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Declining to come of age in an England locked in austerity and sexual repression, John Francis Lane moves to Paris, meets Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau and Edith Piaf and embarks on a lifelong feasting on the best that the art world can offer. He devours landmark works by Maria Callas and Luchino Visconti, Eduardo De Filippo, Franco Zeffirelli, Dario Fo. He moves to Rome when Hollywood arrives to make Ben-Hur, Roman Holiday and Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, a film in which John Francis Lane is cast as Bacchus. He parties wth Grace Kelly, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alberto Moravia and Gina Lollobrigida. As a foreign correspondent for Films and Filming magazine, he befriends Fellini, Antonioni, Pasolini, Francesco Rosi and appears in their finest films. He works with Sophia Loren, Monica Vitti, Silvana Mangano, Anna Magnani and Claudia Cardinale. He acts with the three biggest box office stars of the era, Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman and Toto. He is employed by the great producers Dino De Laurentiis, David O'Selznick, Alfredo Bini and Carlo Ponti, and works with Sean Connery, Orson Welles, John Wayne, Alain Delon, Richard Burton, Warren Beatty, Peter Ustinov and Rock Hudson. He is robbed by Pasolini’s street boys, causes a riot, and finds it impossible to resist a man in uniform.
This new edition of John Francis Lane’s memoirs adds more than a third of a million words, restores dozens of adventures, and includes references to more than a thousand films as he observes from the inside the rise and fall of the Golden Age of Italian Cinema, from Bicycle Thieves to Steve Reeves, from Mondo Cane to Spaghetti Westerns, from La Dolce Vita to Fellini’s Roma, a film that ends with John Francis Lane toasting the end of the world with Gore Vidal.
