It may be a beautiful city, swarmed by tourists, bursting with art and listed as a Unesco World Heritage site, but for filmmakers, Venice has always had a very morbid attraction. In movie after movie, it is associated with death, corruption or romantic betrayal and sexual humiliation. It’s a metropolis that is sinking and decaying, where visitors invariably get lost figuratively and literally.
The re-release (on 5 July) of Nic Roeg’s masterpiece, Don’t Look Now (1973), is a reminder of just how oppressive the city so often seems on screen. While others rhapsodised about the churches and the paintings in Venice, Roeg in interviews would talk about the putrid smell that wafted over the Venice lagoon. He deliberately shot the film out of season. “Winters are really quite grim in Venice. There is a sense of isolation, of its separateness,” the director later reflected. He talked of the city’s “eeriness, its strangeness, its sense of doom”.
Although Roeg shows familiar landmarks and shoots in churches and on canals, Don’t Look Now is a very long way removed from the Baedeker Guide vision of Venice. Its protagonists, the bereaved couple (Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland), getting over the drowning of their daughter, endure a series of ever more uncanny and disturbing experiences in Venice (where the husband has come to work). He keeps on thinking he is seeing his daughter in her familiar red anorak disappearing down alleyways. The reason the red jacket sticks out so garishly is that the colours are otherwise so muted. A serial killer is on the prowl. A blind medium claims to have contact with the dead child.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
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This is a supremely creepy and offbeat film that skirts the line between macabre thriller and psychodrama about grief. Watching it does nothing at all to make you want to visit the city in which it is set.
There are many other movies in different genres (literary adaptations, crime thrillers and biopics among them) in which the Venetian scenes have the same miasmatic atmosphere.
“You turn and take a right and then you turn and take a right,” the hotel concierge tells the British couple, Colin and Mary (Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson), early in Paul Schrader’s The Comfort of Strangers (1990). The remark sums up perfectly the baffling, maze-like quality of the city. The couple try to follow the concierge’s instructions but quickly end up hopelessly disoriented. When they are tired and vulnerable, the sleek but malevolent local, Robert (Christopher Walken), in his white Armani suit, sidles his way into their lives with predictably lethal consequences.
Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1971) may boast gorgeous production design but it shows a city in the grip of disease. Its lead character, the composer Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde), has an unwholesome obsession with a teenage boy. Warner Bros were bewildered by the film. As Bogarde wrote in a letter (quoted in John Coldstream’s biography of the actor), the Hollywood studio had no idea “how to sell a movie about ‘this old fag who digs kiddies’”. At least, Tadzio, the handsome adolescent, looks healthy. That is more than can be said for the Venetians shown in the movie suffering from cholera – and whose plight the authorities are desperate to keep hidden from the tourists.
Federico Fellini’s Casanova (1976), starring Donald Sutherland in his second major Venice movie, offers an equally ambivalent view of the city built on water. It is here that Casanova is arrested and imprisoned for debauchery after a very acrobatic sex scene, involving a woman dressed as a nun. As portrayed by Fellini, Venice’s masked carnivals resemble grotesque satanic rituals in Dennis Wheatley novels. The revelry is strangely stylised and sinister.
Venice hosts the oldest and grandest film festival in the world, established under Mussolini in 1932. The Venice festival features in Joseph Losey’s Eva (1962), a film about jealousy and sexual humiliation in which a hulking Welsh writer (Stanley Baker) is reduced to a quivering, paranoid wreck by the seductive Eva (Jeanne Moreau).
Even politely spoken Henry James adaptations of the 1990s such as Iain Softley’s The Wings of a Dove (1997) associate Venice with romantic betrayal and terminal illness. Helena Bonham Carter and Linus Roach play the cash-strapped British lovers who plot to fleece a beautiful American heiress suffering from some unspecified disease. This is a costume drama that is far bleaker and more unsettling than its beautiful locations initially make it seem.
