The Nude Princess (1976) User Reviews

Not what one would have expected

[stefanozucchelli · 5/10 · 12 December 2021]

I think I have not quite understood the meaning of this movie. The movie has a very heavy and slow tone that ties in badly with several of the scenes you see. In some moments it seems that he wants to criticize the situation in the third world while in others he switches to highly sensual scenes.

Serious but seriously sleazy movie

[lazarillo · 30 August 2007]

The female ambassador (Ajita Wilson) of an impoverished but resource-rich Afican country (and the reputed mistress of its brutal dictator) comes to Italy on business. She is befriended by female industrial spy (Tina Aumont) and pursued by a boozy, scandal-sheet reporter (Luigi Pistilli) and a number of political and business world enemies out to discredit her with a sex scandal.

This movie, strangely enough, was (very) loosely based on real incident that happened around that time involving Ugandan dictator/erstwhile cannibal Idi Amin and an African supermodel. It's an interesting movie in that it is relatively sophisticated (the key word there being "relatively"), but also very exploitative (the rather schizophrenic director was responsible for both the arty "Io, Emmanuelle" and several uber-sleazy Nazi camp sexploitation movies) The movie is an example of a kind of Italian version of 1970's "blaxploitation", which unlike American version was aimed mostly at white audiences and focused much more on sexy, naked black women than strutting, macho black men. It has some potentially offensive scenes including a black man being castrated during oral sex (albeit by a black woman) and a black woman who is being kept as a sex slave by a chubby white midget (although both of these scenes may have some kind of metaphoric significance that eluded me). Still, Tina Aumont is very sexy, as is Ajita Wilson I guess (considering that she reputedly was once a man)

With the fictional Uganda backdrop this movie seems to be making some kind of serious commentary on the exploitation of the Third World, the way big business cozies up to brutal dictators, and the way media ignores all the important events in the world to focus on the salacious. Unfortunately, the movie itself is guilty of the latter, and the serious points it makes get kind of lost in the sleaze it wallows in. Nevertheless, the movie is at least somewhat interesting today because it's very rare to see either a serious movie that is this sleazy or sleazy movie that is this serious.

The BARELY Nude Princess

[PWT20 · 3/10 · 21 February 2006]

I watched this movie under the pretense that it was a 70s exploitation a la Jess Franco. It never delivers.

The plot lines are completely convoluted. I wouldn't really be able to sum it up if someone asked me what it was about. There was no depth and I didn't care for any of the characters.

Simply put, NUDA PRINCIPESSA sets up the audience to think it's a sexploitation, but there's only unsatisfactory nudity. At other points, it feels like it's going to turn into a giallo, but no one is killed.

* * * POSSIBLE SPOILER * * * A good example would be the character of Gladys. Throughout the film, she keeps on saying how attracted she is to Princess Mariam, how the Princess casts some kind of magic spell over her. But do they ever get together? NO! Does anything ever come out of this attraction? NO! Same goes with everything else in this film.

There is just no purpose in LA NUDA PRINCIPESSA. It's a void that you should completely avoid!

I saw a pornographic version

[YuriParga · 6 April 2007]

I was a teenager in 1976/77, when in Spain it was absolutely impossible to see XXX films in theatres. I went to France to visit my uncle and convinced him to go to see one of those films. I already knew Tina Aumont, so I was surprised she was billed in this one. I noticed her XXX scenes was a bad edit of other women and her face. The fact is that only some time later I realised the film was based on the story of a princess from Idi Amin's Uganda who was at the head of a ministry (I can't remember the details, I'm sorry) and, apparently, was framed into a sex scandal in an airport in Europe in order to push her out of politics. As far as I remember it, it was pretty obvious that the story had been filmed without the XXX scenes and that those had been added later. Maybe they were discards of other films. Maybe this explains the out-of-focus scenes Mario can't understand: maybe those are some of the XXX scenes blurred on purpose… All in all, I still remember it as a pretty decent film… not interesting but not impossible to watch… Ah, the pornographic scenes were really awful… Luckily, I've seen better things since

not a norm

[mariorakocevic · 5 April 2002]

Most people Cesare Canevari is known (if at all) as the director behind the very bad nazi picture "Gestapos last orgy", with "La principessa nuda" Canevari proofs that he can make also good film-and not what you would really expect.. besides this is definitely a much more personal work-Canevari was responsible for the story, and edit what you cant say about "Gestapos last orgy". "la principessa nuda" is a film hard to put in a category- in a very own way unusual: the entire tone of the film is quite ironic to sarcastic that reaches comedy, but in artistic vein, still this cannot give a real overview of the film. the story as the title might suggest, is about an african princess, (performed by Ajita Wilson) who is making a trip to milano for political reasons with the intend to help her people in africa. in milano arrived, she gets assistance from a woman (tina aumont) who-as all the men there is immediately quite attracted to the princess. a sleazy journalist (who has nothing against alcohol in the morning) also crosses her way-first with the intend to interview her about her private life but he has the plan to make nude pictures of her(well therefore the title)- later he wants to make pictures of her while having sex- to ruin here it is revealed that the princess cannot laugh or cry nor has interest in "encounters" with men(or women) with help of a girlfriend she participates in a kind of ritual, this results later in a bizarre orgy, where also a dwarf is involved. canevari uses partways odd camerangles and fast cuts during some scenes-one scene for example is totally out of focus, (it would be an insult if that was NOT intended!), metaphors like the sound of the jungle during a milano traffic shot the funky (beat)music is quite good-but i doubt there´s a soundtrack of it. this film deserves surely some more hype-but meaning of course not the mainstream with it i havent read something before the film-therefore i didnt know what to expect-my maininterest in the film was the presence of tina aumont-an actress i love. the film was released in germany under the rather misleading title "Black Magic"

Peculiar by any measure

[philosopherjack · 16 April 2021]

The title character in Cesare Canavari's The Nude Princess, Miriam, is a lawyer and former nude model (a duality which well sums up the film's dominant mindset) who comes to Milan to negotiate construction contracts on behalf of her emerging African nation, and Canavari does affect some critical interest in the condescending and exploitative mindset of former colonial powers, portrayed here as certain they can negotiate rings around her (to the extent their thoughts are anything other than lewd ones). For all her impact on those around her, Miriam regards herself as "dead inside," which she attributes mainly to a sexually traumatic past incident negotiated by the nation's dictator, who regards her as his slave. Over the course of the film, various forces intervene to push her toward reawakening, which we can take in some general way to stand in for the broader evolution of African consciousness. However, such concerns sit strangely in a film of such lascivious instincts, one which seems primarily occupied by ensuring a regular supply of female nudity, a project executed with varying degrees of finesse: the film feels almost afraid of its own privileging of a powerful black woman (one played by a transsexual yet) and constantly drawn to self-sabotage, by insisting that she's just another prisoner of quivering biology, her problems ultimately nothing that couldn't be cured by the right man. Likewise, the appropriation of African culture oscillates between seeming admiring and engaged and just being reductively offensive. Despite everything though, it's hard not to have some affection toward a film which thinks to cast the alluring and very European Tina Aumont as an American industrial espionage expert called "Gladys Fogget," or in which we're led to understand that wild, mind-altering tribal dances around a fire can apparently take place on an upper floor of a downtown Milanese building.