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Lea Massari, the Italian actress and European cinema icon famous for her roles in Michelangelo Antonioni‘s L’Avventura (1960), Dino Risi’s A Difficult Life (1961) and Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart (1971), has died. She was 91.

Massari died at her home in Rome on Monday, Italian media reported.

In a decades-long career that spanned films, television and theater, Massari played alongside the likes of Alain Delon, Jean Paul Belmondo, Michel Piccoli and Omar Sharif. She was a critical and audience favorite but shunned the spotlight. After retiring from acting more than 30 years ago, she rarely appeared in public.

Born Anna Maria Massatani on June 30, 1933 — she took the stage name Lea in honor of her fiancé, Leo, who died in an accident shortly before they were to be married — her childhood was spent across Europe as her family followed her father, an engineer, to positions in Spain, France and Switzerland.

I recently saw a friend in a play about Robin Hood. They performed on a small outdoor stage in the middle of a park, acting with minimal sets and costumes. Still, it was an engaging, funny play, and it even made me a little verklempt to think about the fact that humans have been dressing up in parks to tell each other stories of Robin Hood for hundreds of years. We like to entertain each other, and I think that's neat.

The same goes for Greek mythology. These stories have circulated for millennia, used as moral lessons or to simply pass the time. There's a vast amount of mythology to dive into, but at least in the world of cinema, we tend to tell each other the same few stories over and over again, dressing up in costumes to act out the adventures of Hercules, the trials of Odysseus, or...

Before 1967's A Fistful of Dollars, Clint Eastwood's career consisted primarily of several uncredited roles in films with dull titles like Revenge of the Creature (1955) and Tarantula! (1955), and one-off performances in anthology series like the dryly named waterlogged drama Navy Log (1955) and the much more memorable Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955). Before Eastwood's teeth-gritting snarl and perpetual sun-in-the-eye squint became as intrinsic to American popular culture as Twinkies, the actor was in dire need of a proper vehicle to coax the latent hard-ass from his slumber.

In those early years, it was 1959's Rawhide, in which Eastwood portrayed the precocious ramrod Rowdy Yates, a former Confederate Army soldier. If any of those early performances could be said to provide an inkling as to what sort of gruff underbelly could be scratched with the right material, it was Rawhide. In Yates, we have a nascent iteration of the type of character...

Clint Eastwood was already 30 years old when he landed his breakout role in the CBS Western "Rawhide." The actor had spent much of the 1950s getting by on bit parts in B movies (most notably the Jack Arnold monster duo of "Revenge of the Creature" and "Tarantula"), and guest roles on TV series like "Maverick" and "Death Valley Days," so you'd think he would've been thrilled. But Eastwood was displeased with his character Rowdy Yates, who, early on in the series' run, was a wet-behind-the-ears ramrod. At his age, he was eager to play a grown, capable man with enough years behind him to allow for a bit of mystery.

Eastwood's restlessness coincided with a shift in filmmakers' approach to the Western genre. Though maestros like John Ford, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, and Budd Boetticher had allowed for moral ambiguity in their movies, the vast majority of Westerns were white...

Italian director Sergio Leone is often considered to be one of the best filmmakers ever to pick up a camera. His films were so stylized that they often split the difference between high art and low art, elevating the otherwise generic stories of his movies into visual and audio extravaganzas.

Unfortunately, Sergio Leone only lived long enough to direct eight feature films, one of which was never officially credited to him. He began with low-budgeted Sword and Sandal movies in the Italian studio system before becoming so undeniable as a storyteller that he would reinvent the Western genre, creating what's known as the Spaghetti Western. From picturesque landscapes to uncomfortable close-ups and transcendent use of music, Sergio Leone's films were undeniable and utterly unforgettable.

Related 10 Most Important Westerns of All Time The Western genre has massively influenced the cinematic medium and produced several of the most important films of all time.

It's odd to think that there was a time when Clint Eastwood was just a jobbing actor and not the Hollywood legend we know him to be. As an actor and a director, the man has had a career that anyone looking for success in the film industry would envy, being able to make whatever he wanted to make consistently for decades.

Though he's tackled crime stories, romantic melodramas, biopics, and just about everything else you could in the business, we all know Clint Eastwood's bread and butter is the Western, the genre that rocketed him to stardom in the 1960s with the release of Sergio Leone's classic Spaghetti Western "Dollars" trilogy, all three of which hit American movie screens in 1967.

Prior to heading over to Italy to take on the Man with No Name character, Eastwood was the co-star of the television series "Rawhide" for eight years, and...

You can’t argue with disc collectors eager to rediscover movies they loved at age 10, in terrific kiddie matinees. Cowboy star Rory Calhoun makes a perfectly fine Italian vagabond ladies’ man for this very un-serious ‘oriental’ adventure, and Yôko Tani is the requisite princess who needs kissing lessons. Tim Lucas’s welcome, info-packed commentary satisfies our curiosity about the long-unavailable title — it’s different than the A.I.P. release we (barely) remember.

