On the Loose in Amsterdam

The Italian film poster for THE GIRL IN THE PICTURE WINDOW (1961), directed by Luciano Emmer.

The controversial problem of immigration in Italy has been a problem for decades, not just with internal migration of workers from the south to the north, but also with the influx of refugees from Africa and other areas around the Mediterranean. Not surprisingly, there have been numerous Italian films to address this situation over the years but only a handful of them have received praise and recognition outside their own country. Among them are Pietro Germi’s Il Cammino della Speranza (The Path of Hope, 1950), in which a group of Sicilian workers try to emigrate illegally to France, I Magliari (The Swindlers, 1959), Francesco Rosi’s drama about an out-of-work Italian miner (Renato Salvatore) in Germany, and Lina Wertmuller’s Tutto a Posto e Niente in Ordine (All Screwed Up, 1974), which focuses on immigrants from southern Italy trying to find work in Milan. To this short list, I would like to add Luciano Emmer’s rarely seen La Ragazza in Vetrina (The Girl in the Picture Window, 1961), a tale about two immigrant miners in Belgium who enjoy a weekend getaway in Amsterdam.

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Space Oddity

Androids with four arms! Curvaceous, lifelike inflatable women! Bald interplanetary kidnappers dressed in dark raincoats and wearing shades! Human mutants and laboratory rejects! A bizarre space-age cabaret where all of the performers are dressed as giant butterflies! These are just a few of the sights you’ll see on The Wild, Wild Planet (1966), a groovy Italian science-fiction adventure directed by Antonio Margheriti. 

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Hell is Other People

A random group of strangers being forced to share close quarters during an impending disaster or emergency situation is a familiar trope in genre films. The situation becomes even more dire when most of the stranded individuals prove to be loathsome or extremely annoying. This is essentially the set-up for Something Creeping in the Dark (Italian title: Qualcosa Striscia nel Buio, 1971), a quintessential old dark house thriller which starts as a suspenseful melodrama and quickly descends into the realm of the occult.  

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