(translated from Nocturno magazine and continued from here)
With Il figlio di Spartacus began the busiest and most intense period of my career as an assistant director. Sergio was a very funny guy, able to fool around even when he was in his director’s role on set. I remember an episode that happened on the set of Toto Sexy (which was accredited solely to Mario Amendola, but was partially shot by Corbucci). We shot all of the stripteases to insert into the film at Titanus Farnesina, and at our disposition we had all the most noted strippers in the world at the time: Coccinelle, Bambi, Dodo from Hamburg, Ya Doucheskaya. Sergio was engrossed in the shoot, so gave me his little Super 8 camera and said: “Rugge, Brigitte Bardot’s shooting a film in another studio with her husband Roger Vadim, I want you to film them when they’re in the street, upt to the point when they go into the cinema.”
After some days he called me on the telephone, summoning me to his house on Viale Pinturicchio. He made me sit down in front of an improvised screen and watch, surprised, as the beautiful Bardot enters the studio to shoot a red light movie. Sergio, with the help of a capable editor, had made it look as if the diva was stripping, whereas in fact she’d been substituted for one of the aforementioned strippers. That was Corbucci, one of the greats!
Notes
I’m guessing the film Bardot was shooting was the Italo-French production Warrior’s Rest, but that means Toto Sexy was shot quite a while before it’s September 1963 release date (Warrior’s Rest was released a whole year earlier)
The strippers named are interesting. Ya Doucheskaya had a small role in Elio Petri’s The Teacher from Vigevano at around the same time. Coccinelle was a fascinating character, a transexual born as Jacques Charles Dufresnoy who had a sex change in 1958, performed at a popular transvestite cabaret show called Chex Madame Arthur before becoming the main attraction at Le Carrousel de Paris. She also appeared in a couple of Spanish films.
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