The Impetus
On
July 11, 2025, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Sean Baker announced
his participation in an upcoming BluRay box set of films starring one
of his favorite performers, the regal Ornella Muti. He was quoted in
very excited prose about his pleasure to be interviewing her about
the four selected films, and other related topics.
Though
never quite achieving the same name recognition in America other
legendary daughters of Italy as Sophia Loren or Isabella Rossellini
have won, regardless of the genres you favor in your movie love, you
have seen her versatility in the company of several iconic stars:
tackling the climates of Bukowski with Ben Gazzara in TALES OF
ORDINARY MADNESS and Proust with Jeremy Irons in SWANN IN LOVE,
confronting Gerard Depardieu’s toxic masculinity in THE LAST WOMAN,
slow-burning (or stifling laughter) against the broad comedy of John
Candy in ONCE UPON A CRIME, and, yes, tempting the Saviour of the
Universe in FLASH GORDON.
The four films chosen for the set all represent Muti in her ascent, before 1980 and “that multi-million dollar work of art playing across town,” as the makers of FLESH GORDON liked to say in their advertising. Three of the films have previously had a limited availability in America. Her film debut, Damiano Damiani’s THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WIFE, did not get a US theatrical release, but was issued on a domestic DVD by the defunct NoShame label in 2006 (with booklet notes by Richard Harland Smith), and a domestic BluRay by the defunct Twilight Time label in 2016 (with booklet notes by Julie Kirgo). Dino Risi’s FIRST LOVE (aka LAST LOVE), also did not reach US theatres, but did get a substantial run in French-speaking Canada. By virtue of their longstanding relationship with Mars Film Produzione, Paramount opened Tonino Cervi’s NEST OF VIPERS in New York, but while wire services promoted it to readers in other cities, the studio never expanded their release beyond there, nor gave it a video release.
The fourth, however, had a surprisingly long and sustained presence on these shores, albeit long after its original production and release. It also arrived in substantially different condition than the rest of the world saw it in. And by plain dumb luck, its presence cast an inadvertent shadow on its otherwise luminous star’s push into Hollywood.
The Disclaimer
To use Garrett Morris parlance, Sean Baker been berry berry good to me.
Damiano
Damiani’s 1970 film THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WIFE was a sensation in
Italy for several reasons. Its story came from the real-life actions
of Franca Viola, a Sicilian teenager who, after being kidnapped and
sexually assaulted by a former boyfriend with organized crime
connections, refused his family’s offer of a “rehabilitation
marriage” and instead pressed charges, which despite threats and
smear campaigns, successfully resulted in a guilty verdict and
imprisonment. (For context: in Italy, divorce was not legalized until
1970, birth control not legalized until 1971, and rape was not
reclassified to a crime against a person rather than “public
morality” until 1996!) It was the debut performance for Ornella
Muti, who was 14 at the time of production, with only some modeling
experience in her background; the performance won her a Grollo d’oro
Award for Best Debut Actress. It was also the debut performance for
her co-star, Alessio Orano, who portrayed her would-be lover and
antagonist.
This
would not be the last time the two actors worked together. Or that
Orano would embody both characteristics.
The Document
Writer/director Giorgio Stegani Casorati (most often credited without his surname), who, like many Italian filmmakers, previously turned out a standard array of espionage and western potboilers through the ‘60s, and before that had scripted MILL OF THE STONE WOMEN for Giorgio Ferroni, switched genres again for his 1971 production, IL SOLE NELLA PELLE, colloquially translated as SUN ON THE SKIN (though the intended translation had been SUN IN YOUR SKIN). Since the 1968 Franco Zefferelli film adaptation of ROMEO & JULIET with Olivia Hussey was still a popular revival title worldwide, and LOVE STORY was setting records in 1970, tragic romances set among beautiful youths with an economic divide between them was a good hook. And a chance to send an open rebuke to the sensationalist tendencies of both the State and the Fourth Estate, who in later years would become world-notorious for excessive behaviors, even better.
