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

[Admin (Sebastian)]

There really is no good reason for the lack of a BluRay. I am watching this now on German Amazon Prime and while it’s not the best HD transfer in town, it surely is sourced in a way that a BluRay might be on the cards. Someone talk to Minverva and do this.
But oh boy that German dub, mostly improvised jokery

[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.

[Gritz]

Raro is bringing this to blu-ray in March and I am in. Always enjoyed this!!!

[Admin (Sebastian)]

oh wow thanks for the tip. Will research and update the home video calendar

[Admin (Sebastian)]

This movie’s page in the SWDb has been upgraded to the new “SWDb 3.0” format. Please have a look and let us know if there’s something you can add (information, trivia, links, pictures, etc.).

[QuickDraw (Lewis)]

The Belle Starr Story now has a poll available on the original post at the top of the thread!

[I_love_Cat_Stevens]

Just finished watching this. The beginning titles reminded me of James Bond films, even the song sounded like something out of a 007 movie.

I wanted to like the film but it progressed so slowly and felt boring at times. Also, I felt like there was something missing from Belle Starr as a character even though the characters were well written (everyone had their own personalities and all those small details). Belle could’ve been more badass but she seemed to soften towards the end of the film. But I have to say, Elsa Martinelli and Francesca Righini were absolutely gorgeous and George Eastman was amazing too.

An okay film but could’ve been so much better

[QuickDraw (Lewis)]

@I_love_Cat_Stevens

An okay film but could’ve been so much better

Yeah, pretty much.

Don’t forget to put a rating on the poll… if you’re so inclined.

[LankyGringo (Brian)]

This is just me, and I am probably reading too much into it, but I had a nagging feeling through the whole film that Elsa Martinelli didn’t really want to be there. It felt as if she were just going through the motions and trying to get it over with as soon as possible.

[Perdono (Andreas)]

Can anybody tell me if there is a uncut version ?
Amazon 1:35:28
German Blue-ray 1:39:45
English version on YouTube 1:39:56
German Leonine DVD 1:35:28
Onceuponatimeinawestern.com 1:43:00
Comingsoon.it 1:43:00

THX

[Admin (Sebastian)]

who says it’s cut somewhere? just checking, but these discrepancies are rather minor and could be due to different opening/closing credits, pal/ntsc/hd differences etc…