1/15 15. Death Becomes Her (1992)
Two women – a struggling writer (Goldie Hawn) and an aging actor (Streep) – take a magic potion that promises to make them beautiful and young forever. While Streep’s ruthlessly ambitious Madeline Ashton and Hawn’s Helen Sharp are both cast as villains, it’s easy to sympathise with women compelled to take drastic action to meet society’s standards of beauty. And although it tanked at the box office upon its release in 1992, Robert Zemeckis’s black comedy has become a cult favourite – particularly for the LGBT+ community – thanks to the sheer thrill of watching Streep and Hawn whack each other over the heads with shovels. “This is absolutely through the roof, hyperbolic farce,” Streep has said of the movie. “In one take we would try to do one take that had some grounding in human experience, and then the sky was the limit.” Streep achieves this, for despite the head-turning antics of her character you can still find something about the female experience to identify with. (RO)
2/15 14. Mamma Mia (2008)
The Oscar-winner is known for her weightier roles, but she takes a different direction in Phyllida Lloyd’s Abba inspired hit blockbuster. Streep plays the singing and dancing Donna Sheridan-Carmichael (highlights include her singing “Super Trouper”), who runs the hotel Villa Donna on a Greek Island. Her daughter, Sophie, is getting married and has invited three of her mum’s former lovers (Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgard) along, in the hope that one of them is her father, and can give her away. Streep had sung before in Postcards from Edge (1990) and A Prairie Home Companion (2006) – but doing the splits was a career first. (CC)
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3/15 13. Out of Africa (1985)
This epic romantic drama, directed and produced by Sydney Pollack, starred Meryl Streep and Robert Redford as doomed lovers in Africa. But despite the film winning seven Academy Awards in 1986, including for Best Picture and Best Director – Streep’s restrained performance as the Danish Baroness Karen Dinesan, whose memoir of colonial life the film is based on, lost out to Geraldine Page’s old lady Mrs Watts in The Trip to Bountiful. The onscreen chemistry between Streep and Redford lacked the passion and electricity of, say, her and Kurt Russell in Silkwood (1983), but the film certainly made up for it in sweeping panoramic cinematography. (CC)
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4/15 12. Defending Your Life (1991)
Albert Brooks wrote, directed and starred in this comedy classic. It tells the story of Daniel Miller, who is sent to the afterlife, after a car crash, where he falls in love with the sweet Julia (played by Streep), who has led a perfect life. But he is on trial in Judgement City and must conquer his fears to move on to the next phase of existence, or else be sent back to earth to let them go. It was not a box-office hit when it was released but has since gained a cult following. Streep met Brooks at a party, when he told her about his film, and she asked: “Is there a part in it for me?” (CC)
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5/15 11. Silkwood (1983)
Given that Streep plays real-life whistle blower Karen Silkwood, who was exposed to a life-threatening dose of nuclear radiation and died in a suspicious car accident at the age of 28, Silkwood could easily have been a grim, even turgid affair. But thanks to Streep’s brilliant performance – her Karen is mischievous, flawed and heroic, flashing her co-workers and risking her life for the sake of justice all in one day – it is nothing of the sort. “It was magic,” said Silkwood’s boyfriend Drew Stephens when he saw the film. “It makes a human being out of Karen, instead of myth.” (Bioreports)
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6/15 10. Deer Hunter (1978)
Cast in the role of Linda after Robert De Niro saw her in a stage production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at Lincoln Center, Streep was a revelation in Michael Cimino’s brutal treatise on the agony of the Vietnam War. In a film where the machismo is excessive, Streep exists as some kind of counterpoint, playing with great restraint a young woman torn between her commitment to her fiancé (Christopher Walken) and her desire for his best friend (Robert De Niro). Her mournful singing of “God Bless America” at the end has gone down in cinematic lore. (PS)
7/15 9. Postcards From the Edge (1990)
