The Girl from Trieste

Muti is saved from a watery grave, artificially respirated, and then confronted on the beach by expatriate cartoonist Gazzara, who in no time is brazenly squinting down her bodice. When she confesses to doing such suicidal things for kicks, it's plain he should duck for cover, but as her eccentricity runs on down to barking lunacy, so he becomes more and more obsessive, the fool. By the time she has shaved her head bald, it's clear that it's going to end badly, and her desperate yearning for punishment is going to allow Campanile full rein in showing all its festering detail. Gazzara coasts through it, rumbling away in his best Hemingway manner; and Muti seems to be cornering the market in doe-eyed doxies with a serious Catholic problem; the rest is just a gaudy treadmill. CPea.