An Almost Perfect Affair (1979) on Netflix
Hal Raymond comes to Cannes to sell his movie, but customs officers at Nice Airport seize his reels. There he meets Maria Barone, the wife of Italian producer Freddie Barone.
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- Rotten Tomatoes60%
Trailer
Plot summary
Hal Raymond, a first-time filmmaker just out of graduate school, reaches the Cannes Film Festival with a movie he has made about Gary Gilmore and hopes to find a buyer for it. Customs officers at Nice Airport hold his reels: he did not observe the rules for bringing film into the country. Maria Barone, a former actress married to the Italian producer Federico Barone, waits in a different queue, where her dog Mortimer is taken from her hand luggage. When Hal returns for an interview with Lt. Montand, the officer tells him a censor must view the film first, perhaps in a month. Storming out, Hal runs into Maria, describes his trouble, and she tells him not to give up, thinking her husband may be able to intervene with the customs office.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about An Almost Perfect Affair (1979)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Monica Vitti was unwilling to publicize the film in the United States because of her fear of flying, a position she kept even after Paramount offered to book her on an Atlantic ship and charter a train across America, so the studio canceled the first leg of the North American publicity tour entirely.
- When posters went up at the Festival advertising Shoot Me Before I Kill Again, the fictitious movie at the heart of the film's story, many producers "popped up to try to invest" in it, apparently believing that it was real.
- Ritchie was set off by learning of George Lucas's own experiences at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival for a screening of THX 1138, and enlisted Don Petersen to help write a screenplay capturing the giddy euphoria of a young director at his first international film festival.
- Ritchie deliberately kept the film "small-scale" and low budget so that he could persuade Paramount, as a quid pro quo, to hand him the right of script approval and control over the final cut.
- The Motion Picture Association initially classified the film as 'R' on the grounds that it included "sexually derived expletives", a decision that was overturned on appeal, after which the film was reclassified as 'PG'.
