Year: 1953
Duration: 01:33:20
Directed by: Raffaello Matarazzo
Actors: Kerima, May Britt and Ettore Manni
Language: Italian
Country: Italy
Also known as: La nave delle donne maledette, Ship of Lost Women
Description: The screen explodes violently with unreleased emotions of suppressed desires!
Review Well, as I said, I don’t speak the language of the movie, but here’s what I understood. In eighteenth century Italy, a young bride’s (May Britt) wedding is interrupted by a police inspector named Victor Macdonald (Giorgio Capecchi). It seems she’s under arrests for some vile deed!
The bride’s parents bring familial pressure to bear on the bride’s cousin (Kermina), who takes the rap. She’s found guilty (I get the impression that the crime is having an abortion, but I’m really just guessing.) Despite the efforts of her young lawyer (Ettore Manni), she’s found guilty and sentenced to…
Well, whatever it is, it has something to do with floating around on a big boat with other women, and she’s carted off. Her valiant lawyer stows away on the “nave delle donne maledette”, aided by a guard who, in better days, was a friendly monk. Also aboard is the young bride, winning over the captain with amorous advances. How can the lawyer prove his client innocent in such circumstances?
All this happens in the first hour and a quarter of the film. It’s a very talky movie at the beginning, for those of you expecting something more like a modern WIP film. It’s much closer to an Italian costume version of Caged (1950); with less outright perversion.
The ending, though, is wonderful. Surrealist critic Ado Kyrou described the movie in these terms: “[A movie] in which sadism, revolt, eroticism, religion, and melodrama conspire to form a series of problematically linked scene dependent on the commonplace, raised by its rigor to the level of pure involuntary poetry”. I’s mostly the last 15 minutes h’s talking about. Reminded me of Lysistrata as written by… well, by an unknown Italian studio hack in the 50s.
Why else should you see it? It’s a women in prison film. On a boat.
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