Hollywood sul Tevere

While the topic of the making of American movies in Italy in the 50s and 60s could be quite interesting, this documentary is not the place to go. Made up of old newsreel film of stars wandering aimlessly on the back-lot or being mobbed by photographers, there is absolutely no structure to this - it is just thrown together, totally out of chronological order, with no interviews, no proper narration and, in the version I saw on World Movies/SBS in Australia, some of the most amusingly awful subtitles in existence. Either the original Italian narration is incomprehensible and absurd, or someone in the translation department was having a bad day. Hard to tell if the narration is current with the documentary - 2009 - or just a retelling of the original from the breathless newsreels of the time. This is like watching a bad "new faces" act - amusing because it's so bad, but ultimately frustrating.