Review: ‘Senso’ uncovers a visually splendid Italian melodrama rarely seen in America

Film Critic For a much admired work by a major director, “Senso” has taken a long time to get to Los Angeles theaters in a form close to its original shape. Starring the unlikely couple of America’s Farley Granger and Europe’s Alida Valli, “Senso” first reached English-speaking audiences in a cut-down and dubbed version with the wacky title of “The Wanton Countess.” The original Italian version, with Granger dubbed, as was the custom, did not reach even as far as New York theaters until 1968, when the New York Times dismissed it as “closer to soap opera than Mr. Visconti imagined.” A reaction like this was certainly not what Visconti, eventually responsible for classics ranging from “Rocco and His Brothers” and “The Leopard” to “Death in Venice,” had in mind when he and top Italian screenwriter Suso Cecchi d’Amico began adapting the novella by Camillo Boito. Instead “Senso” stars Valli, who’d been a knockout playing opposite Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles in “The Third Man,” and Granger, who seemed like a hot ticket after the Alfred Hitchcock double bill of “Rope” and “Strangers on a Train.” Certainly from a visual point of view, “Senso,” which the celebrated French critic Georges Sadoul called “one of the most beautiful Italian films ever made,” lived up to expectations. Aldo and Robert Krasker with Giuseppe Rotunno serving as camera operator, “Senso” is visually lush and luxurious from its opening sequences shot at Venice’s Teatro La Fenice opera house to later shots at a Palladian villa outside of town to expansive panoramas of military action that close the film. Though Visconti and Cecchi d’Amico receive the main screenwriting credit, “collaborators” Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles also get on-screen credit, and in fact “Senso” often has the emotional hot house atmosphere that characterized Williams’ late plays.