Day
2 in Venice, and as the press accreditation desk wasn’t opening till the
afternoon, that left the morning free for a visit to the Libreria Solaris, the
only place in Venice for film books and DVDs (and I mean ‘only’ in both senses
of the word). Having grabbed a fistful of movies – including the Italian
releases of both HerculesHercules Unchained, which I
fervently hope are taken from better prints than the budget discs available in
the States – I moseyed on back to the hotel and then over to the Lido,
pondering awhile the relationship between Venice and the movies.
Moonraker
Venice
has often been likened to a living film set, a most appropriate comparison
considering the city was literally conjured into reality from nothing. And yet,
paradoxically, it’s the very unreality of the place, the sheer improbability of
it, that leaves the deepest impression on even the most fleeting of visitors.
Venice exists, but a part of your mind is always aware that it shouldn’t.
As
with actual film sets, some directors make better use of them than others,
while the very best contrive to make the production design an integral part of
the story rather than mere backdrop. In this regard, Venice is no exception.
Some
of the more memorable instances of Venice as backdrop include Sean Connery,
Daniela Bianchi, and Matt Monro combining for the final sequence of From
Russia with Love (1963), as James Bond unspools a reel of compromising film
into the Grand Canal. Bond was back in Venice in 1979 for the puerile Moonraker,
in which Roger Moore struggled to maintain his dignity while driving a
gondala-cum-car through St. Mark’s Square, in addition to having a smashing
time in a fight sequence set in a Murano glass factory. And more recently, an
actor with ginger hair, inexplicably cast as 007, was involved in the
preposterously overblown CGI destruction of an entire Venetian palazzo in the
preposterously over-praised Casino Royale (2006).
Bonaparte
wasn’t the only Napoleon to invade Venice. One hundred and seventy years after
the megalomaniac Corsican brought an end to the Venetian Republic, Robert
Vaughn took time off from playing Napoleon Solo to appear in The Venetian
Affair (1967), a tale of murky goings-on derived from a book by Helen MacInnes
and co-starring Euro-spy stalwarts Luciana Paluzzi and Elke Sommer, together
with none other than Karloff the Uncanny in one of his last roles.
Entirely
by coincidence, of course, Illya Kuryakin was on hand for a fortuitous Man
from U.N.C.L.E. photo-opportunity, when David McCallum “just happened†to
be in the vicinity while filming the obscure romantic comedy, Three Bites of
the Apple, opposite Eurobabe Sylva Koscina.