Director: Edoardo Re (aka Mario Caiano); Scr: Mario Caiano; Photo: Giovanni Ciarlo; Music: Franco Bixio; Prod Dir: Ennio Onorati; Film Ed : Claudio Cutry; Art Dir/Costume Design: Riccardo Domenici

CAST: Rosalba Neri (Bona), Christa Linder (Fiora), Peter Landers (exorcist), Toni Ucci (Nicolo), Rosemarie Lindt (Nicolo's wife), Orchidea de Santos (Amanda), Mario Frera (Bona's husband), Clara Colosimo (Fiora's mother), Fausto di Bella (Menico da Pistola), Linda Sini (Lady Brenda), Giacomo Rizzo (Minchiotto), Dante Cleri (doctor)

NOTES: after the success of Pasolini's Decameron and Bruno Corbucci's Boccaccio in 1971, the Italian film industry went wild in 1972-73, producing nearly four dozen imitations in two years! One of these was Tales of Viterbury, directed by Mario Caiano under the pseudonym "Edoardo Re." Since my Italian vocabulary is largely restricted to food-related words, I cannot vouch for the complete accuracy of the following, but I did my best.

Like the bulk of the Decameron imitations, Tales of Viterbury is a period film and consists of a series of episodes. The framing story: a group of women are doing their laundry and begin to tell lusty tales. Story #1 involves a young man who marries a young woman without ever having seen her face (she always wears a veil, which should have been a warning sign right there, but her mother makes some excuse about a vow, etc., and he falls for it). On his wedding night, the husband is shocked to see that his bride has an attractive body but a really ugly (I mean, witch-ugly) face. Add to this the young man's inexperience with sex, and the bride is left unsatisfied. Her mother volunteers to give the groom some "lessons," but as the episode ends, the frustrated bride is stuck outside the bedroom as her mother and husband enjoy themselves. Story #2 concerns the various attempts of a young man to make love to his girlfriend, despite her hostile father's presence. After numerous failures (he disguises himself as a scarecrow and has himself smuggled into the castle in a barrel, among other schemes), the man gives up.

The third story is the longest. A woman and her older husband (who resembles Akim Tamiroff or Víctor Alcocer) move into a "haunted" house. The "ghost" is the woman's lover, who tries to scare the husband away. However, the man returns with a wacky exorcist. The exorcist turns out to have a thing for the attractive wife himself, and after getting the husband and lover out of the way, starts to get busy, only to be attacked and driven off by a demonic turkey. The turkey apparently has some ideas of its own...

Episode #4 stars Christa Linder as Fiora, a young woman who develops (imaginary) painful cramps in her private parts. Her mother consults a doctor. Their solution is to force the kitchen servant boy to have sex with Fiora, which seems to alleviate the pain. Note: Christa Linder is topless for virtually the entire episode. In the fifth story, a farmer (who looks like Sid Caesar) has a hard time convincing his wife to have sex with him, but once she gets started, she won't quit. The farmer is exhausted by her constant demands. Episode #6: a bandit robs a traveling bishop of a valuable painting and of his robes. A large, bald man (who has a high-pitched voice and says he was castrated in some kind of accident) insists that the "bishop" give his young and attractive wife the last rites. However, her illness is "lack of sex," and the disguised bandit is happy to provide the cure. He and the husband have a long fight, but the bandit leaps out of the window, right into a large fishing net. As the episode ends, the false bishop is working with other convicted clergy, turning a wheel which grinds flour. The seventh and last episode takes place in a small town, where a large bearded man (who resembles Bud Spencer) overhears several waitresses talking about the impressive sexual-physical attributes of another visitor. The bearded man knows this is the same man who had an affair with his daughter (wife?) the year before, leaving her pregnant. He helps the man (who is wimpy-looking, in contrast with his reported sexual prowess) escape from soldiers who are there to arrest him for another crime, on the condition that he "do the right thing" and marry his daughter. They are chained together so the slippery lover can't escape. However, a short time later the scrawny Lothario betrays the bearded man, accusing him of being a criminal and handing him over to some soldiers. As the film ends, the women grab their passing husbands and drag them into the laundry shed for some recreation.

Tales of Viterbury is not really very entertaining, and in fact not even very sexy. Episode #2 has almost no sex or nudity, and #3 is also rather skimpy in this regard. The other stories have a fair amount of topless shots and some bare buttocks, but no frontal nudity, and in fact the simulated sex is brief and mostly comic (in the "fake bishop" episode, the young wife and the bandit are so energetic that they wreck the bed!). I'm sure my lack of comprehension of spoken Italian caused me to miss some of the humor, but I don't think the picture would be that funny in any case. Rosalba Neri and Christa Linder are the only two performers I 've ever heard of, but then again I'm not an expert on Italian cinema. Christa Linder's episode is rather short and pointless, and she's seen to better effect in other movies.

Back to the Christa Linder Films Page.

Posted 1 May 2000 by D. Wilt (dw45@umail.umd.edu)