This one is for fans of Ava Gardner — an expensive Italian production we have never seen in a decent video copy, now remastered from the original Technirama negative. Anthony Franciosa is an emotional, altruistic Francisco Goya, caught up in the court intrigues of 18th century Madrid. Neither his tempestuous romance with his rumored muse (Ava) nor the story of his famous and controversial paintings are strictly historical — but the artist was investigated by (whisper) The Spanish Inquisition. Also with Amedeo Nazzari and Massimo Serato.

The Naked Maja
Blu-ray
MGM
1958 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 111 min. / La maja desnuda, Goya / Street Date February 2, 2025 / Available from moviezyng / 19.95
Starring: Ava Gardner, Anthony Franciosa, Amedeo Nazzari, Gino Cervi, Lea Padovani, Massimo Serato, Carlo Rizzo, Audrey McDonald, Ivana Kislinger, Renzo Cesana, Carlo Giustini, Carmen Mora, Patrick Crean, Peter Meersman, John Karlsen, John Horne, Tonio Selwart, Erminio Spalla, Pamela Sharp, Paul Muller, Stella Vitelleschi, Gustavo De Nardo, Enzo Fiermonte.
Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno
Production Designer: Piero Filippone
Hair Stylist for Ava Gardner: Sydney Guilaroff
Costume Design: Maria Baroni, Dario Cecchi
Film Editor: Mario Serandrei
Original Music: Angelo Francesco Lavagnino
Screenplay by Norman Corwin, Giorgio Prosperi story by Oscar Saul, Talbot Jennings
Produced by Silvio Clementelli, Goffredo Lombardo
Directed by Henry Koster

A big production boom hit Italy in the second half of the 1950s, fueled by terrific locations, bargain rates and improved facilities partly funded by big U.S. pictures like  Quo Vadis. Hollywood studios couldn’t take home all the profits earned in Europe, but every country loved the idea of those profits being plowed into the local economy. American money, while it lasted, revitalized the English film industry as well.

In Italy, Titanus’s big production of 1958 was The Naked Maja, a story invented around the famed artist Francisco Jose de Goya. Italo producer Goffredo Lombardo initially got a deal going with the American filmmaker Albert Lewin, who had directed Ava Gardner in the hit  Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. At the same time, director Anthony Mann tried and failed to set up a Goya movie, to star his wife Sarita Montiel. When Lombardo finalized a deal Lewin was no longer in the picture. The international production was divided between territories: United Artists for the U.S., Titanus for Italy and MGM for the rest of the world.

The movie adaptation isn’t very faithful to Spanish history, or to the history of great art. The life of Francisco de Goya has been turned into a tragic romance. But the color on MGM’s disc is quite beautiful. There are no reasonable images or frame grabs online for The Naked Maja, which is why our illustrations here are so weak.

The well-remembered Norman Corwin wrote the first script. Corwin had just been Oscar-nominated for MGM’s Vincente Minnelli hit about Vincent Van Gogh,  Lust for Life. One famous painter is pretty much like another, right?  The screenplay was changed so much that Corwin asked to have his name removed. The only writer that needs a reprimand, is whoever came up with the English-language romantic dialogue, which too frequently becomes risible:

As anything from Hollywood was still considered the gold standard in Italy, experienced American directors found jobs abroad. Frank Borzage, Robert Aldrich, Michael Curtiz, Edgar Ulmer, Jacques Tourneur, André de Toth and King Vidor all migrated to Rome for at least one movie. Director Henry Koster was still getting steady Hollywood work when he made two films in Italy. The  second was for his home studio 20th Fox, again from a screenplay by Norman Corwin.

Signing the temperamental star Ava Gardner probably sealed the deal; it was her last film on an MGM contract. She had already played a  barefoot ‘contessa’, and her casting here likely conjured mental images of a Duchess desnuda. The hard-living high maintenance star was picky about her roles, and reportedly gave the production grief throughout, with stellar demands.

In the second half of the 18th century Francisco Jose de Goya (Anthony Franciosa) is building his reputation as a portrait painter when he meets Maria Teresa de Cayetana, the Duchess of Alba (Ava Gardner). The companions of the adventurous widow disapprove of her habit of frequenting ‘common’ clubs. King Carlos IV (Gino Cervi of  Becket) enjoys his hobbies, like playing the violin. He’s disengaged from politics, and doesn’t know that his Prime Minister Manuel Godoy (Amedeo Nazzari of  Nights of Cabiria) is a traitor, plotting with the French to steal his throne.

