Customer Reviews

The Montesi Scandal: The Death of Wilma Montesi and the Birth of the Paparazzi in Fellini's Rome

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I found this book fascinating and recommend it highly to anyone interested in Fellini's "Roma" of the 1950s, in the cocktail generation, or in how a minor news item gets taken up by the popular press and expanded into an enormous scandal. It's a book about what's true about so-called "true crime." Pinkus writes well, and uses the format of a film treatment (not a screenplay) to tell the story of a Rome fascinated with film, celebrities, and stardom--whose Post-war denizens think of their own lives in terms of the movies they go to see. There are some great photographs in this book, and it is in part about the birth of the paparazzi, which occurred in relation to this murder case. Features a great cast of characters. Apparently dozens of filmmakers have, over the years, tried to figure out how to make a movie about this mystery. Maybe now Pinkus has provided just the right "map" for telling this great, complex story via celluloid.

Life is messy. Death is messier, particularly when it involves powerful politicians, sex, drugs and, in this case, a victim who is either a) a total innocent; or b) a drug-ridden sex toy. Pinkus has taken an Italian scandal from the 1950s and re-created it as a brand-new screenplay, drawing liberally on the approach taken by the great Italian filmmakers of the time, who themselves raided the story for their own movies.
A fascinating and original treatment of the quintessential tabloid scandal story.

This is one of the most engaging and inventive works of cultural studies to appear in recent years. Its analysis of postwar Italian culture complements what Kristin Ross's _Fast Cars, Clean Bodies_ did for postwar France. I teach film studies and have often assigned it as required reading in the weeks I teach Fellini and Italian film of the 1950s. Like the Montesi scandal itself, the book is evocative and complicated. However it is hardly a book to be appreciated only by academics.

With this publication of "The Montesi Scandal: The Death of Wilma Montesi and the Birth of the Papparazzi in Fellini's Rome"
(What a title! What a conception!), Karen Pinkus has created a remarkable original----a new genre combining the best elements of the traditional screenplay/mystery/political analysis/ and cultural anthropology treatise. I saved this book for my vacation and it proved to be the savory read I'd hoped for. Like Wilma's family, I found it difficult to move beyond the footbath theory.

Readers, like myself, expecting a book along the lines of "White Mischief" will be disappointed by "The Montessi Scandal." It is neither a true crime book, nor an academic study putting the scandal in the context of 1950s Italy.

Rather, it is a hybrid--of history, linguistics, film theory, Marxism, Feminism, psychology--that anybody who has ever sat through a semiotics class will recognize. Karen Pinkus describes her book as a "screenplay" (it isn't) "concerning primarily the intersections of cinema, paparazzo photography, tabloids, feminity, and politics."

Professor Pinkus is clearly very knowledgeable about Italian history and language: the book contains a solid description of the facts and characters of the case and any consideration of the Montesi scandal would be deficient without the secondary issues Professor Pinkus raises. But the book is an oddity outside the university.

A well-researched history of the Montesi scandal is long-overdue.