I love those comedies from the Swinging 1960s that are part farce, part caper movie in which a huge international cast sashays through Europe in an incomprehensible plot. The cinematic equivalent to a 1960s discotheque, with its trendy music, jet set movie stars, mod costumes, and fab hair styles, this subgenre not only includes breezy examples such as Casino Royale (1967) and What’s New Pussycat? but also atrocious bombs like The Happening and Skidoo! My favorite has always been After the Fox, which I recently saw again after many years. I was delighted to discover that After the Fox not only held up for me this time around but that there was more to the film than I realized.

After the Fox failed with the critics and at the box office in 1968 when it was first released, and few have warmed up to it in the interim. The odd assembly of creative personnel is frequently cited as one of the film’s weaknesses. Comic actor Peter Sellers and beefcake movie star Victor Mature appear alongside perennial starlet Britt Ekland in a film directed by Vittorio De Sica and written by Neil Simon. While Simon, who is famous for his very American, middlebrow comedy, and De Sica, who was the acclaimed neorealist director of The Bicycle Thief, do not generally come up in the same conversation, I found nothing disastrous in their collaboration.

SELLERS AS ALDO VANUCCI, THE FOX

After the Fox was devised as a vehicle for Sellers by Simon, and the film belongs to him. Sellers was perfect at farce because he excelled at playing characters defined by eccentric accents and exaggerated mannerisms. He was skilled at both verbal and physical humor, and he became famous for playing multiple characters in the same film. Sellers had the ability to make each of his characters distinct and different, because he lost himself completely in his roles. It was his special talent, but it may have been a skill that reflected something darker. Sellers noted in interviews, “There used to be a real me, but I had it surgically removed,” and “I feel ghostly unreal until I become someone else again on the screen.”

In After the Fox, Sellers plays Aldo Vanucci, a master thief imprisoned for his crimes.  When his cohorts visit him in jail, they bring him two bits of information that encourage him to stage a break out. His younger sister Gina is running around with older men, and international criminal Mr. Okra wants Vanucci to take a stolen gold shipment and smuggle it into Italy. Aldo escapes by pretending to be the prison psychiatrist and returns home to find Gina trying to pick up an older gentleman in a sidewalk café. Enraged at her promiscuous behavior, he explodes, only to find that she was really acting in a scene in a movie. The incident inspires Vanucci to use a phony movie shoot to smuggle Mr. Okra’s gold into southern Italy. He pretends to be director Federico Fabrizi shooting a film involving a gold shipment, so that he can sneak the gold into Italy under the noses of the authorities.

DE SICA LIKED TO SHOOT IN THE LATE AFTERNOON AND CALL IN BETS FROM THE SET, TWO THINGS THAT IRKED THE AMERICANS.

The film-within-a-film structure afforded De Sica an opportunity for creative input. Simon had written the film for Sellers, who was attempting to coproduce his own films with a partner through a company called Brookfield. The writer suggested De Sica to the Sellers, who asked the Italian director to join the production. However, once on board, the director wanted to give the film “more importance,” at least according to Bert Cardullio’s biography Vittorio De Sica. To Simon, the film was a comedic romp tailored to the talents of Sellers, so he did not embrace De Sica’s desire for more depth or significance. Cesare Zavattini was given conscripting credit on the film, and my guess is that De Sica wanted Zavattini, his longtime screenwriter from the days of The Bicycle Thief, to join him on the project to help him tweak the material.

Many consider After the Fox an odd addition to De Sica’s filmography, with some actually criticizing it simply because it is such an anomaly. But, if De Sica and Zavattini are responsible for the film’s light-hearted, self-reflexive commentary on the illusory nature of popular Hollywood filmmaking, I don’t find that unusual for a director whose fame rested on neorealism, a movement at odds with Hollywood glamour and fantasy.  The gentle poke at the nature of filmmaking comes as soon as Aldo misconstrues his sister’s scene at sidewalk café; she’s supposed to in a movie scene being shot on location, but he thinks she is having an affair with the corpulent, older man who is her costar. In his hysteria over her behavior, he screams “harlot” in the same breath as “starlet.” He discovers that she no longer goes by Gina Vanucci but is now Gina Romantica, a name that reflects her star image as a sexual fantasy figure, a type of role that perpetual starlet Britt Ekland never escaped. Starlet/ harlot, indeed! I wonder if there is significance to the fact that Gina Romantica sounds perilously close to Gina Lollobrigida—perhaps a stab at the exaggerated,  uber-glamorous Italian movie actresses who dominated Cinecitta’s film production during the 1960s. They were a far cry from the earthiness and naturalism of earlier Italian actresses such as Anna Magnani and Giulietta Masina.

