The 10th Victim. We Still Kill the Old Way. Property Is No Longer a Theft. Todo Modo. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion. Elio Petri made movies that challenged viewers and sadly, he died at 53, an age well too young and one that should have left many years to continue pushing cinema.

Based on The Beckoning Fair One” by Oliver Onions — where do you think the soundtrack team got their name? — A Quiet Place In the Country stands between and yet above so many genre. Is it giallo? Gothic horror? An art film? Comic book trash, as The Boston Globe wrote? Can it be all of those?

Leonardo Ferri (Franco Nero) hasn’t been able to paint for a long time. His girlfriend Flavia (Vanessa Redgrave) keeps pushing him to get back to painting so she can sell his work at her gallery. She rents him a mansion out in the countryside, but he feels lost. Then he notices an abandoned property and moves in, a place once taken care of by Attilio (Georges Géret). He hires a housekeeper, Egle (Rita Calderoni in her first world, not yet entering the psychosexual world of Renato Polselli’s films) and begins to make the place new again.

Yet there are noises everywhere and strange feelings. A shopkeeper tells him that a girl, Wanda (Gabriella Boccardo), died there during World War II, shot by a plane. He keeps seeing a man leave flowers on his property every day. Flavia leaves when the house itself seems to attack her, as a hole opens under her feet and a bookshelf nearly falls on her.

Without her, Leonardo becomes obsessed with Wanda, learning how every man in town was in love with her and every woman hated her. Was she a nymphomanic using everyone? Was she looking for love that she didn’t have anywhere else? Was she using everyone or were they using her? He finally tracks down her mother (Madeleine Damien) to Venice where she lives in a small apartment. Telling her that he’s a journalist, he takes photos of her back to the house.

The person leaving the flowers ends up being Attillo. He tells her that he never cared that she loved anyone else, that they had a secret room where her mother watched them make love through a mirror, that the only time he ever grew jealous was when he watched her be mounted by a German soldier who he killed. She helped him bury the body on that day, the same one she died in the air strike.

Flavia comes back and learns that Leonardo has given up on everything. Even his attempts at romance are too rough and between an electric current that strikes her and being strangled by unseen fingers during a seance, she knows she can no longer stay. As the guests department, Leonardo follows her, stabbing her before tearing her to pieces with a shovel. He also attacks his maid and her boyfriend, using them as part of his art before his mind goes a series of visions in which soldiers force people to paint on the grounds and Atillo reveals that Wanda survived the air attack and he was the one who killed her. As the police come to arrest him, he realizes that Flavia stands in the crowd with the onlookers.

Months — or years? — later, he is confined to a mental institution. All he does is work, finally being able to paint sexualized artwork, living off pornography and chocolate. The orderly takes his work, telling him he needs even more and delivers them to Flavia, who hides from his window. She remarks that she wishes that she had his life, as it looks so relaxing.

This movie made me cry more than once and sometimes from joy and other times from the abject nature of my sadness. Perhaps also the Ennio Morricone score. It’s emotional when a movie works so well, when you realize that this is the only first-time watch that you will ever get. And it strikes a nerve that Franco is looking for someone who was never there, a woman who is perfect because he only sees her in his mind, but every man, even the ones who touched her before, cannot forget her, as her ghost — memories and not supernatural, mind you — will remain burning hot in their memories as they settle for their wives and lives. Is Franco’s character any different than them? Is Flavia not attacked at all by the supernatural but perhaps the one who engineered all of this, a non-horror ending that turns this into the giallo? Did anyone die? Did anyone live?

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Radley Metzger made this movie in black and white to, as he told The Rialto Report, “to deliberately align it more closely to classic cinematic love stories of yesteryear rather than the often gaudy sexploitation movies that were de rigueur in the late 1960s.”

Thérèse (Essy Persson, who is also in Metzger’s I, A Woman, Mission Stardust and Cry of the Banshee) and Isabelle (Anna Gaël, also known as Anna Abigail Thynn, Marchioness of Bath; Ceawlin Thynn, 8th Marquess of Bath; Viscountess Weymouth; the Dowager Marchioness; the Honorable Lady Thynn; as you can tell by her title, Gaël’s life was fascinating, beyond acting in movies like Dracula and Son and Zeta One. According to the introduction to her incredible Rialto Report interview, she spent the 70s married to a “…wealthy British aristocrat, a controversial and scandalous union that started when Anna was just 15, and involved salacious stories of hundreds of lovers, erotic paintings of the Kama Sutra that police deemed to be obscene, one of the most famous English stately homes, and allegations of racism that caused the break-up of a noble family.”) are two young women who fall in love after Thérèse is taken to a boarding school by her remarried mother. The entire story is told in flashback; as it was shot without sound in the style of Italian movies, the dubbed nature of the film adds a dreamlike quality.