SUN ON THE SKIN uses an outwardly incongruent framing device of police investigators and reporters gathering interviews and gossiping among themselves to tell its real story of a doomed romantic interlude between Lisa, the 15 year-old daughter of a car magnate, and Robert, a 19 year old itinerant musician. The two meet when Lisa’s affluent friends crash a campsite nicknamed “Polynesia” where Robert and several unclothed friends hang out. Smitten, she attempts to introduce Robert to her otherwise laissez-faire parents, but her father, brewing prejudice about the counterculture and his inability to see her as anything but a child, forbids her to continue seeing him. Robert himself says he intends to move on to another city anyway, but Lisa coaxes him to spend another day with her. After taking a sailboat from one of her family’s vacation homes, the vessel wrecks on a shoal and the two end up on a deserted island. As they share intimate thoughts and gestures with each other, oblivious to the outside world, her father calls in favors with several government authorities to find them, in a nightmarish interpretation of MOONRISE KINGDOM. When a pair of hunters who come to the island for game find the boat wreckage and spot them in lovemaking, upon returning to the city, they misreport the tone of their behavior, suggesting a scenario, well, not unlike that in their earlier pairing from WIFE, which in turn creates further confirmation bias with all the wrong people. As Jonathan Swift wrote, “[If] a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work,” and when the adult world finally finds Lisa and Robert, it’ll take less time than that yield its consequence.
Considering the onscreen emnity their respective roles required in WIFE, Italian moviegoers may have been surprised that Orano and Muti would appear together again as comparably gentle lovers. According to co-star Stella Carnacina, she and Muti were both courted to play Lisa, and Muti’s blue eyes were the clincher, so perhaps it could just as easily had been Carnacina on that island. But seeing as Stegani wrote his character to have blue eyes, perhaps also he already had plans for a reunion for the couple. And seeing that they had already effectively explored the worst case scenario a man and woman could experience in their previous film, the actors understood the chemistry that fueled their hatred in one movie could be steered in the other direction. Orano in particular strikes a curious balance between mellow and menace as the hunky hippie drifter Robert; he knows the danger he could pose to Lisa, and frequently tries to warn her away from fixating on him. Even when they’re alone in their ersatz paradise, he never brings overt or passive-aggressive pressure to her to give herself to him: she makes the choice to expose herself completely. (Or at least, as the Italian credits make clear, the then-16-year-old Muti’s adult body double exposes herself.) And in the climax, when both reporters in a helicopter and police with guns send him running for his life, it does play out like hunters gleefully pursuing a beast, albeit a model-handsome, shirtless beast. In this spirit, in Germany, while the film had been released as A SUMMER OF TENDERNESS, some home video releases retitled it HUNTED TO DEATH.
As
with several Italian films from the mid-’60s onward, there was an
eye for getting SUN seen in other territories. A full English dub
track was prepared, complete with the requisite voices of Peter
Fernandez and Frank Wolff. Score composer Gianni Marchetti, whose
dozens of alternate credit names in his prolific career include
“Johnny Bravo,” enlisted expatriate Scottish band Middle of the
Road, famous for their #1 UK hit “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep,” to
write and sing original songs in English for the soundtrack, which
was released in almost all territories. The export version of SUN
opened in Hammersmith, London, on a double feature with COUNTDOWN TO
VENGEANCE starring Serge Reggiani and Jeanne Moreau, in June of 1972.
However, the movie did not make it to America.
Not until
several years, and several changes, later.
The
Lure
By 1979. movies featuring Ornella Muti in their casts were making their way to American theatres: DIRTY PICTURES, ITALIAN GRAFFITI, COME HOME AND MEET MY WIFE, LEONOR, VIVA ITALIA!, and the aforementioned NEST OF VIPERS, all received substantial, if not nationwide, releases. Plus some outings as LA CASA DE LAS PALOMAS, EXPERIENCIA PREMATRIMONIAL, and UNA CHICA Y UN SENOR, while not given regular runs, did pop up in Spanish-language theatres in the South. However, while her visage was often featured on poster art, and her name mentioned in critics quotes, as the entertainment press terminology would say, she was not yet in a position to “open” a picture here.
