Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Film
Back in the 1980s, a Venice film archive found that the city had appeared in one form or
another in 380,000 films - feature films, shorts, documentaries, and other works archived
and screened at the city's Casa del Cinema. But Venice's photogenic looks have proved a
mixed blessing. This city is too distinctive to fade into the background, so the city tends to
upstage even the most photogenic co-stars (which only partly excuses 2010's
The Tourist
).
Since Casanova's escapades and a couple of Shakespearean dramas unfolded in Venice,
the lagoon city was a natural choice of location for movie versions of these tales. In the
Casanova category, two excellent accounts are Alexandre Volkoff's 1927
Casanova
and
Federico Fellini's 1976
Casanova,
starring Donald Sutherland. Oliver Parker directed a
1995 version of
Othello,
but the definitive version remains Orson Welles' 1952
Othello,
shot partly in Venice, but mostly on location in Morocco. Later adaptations of silver-screen
classics haven't lived up to the original, including Michael Radford's 1994
The Merchant
of Venice
starring Al Pacino as Shylock, and Swedish director Lasse Hallström's 2005
Cas-
anova,
with a nonsensical plot but a charmingly rakish Heath Ledger in the title role.
After WWII, Hollywood came to Venice in search of romance, and the city delivered as
the backdrop for Katherine Hepburn's midlife Italian love affair in David Lean's 1955
Sum-
mertime
. Of all his films, Lean claimed this was his favourite, above
Lawrence of Arabia
and
Doctor Zhivago
. Locals confirm that yes, Signora Hepburn did fall into that canal, and
no, she wasn't happy about it. Gorgeous Venice set pieces compensated for some dubious
singing in Woody Allen's musical romantic comedy
Everyone Says I Love You
(1996). But
the most winsome Venetian romance is Silvio Soldini's
Pane e Tulipani
(Bread and Tulips;
1999), a tale of an Italian housewife who restarts her life as a woman of mystery in Venice,
trying to dodge the detective novel-reading plumber hot on her trail.
More often than not, romance seems to go horribly wrong in films set in Venice. It turns
to obsession in
Morte a Venezia
(Death in Venice), Luchino Visconti's 1971 adaptation of
the Thomas Mann novel, and again in
The Comfort of Strangers
(1990), featuring Natasha
Richardson and Rupert Everett inexplicably following Christopher Walken into shadowy
Venetian alleyways. A better adaptation of a lesser novel,
The Wings of the Dove
(1997)
was based on the Henry James novel and mostly shot in the UK, though you can scarcely
notice behind Helena Bonham-Carter's hair.
Venice has done its best to shock moviegoers over the years, as with Nicolas Roeg's riv-
eting
Don't Look Now
(1973) starring Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie, and Venice at its
