R.I.P. Francesco Degli Espinosa

Francesco Degli Espinosa is possibly not the best known of directors to have worked in Italian cinema, but he did make a couple of obscure, c-grade films: the spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in the Wild, Wild West (aka C’era una volta questo pazzo pazzo west (69)) and Giochi erotici di una famiglia per bene (75), a sexy thriller with Erika Blanc and Donald O’Brien, where Espinosa took over from the initial director (possibly writer Franco Polselli?). He seems to have worked in the industry on and off for some years – he’s credited as the assistant director to Michelangelo Antonioni on his portion of the 1953 anthology L’amore in citta (53), and also worked on shorts at around the same time with Francesco Maselli. However, despite this long association with Italian cinema, his name only appears on the credits of a handful of productions, which is interesting.