What came forward from Transvue, however, under the new title SUMMER AFFAIR, was a significantly altered experience. The opening credits, where Robert is day napping in a city square and Lisa walks past him, were dropped. Almost all the investigators and interviews framing device was cut out, aside from a few scenes necessary to explain crucial plot developments. While some flourishes, such as a recurring motif of Lisa’s father at crucial interactions literally seeing her in her younger years before seeing her in the present day, were retained, the overall sociopolitical lens hovering on the story was dropped to focus almost entirely on the rise and crash of the teens’ idyll. The instrumental cues of Gianni Marchetti and most of the Middle of the Road tracks stayed in place, but several scenes had their music replaced with multiple incarnations of a newly-recorded song, “Don’t Wake Me Up Tonight,” produced by longtime recording engineer Robert de la Garza, written by guitarist Bucky Barrett & songwriter Bobbi Cole Meyer, and sung by Deborah Mosely, a former Miss Georgia who, according to the hype on the American soundtrack album, was the “winner of Transvue Pictures’ National Talent Search Contest.”
Most distinctly, and jarringly to anyone who did see it in its original European cut, an entirely new 10 minute opening, with Anglicized talent credits (Alessio Orano was now “Les Rannow,” Luigi Pistilli now “Louis Pistilli”), was attached, featuring American actors completely unconnected to the film! Holly Gagnier, later to play Sarah Jessica Parker’s nemesis in GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN, and Gregory Labaqui portray Susie and Tony, carefree friends in San Francisco who, after a pas de deux in Union Plaza during the credits, meet up in a discotheque to watch some impressive (if thematically out of place) breakdancing by L.A.-based group The Stylistic Dancers, and provide an exposition dump to somehow connect them to the actual protagonists, before a rotating wipe (the kind notorious to edited reruns of ‘70s sitcoms) finally takes us to the real movie and the “Polynesia” hippie encounter. UCLA Film & Television School alumna and PENTITENTIARY producer Alicia J. Dhanifu (pictured above) would write, direct, and choreograph this retconning footage. For having such a thankless task, she delivers above and beyond the call, even if what she has presented is tonally misleading.
SUMMER AFFAIR got its first US playdate in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on November 30, 1979, and slowly trickled through Southern theatres and drive-ins for a full year onward. Ad copy promised “A touching poignant look at love,” and “What you dreamed of but never dared to do,” and cautioned, “THIS PICTURE MAY BE OFFENSIVE TO THOSE PERSONS SENSITIVE TO TOTAL NUDITY!” As was typical of dubbed foreign pickups released by small distributors, almost no press reviews were filed in the markets where it opened, and where there were, such as Jeff Millar of the Houston Chronicle, they were dismissive: Millar’s review literally ended with, “The film is preposterous, and with newsprint over $400 a ton, I’ll not waste another ounce on it.” Transvue nonetheless treated the film as a perennial: it was still receiving first-run engagements as late as September 1983. And in 1986, it received a big-box VHS release from Active Home Video, in tandem with other Transvue titles.
The Landing
After completing SUN ON THE SKIN, Ornella Muti and Alessio Orano would make one more film together, EXPERIENCIA PREMATRIMONIAL, made and released in 1972. Again, they would play lovers in a fraught place and time: in this circumstance, Spain, in its final years of Catholic repression under Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Here, Alejandra and Luis, against the conventional morality of their families and the general society, choose what we Americans only half-jokingly used to call “living in sin,” to see if marriage is really for them. At first, flush with excitement, they are happy in their cohabitation. But, because this is a melodrama set in a country that was punishing subversion, Alejandra gets pregnant, Luis gets bored and cheats on her, their relationship falls apart, and everyone learns a lesson that anything other than church-sanctioned unions will end badly. In Franco’s Spain, anyhow.
While any possible previous romantic behavior during the making of their three films together was not mentioned or documented in the press, Muti and Orano would marry in 1975; she was 19, he was 29. One month earlier, Muti had given birth to her first daughter, Naike Rivelli, who was born in 1974; at the time, she alluded to an older and married man “not in the movie business” as the girl’s father. Shortly after their marriage, Orano formally adopted Naike. After three years together, Muti and Orano would separate in 1978. Muti would soon decamp with Naike to Los Angeles in late 1979 after completing production on FLASH, where she would be appearing in her first project for an American director: James Toback’s LOVE AND MONEY.