Prime Minister Godoy is also cuckolding Carlos via an affair with the Queen Maria Luisa (Lea Padovani of  Christ in Concrete). The Queen hates the Duchess, a conflict that ‘accidentally’ wins Goya an appointment as a court painter, despite his tendency toward untraditional portraits and dramatic paintings of the poor.

Goya and the Duchess of Alba share a love of common people. They become an item after they flee an anti-Godoy a street demonstration. Godoy needs loyalists for his schemes, and blackmails the Duchess with threats of an Inquisition arrest for Goya. To save the painter, she must trick him into thinking she loves Sanchez, a loyal officer (Massimo Serato of  El Cid).

Infuriated, Goya paints Los caprichos, ‘The Caprices,’ satirical drawings that criticize high Spanish society. For that scandal he is called before The Inquisition. The tribunal has also seized Goya’s ‘pornographic’ painting La maja desnuda, ‘The Naked Maja.’ They demand to know the identity of the woman in the painting, presumably to accuse her of witchcraft.

We only see a little of Goya at work on his canvasses, waxing feverish like  Michelangelo or  Gulley Jimson. Many of Goya’s group paintings are enormous. The un-billed artisans that copied them and fabricated partly-painted versions did a fine job. We’re told that  Los caprichos was a set of 80 prints, handsomely published.

Critics unkind to The Naked Maja were quick to point out its distortions of history. The intrigues in the court of Carlos IV were more complicated and less dramatic. Manuel Godoy commissioned the painting La maja desnuda and the present consensus is that the model was one of his mistresses. The Duchess of Alba may well have been romantically involved with Francisco Goya, but they met when he was 50 years old, beset by illnesses and stone deaf. He was not the energetic action man depicted by Anthony Franciosa, dashing about Madrid and winning a knife fight with moves like a Matador. This Goya is also an impulsive idealist, deeply hurt to witness firsthand the corruption at King Carlos’s court.

Some biographical details about Maria de Alba are correct. Having no children of her own, she adopted a black orphan. Goya did paint her more than once. But the lovers’ tragic romance is an invention, along with the severity of Goya’s ‘little Inquisition problem.’  An investigation was indeed begun, but art experts declared La maja desnuda part of an established ‘approved’ tradition, and both it and Goya were let off the hook. The inquisitors locked the painting away for a few years, where it survived along with a clothed version of the model in the same pose.

In the film’s trial scene Los caprichos is examined as well; this seems unlikely as several of its satirical sketches are harsh lampoons of The Inquisition itself. The film implies that the Duchess risks a lot to protect Goya. But he seems to have been well insulated from the political censors, for his career continued even after his royal patrons were deposed.

The ambitious Godoy sells out to the French and helps Goya only to try to get the Duchess on his side. The finale implies that Godoy had something to do with her death. The real Duchess of Alba died of a mysterious illness, aged 40; in 1945 an autopsy determined that the cause was encephalitis. None of The Naked Maja was filmed in Spain, not even the impressive Royal Palace on view. According to the AFI, the fascist Franco regime denied access because of objections from the descendants of the Duchess of Alba.

The Naked Maja is slow and its story far too formulaic. Francisco Goya doesn’t get along with his corrupt patrons. He and Maria Teresa Alba become liberal social rebels; when their romance is threatened, the Duchess lies to protect him as in a dime novel. The tragic finish all but plagiarizes the finale of Greta Garbo’s  Camille, complete with a ‘look the other way, please’ moment just before the end.

Anthony Franciosa puts a lot of effort into Goya’s idealism, hurt pride and boundless love for the Duchess. But he still seems far too serious.  When he smiles, his hair and costuming make him a dead ringer for Russ Tamblyn in Tom Thumb. Ava Gardner is appropriately regal & passionate. She of course looks glorious throughout, even when deathly ill. The canned romantic dialogues keep coming, making the show play like a fabricated Classics Illustrated comic book.

Amadeo Nazzari’s Godoy has plenty of screen time but like most everyone else is a one-note character. Only at the finish do we find out that he too has the hots for the daffy Duchess. The art expert that backs Goya, called either Maestro or Bayeu, is none other than Renzo Cesana of the scary noir  Try and Get Me!  He once was very well known as an early TV celebrity called  ‘‘The Continental.’  Audrey MacDonald’s part may have been heavily cut; she may be the unidentified servant who betrays the Duchess at the finale.

Gino Cervi and Lea Padovani play the royals — he’s a fuddy-duddy and she’s something of a viper. Both are manipulated by the crooked Godoy. Tonio Selwart’s lean face stands out; he was a nasty Nazi years before in Fritz Lang’s  Hangmen Also Die! — and the obvious model for the scarred ‘Fearless Leader’ on TV’s Rocky and Bullwinkle.  Paul Muller ( I Vampiri) is a French ambassador, and Carlo Rizzo ( I Clowni) is Goya’s earthy sidekick.

