The Moseby Confidential Files: Laura Gemser in the Seventies (Amore libero-Free Love)

Born Laurette Marcia Gemser in Java, Indonesia a few weeks before Halloween in 1950, Laura Gemser came of age in the Dutch city of Utrecht after her parents relocated to the Netherlands just before her fifth birthday. A bright student with an interest in the arts and fashion, Gemser found herself enrolled at Artibus Art School in Utrecht in her late teens. While enrolled at Artibus, Gemser's striking good-looks led to a blossoming modelling career and soon she was being featured in various Belgium fashion and men's magazines.

It was her sudden success as a model that made Laura Gemser relocate from The Netherlands to Italy in her early twenties and film offers soon began to trickle in. Gemser's first film, Amore libero-Free Love, would be shot in 1973, and released in 1974, just before Laura's 24th birthday.



Directed by Pier Ludovico Pavoni, Amore libero-Free Love is a picturesque, if vacant, production that survives solely on its glorious locations and Gemer's incredible charisma. Better known for his terrific work as a cinematographer on works such as Mill of the Stone Women (1960), Pavoni's directorial credits include just three films, with Amore libero-Free Love being the second. The story, what there is of one, centers on a lonely engineer named Francesco (Enzo Bottesini) who, while searching for a missing miner on a beautiful tropical island, begins an affair with a lovely young woman named Janine (Gemser).







Amore libero-Free Love is a fairly pedestrian film and Pavoni doesn't show a lot of flair as a director, although to his credit he was smart enough to realize the main selling points of his film were the island and Gemser. Clocking in at under 90 minutes, Amore libero-Free Love never completely outstays its welcome and as a eye-popping travelogue it's quite a functional film and Gemser shines in her first role, even though ultimately Pavoni doesn't ask a lot of her other than just being gorgeous.








Amore libero-Free Love wasn't the easiest film to track down, when I first saw it, and my copy comes from an old television broadcast. It was released as The Real Emanuelle, to capitalize on Gemser's legendary films as Black Emanuelle, by MyA DVD a few years but apparently they utilized a print as poor as my copy. While it is understandable why MyA retitled the film, Amore libero-Free Love is actually a much more innocent and tamer work than those later Joe D'Amato films, although it can be seen as a bit of an early run-through in certain aspects.

***Harry Moseby Confidential was a mostly visual-based blog dedicated to the seventies that I have maintained, on and off, for the past several years. I have recently shut the site down and will be transferring the best of the Moseby posts to Moon in the Gutter and my Tumblr site, Gutter on the Moon, with added text when needed.***

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Harry Moseby Confidential's Laura Gemser Celebration is Complete

After working very sporadically on it for months, I have finally completed my tribute to Laura Gemser over at Harry Moseby Confidential. Fans of the iconic actress will find various lobby cards, posters and hundreds of screen shots I captured from her work in the seventies. I might be mistaken but I believe I have put together the largest collection of Gemser shots currently on the Internet, so I hope it proves interesting for other fans. Here is the link for those interested.

The Moseby Confidential Files (Laura Gemser in the Seventies) El Periscopio (1979)

***A promotional shot of Laura Gemser in the seventies***

While he is primarily known as a director of horror films, with Vampyres being the most celebrated, and thrillers, the masterful Symptoms standing as his greatest work, Spanish filmmaker Jose Ramon Larraz has worked in a number of, sometimes surprising, genres including comedies. While not among his more notable films, El Periscopio, a sex-comedy from 1979 starring a lovely Laura Gemser remains a lightly perverse and fitfully funny film that is worth seeking out for fans of this iconic director, as well as its popular star.

Larraz was turning fifty years old when El Periscopio hit the European film market in 1979. Given the more provocative title And Give Us Our Daily Sex in some English language markets, El Periscopio wouldn't turn out to be a great success for Larraz but it would provide an interesting conclusion to his powerful seventies output. Sandwiched in between the relatively obscure The Golden Lady (1979) and the underrated Stigma (1980), El Periscopio is the most lightweight film Larraz ever shot, a deliberately ridiculous and goofy work centering on a teenagers obsessive peeping at two often-undressed nurses who are his neighbors. Even though it is bogged down by a series of bizarre subplots, El Periscopio ultimately succeeds as a sexy dumbed-down farce precisely because Larraz understood the type of film he was making. In other words, El Periscopio is the kind of intellectually vacant film only a very intelligent director could successfully make.

While preparing El Periscopio in 1978 Larraz handed over his story idea to none other Sergio Garrone, the writer and director of some of the most deranged and infamous Italian exploitation films of the sixties and seventies, including Kill Django...Kill First and SS Experiment Love Camp. Garrone would end up penning the final screenplay for Larraz but his work would turn out to be surprisingly soft as well. While El Periscopio is slightly seedy, and surprisingly explicit, in spots, this is a rather tame collaboration from the minds of Larraz and Garrone, a collaboration that could have proven very dangerous indeed had the two been looking to make something truly disturbing.

Exploitation fans will notice several familiar, and welcome, names on the credits of El Periscopio including composer Ubaldo Continiello (he would provide the excellent score for Lamberto Bava's terrific Macabre less than a year later) and former Pasolini cinematographer and future director Roberto Girometti, who photographed the film. In front of the camera, we have a few familiar faces as well including Gabriele Tinti and, of course, Laura Gemser.

While El Periscopio will be of interest to fans of Jose Larraz, perhaps the reason most will want to seek it out will be due to the presence of Laura Gemser. The Indonesian beauty had been working almost nonstop in the five or six years leading up to El Periscopio and she's a pleasure to watch in the film, even though Larraz doesn't ask much of her. Still, Gemser manages to be both funny and sexy and, I suspect, the role must have felt like a breeze after the globe-hopping films she had been making mostly with Joe D'Amato.

El Periscopio remains one of the more elusive films that Laura Gemser shot in the seventies. My version comes from an imported VHS English language dub that leaves a lot to be desired visually, but at least appears to be taken from an uncut print. Considering the considerable cult followings that both Laura Gemser and Jose Larraz have a proper release on disc would be most welcome.