In the lead-up to Ornella Muti’s late 1980 American publicity tour to promote FLASH GORDON, and herself to English-speaking moviegoers, her estranged husband Orano filed litigation in Italy to gain sole custody of the now-six-year-old Naike. The challenge clearly rattled the young mother, as this subject would come up time and again in the interviews that were supposed to be simple innocuous junket chats. As she told writer Lloyd Shearer in a wire service interview running October 25, 1980, “After three years, Alessio leaves, wants nothing to do with me or Naike. We are separated. Now he come back and say he wants custody of Naike – that he is legal, official father. I will fight to the death not to give him my baby.”
And even though it was such an under-the-radar release that the closest it came to Los Angeles was a Fresno engagement in November 1980, it stands to reason insiders somehow got word to her that SUN ON THE SKIN, the movie from so long ago where she and her ex were au naturel, was currently in American theatres; and that surely would have felt like, well, salt in the wound.
The dissonance would come to a head on December 4, 1980, during the most-covered stop of Muti’s American charm offensive, in Cincinnati, Ohio – my home town. She had a very busy day of activity ahead of her: a TV interview with local talk show host Bob Braun, a mayoral welcome, and a meet-and-greet at posh department store Shillito’s in Downtown, followed by a mall appearance, a charity fundraiser, and a Showcase Cinemas multiplex opening in Eastgate 20 miles away. The embodiment of European glamour was entering a new world - the midwestern heartland - at warp speed.
As a child of a Franco-Italian mother who moved her
parents to America a few
years after my birth, and a film obsessive since fourth grade, I had
a bit of a head start on Ornella Muti awareness. My grandparents had
the big cultural magazines from the old country – Paris Match,
Gente, Oggi – sent over, so I’d seen photos of her in them, and
knew she was a big deal. I also knew that Cincinnati was a nice
enough place by my standards, but wondered what a
lady of culture like her would have made of it. I
was fearing the worst.
From what I can find in the public record, it was not a good day for her. In separate interviews with the Cincinnati Post and Cincinnati Enquirer, which either took place during her media blitz or the morning after, it was brought up that sometime during her activities, there had been a fresh escalation from Orano’s camp in their ongoing custody fight. The Post’s writer, Jerry Stein, managed to speak to her when she was in a more convivial state of mind, but the Enquirer’s writer, critic Tom McElfresh, must have had his window of access right after the phone call, because his report was full of pissy commentary about Muti’s unloquacious demeanor, right down to the headline: “Ornella Has Little to Say About Flash.” When she admits to being brought down by troubling news and that she would be in a better mood in a few hours, McElfresh makes of point of telling the reader he didn’t have a few hours to wait for her mood to improve. (This is also a man who once fawned over Jayne Kennedy when she made a visit for the World Premiere of her action film DEATH FORCE, only to ridicule the film and the fact it premiered in Cincinnati days later.) In a post on Cinema Treasures, a Redstone Theatres employee working the inauguration of the Eastgate Showcase revealed that Muti arrived late for the FLASH premiere, which logic suggests may also have been caused by dealing with news from home. And while no video is readily available from her “BOB BRAUN SHOW” appearance, back then, everyone my age and older pretty much agreed he was probably very nice, but such a white bread square he made Mike Douglas look like George Carlin, so imagination yields cringey conclusions.
The Postscript
Ornella’s Muti’s Hollywood experiment did not last long. LOVE AND MONEY, which had its first test-screening in November 1980, received a small and publicity-free contractual-obligation release in February 1982, and was sent to cable nine months later. She and her daughter returned to Europe, and contentedly stayed there. She has acted in several English-language projects since, but in most of these situations, they have been made overseas – in short, American directors come to her rather than she to them.
As
for her contentious ex-husband Alessio Orano, his trail runs cold
after 1998.
And The Cincinnati Post, “THE BOB BRAUN SHOW,” Shillito’s, Showcase Cinemas Eastgate, and the luxury hotel where Muti rested...are all gone.
I
can’t wait to hear what Baker and Muti talk about later this year.
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