Has there ever been a feistier on-screen mother-daughter rivalry than Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine’s? MacLaine plays a volatile, self-absorbed actor, Streep her recovering drug addict daughter – also an actor, albeit a less famous one. The film is based on Carrie Fisher’s revered semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, and Streep and MacLaine more than do it justice. Their chemistry is intoxicating, and Streep shines as a sweet screw-up trying to avoid a full-on breakdown. (Bioreports)
8/15 8. The Bridges of Madison Country (1995)
Streep’s most frequently overlooked role is that of bored housewife Francesca Johnson in Clint Eastwood’s adaptation of Robert James Waller’s best-selling novel. Francesca is the embodiment of loneliness and frustration – living with her husband and their children in an isolated farmhouse set against the vast stretches of land in Iowa, US. Streep takes the schmaltzy romance of the original material and transforms it into something with gravitas and passion. Where a lesser actor might not be as convincing, Streep persuades the audience that her character believes her affair with Eastwood’s roaming photographer Robert Kincaid is necessary to help her escape her humdrum existence. A fierce, unhurried performance is what builds the superb tension in this film. RO)
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9/15 7. The Hours (2002)
This cinematic triptych, in which three women’s lives are interconnected by Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, takes place over the course of a single day in three different decades. Nicole Kidman plays Woolf, Julianne Moore a trouble Fifties housewife who finds solace in the writer’s tome, and Streep Noughties New Yorker Clarissa, a modern-day embodiment of the novel’s title character. As a woman whose life is slipping out of her control, Streep is commanding, tormented, elegant. (Bioreports)
10/15 6. Sophie’s Choice (1982)
False teeth, eerie accent, dramatic fireworks, check: this famously strange and tortured performance bagged Streep her first Oscar as a leading actress, three decades before her second as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. In Alan J Pakula’s ponderous, emotionally pornographic adaptation of the William Styron bestseller, Streep’s Sophie – a Polish immigrant and Holocaust survivor in a Brooklyn boarding house – is the one element that escapes mustiness, bringing fidgety life and neurosis to a part that had Oscar written all over it. (PS)
11/15 5. Julie & Julia (2009)
As beloved American chef Julia Child, “the woman who taught America to cook”, Streep gives one of her most charismatic performances to date – one that goes beyond mere imitation. Norah Ephron cast Streep, an old friend, after the actor heard she was working on the project and immediately offered her best impression of Child’s famous, high-pitched catchphrase: “Bon appetit!” What is most impressive about Streep in this Oscar-nominated role is her resistance to portraying Child as some kind of cartoon character (she had met the chef in person, and found her to be surprisingly difficult). In between the charming displays of joie de vivre are subtle glimpses of Child’s heartbreak over her and her husband’s inability to conceive a child. And you can see how Streep, who has recalled being told she was not “beautiful” enough for certain roles, could identify with Child’s stubbornness at being told she wasn’t good enough to attend the famous Cordon Bleu school of cooking. (RO)
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12/15 4. Adaptation (2002)
Susan Orlean, the non-fiction writer who gets entangled in Charlie Kaufman’s writer’s block, was a chance for Streep to loosen up: she’s light, funny and appealingly baffled by the film around her. The conceit starts with her obliviously going about her business, but then the script of Kaufman’s imagination suddenly takes hold – and before you know it, she’s working out her own fictional mid-life crisis in the most surprising ways. A shape-shifting part she layers with finesse, it coaxes out her mellow side, even if this is one of her wildest projects. (PS)
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13/15 3. The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Many would have been tempted to ham up the role as boss-from-hell Miranda Priestly, a ruthless fashion magazine editor who hires hapless Andi Sachs (Anne Hathaway) and pushes her to the brink, but Streep plays her as calmness personified. Why raise your voice when you can destroy someone’s self-worth with the briefest of glances or the pursing of your lips? Streep was rightly Oscar-nominated for the role, and deserved to win for her cerulean sweater monologue alone.
