Watch Sandra For Free

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

***User-reviewer bennyraldak ("Forbidden desire", bennyraldak from Netherlands, 4 September 2009) sees "Sandra" as being focused on Claudia Cardinale's character's demons. Ilpo Hirvonen ("The decay of an aristocratic family", Ilpo Hirvonen from Finland, 21 September 2010) has a good general summary.*** Luchino Visconti's Sandra (1965), is a puzzling but splendorous visual treat that depicts incest, homo-eroticism, madness and collaboration with the Nazis. Its fairly slow pacing and reluctance to make obvious useful information will challenge those who spend hours a day gazing down at their QWERTY devices. However, "Sandra" is very rich and satisfying; it is flawlessly served up by the great Visconti. (I like it more than "The Leopard.")A modernized retelling of the Greek myth Electra, an attractive, upper-class, socialite couple (Claudia Cardinale in the eponymous role, Michael Craig as her husband Andrew) return to the mansion of Sandra's youth (which she was forced to flee), to attend a small ceremony honoring her father, who was murdered by the Nazis at a concentration camp. When she is reunited with her unstable brother, Gianni (Jean Sorel), the physical connection between them is made very obvious. Their closer-than-normal relationship is never a secret to the audience, but revealing it is a big concern to Andrew and other observers, such as Sandra's barrister stepfather Gilardini (Renzo Ricci). The perpetually nervous Gilardini and Sandra's clinically insane mother (Marie Bell) may also have collaborated with the Nazis by betraying Sandra's father, creating an unusual conflict of pairs.Shot in high-contrast Black and White, Visconti's skill at shooting his photogenic cast in tight quarters is evident. Because the English translation of the film is somewhat talky, it helps to develop the skill of quickly reading the subtitles in order to enjoy Visconti's work. It is amazing how precise and detailed the imagery is. The scenes between the anguished brother and steely sister are frequently filled with erotic tension. Visconti's trademark homo-eroticism is also present, but to a smaller degree.One of the more interesting characters is Sandra's "first love" who is now a physician. He seems to personify not just a mixture of Sandra's husband and her brother, but also the Nazi collaborator Gilardini. At least, that's my interpretation of the final image.Visconti's depiction of a decaying aristocratic family has great depth, and fans of the great director will not be disappointed with it.

Luchino Visconti often dealt with the disintegration of family in his films; The Damed, The Leopard, Conversation Piece.. The stories were tragedies and only in Bellissima (1951) the family sticked together in the end. Sandra (Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa...) is also a film about this, but specifically about an aristocratic family full of betrayal, decay and immorality.Incest is a leading theme in Sandra; we are given clues about it throughout the film, but not a definite proof. The affair of the siblings remains in the shadows and there's something odd in the relationships between the children and the parents. Visconti first approaches this controversial theme calmly, showing it as a small thing - we are not told much about it. But then he increases it to enormous dimensions.Luchino Visconti sets this story to a dying city around a aristocratic class that is dying out. Great tragedies, misfortunes and decay lead this class to extinction. Already in Senso Visconti achieved an aesthetic revolution, but he continues this in Sandra with a political and ethic revolution. Sandra is not the easiest film by Visconti and many people in the theater seemed to neglect it. In the beginning I found it a little unreachable and absurd but it grew up to be a beautiful allegorical description of the decay of an aristocratic family.

Great film about dark secrets and forbidden desire. Luchino Visconti depicts the life of a beautiful woman caught between her past and her present. Underneath her beauty she turns out to be filled with ugly and painful memories. Sandra (played by Claudia Cardinale) struggles with obscure feelings of guilt, alienation and questionable longings. After she takes her husband to her childhood home she finds herself thinking about her painful past. When her somewhat estranged brother shows up things turn out to be more obscure. Hidden secrets and feelings from the past seem to float to the surface once again. The o so beautiful Sandra turns out to be a complex and mysterious woman. A little more raw than most of Visconti's work, but still beautiful and authentic. A film about a woman struggling with her demons, both inside and outside of her.

An uneven entry in the Visconti canon, "Sandra Of A Thousand Delights" comes directly after "The Leopard", and while I consider "The Leopard" a masterpiece, it was still a film where Visconti was developing as a director, not really reaching the masterly stylistic highs of "The Damned" or "Death In Venice", but with a majestically deep plot that made up for any directorial deficiencies.Now, "Sandra Of A Thousand Delights" is still a point in Visconti's career where he's developing as a director. He's close but he's not quite there. Shot in black and white, and with an overly dark photography that emphasizes the desolate feel, even though this is a highly intense drama - perhaps too dramatic for it's own good, it doesn't have the necessary substance to back up the plot. In the end it's just a family drama and nothing more, even if it's a forceful one: Sandra reunites with her family on the eve of her father's memorial service but there's two dark secrets lurking in the shadows; her incestuous affair with her brother, and her adulterous mother's dereliction of her husband (Sandra's father) in a concentration camp.