EKLAND AS GINA ROMANTICA

As in most of his movies, Sellers’ character disguises himself as someone else, in this case the phony film director Federico Fabrizi. Fabrizi gestures broadly and wears glasses with black frames just like the real-life director who inspired him, Federico Fellini. At one point, Fabrizi explains that he is making a neorealist film. “What’s neorealism?” asks another character. “No money,” replies the cynical American agent representing aging Hollywood star Tony Powell.

Tony Powell is played with just the right amount of narcissism and insecurity by Victor Mature. Powell worries that his beefcake good lucks and masculine sex appeal are fading, so he is constantly looking into mirrors, touching up his hair and eyebrows. He tries to dazzle those around him with a too-broad smile plastered onto his face. Like Mature, Powell became famous for playing detectives in Golden Age movies, so when Fabrizi explains that the storyline of his fake movie is about “man’s search for his own identity,” adding “art is art” and “art is love,” Powell agrees to be in it “in a trench coat.” Indeed, to play Powell, who becomes the star of the film-within-a-film, Mature wears an old trench coat that he had worn in his detective films from the Golden Age.

VICTOR MATURE IS FUNNY AS TONY POWELL,WITH HIS EVER-PRESENT MOVIE-STAR SMILE

My favorite movie-related scenes are those that poke fun at the Italian film industry’s preference for dubbing all sound. During the post-neorealist era, the Italians re-recorded 100% of the dialogue and sound effects for their films, adding them in post-production. International cast members spoke their lines in their native tongues while performing during shooting, but that version of the dialogue was never used in the final film. All dialogue and sound effects were re-recorded in post-production and dubbed in. Legend has it that many of Italy’s finest actors didn’t bother to learn their lines during shooting, often making up their dialogue or reciting numbers while they acted. Because Italian films were distributed all over the world, producers dubbed certain characters with multiple actors from different countries, depending on what languages they needed for distribution purposes. The Italians became notorious for dubbing characters with voices that didn’t seem to match their appearances. After the Fox pokes fun at this convention twice: In one scene, Vanucci meets his contact in a restaurant to discuss the smuggling caper. He sits next to a beautiful woman whom he immediately begins to romance, but the words that come from her mouth are spoken in a gruff male voice. It’s actually the voice of his partner in crime, who sits behind the woman to convey the details of their plans, while the woman mouths each of his words in perfect synchronization. At the end, Vanucci remarks, “It’s been a real pleasure doing business with a man as beautiful as you.” Later, two carriage horses meet at a fountain and begin drinking. One seems to say to the other, “Do you have the plan?” Then the camera pulls back to reveal that it is Vanucci speaking with his partner.

IN THIS SCENE, THE BEAUTIFUL WOMAN SEEMS TO SPEAK WITH THE GRUFF VOICE OF A MAN, A JOKE ABOUT THE ITALIAN FILM INDUSTRY'S PENCHANT FOR DUBBING DIALOGUE.

De Sica makes a cameo appearance in the film as an Italian director sitting on a crane while he shoots a scene during a sand storm. He demands, “More sand,” as he disappears into a cloud of blowing dirt and debris. When the wind machines die down and visibility returns, the director discovers his film equipment is completely gone—including the crane—as Vanucci and his gang literally steal it out from under him.

Stories of Sellers’ bizarre and extreme behavior may have set the stage for the film’s negative reception. He and De Sica fought bitterly as he tried to control the action on the set, particularly the direction of the actors. Sellers complained the director couldn’t speak English, and De Sica preferred shooting only in the early evenings. The friction was compounded by the fact that Sellers and Ekland, who were married at the time, fought constantly because of the actor’s jealousy and temper. While shooting in Rome, the couple rented a huge villa; Sellers demanded that Ekland carry a walkie-talkie when they were not in the same part of the apartment so he could keep tabs on what she was doing. Their evenings were often spent arguing, and one night, she escaped his wrath by crawling through a window in her night clothes and finding refuge with her neighbors.

SELLERS AS ALDO VANUCCI PLAYING FEDERICO FABRIZI

Simon was confounded by the superstitious behavior of De Sica and his crew. Once, after Mature threw his script into the sea in a fit of frustration, a crew member fished it out, and De Sica sent for a local priest to bless it. Oddly enough, instead of fueling Sellers’ temper, De Sica’s superstitions influenced Sellers. De Sica despised the color purple and would not allow the color to be part of the set design or costumes, telling Sellers it was the color of death. The comic actor, who had already suffered one serious heart attack, took the superstition seriously, and for the rest of his life would not tolerate the color purple. Not only did he refuse to have purple be part of the sets or costumes, assistants had to sweep offices and hotel rooms for the color before his arrival.

Though not Sellers’ best film, he is incredibly funny and deft at his disguises and masquerades in After the Fox, while De Sica’s self-reflexive touches on the nature of 1960s filmmaking are quite entertaining. Plus, I guarantee that if you listen to the theme song performed by Sellers with the Hollies, it will stick with you almost as long as the film.