Barry Wetcher/20th Century ./REX/Shutterstock
14/15 2. Doubt (2008)
In John Patrick Shanley’s adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play (set in the Bronx during the Sixties), Streep is the severe Sister Aloysius opposite the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s cheerful, slightly bumbling Father Flynn. As she stalks up and down the pews filled with Catholic children, she requires little in the way of makeup, props or costume to create a sense of foreboding– just the glint on her spectacles and the black bonnet that enhances her crow-like mannerisms. Sister Aloysius is the last frontier between the old world she knows and understands – where fear is a necessary tool to set children on the path of righteousness – and the new one, in a film set shortly after the Second Vatican Council pledged to bring the Catholic church into the 20th century. This is (deservedly) one of Streep’s most critically acclaimed roles, and earned her best actress nominations at the Oscars, Baftas and Golden Globes, along with a win at the Screen Actors Guild awards. (RO)
15/15 1. Kramer vs Kramer (1979)
Stepping into a role that was originally meant for Charlie’s Angels’ Kate Jackson, Streep won her first Oscar (for Best Supporting Actress) for Robert Benton’s emotionally pummelling portrait of marital collapse. As Joanna, a frustrated spouse who walks out on her husband (Dustin Hoffman) and six-year-old son then returns 18 month later to fight for sole custody, Streep doesn’t get much screen time but, boy, does she make it count. Hers is a performance that somehow makes you sympathise with Joanna’s position, her face a mobile canvas onto which she paints angst, confusion and a deep melancholy. It’s masterful. (PS)
1/15 15. Death Becomes Her (1992)
Two women – a struggling writer (Goldie Hawn) and an aging actor (Streep) – take a magic potion that promises to make them beautiful and young forever. While Streep’s ruthlessly ambitious Madeline Ashton and Hawn’s Helen Sharp are both cast as villains, it’s easy to sympathise with women compelled to take drastic action to meet society’s standards of beauty. And although it tanked at the box office upon its release in 1992, Robert Zemeckis’s black comedy has become a cult favourite – particularly for the LGBT+ community – thanks to the sheer thrill of watching Streep and Hawn whack each other over the heads with shovels. “This is absolutely through the roof, hyperbolic farce,” Streep has said of the movie. “In one take we would try to do one take that had some grounding in human experience, and then the sky was the limit.” Streep achieves this, for despite the head-turning antics of her character you can still find something about the female experience to identify with. (RO)
2/15 14. Mamma Mia (2008)
The Oscar-winner is known for her weightier roles, but she takes a different direction in Phyllida Lloyd’s Abba inspired hit blockbuster. Streep plays the singing and dancing Donna Sheridan-Carmichael (highlights include her singing “Super Trouper”), who runs the hotel Villa Donna on a Greek Island. Her daughter, Sophie, is getting married and has invited three of her mum’s former lovers (Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgard) along, in the hope that one of them is her father, and can give her away. Streep had sung before in Postcards from Edge (1990) and A Prairie Home Companion (2006) – but doing the splits was a career first. (CC)
Rex Features
3/15 13. Out of Africa (1985)
This epic romantic drama, directed and produced by Sydney Pollack, starred Meryl Streep and Robert Redford as doomed lovers in Africa. But despite the film winning seven Academy Awards in 1986, including for Best Picture and Best Director – Streep’s restrained performance as the Danish Baroness Karen Dinesan, whose memoir of colonial life the film is based on, lost out to Geraldine Page’s old lady Mrs Watts in The Trip to Bountiful. The onscreen chemistry between Streep and Redford lacked the passion and electricity of, say, her and Kurt Russell in Silkwood (1983), but the film certainly made up for it in sweeping panoramic cinematography. (CC)
Rex Features
4/15 12. Defending Your Life (1991)
Albert Brooks wrote, directed and starred in this comedy classic. It tells the story of Daniel Miller, who is sent to the afterlife, after a car crash, where he falls in love with the sweet Julia (played by Streep), who has led a perfect life. But he is on trial in Judgement City and must conquer his fears to move on to the next phase of existence, or else be sent back to earth to let them go. It was not a box-office hit when it was released but has since gained a cult following. Streep met Brooks at a party, when he told her about his film, and she asked: “Is there a part in it for me?” (CC)
Rex
5/15 11. Silkwood (1983)
Given that Streep plays real-life whistle blower Karen Silkwood, who was exposed to a life-threatening dose of nuclear radiation and died in a suspicious car accident at the age of 28, Silkwood could easily have been a grim, even turgid affair. But thanks to Streep’s brilliant performance – her Karen is mischievous, flawed and heroic, flashing her co-workers and risking her life for the sake of justice all in one day – it is nothing of the sort. “It was magic,” said Silkwood’s boyfriend Drew Stephens when he saw the film. “It makes a human being out of Karen, instead of myth.” (Bioreports)