Marco Polo

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1962 / Color/ 2:35 widescreen / 104, 95 min. / Street Date , 2023 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Rory Calhoun, Yôko Tani, Camillo Pilotto, Pierre Cressoy, Michael Chow, Thien-Huong, Franco Ressel.

Cinematography: Riccardo Pallottini

Production Designer: Zoran Zorcic

Art Directors: Aurelio Crugnola, Franco Fumagalli, Miodrag Miric, Jovan Radic

Film Editor: Ornella Micheli

Costume design: Mario Giorsi

Original Music: Angelo Francesco Lavagnino / Les Baxter

Written by Oreste Biancoli, Ennio De Concini, Eliana De Sabata, Antoinette Pellevant, Piero Pierotti, Duccio Tessari

Produced by Luigi Carpentieri,...

Finally out on Blu-ray in Region A, Luis Buñuel’s beautiful color adventure is a worthy jungle tale shot through with his signature negativity — it could be titled “The Bad, The Greedy and the Faithless.” The Spanish surrealist’s filmic obsessions steered toward the anarchistic, the anti-clerical and anti-bourgeois; all of his films are political, but three features in the 1950s cast a harsh eye on the subject of revolution itself, with surprising results. With the presence of movie stars Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli, this may also be the director’s most commercial feature.

Death in the Garden

Blu-ray

Kino Classics

1956 / Color / 1:37 / 104 min. / Street Date July 23, 2019 / La mort en ce jardin / Available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli, Tito Junco, Mich.le Girardon, Jorge Martínez de Hoyos, Francisco Reiguera, José Chávez.

Cinematography: Jorge Stahl, Jr.

Film Editors: Denise Charvein,...

Finally out on Blu-ray in Region A, Luis Buñuel’s beautiful color adventure is a worthy jungle tale shot through with his signature negativity — it could be titled “The Bad, The Greedy and the Faithless.” The Spanish surrealist’s filmic obsessions steered toward the anarchistic, the anti-clerical and anti-bourgeois; all of his films are political, but three features in the 1950s cast a harsh eye on the subject of revolution itself, with surprising results. With the presence of movie stars Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli, this may also be the director’s most commercial feature.

Death in the Garden

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1956 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 104 min. / Street Date July 23, 2019 / La mort en ce jardin / Available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli, Tito Junco, Mich.le Girardon, Jorge Martínez de Hoyos, Francisco Reiguera, José Chávez.

Cinematography: Jorge Stahl, Jr.

Film Editors: Denise Charvein,...

Growing up as Sergio Leone’s career escalated segueing from the so-called “Dollars Trilogy” to “Once Upon a Time in the West” up to their father’s final masterpiece, “Once Upon a Time in America,” led his children Raffaella and Andrea to become steeped in two inextricably linked passions: film and family.

“Film has always been an aggregating element of our family,” says Andrea, speaking with Raffaella in the office that used to be their father’s in a villa on Rome’s outskirts, now the company’s headquarters. “In the evenings we would discuss movies and our father used to talk to us about his projects.”

Raffaella remembers spending every other summer of her childhood on one of the director’s sets in Spain, in the desert of Almeria where “A Fistful of Dollars,” “For a Few Dollars More,” “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” as well as other Leone films,...

By Fred Blosser

I saw many, many Italian-made sword-and-toga movies as a kid in the early 1960s at the Kayton, my neighborhood movie house, where they usually played on mismatched double-bills with B-Westerns, British “Carry On” comedies, low-budget noir dramas, and fourth-run Elvis movies. Many of these Italian epics were simplistic and formulaic, as if the producers figured that people had come to see spectacle, sex, and sword-fights, and never mind anything else. Regardless, more ambitious productions occasionally surfaced with slightly more dramatic substance and marginally higher production values. One such entry was “The Colossus of Rhodes” (1961), Sergio Leone’s first acknowledged directorial credit preceding his breakthrough success with “A Fistful of Dollars” in 1964. The Warner Archive Collection has released the 1961 movie on Blu-ray with audio commentary by Sir Christopher Frayling, Leone’s biographer and longtime critical champion.

The script co-written by Leone has plenty of plot -- almost too much,...

Sergio Leone was born Jan. 3, 1929; he would have been 90 this week. Though he directed only seven films, their impact has been wide and long-lasting, including making Clint Eastwood a star.

On Oct. 11, 1967, Variety carried a guest column by Lee Van Cleef shortly before the U.S. bow of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” The actor countered criticism that Leone’s films are too violent: “What could have more violent sequences than the Bible?” he wrote. Van Cleef added that the films were authentic and heavily researched, saying that on the set the filmmaker “carried a small library of well-illustrated American books devoted to American history of those times.”

