Roba da ricchi

Lino Banfi e due tette come marmo di Carrara

Roba da ricchiⁱ is one of those made-for-tv productions that illustrate why European television was always much better than Americanⁱⁱ television. It really should be obvious from the above illustration (yes, this was aired before the watershed, seeing how Europe doesn't actually have this weird "watershed" thingee whatever it means), but if it isn't... hey, try Last Tango In Paris.

The story is quite simply that rich, loved, comfortable women go amok, in a lustful, uncontrollable search of violence, humiliation, pain and suffering. Because, the story (as well as reality) goes, woman is not made for well being and being well, she's made for toil and being used.

And so the rich guy's wife falls for the approximately clean and approximately musical Napoleone, a scruffy guitar-wielding bum. The princess of Monaco falls for a fat, confused and useless priest whom she for whatever reason perceives as grotesquely unbridled, violent and supermasculine (staggering, what feats of superimposition female eyes are capable of). The entire hierarchy of the Church, represented by whatever local cardinal plus the telephonic voice of John Paul II plus the entire hierarchy of the laic equivalent, represented by a female psycho-doctor-scientist supports the entire thing from the bysides, working dilligently to make the rapture more or less socially acceptable, or at least socially invisible.

And so the women get a good thrashing, their pubescent daughters get a good example and their respective husbands get a good set of horns. Life moves on, the laughs were had, the wine is drunk, the music spent, ready to spin the wheel a second time.

Serena Grandi modelling adult diapers.

1. 1987, by Sergio Corbucci with Laura Antonelli (Malizia, Mogliamante), Lino Banfi (Fracchia, La Belva Umana), Paolo Villaggio (Fantozzi, ragioner Ugo), and a bunch of other italian TV personalities, mostly forgotten today, a sort of SnL crew of the time and place. [↩]
2. The UK and its colonies is included in "American", seeing how part of the Continent it ain't. [↩]