A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Thursday, November 13, 2025

Killer Nun (Giulio Berruti, 1979)

Anita Ekberg in Killer Nun

Cast: Anita Ekberg, Alida Valli, Massimo Serato, Paola Morra, Joe Dallesandro, Lou Castel, Daniele Dublino, Laura Nucci, Alice Gherardi, Nerina Montagnani. Screenplay: Giulio Berruti, Alberto Tarallo. Cinematography: Antonio Maccoppi. Production design: Franco Vanorio. Film editing: Mario Giacco. Music: Alessandro Alessandroni. 

In Giulio Berruti's Killer Nun Anita Ekberg plays Sister Gertrude, a hospital nurse recovering from an operation to remove a brain tumor whose erratic behavior outrages the patients -- in a fit of rage she even stomps on an elderly woman's false teeth. Gertrude is addicted to morphine, and when that gets in short supply, she slips away to the city, doffs her habit, sells her mother's ring to buy more, and has sex with a stranger she picks up in a bar. Back at the hospital, patients start dying in unusual circumstances, and Gertrude manages to put the blame on the head physician and get him fired. But among her manifest sins, is she guilty of murder?  Berruti tries to integrate nudity and lurid violence into a story, based on an actual case, divided between two impulses: to shock. or to make the characters into actual people. The latter impulse is partly thwarted by the casting: Ekberg, never much of an actress. can't handle Gertrude's mood swings. In the end, the chief problem with Killer Nun is that its title promises a sleaze that it doesn't deliver in a story it doesn't know how to tell. 

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