In that same issue, Leone said he didn’t invent Westerns all’Italiana. There were two dozen before the 1964 “Fistful of Dollars.” But the film was such a hit, he said, it inspired more than 200 spaghetti Westerns in the following two years,...

The Colossus of Rhodes

Blu ray

Warner Archive

1961 / 2:35 / Street Date June 26, 2018

Starring Rory Calhoun, Lea Massari, Georges Marchal

Cinematography by Antonio Ballesteros

Directed by Sergio Leone

Fred Astaire once said of an undulating Cyd Charisse, “She came at me in sections.” So does the star of Sergio Leone’s The Colossus of Rhodes, a 300 foot titan whose sky-scraping vertical stance is at extreme odds with Leone’s widescreen frame. Save for some long shots, one of The Seven Wonders of the World is reduced to a slide show of disconnected body parts. Such are the giant-sized headaches of epic movie-making.

Even before an earthquake would wreak havoc on the community and topple the Colossus in 226 BC, Rhodes was a city in turmoil. Darios, a Brylcreemed military hero and would-be romeo has just dropped anchor but in lieu of a warrior’s welcome, he’s immediately ensnared in a two-pronged...

Luis Buñuel’s filmic obsessions steered toward the anarchistic, the anti-clerical and anti-bourgeois, with a surreal spin. All of his films are political, but three features in the 1950s cast a harsh eye on the subject of revolution itself, with surprising results. This beautiful color show is a worthy jungle adventure tale shot through with Buñuel’s signature negativity — it could be titled “The Bad, The Greedy and the Faithless.”

Death in the Garden

Region B Blu-ray + DVD

Eureka Entertainment / Masters of Cinema

1956 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 104 min. / Street Date June 19, 2017 / La mort en ce jardin / Available from Amazon UK / £ 11.65

Starring: Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel, Michel Piccoli, Tito Junco, Michèle Girardon, Jorge Martínez de Hoyos, Francisco Reiguera, José Chávez.

Cinematography: Jorge Stahl, Jr.

Film Editors: Denise Charvein, Marguerite Renoir

Original Music: Paul Misraki

Written by Luis Alcoriza, Luis Buñuel, Raymond Queneau, Gabriel Arout from a novel by José-André Lacour.

"He's best known for his westerns, which traditionally are sagas about how civilization begins, how ruthless and cynical men rip it out of the throat of the wilderness," writes Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix. "But the end of civilization is what really fascinated Sergio Leone, and the poison within that undoes every would-be paradise. Death and doom and dark hilarity overshadow his films, not just the westerns, but all of them, which are on view this month in a two-week retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive. From his first directorial effort, The Colossus of Rhodes (1961; screens November 13 at 4:30 pm), to the script about the 900-day siege of Leningrad that he left behind when he died in 1989 at the age of 60, Sergio Leone showed us how the world ends — be it by the slow brutal murder of a modern city, or the catastrophic destruction of an ancient one."

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So last year I joined Twitter and desperately struggled to figure out a good use for it. Assuming most people following my account might come from the Film Junk podcast, I thought it might be an idea platform to keep track of what films I've been watching and what ratings I give them. My first post was March 9th, 2009 with David Cronenberg's The Brood (3.5/4) and since then I've managed to check out a good number of great films over the last year. (Jacques Tati's Play Time and Wim Wender's Paris, Texas are definitely two stand outs on this list.) Many of these are first time viewings, but a there are also a lot of movies I just felt the urge to revisit. So what do you think? Any favourites? Have a look for yourself after the jump! The Brood, (Cronenberg, 1979) 3.5/4 Operation Crossbow (Anderson, 1965) 3.5/4 Watchmen, (Snyder, 2009) 3/4 Pontypool, (McDonald, 2008) 4/4 Pinocchio,...

0:00 - Intro 1:15 - R.I.P. Patrick Swayze 5:30 - Tiff Review: The Road 17:55 - Tiff Review: Jennifer's Body 23:35 - Tiff Review: Survival of the Dead 33:20 - Tiff Review: My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done 52:50 - Tiff Review: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans 1:06:10 - Tiff Review: Up in the Air 1:13:50 - Tiff Review: [Rec] 2 1:19:25 - Tiff Review: Life During Wartime 1:33:00 - Other Stuff We Watched: Bitch Slap, Whip It, Vengeance, Defendor, Solomon Kane, Solitary Man, Daybreakers, Monterey Pop, The Colossus of Rhodes, Grace, Fanboys, Community, Glee, Archer, Survivor 2:03:05 - Junk Mail: The Het Voice Mail 2:06:40 - This Week's DVD Releases 2:08:30 - Outro » Download the MP3 (60 Mb) [1] » View the show notes [2] » Vote for us on Podcast Alley! [3] Subscribe to the podcast feed: [4] [5] [6] [7] Donate via Paypal: Recurring Donation $2/Month: [1] http://www.