The Best (1976) User Reviews

Italian sex comedy is fun, innocent, and loaded with nudity

[roger-212 · 8/10 · 10 January 2005]

Otherwise known as "Au Pair Girl," this casts Guida as a young (of course) innocent (of course) girl who gets a job in a house with a variety of people living in it who all want to get into Guida's bed. Gloria Guida always exudes an innocent sexiness in her films - she was voted Ms. Teenage Italy in the early 70s and that was the start of her film career.

Even when taking off her clothes, she is never smarmy, lustful (the chief exception may be F. DeLeo's "To Be Twenty") or manipulating. She doesn't seem to realize the sexual confusion that trails in her wake, and when she finally takes leave of the house, she understands - finally - how much the old rich man in the upstairs loft really thinks of her.

She rewards him with a quick flash underneath her dress. Yet, it's all in good fun, moves by quickly, and fits into the Italian sex comedy clichés of the era.

The bottom of the well

[lazarillo · 26 April 2007]

Although I have seen a truly shameful number of Italian sex comedies starring Gloria Guida (and others), I really went to the well one too many times with this one. Guida plays an incredibly stupid "au pair girl" (as opposed to an au pair guy?)who, after losing her virginity in a train tunnel(you don't wanna know, believe me), comes to work for a greedy couple who make money by renting her out to all the other tenants in their building--a hooker, a lesbian, an in-hock father and his sexy gold-digging daughter, a closeted-gay politician, a dying old man, and pretty much every other Italian sex comedy cliché imaginable.

Naturally, this movie is badly-dubbed by the usual bunch of thoroughly unfunny idiots, and the plot could charitably be described as random. Worst of all perhaps though, there is not nearly as much nudity as everyone has come to expect from ole Miss Teen Italy of 1974. There is a running joke, for instance, where her male employer keeps trying unsuccessfully to see his au pair naked. It's one thing, however, to relentlessly tease a lecherous character in a movie; it's whole other thing though to relentlessly tease all the lecherous people in the audience. To be fair, Guida and some of the other women do have some brief nude scenes, but the only guy, on or off-screen, that gets to see "all" of Guida is the dying old man in a blatant rip-off of the end of Ursula Andress's "The Sensuous Nurse".

With the exception of "Being Twenty" all of Guida's movies that I've seen are pretty bad, but they are ALL better than this one.