Swept Away

Most ‘shouts’ for movies – those quotes you see promoting movies have the quoted person saying something like “plumbs the depths of human emotion” or whatever. A 1974 film by left wing Italian feminist Lina Wertmulla, had this ‘shout’ on the Walhalla poster that hung in our living room when I was a student. “Don’t tell me I can’t make films about sex and violence you arsehole”. Well it certainly got my attention. And it was one of the most confronting movies I ever saw. It’s title is “Swept Away… By an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August” usually abbreviated to “Swept Away” and reprised by Madonna a few years ago in a disastrous remake. Having wanted to watch it again for a long time, and having not found it in video stores, I discovered the original, complete in 12 parts on YouTube. Part 1, which leads you to part 2 and so on, is here. Amusingly the number of times each video’s been watched falls from 13,962 to 2,843 for Part 12 – the last installment.

You can even watch the whole thing in somewhat better shape dubbed into English here, but I suspect the Italian version I watched last night is better to watch.

Anyway, it would be fair to say that opinions differ about the merit of the film! You’ll understand why if you watch it.

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The Worst of Perth
13 years ago

Maximum 4 stars from Ebert even with the raping? Looks like a scream.

Did you notice you have a hotlink no-no image complete with wagging finger? I thought it was an ad for the film.

The Worst of Perth
13 years ago

(When I view) The image to the left of the text has an animated wagging finger from the movie poster site saying “oops, it looks like someone hotlinked to our image. We don’t mind if you use our image, but please download it and put it on your own server, we pay a fortune for bandwidth, so please put it on your own server…(follows much, much more “dude not cool” text from movieposters.com.

Is noone else seeing this? If I follow the image properties link I get the poster, but there’s an anti hotlink image coming up on a straight link to this post.

But the movie. I feel I’ve seen it.

A

The Worst of Perth

The Worst of Perth
13 years ago

Now it’s resolved. I kinda liked the wagging finger.