Rex
6/15 10. Deer Hunter (1978)
Cast in the role of Linda after Robert De Niro saw her in a stage production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at Lincoln Center, Streep was a revelation in Michael Cimino’s brutal treatise on the agony of the Vietnam War. In a film where the machismo is excessive, Streep exists as some kind of counterpoint, playing with great restraint a young woman torn between her commitment to her fiancé (Christopher Walken) and her desire for his best friend (Robert De Niro). Her mournful singing of “God Bless America” at the end has gone down in cinematic lore. (PS)
7/15 9. Postcards From the Edge (1990)
Has there ever been a feistier on-screen mother-daughter rivalry than Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine’s? MacLaine plays a volatile, self-absorbed actor, Streep her recovering drug addict daughter – also an actor, albeit a less famous one. The film is based on Carrie Fisher’s revered semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, and Streep and MacLaine more than do it justice. Their chemistry is intoxicating, and Streep shines as a sweet screw-up trying to avoid a full-on breakdown. (Bioreports)
8/15 8. The Bridges of Madison Country (1995)
Streep’s most frequently overlooked role is that of bored housewife Francesca Johnson in Clint Eastwood’s adaptation of Robert James Waller’s best-selling novel. Francesca is the embodiment of loneliness and frustration – living with her husband and their children in an isolated farmhouse set against the vast stretches of land in Iowa, US. Streep takes the schmaltzy romance of the original material and transforms it into something with gravitas and passion. Where a lesser actor might not be as convincing, Streep persuades the audience that her character believes her affair with Eastwood’s roaming photographer Robert Kincaid is necessary to help her escape her humdrum existence. A fierce, unhurried performance is what builds the superb tension in this film. RO)
Getty Images
9/15 7. The Hours (2002)
This cinematic triptych, in which three women’s lives are interconnected by Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, takes place over the course of a single day in three different decades. Nicole Kidman plays Woolf, Julianne Moore a trouble Fifties housewife who finds solace in the writer’s tome, and Streep Noughties New Yorker Clarissa, a modern-day embodiment of the novel’s title character. As a woman whose life is slipping out of her control, Streep is commanding, tormented, elegant. (Bioreports)
10/15 6. Sophie’s Choice (1982)
False teeth, eerie accent, dramatic fireworks, check: this famously strange and tortured performance bagged Streep her first Oscar as a leading actress, three decades before her second as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. In Alan J Pakula’s ponderous, emotionally pornographic adaptation of the William Styron bestseller, Streep’s Sophie – a Polish immigrant and Holocaust survivor in a Brooklyn boarding house – is the one element that escapes mustiness, bringing fidgety life and neurosis to a part that had Oscar written all over it. (PS)
11/15 5. Julie & Julia (2009)
As beloved American chef Julia Child, “the woman who taught America to cook”, Streep gives one of her most charismatic performances to date – one that goes beyond mere imitation. Norah Ephron cast Streep, an old friend, after the actor heard she was working on the project and immediately offered her best impression of Child’s famous, high-pitched catchphrase: “Bon appetit!” What is most impressive about Streep in this Oscar-nominated role is her resistance to portraying Child as some kind of cartoon character (she had met the chef in person, and found her to be surprisingly difficult). In between the charming displays of joie de vivre are subtle glimpses of Child’s heartbreak over her and her husband’s inability to conceive a child. And you can see how Streep, who has recalled being told she was not “beautiful” enough for certain roles, could identify with Child’s stubbornness at being told she wasn’t good enough to attend the famous Cordon Bleu school of cooking. (RO)
Rex
12/15 4. Adaptation (2002)
Susan Orlean, the non-fiction writer who gets entangled in Charlie Kaufman’s writer’s block, was a chance for Streep to loosen up: she’s light, funny and appealingly baffled by the film around her. The conceit starts with her obliviously going about her business, but then the script of Kaufman’s imagination suddenly takes hold – and before you know it, she’s working out her own fictional mid-life crisis in the most surprising ways. A shape-shifting part she layers with finesse, it coaxes out her mellow side, even if this is one of her wildest projects. (PS)
Rex
13/15 3. The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Many would have been tempted to ham up the role as boss-from-hell Miranda Priestly, a ruthless fashion magazine editor who hires hapless Andi Sachs (Anne Hathaway) and pushes her to the brink, but Streep plays her as calmness personified. Why raise your voice when you can destroy someone’s self-worth with the briefest of glances or the pursing of your lips? Streep was rightly Oscar-nominated for the role, and deserved to win for her cerulean sweater monologue alone.
