at the north pole has given him a measure of social anxiety.  Actor Alberto Rabagliati manages to embody both ‘right jolly old elf’ and ‘old man down on his luck’, and sometimes both at the same time.  It’s hard to judge anybody’s performance because of the dubbing (although even there I’ve heard much, much worse), but physically he’s perfect.  Mrs. Claus is a ‘kill them with kindness’ type, and you can see she takes just a bit of spiteful joy in Prune’s response to the word ‘children’.  Whipple can be shy but once he gets into his Lawyer Groove he has no problem getting in Prune’s face.  Blossom the butler is a jerk but has a soft spot for the dog, and so on.  The only character moment I really don’t like is Prune’s redemption at the end.

This bit is simply, as Jonah and the bots observed, too easy – one gift and suddenly years of mental torment and toxic behaviour are gone, poof!  It does give a good ending to the bit where Prune insists he was never a child and the elves can’t find anything about him, but doesn’t the fact that Jonathan lost his letter just give him that much more reason to be angry?  Furthermore, there’s the fact that gifts from Santa and gifts from family coexist in this world, as illustrated by the department store and the Christmas shopping.  Even if he didn’t get a sailboat from Santa, shouldn’t little Phineas have gotten one from his parents?  There are clearly more issues going on here than a simple lost letter.

That brings us to the real meat of this movie.  Last year, at the beginning of my review of Elves, I noted that the Christmas season is a contradictory one – what we actually feel is often violently at odds with what’s supposed to be the ‘Spirit of Christmas’, and the most obvious facet of this dichotomy is the whole ‘Season of Generosity’ thing.  Generosity is great and the world needs more of it, but at Christmas the recipients of this generosity are most often children, who respond by learning greed. This interplay goes on throughout The Christmas that Almost Wasn’t.

We start with the kangaroo court in which Whipple accuses Prune of being a tightwad.  Prune insists that his motives have nothing to do with greed – he just hates children!  In fact, one of the reasons he gives for hating them is because they’re greedy. All they want is toys and candy, and every year Santa indulges the little brats!  Santa, on the other hand, insists that being generous to children will teach them to be generous to others.

At the last moment, when all hope seems lost, we find that Santa was right – the kids are more than happy to donate their piggy banks to pay Santa’s rent!  This not only makes Christmas possible, but also allows Santa and his wife to passive-aggressively pay almost entirely in pennies – I once did this to a high school math teacher who made us all buy a five dollar study guide and let me tell you, there are few things more satisfying.  Even so, there’s a weird extra layer to this action.  The kids are being generous, but they must all know that if they aren’t, it’s them who will suffer the consequences.  Who wouldn’t donate a dollar or two when their Christmas presents are at stake?  Are the children being generous?  Or are they being greedy?

Isn’t that what we all do at Christmas?  When the ancient Romans sacrificed to their gods, they said do ut das, which means something like I am giving so that you might give. We give gifts to friends and family at Christmas in the expectation that they will give us something we wanted. My eight-year-old niece really wanted Wings of Fire III for Christmas this year, and pouted all day because nobody could find it for her, despite the fact that she got a load of other presents. When you give with no expectation of return, that’s charity, which we also do at Christmas – but in our minds, our reward for charity is feeling like a good person, while our reward for giving presents is getting presents back.

Another facet of this in the movie is that Santa actually has an arc of his own, in learning to accept generosity.  Generosity is Santa Claus’ defining trait, but in The Christmas that Almost Wasn’t we see him try to refuse offers of kindness from others. First there’s when Whipple offers to give him the money – Santa tries to refuse, and looks relieved when Whipple finds he doesn’t actually have that much money to give.  Too, Santa has not chosen his lawyer at random.  He knows he can’t afford to hire a lawyer so he goes to somebody who has already offered him a favour, rather than pleading for charity from a complete stranger.  Santa does not expect people to be generous to him.

At the end, when the boy named Charlie suggest that the children could donate the money, Santa once again tries to refuse.  The kids’ show of support, however, is so overwhelming that Santa can’t say no.  He realizes that he doesn’t always have to be the generous one – he can be the recipient. I suppose this is reflected in Prune’s arc, as he, too, finds he can accept generosity.  If this were intentional, it wasn’t done very well, but as I already observed Prune’s entire arc wasn’t done very well.  The film spends far more time on Santa and Whipple than it does on Prune, and we would have needed to know far more about the role of generosity in Prune’s life to get anything out of it.

Happy new year, everybody!  We get a new Mars rover in 2020, which is a great note to start on. I’ve only got a couple more MST3K movies to go, so I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to do with this blog once I’ve covered those.  I’ve had a lot of fun writing this and judging by the likes and reblogs, you guys are having fun reading it.  There’s also the hope that somehow, someday, we’ll get more new episodes.  I think I’ll try doing regular Episodes that Never Were for a while and see how that goes over.  It’s not as if the world has any lack of bad movies, and they keep making new ones all the time.

No, I haven’t seen Cats yet.

