002 operazione Luna

002 operazione Luna
002 operazione Luna

1965
Original running time: 90 minutes
Italy
An IMA (Rome), Agata (Madrid) production
Distributed by Medusa
Director: Lucio Fulci
Story: Amedeo Sollazzo, Vittorio Metz
Screenplay: Vittorio Metz, Amedeo Sollazzo
Cinematography: Tino Santoni
Music: Coriolano Gori
Editor: Pedro del Rey
Art director: Adolfo Cofiño
Cast: Ciccio Ingrassia     (Ciccio / Major Borovin), Franco Franchi (Franco / Colonel Paradowsky), Monica Randal (Mishca Paradowsky), Linda Sini (Leonidova), Maria Silva, Enzo Andronico, Ignazio Leone, Emilio Rodríguez, Elena Sedlak, Pasquale Zagaria, Franco Morici, Piero Morgia

Story
Following an unexplained loss of contact with a space mission to the moon, Soviet authorities decide to avert news of the possible disaster by quickly sending off another mission, manned by exact doubles of the missing and now presumed dead cosmonauts.  Unfortunately, the only lookalikes they can come up with are a pair of idiotic thieves, Franco and Ciccio, who are kidnapped and launched into space.  Things only become more complicated for them when they return to earth…

Reviews
A Soviet spaceship is lost. To mask the failure a second spacecraft is sent to to the moon with the doubles of the two missing cosmonauts, thieves captured in Rome. One of the 15 films of 1965 made by the comedy double act Franco & Ciccio.  Three space probes (Lunik) were launched by the Soviets in 1959,and the American Apollo program put the first man on the moon in July 1969, four years after the two comics. (Morandini)

Other links
Giallo Fever
A good review here, although I think Keith makes a mistake typical of contemporary film reviewers, by viewing this as one of Fulci’s lesser works, a job for hire which he didn’t really care about.  It was, but these Franco & Ciccio gigs were films that the directors were extremely proud of (including Fulci), possibly more so than many of their films that were better known to English language audiences.  And talking of limitations ignores the fact that all Italian genre films were subject to creative limitations, whether they were westerns, horror films of comedies.

Here’s a clip on YouTube:

About Matt Blake 890 Articles
The WildEye is a blog dedicated to the wild world of Italian cinema (and, ok, sometimes I digress into discussing films from other countries as well). Peplums, comedies, dramas, spaghetti westerns... they're all covered here.

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