Giacomo Assandri

A couple (Carati and Cricotti) have to rent a hotel room which is really a haunted house. Well haunted is overstating it. Just old Renzo as a horny ghost who wants to get it on with Carati. Sexual frolics abound, Carati takes baths and has sex and hubby fulfills his role as cuckold.

The town drunk of Gallatin, Missouri is former outlaw Franky James, brother of Jesse James. He is reformed by a woman, a young boy and a dog. He helps rid the town of corrupt town boss Mr. Morgan.

This homage to Italy’s “White Telephone” films (sophisticated comedy-dramas revolving around working-class girls) of the 1930s gives Agostina Belli her best role – going from chambermaid to prostitute to singer to film-star to mistress of ‘Il Duce’! – for which she received a special David Di Donatello award, the Italian equivalent of the Oscar. Incidentally, the English title evokes memories of Octave Mirbeau’s ‘scandalous’ novel “Diary Of A Chambermaid” – thrice brought to the screen (in Hollywood in 1946 by Frenchman Jean Renoir, in France in 1964 by Spaniard Luis Bunuel and in 1974, typically as a sexploitationer, by prolific “Euro-Cult” exponent Jess Franco: the latter being the only one I haven’t watched and don’t own in any form). At other points in the narrative, the film also reminded me of A STAR IS BORN (itself filmed several times) and BELLE DE JOUR (1967), Bunuel’s celebrated classy treatment of prostitution…