The Sensuous Nurse

1975

Part1:

Ursula Andress film clips

samples below

(tomorrow: the other women in the cast.)

Scoop's notes:

God bless those guys at NoShame Films, whoever they might be, for bringing The Sensuous Nurse to DVD. They did everything right.

The Sensuous Nurse is one of the great Italian sex farces of the 60s and 70s, but nobody has known that for a couple of reasons. First, it has never been available on DVD. Second, the available video tapes were not only of inferior quality, but were significantly expurgated as well. Although the film runs more than 100 minutes long, various video versions have been as short as 77 minutes. This DVD not only restores the film to its original full length, but also preserves the original widescreen aspect ratio, and has been digitally re-mastered from the vault negatives. The DVD even includes a 23 minute featurette about the film. Such a feature is rare for any 30-year-old film, let alone one which originally ran in Italy's "seconda visione" circuit (roughly the equivalent in quality of America's drive-in circuit).

The low IMDb rating is just crazy. I have to assume that the people who assigned those low grades must have seen the truncated versions, and that those versions must have been edited down to incoherence. The full version not only looks good, but it works quite well, both as a lowbrow comedy and as erotica. There are sexy scenes; there are funny scenes; and there are funny sex scenes. Oh, sure, the humor is crude. It consists mainly of mugging and lowbrow hijinks. The liner notes mention that this film is basically like a Benny Hill sketch expanded to feature length, and that's true, but it's such good-natured, irreverent, over-the-top fun that I found myself laughing out loud several times, almost against my will. The politically incorrect comedy is just the icing on the cake, because the primary appeal of the film is not one but two naked Bond girls: Ursula Andress (Dr. No) and Luciana Paluzzi (Thunderball). Luciana didn't remove her panties, but I think this movie presents your only opportunity to see her ample bosom. Ursula showed it all, again and again, and looked magnificent doing so. Pretty Carla Romanelli also supplied full frontal and rear nudity in a comic role, and one other woman stripped stark naked just to get her nipples tweaked by Jack Palance while he was making a phone call.

The plot concerns a rich old man who has a heart attack during sex with a younger woman. Expecting his imminent demise, his family has just about divided his possessions when the family doctor presents them with the bad news: he might recover. The doctor has two things to add: (1) the old man would surely die if he had a second heart attack; (2) he will need constant care and, given his financial status, can and should be attended by a full-time nurse. His scheming nephew thinks about these medical recommendations and realizes that if the two points were to be combined into one, it would be a sinister and profitable plot. What if the old man had a full-time nurse so gorgeous that he would have to mount her, thus causing his second heart attack?

Enter Ursula Andress.

Andress eventually comes to realize that the old boy is quite a good fellow, while his family consists of a bunch of greedy sycophants, so she backs out of the scheme, falls in love with the old man, and ...

... well, I think you can probably take it from there.

Some of the family members are hilarious. One of the nephews is a retired war veteran who seems to think he's still in the army, and re-creates various military exercises and maneuvers around the grounds of the estate, complete with military music played on a powerful sound system. His nemesis is the local drunkard, who loves to play pranks on him by sabotaging his equipment. Those two characters, and their rivalry for the affections of the gorgeous maid, fuel much of the comedy.

Without really thinking it through, I started watching the film in English with English sub-titles, and that turned out to be a great idea, because the translations were radically different, and sometimes one of the two came up with a much funnier way to translate the Italian jokes into English equivalents. You will miss some of the humor if you choose only one or the other. The American English dubbing is surprisingly good - not good in the sense of "co-ordinated with the lip movements," but good in the sense of "actually employing real actors with a deft comic touch." Although I lack sufficient skills to understand the Italian soundtrack, I have to think the American actors probably did an excellent job at conveying the humor of the original Italian script.

I thought I was watching this film in order to record the nudity dutifully, but I ended up enjoying the hell out of it, dumb though it was. I recommend this DVD if you have any interest in the Italian sex farces of that period, or in the beautiful women in the cast.