That Malicious Age (1975) Watch Online

 

That Malicious Age (1975) Watch Online

Silvio Amadio co-wrote and directed the 1975 Italian romantic drama film That Malicious Age. Gloria Guida and Nino Castelnuovo appear in it.

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Napoleone (Castelnuovo) is an artist bored of his married life and applies to work as a gardener at a summer mansion. On his way to Elba, he meets an attractive teenage girl (Guida) who attempts to seduce him and when he gets to the mansion, he learns that she is Paola, his employers' daughter living with her mother (Anita Sanders) and stepfather (Silvio Amadio). The mother is soon attracted to Napoleone but he has a growing affection for Paola, fuelled by her flirtatious behavior and his passion eventually turns into violence against a mentally disturbed fisherman (Mimmo Palmara) courting Paola.

hapless gardener is seduced by a mother and her underage daughter Not all Gloria Guida comedies are created equal. Just like Fernando di Leo’s Blue Jeans (1975) before it That Malicious Age is another of these rather bland melodramatic and slightly tragic coming-of-age commedia sexy all’italiana exercises that are part and parcel in Guida’s early-to-mid seventies repertoire. Like any of the titles preceding it That Malicious Age has a proclivity towards melodrama but that doesn’t stop it from featuring more than a copious amount of Guida in advanced state of undress and a handful of risqué situations that it could easily classify as a regular soft erotic romp. Is it one of Gloria Guida’s best outings? That’s entirely dependent on what you come to these things for. What it does feature is enough Gloria Guida in the buff to satisfy anyone’s cravings.

Silvio Amadio was crazy about Gloria Guida. Perfectly understandable given how lovely la Guida was one of the prime Lolitas of the commedia sexy all’italiana. No, Amadio wasn’t just crazy about her. He was obsessed with her. He had filmed glorious Gloria earlier in the not entirely creatively stunted The Minor (1974) and would do so again in So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious (1975). 

Unfortunately Guida didn’t reciprocitate his amorous feelings and Amadio descended into a self-destructive tailspin as a result. Gloria - whose shapely derrière was made a legend in its own right by Mario Imperoli’s Monika (1974) and Blue Jeans (1975) - was in a relationship with famed showman/crooner Johnny Dorelli and no on-set fling with a celebrated director was worth that risk. However Guida’s claim to cinematic immortality was to come in the form of Michele Massimo Tarantini’s La Liceale (1975) (released in North America as The Teasers) with Giuseppe Pambieri and a few years down the line with Fernando di Leo’s irreverent, subtextual and widely misunderstood satire To Be Twenty (1978) where la Guida was in company of fellow Lolita Lilli Carati, genre veteran Vittorio Caprioli and the late, great Ray Lovelock. 

At behest of his high-strung (off-screen and uncredited) wife out-of-work painter Napoleone “Nino” Castellano (Nino Castelnuovo) takes up a gardening job at a summer mansion in the municipality of Portoferraio on the Mediterranean island of Elba on the Tuscan Archipelago. En route to the job interview Nino makes his acquaintance on a crowded bus with a stunning blue-eyed blonde who immediately starts flirting with him. Once at his destination he awkwardly bumbles his way through the job interview with the family matriarch (Anita Sanders), a bored socialite housewife, who instantly makes advances towards him. It is then that Nino finds out that the attractive girl he met on the bus earlier is his employer’s daughter Paola (Gloria Guida). Paola lives with her mother and absent stepfather and writer Adolfo (Andrea Aureli). As Nino settles into his new surroundings and starts to work around the house he is alternately pushed into compromising positions by the mother as well as the daughter.