Carlo Guistini squares off against Goya in a knife fight at the opening. Both he and Massimo Serato would show up as Gamma I spacemen in Margheriti’s  I Criminali della galassia. Serato has the only supporting role that really pays off. As Sanchez, one of the Duchess’s ex-lovers, he turns out to be an understanding and sympathetic friend.

The movie is not at all well directed. Director Henry Koster always did respectable studio work, including big pictures like  The Robe, but critics like Andrew Sarris took little notice of him. Koster was reportedly unhappy with this show filmed under great pressure, and possibly with an Italian co-director in the mix. The famed Giuseppe Rotunno was the cameraman, but most of the interiors are lit high-key and flat, like the least creative Hollywood epics. The camera coverage is standard, and often on the wide side, as if the filmmakers were told to showcase the big sets. As scenes drag on we find our eye wandering around rooms.

The film can boast impressive production values in its crowd scenes, royal carriage processions, and long lines of mounted troops of both nationalities. The peasant costumes look as new and bright as the military uniforms; nobody was looking for gritty period realism. The only real action comes at the finish, in a violent street battle with lots of cutaways of noble peasant rebels being bayoneted and several French throats cut. Some angles on a set of steps threaten to replay the Odessa Steps sequence from  Battleship Potemkin.

The post-dubbed dialogue is good for the leads, but some scenes feel stilted because everyone else has been given the familiar stock voices heard in other Italian imports. We suspect that two or three voice talents do all the male voices. The show takes place in roughly the same time period as Stanley Kramer’s  The Pride and the Passion. I suppose that movie marketers could have argued which combo held better box office potential: Ava Gardner and a nude painting, or Sophia Loren and a giant cannon.

The critics tore the picture apart. Variety said that it ‘just drags on, a maze of pompous dialogue and muddled emotions.’ The Time reviewer called it an atrocity on history. We didn’t find it that terrible, just overlong. United Artists endured more grief when some censors objected to the reproduction of the famed nude painting in the advertising art. The Post Office got into the act, refusing to send out a mass mailing of postcards with the same graphic. You’d think a ‘Congressman Godoy’ was scheming behind the scenes.

Ava Gardner’s next picture was Stanley Kramer’s  On the Beach, filmed in Australia. Could she have been a factor in the hiring of Giuseppe Rotunno to film that B&W movie?  His work on that picture is stunning.

MGM’s Blu-ray of The Naked Maja is a handsome and nicely remastered widescreen presentation. One reason that the movie is all but unknown now is that the only way to see it was on wretched pan-scanned prints of very poor quality. Putting it back in its original Technirama proportions, with its color restored, makes a big difference. Again, the wretched visuals shown here do not reflect the Blu-ray’s excellent color values.

Technirama was a popular large format film system that gave the oversized VistaVision format a slight squeeze. It produced ultra-wide 35mm projection prints of exceptional quality, as seen in  The Big Country,  Sayonara and  The Vikings. The disc utilizes a new 4K scan of the original negative by Titanus in Italy, with color grading supervised by MGM Amazon in the U.S.. Colors are very good; contrast looks a little high in some night exteriors. We see a lot more detail than we expect to see. Giuseppe Rotunno’s handsome images are consistently deep-focus.

We still react negatively to the canned voices, all of which are 100% on-mike; we keep expecting Steve Reeves to wander into a scene. The Lavagnino soundtrack score comes through well. At one point we hear the notes of the song we know as ‘Danny Boy,’ so I’m assuming that it must have been adapted from an older melody. To these uncultured ears, a music cue for a street dance sounds rather Italian, not Spanish. The lovers’ big romantic dance scene takes place in a cantina with extras sitting around like furniture. The few musicians on view are suddenly replaced by a full string section worthy of a philharmonic orchestra.

The disc’s feature encoding is excellent, but MGM’s disc production is beyond lean. The menu is a simple two-click graphic, and nothing else. The cover photo is dark and dull; the cover layout could have been ordered by phone. The text misspells Ava Gardner’s name.

These MGM discs are plain-wrap releases; a place to see what’s available online is at  Moviezyng. It’s an odd assortment with a few unique items, like  Red Planet Mars.

The Naked Maja
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Good – but Good for big fans of Ava Gardner
Video: Excellent
Sound: Very Good
Supplements: None
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: March 2, 2025
(7287maja)

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