Certo, certissimo, anzi probabile... (1969)

This Marcello Fondato comedy is one of Catherine Spaak's better late nineteen-sixties films. Claudia Cardinale plays a telephone operator who breaks up with her current boyfriend and moves in with her best friend, a stylist played by Spaak. While they are both constantly on the lookout for men, and share similar tastes, Cardinale is looking for somebody to marry her while Spaak is only interested in taking on lovers. It isn't long before their friendship sours into a scathing competition when Cardinale's dates not only start rejecting her preference for long-term commitment, but also become allured by Spaak's "no strings" free love. European cinema icons John Phillip Law, Robert Hoffmann, Nino Castelnuovo, and Antonio Sabato are among the love interests. One of Spaak's songs, "Oh," is heard playing on the radio in the film, and Carlo Rustichelli's score (featuring the "vocalism" of Edda Dell'Orso) recycles a theme he wrote for Spaak's "Tre Notti d'amore."

The transfer I came across is in widescreen with the original Italian audio, from an Italian television broadcast. There is a full screen, English-dubbed version of the 1973 American release, "Diary of a Telephone Operator," available in the public domain, which has seen numerous bargain basement DVD releases in America over the years, all reportedly deriving from an early eighties VHS master. While I don't mind some English dubs, I have a feeling a lot of the humor here would be lost in English.