Ticket 2 Ride

Last week, I focused on films of the late Robert Redford. This week’s edition of Saturday Night at the Movies remembers another film legend.

Claudia Cardinale passed away this week at age 87. That name probably doesn’t register with people under the age of 50, at least in America, where Cardinale in the 1960s made some of her most memorable films. In truth, she made films for seven decades, mostly in Italy and France where she was revered as an actor.

It’s easy to focus on her smoldering, dark beauty, and dismiss her as a sex symbol of a bygone era, but that would completely overlook her talent and long career. She worked with many influential film directors including Sergio Leone, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Werner Herzog, Mario Monicelli, Mauro Bolognini, Abel Gance, Richard Brooks and Henri Verneuil.

Hollywood called and she made a number of films in 1960s where she became known to American audiences in films like The Leopard, The Pink Panther, Circus World, The Lost Command, The Professionals, Once Upon a Time in the West and Don’t Make Waves.

Producers were quick to exploit her looks and that sexy, European image, like other female actors that crossed the Atlantic including Sophia Loren, Ursula Andress Gina Lollobrigida, Brigitte Bardot and Anita Ekberg. Cardinale said that she was leery of the Hollywood film industry and didn’t want to be marketed and sold as a commodity like her European contemporaries.

In Richard Brooks’ The Professionals (1966) Cardinale was cast as the kidnapped Mexican wife of a powerful older American who sends mercenaries to rescue her. She is also the girlfriend of her captor, a revolutionary leader. While she may have been intended as eye candy, she had a toughness and independence that stood out in the role.

That was followed by Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) where she played a New Orleans prostitute who marries a soon to be wealthy land developer in the West. On her arrival to him, she finds his entire family murdered, and in the middle of a feud over his very valuable land. Again, she fills the need for a sexy, vulnerable widow, but she quickly figures out the lay of the land and intends to hold onto the land she has inherited.

Cardinale quickly understood the pitfalls of the film industry, whatever continent it was based. Actors, women in particular, were exploited and cast aside. A lifelong supporter of women’s rights, and since March 2000, a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, to improve the status and living conditions of girls and women through education.

Rest in peace.