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Tuesday, February 23, 2010

It is all about the dress!

During the height of the Spy-Craze in 1966, Marisa Mell played the part of Charity Farrel in the secret agent movie "New York Chiama Super Drago", directed by Georgio Ferroni. In this movie, she is some kind of a double agent luring our secret agent Super Drago into a trap and in the end regretting it by paying with her life!
Marisa Mell was dressed for this production by Adriana Berselli a costume designer and costumière with quite a reputation in this field working for movies during her career like "L' Aventurra" by Michelangelo Antonioni with Monica Vitti or "The Cassandra Crossing" by George Cosmatos with Sophia Loren. A grey-blue-ish sleeveless evening dress worn by Marisa Mell catches the eye in this movie. It was so popular by the producers that it got a prominent place on most of the lobby cards and the poster promoting the movie. But that was not enough. For the Italian lobby card of the French movie "Le Train d' Enfer" from 1965 with Jean Marais as leading man, released a year later in Italy, the producers of that movie, took the Marisa Mell shot from New York Chiama Super Drago and incorporated it into their own lobby card with title "Danger Dimensione Morte" to make the scene more exiciting. The only difference is that the dress is now some kind of ruby red in stead of grey-blue. This was common practice during the booming days of Euro cult movies especially for Spaghetti Westerns with more than 800 movies produced. So finding a good motive for a lobby card or poster was not easy. After a certain time the production designers ran out of motives and copied motives from other movies that got the most success and transfered them to their own movie posters and lobby cards. Work done!

3 comments:

Alex B. said...

I love this blog as I'm into 60's/70's culture and fashions.
Am very interested in lerning more about Marisa, too! Thanks for some terrific info and pictures

Mirko di Wallenberg said...

Hi Alex, thanks for the nice words! You have also a well documented blog! I made a link on my blog to yours! Best wishes, Mirko!

Alex B. said...

Well, I returned the favour now and added a link to your blog on mine:)