Profumo di donna (1974)

Director:

Dino Risi

Writers:

Giovanni Arpino (novel)
Ruggero Maccari (writer)

Release Date:

20 December 1974 (Italy)

Genre:

Comedy | Drama

Plot:

An army cadet accompanies an irascible, blind captain on a week-long trip from Turin to Naples. The captain...

Plot Keywords:

Beautiful Woman | Black Comedy | Female Nudity | Commedia All'italiana | Blindness

Awards:

Nominated for 2 Oscars. Another 5 wins & 1 nomination

Cast

Vittorio Gassman	...	Il capitano Fausto Consolo
Alessandro Momo	...	Giovanni Bertazzi, aka Ciccio
Agostina Belli	...	Sara
Moira Orfei	...	Mirka
Franco Ricci	...	Raffaele
Elena Veronese	...	Michelina
Lorenzo Piani
Stefania Spugnini	...	Candida
Torindo Bernardi	...	Vincenzo
Marisa Volonnino	...	Ines
Carla Mancini	...	Nun
Alvaro Vitali	...	Vittorio
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Sergio Di Pinto

Also Known As:

Scent of a Woman (USA)
That Female Scent (UK)

Runtime:

103 min

Country:

Italy

Language:

Italian

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

West Germany:16 (f) | Argentina:18 | Chile:18 | USA:R

Filming Locations:

Genoa, Liguria, Italy

Company:

Dean Film

Quotes:

Il capitano Fausto Consolo: You know what I am?
Giovanni Bertazzi, aka Ciccio: No.
Il capitano Fausto Consolo: The eleven of spades.
Giovanni Bertazzi, aka Ciccio: It doesn't exist.
Il capitano Fausto Consolo: That's the point. A card that's not in the pack. Good for no game.

Movie Connections:

Remade as Scent of a Woman (1992)

Soundtrack:

Il canotto

A milestone in Vittorio Gassman's career

Dino Risi is one of the most important directors in Italian cinema, from the Fifties to the Seventies. Generally he's recognized as one of the fathers of Italian comedy ("commedia all'italiana") -the expression doesn't mean that the movies make you laugh all the time, it means that stories are a mix of happiness and bitterness, as life is. And not always there's a happy ending.

Dino Risi worked with the "who's who" of Italian cinema, but he became famous also for casting frequently actors like Gassman, Ugo Tognazzi, Nino Manfredi and Alberto Sordi -they were ideal for characterizing Italian defects and virtues, above all defects...! "Profumo di donna" is taken from a book by Giovanni Arpino. In this 1974 movie Vittorio Gassman is a blind ex military officer who makes a trip from Genova to Naples. A young boy accompanies him. Fausto -Gassman's character- has to deal with the tragedy of being blind, he wants to commit suicide...

Fausto is a man who lost everything; he can feel the presence of a woman (which explains the title "Profumo di donna", in English "Scent of a woman") but doesn't want to be loved for pity.

It's difficult to describe a film which has a lot of themes -friendship, aging, the drama of being different from the others. But everything is treated in a delicate and moving way, although it's not a film for making you cry.

Vittorio Gassman performance is simply superb -he won a prize in Cannes in 1975. The picture got that same year an Academy Award nomination.

In 1992 Al Pacino starred in an American remake -"Scent of a woman", as I said the title is the exact translation from the Italian one. The actor won an Oscar but the film is not as good as the original. Apart from the extraordinary Pacino performance, everything is treated in a typical Hollywood way, with a more schematic story (for example the fact that the blind officer later helps his young companion is absent in the original film).

I suggest the people who only saw the Al Pacino version to see the Vittorio Gassman film -it's softer and more complex at the same time.