A Place for Lovers

Plot summary

The rich fashion designer Julia is tired of living because she knows she is suffering from a malignant cancer. When the woman leaves for her last holiday in Cortina d'Ampezzo, she meets the young and vital Valerio. The two fall in love instantly, but Julia does not reveal her secret to Valerio. When Valerio finds out that she is sick and dying, he decides to pretend to know nothing, continuing his love affair with Julia to the end.

Cast

Soundtrack

Ella Fitzgerald provides two songs, the title song and Lonely is ("What lonely is, is me!"). Both songs can be heard on the Verve release Jukebox Ella: The Complete Verve Singles, Vol. 1.

Reception

The film opened to generally negative reviews. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called it the "most godawful piece of pseudo-romantic slop I've ever seen!" , and Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times referred to it as "the worst movie I have seen all year and possibly since 1926." Rex Reed wrote the film "Looks not so much directed as whittled to death." Time Magazine called the film "Woefully inept... Marcello Mastroianni displays all the zest of a man summoned up for tax evasion. The five scriptwriters who supposedly worked on the film must have spent enough time at the water-cooler to flood a camel." Katherine Caroll's review in The New York Daily News called the film "about as exciting to watch as a game of tiddly-winks."

Mark Deming wrote in the New York Times that Dunaway and Mastroianni were romantically involved during the filming of Amanti but that little of their personal chemistry can be seen in the movie. A Place for Lovers is widely considered to be one of the worst films of all time, and was listed in the 1978 book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time, which called the film "a putrid tearjerker."