Secrets of a Call Girl (1973) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Edwige Fenech stars as a naïve shop clerk in Bergamo who falls for a Milanese mobster laying low near her café. He soon forces her deep into his life, making her carry drugs across the border and forcing her to use sex to compromise rival criminals and others. She does eventually escape from the thug with the assistance of a compassionate doctor, but the mobster tracks her down and wants revenge, so she is forced into a showdown to the death.

It's a classic 1970s Italian grade-B pulp film, part crime saga, part soulful chick-flick. The title is almost completely misleading.

It does offer some guilty pleasures along the way:

1) Richard Conte stars as a mobster named ... (wait for it) ... Don Barzini! (That's the same character Conte played in The Godfather.) I don't know if the mobster was originally named Barzini when this film hit the streets. There are no closing credits on the widescreen DVD print. This film came out while The Godfather was the hottest ticket on the planet, so it's my guess that the Barzini name was cobbled in to make Secrets of a Call Girl seem like some kind of sequel to the Coppola classic.

2) There is a lush, romantic orchestral score by Luciano Michelini. I've spun that in the most positive way. A less enthusiastic summary would be "an evocative piece of 70s nostalgia," and the negative spin would be "hilariously insipid, corny, and repetitive music, frequently descending all the way to mawkish." I didn't enjoy it in an absolute sense, but I loved the nostalgic value of it.

3) The cinematography is actually quite impressive. It was originally filmed in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, which was never convenient for home viewing before DVD. NoShame films has taken the original 35mm reversal print, digitally re-mastered it, and produced it in an uncut transfer. Unfortunately, they did not have as much success with this one as they did with some others (like The Sensuous Nurse and Devil in the Flesh, which look brand new). NoShame did clean up Secrets of a Call Girl, but it looks dark, lacks vibrancy, and is sometimes blurry. It's not bad, mind you, just not as good as some of NoShame's best work. Their other films demonstrate that they are excellent at restoration, so they must have done the best they could with mediocre source material.

4) Edwige Fenech's impressive breasts make several appearances throughout the film, although the nudity is not sufficiently copious to make this a good exploitation film.

Apart from those elements, it is a cheesy melodrama aspiring to be a tragedy. The quality is no better than a 90 minutes of a crime show from any typical American TV show in the same era. The pacing and editing are problematic. The early part of the film is paced so slowly that several minutes of screen time are dedicated to watching a car speed through Milan (The driver is transporting a critically injured mobster, thus providing a justification for a car chase with only one car. Very economical!) The middle of the film includes dialogue and action that had me laughing out loud (it wasn't supposed to be funny). Then the tragic final act of the film is paced so rapidly that ten years elapse unexpectedly: ol' Edwige is young, then she's giving birth, then the child is six years old - and all those transitions occur in jarring, confusing fashion.