Come Have Coffee with Us

An Italian sex comedy directed by Alberto Lattuada, who is most famous for co-directing Federico Fellini's first feature film, Variety Lights. Lattuada was quite a popular director at the time - Variety Lights was a rare box office and critical failure for him, to put it in perspective - and, as much as I like that film, it's a shame that that's basically all he's known for. A while back I discovered his 1962 film Mafioso (which has been released on DVD by Criterion), and I absolutely loved it. Italian DVD company Raro has begun to release discs in Region 1, among them a few Lattuada titles, and I decided to check one of them out. Come Have Coffee with Us concerns an accountant (Ugo Tognazzi) who comes into the lives of three spinster sisters (Angela Goodwin, Francesca Romana Coluzzi and Milena Vukotic) whose father has just died. He promises to help them with their tax problem, but instead begins his ritual of seduction. Goodwin, the eldest, is the first to fall, and ends up marrying him. The other two are madly jealous, but they have no need to be. Soon after the wedding, he turns his libido towards them. It's an amusing film. I'd say it's perhaps a tad too slow, although Raro's supplements (which include an interview with an Italian film historian and a Criterion-style booklet) helped me understand the film a little better.