The Belle Starr Story / Il mio corpo per un poker (Lina Wertmüller, 1968)

[Mickey13]

Copied from the Spagvemberfest 2022 thread:

@Mickey13

A tolerable romance western with a bit of an artificial storyline. While it is hard to qualify the material as anything particularly good, the differing touch renders the composition intriguing and albeit kind of contrived, the utilization of flashbacks diversifies the flow of the narrative to some extent, distinguishing it from scores of spaghetti westerns by reason of some character elaboration and nonlinearity alone. With that being said, only some of it works and despite aiming for an epic atmosphere, the motion picture exhibits rather anaemic direction, lackluster visual style, narrative indifference and conspicuously falls short of its lofty goals.

It also appears to be structurally disjointed in virtue of its flashbacks lasting for as long as half an hour in total and preponderating over the present time of the story, thus following the retrospections feels like viewing a movie within a movie so to speak. At the very least, it undoubtedly constitutes something different and is a bit of a curiosity for that reason alone. Nonetheless, that quality alone cannot make up for the fact that a large portion of the narration feels quite garbled, pretentious and eventually gets bogged down by its overambitious aspirations. You can definitely give it a shot out of pure curiosity if you are a completist and have to see it all, but it’s nothing essential by any stretch of the imagination.