THE GREAT LAURENTIIS IS DEAD

(incidentally) Fonda: Her hands are always her weapon. She has invented her own neapolitan gestural language, which is the key to her formal intelligence as an actor.

As for Dino, maybe it's gone a little too unremarked that, despite his weakness for the occasional art movie, he's the mother and midwife of much of Today's Popular Cinema. His taste is ours now. What he saw in Barbarella, which had to be approached THEN, by Terry Southern et al, with the powdered white gloves of irony, we now bow before with pretentious solemnity.

Also: though Cooper and Schoedsack's King Kong is sublime, silencing -- one of the eternal verities, etc. I love Laurentiis' re-make just as much. Maybe more, sometimes.