Barry Wetcher/20th Century ./REX/Shutterstock
14/15 2. Doubt (2008)
In John Patrick Shanley’s adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play (set in the Bronx during the Sixties), Streep is the severe Sister Aloysius opposite the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s cheerful, slightly bumbling Father Flynn. As she stalks up and down the pews filled with Catholic children, she requires little in the way of makeup, props or costume to create a sense of foreboding– just the glint on her spectacles and the black bonnet that enhances her crow-like mannerisms. Sister Aloysius is the last frontier between the old world she knows and understands – where fear is a necessary tool to set children on the path of righteousness – and the new one, in a film set shortly after the Second Vatican Council pledged to bring the Catholic church into the 20th century. This is (deservedly) one of Streep’s most critically acclaimed roles, and earned her best actress nominations at the Oscars, Baftas and Golden Globes, along with a win at the Screen Actors Guild awards. (RO)
15/15 1. Kramer vs Kramer (1979)
Stepping into a role that was originally meant for Charlie’s Angels’ Kate Jackson, Streep won her first Oscar (for Best Supporting Actress) for Robert Benton’s emotionally pummelling portrait of marital collapse. As Joanna, a frustrated spouse who walks out on her husband (Dustin Hoffman) and six-year-old son then returns 18 month later to fight for sole custody, Streep doesn’t get much screen time but, boy, does she make it count. Hers is a performance that somehow makes you sympathise with Joanna’s position, her face a mobile canvas onto which she paints angst, confusion and a deep melancholy. It’s masterful. (PS)
The various Shakespeare adaptations that have been set or shot in the city, for example, Orson Welles’ Othello (1951) or Michael Radford’s The Merchant of Venice (2004), starring Al Pacino as Shylock, are likewise very morbid affairs.
It is no surprise that the psychopathic Tom Ripley (Matt Damon), ends up in Venice after assuming the identity of his “friend” Dickie (Jude Law), whom he has murdered, in Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1999). It’s the perfect city for him. In Liliana Cavani’s Ripley’s Game (2002), in which John Malkovich played Ripley, the killer has taken up residence in the Venice region. You could hardly imagine him living anywhere else.
Not every movie set in Venice wallows in death, disease and decay. However, films that present a rosy vision of the city tend to be far less powerful than those that explore its darker side. Singing gondoliers don’t have the impact of grotesque dwarves brandishing meat cleavers. Woody Allen’s musical Everyone Says I Love You (1996), partly set in the city, is rarely revived today. Katharine Hepburn had one of her most famous comic scenes walking backwards into the canal as the middle-aged American in David Lean’s Summertime (1955), but when Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck partly set his romantic thriller The Tourist (2010), starring Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie, in Venice, the reviewers all grumbled that it was too light and too sweet. “In my head, I thought of it as a group of critics coming to a restaurant. They thought they had ordered a main course and I served them dessert. Even so, I had put so much love into this dessert, it (the reaction) was that this is a terrible main course,” the chastened German director later reflected on the film’s failure to find an audience.
It is instructive to compare two James Bond movies that alighted in Venice. Moonraker (1979) has a chase with Roger Moore in a motor-powered gondola being pursued by speedboats. It was fun in its way but very cheesy – and features an idiotic sequence in which the gondola comes off the water and speeds through the throngs of tourists in St Mark’s Square. Better by far was the darker and more melodramatic shootout at the end of Casino Royale (2006) in which Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), drowns in front of Daniel Craig’s Bond when a building collapses into the Grand Canal.
Sean Connery’s Bond turned up in Venice in time for the end credits of From Russia With Love (1963), kissing Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi) in a gondola on the Grand Canal – but this was just a token visit. The same could be said for Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade (1989).
The often macabre representations of the city on screen clearly aren’t putting the tourists off. Around 30 million of them still visit the city each year. As they descend in their hordes on Marco Polo airport, they’re not thinking of cholera outbreaks or serial killers or worrying that Venice might soon sink. After so many movies, the question now is how filmmakers can show Venice in an original light. The one type of film we haven’t yet seen is an Irwin Allen-style disaster picture – but if those cruise ships and ocean liners keep on crashing into the city, it is a fair bet we will have one soon.
The restored 4K version of ‘Don’t Look Now’ will be released in cinemas by Studiocanal on 5 July, and on DVD, Blu-ray, EST and in a collector’s edition on 29 July