[schlock-luster-video]

On April 14, 2017, The Christmas That Almost Wasn't was riffed on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

[perfettamentechic]

8 marzo … ricordiamo …

8 marzo … ricordiamo … #semprevivineiricordi #nomidaricordare #personaggiimportanti #perfettamentechic

2021: Franca Polesello, attrice italiana attiva fino alla prima metà degli anni settanta. Iniziò la sua carriera alla fine degli anni cinquanta nello spettacolo, dopo essere diventata Miss Lombardia. Lavorò come modella televisiva e indossatrice, per poi apparire negli anni sessanta in film di genere peplum. In seguito fu scritturata per film commedia, film drammatici e spy-story. La carriera di…

[awesome-shygardencollection-blog]

Alberto Rabagliati canta Sentiss ciamà papà

[giancarlonicoli]

14 apr 2021 14:10

IL VOLO DI LIGUORI - COME MAI PAOLO LIGUORI HA DIFESO, CON UN'ARTICOLESSA  SU "IL GIORNALE", L'EX COMMISSARIO ARCURI? SEMPLICE, SUA MOGLIE (GRAZIA VOLO) E' L'AVVOCATO DI "MIMMO" - E PENSARE CHE QUEL TORDO DI MINZOLINI HA CHIESTO UNA "NORIMBERGA POLITICA" PER I MEDIA CHE NON HANNO AVUTO IL CORAGGIO DI DEPURARSI DALLE NARRAZIONI DI ROCCO CASALINO. POVERO MINZO-MANZO, FORSE NON HA LETTO IL GIORNALE PER CUI SCRIVE…

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Gustavo Bialetti per "la Verità"

È primavera, svegliatevi pennine. Alberto Rabagliati saprebbe come salutare il ritorno sul pianeta Terra di Augusto Minzolini, che sul Giornale di ieri chiede «non tanto una Norimberga giudiziaria, quanto una Norimberga politica», sulla gestione della prima ondata di Covid 19 da parte del governo Conte. L'ex senatore ridicolizza anche i media, accusandoli di «non aver avuto il coraggio di depurarsi dalle narrazioni di Rocco Casalino». Solo che non deve aver letto il giornale per cui scrive.

Domenica scorsa, La Verità ha titolato in prima: «Arcuri sotto inchiesta per peculato».

L' ennesimo scoop di Giacomo Amadori è stato ripreso da tutti. L' inchiesta è quella della Procura di Roma sulla maxi fornitura di mascherine cinesi. Ma al Giornale, l' altro ieri, è salito in cattedra il collega Luca Fazzo, per assolvere preventivamente Arcuri: «Di decisioni sbagliate ce ne sono state a bizzeffe [], ma metterlo oggi al muro per avere comprato a caro prezzo mascherine che andavano letteralmente a ruba in tutto l' Occidente, e che erano indispensabili anche per consentire a medici e infermieri di scendere nella trincea dei reparti Covid, sarebbe ingeneroso».

Chi invece fu generoso è Paolo Liguori, che il 13 dicembre scrisse un elogio dal titolo: «Il governo Casalino-Arcuri, i giganti Covid». Arcuri venne definito «tempestivo, sovraesposto, coraggioso». L'altro «gigante», Casalino, descritto come colui che «comunica ai giornalisti il modo più corretto di informare e suggerisce a Conte tempi e modalità». Nel frattempo, La Verità faceva il suo dovere, un po' in solitudine. Poi, arrivarono i pm. E ora sbuca la Lepre minzolina, per la quale «che la storiella del Modello Italia fosse una mezza barzelletta è sempre stato chiaro a tutti». Beh, a tutti tutti magari no. Citofonare al Giornale.

[onlaproject]

Sabato 21 Dicembre One Night Love Affair & Rodaviva presentano // Radio Londra 1943 \\ Salerno, 21 Dicembre 1943. Le notizie che vengono dal fronte tunisino non sono confortanti e il cerchio degli alleati sulle forze italo-tedesche sta per chiudersi. La sconfitta sembra inevitabile. Dal 1942 le città italiane vengono pesantemente bombardate dalle squadriglie del “Bomber command” della Raf. Il morale è basso e c’è aria di smobilitazione. Paura e incertezza dominano i volti dei civili. L’Italia, il “ventre molle” delle forze dell’Asse, è sull’orlo della catastrofe militare. Nascosto in una vecchia vineria del Centro storico, il Rodaviva, il bar più inn della città, organizza il suo Party a base di cocktail, liquori e distillati per tirare su il morale ai reduci d’Africa, ai militari di stanza nella città e ai civili. Dario Capone, gestore del bar, affida la selezione musicale al giovane #disk_jockey #Graziano_Graziani, un capitano del Regio Esercito gravemente ferito nei furiosi combattimenti di El Alamein e che ora è in convalescenza in città, in attesa di essere rispedito al fronte el #trombettista #George_Pujisevich La musica e l'atmosfera spensierata saranno più volte interrotte dai "messaggi speciali" di Radio Londra, intercettati da una rudimentale radio a valvole del gestore del locale. ******************************* /Graziano Graziani - Dj Set /George Pujisevich - Tromba /Music Intro: Nu Jazz & Nu Swing /Music Disco: Swing, Jazz House & Electro Swing Una selezione che parte dal Nu Jazz (Saint Germain & Nicola Conte) e Nu Swing (Dimaa e Club Des Belugas), infuoca la pista con il Jazz House (Gabin e Gramophonedzie) e l'Electro Swing (Parov Stelar) e si conclude con lo Swing anni '30 e '40 americano (Glenn Miller & Duke Ellington) e italiano (Alberto Rabagliati e Trio Lescan). Dress Code Idea: Soldato anni 40, Ballerina del Varietè, Contrabbandiere di sigarette, Sciuscià INGRESSO LIBERO *Start 21.00 'til end Info & Prenotazioni 🏘️ Location: Rodaviva 🛣️ Indirizzo: via Montefusco, 1 - Cava De' Tirreni ☎️ 089343356 📱. 3477917349 (Dario) 📱 3293423373 (Graziano) 📨 onlaproject@gmail.com 🎬 Art Director: (presso Rodaviva) https://www.instagram.com/p/B6VQS-QoiCO/?igshid=11orp98ojjayu