Roger Ebert called it “the worst movie of the year” and “another of his traveling stupidity exhibitions, which masquerade as “art films” to get into respectable theaters.”

I don’t know if he saw the same movie that I did, to be honest. I was touched by the loss that Thérèse feels as she walks the halls of her abandoned school, remembering when love was young and the feelings of being with the first person that you love. That’s my than smut or a so-called dirty movie in my eyes.

Shot directly after Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik, this Roger Vadim-directed movie is based on the comic book of the same name by Jean-Claude Forest. The film stars Vadim’s then-wife Jane Fonda as Barbarella, a United Earth agent sent to find scientist Durand Durand, who has created a weapon that could destroy humanity.

Vadim was hired to direct this film after producer Dino De Laurentiis purchased the rights. This led to Vadim looking to cast several actresses in the title role, including Virna Lisi, Brigitte Bardot (that’s who the character was originally based on) and Sophia Loren before ending up picking his wife.

In case you’re wondering why this movie is such a mess, Charles B. Griffith was the last writer to work on it, saying that he had done uncredited work on the script after fifteen other writers — including Terry Southern — worked on the movie.

This film is packed with fashion, amazing sets — you can credit Bava’s film for some of that, and great characters, like John Phillip Law (who used the break in shooting to be in the aforementioned Danger: Diabolik) as Pygar the angel, Anita Pallenberg (Performance) as the Black Queen, Milo O’Shea as Durand-Durand, Marcel Marceau in a rare speaking role as Professor Ping, David Hemmings (Deep Red) as Dildano and even cameos from Fabio Testi and Antonio Sabato (who was originally to play the role that Hemmings ended up doing).

So yeah. This is a gorgeous film that makes no sense whatsoever. Is that such a bad thing? I first watched this as a child on HBO and I think when the part came in which the birds tear apart Barbarella’s clothes, my parents decided that it was time for me to go to bed. I was hooked on movies that were seen as being wrong for me to watch and Italian-shot films.

A sequel was planned with producer Robert Evans called Barbarella Goes Down, but it never happened. Nor did a 1990 remake, a Robert Rodriguez idea or a potential project with Nicolas Winding Refn, who moved on to other projects, saying, “…certain things are better left untouched. You don’t need to remake everything.”

The Arrow Video release of Barbarella is, as you always expect, overflowing with features. It starts with a brand new 4K restoration from the original negative by Arrow Films, all inside a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Tula Lotay. It comes with a double-sided fold-out poster featuring the same artwork, six double-sided postcards and an illustrated book with new writing on the movie by Anne Billson, Paul Gravett, Véronique Bergen and Elizabeth Castaldo Lundén, and select archival material.

There’s audio commentary by film critic Tim Lucas, as well as alternative opening and closing credits in 4K with Dolby Vision and the isolated score.

Extras include an appreciation by film critic Glenn Kenny, a two-hour in-depth discussion between film and cultural historians Tim Lucas and Steve Bissette, a feature on the costume designs, an interview with camera operator Roberto Girometti, actor/director Ricky Tognazzi discussing the life and work of his father Ugo Tognazzi, an interview with Fabio Testi, a video essay by Eugenio Ercolani on producer Dino De Laurentiis, a trailer, U.S. TV and radio commercials and an image gallery.

You can get it on 4K UHD or blu ray from MVD.

As he watches the circus, Sergei “Polack” Kowalski (Franco Nero) thinks that one of the performers is Paco Roman (Tony Musante), which makes him think back to when they were revolutionaries and battled against another mercenary named Curly (Jack Palance).

Much like another Nero character, Django, Kowalski has a gun that gives him a big advantage, a Hotchkiss M1914 machine gun. Paco hires him to teach him how to lead a revolution. They go from town to town, stealing money, horses and weapons, even adding another member to their group, Columbia (Giovanna Ralli, What Have They Done to Your Daughters?).

Yet Paco and Kowalski soon start fighting over how much it costs to have him be part of the revolution. Finally, Paco imprisons him and marries Colombia, but then Curly and his men attack. He tries to free Kowalski, who turns the tables on him and he has to be saved by his wife.

Back to the circus, where Curly and his men attack. Kowalski kills them all and gives each man a bullet for their final duel. Then, he takes Paco to collect the reward only for Colombia to betray them both or so it seems before she and the circus performers create a diversion big enough for our two heroes to use machine guns to kill every one of their enemies. Kowalski suggests to Paco that they should be mercenaries, not understanding the dream of the revolution.

Director Sergio Corbucci set the standard for violence in Italian Westerns in movies like Django and The Great Silence before making comedies. Yes, somehow, the same man who made Super Fuzz made the most depressing Western ever, one that leaves its hero and his lover dead in the snow.

You can watch this on Tubi.