The Secret War of Harry Frigg (1968, with Paul Newman), A Lovely Way to Die (1968), and a revealing pictorial in Playboy magazine. Koscina kept up with the times, baring her body in vari- ous sex comedies of the late ’60s and 1970s, including L’assoluto naturale/ He and She (1969), Homo eroticus/ Man of the Year (1971), and Rivelazioni di un maniaco sessuale al capo della squadra mobile/The Slasher is the Sex Maniac (1972), a giallo thriller that was later supplemented with hardcore sex footage in America and reissued as Penetration. In the wake of Lisa and the Devil—and the stronger sex foot- age from the filming which was later added to The House of Exorcism (1975)—Koscina continued to appear in fairly explicit, if otherwise insub- stantial roles in Lucio Fulci’s horror comedy Il Cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco ovvero Dracula in brianza/ Dracula in the Provinces (1975, in which a vampire feeds on her bare bot- tom), and Franz Antel’s Casanova & Company/Some Like It Cool (1976, op- posite Tony Curtis). In the 1980s, though in her 50s, the actress was still playing scenes in the nude on the Roman stage. “My body is still okay,” she told an interviewer, “so why cover it up?” Sylva Koscina, one of the Ital- ian cinema’s great beauties, died of a heart ailment on December 26, 1994, at the age of 61.
Cast as the husband of Koscina’s character was Spanish actor Eduardo Fajardo. Born on August 24, 1918, in Mostiero, Ponteverda, the 54-year-old Fajardo was already the veteran of more than 100 films. He began acting in 1947 and made his first Italian pic- ture—Mario Caiano’s Erik il vichingo/ Erik the Viking—in 1965, which was followed closely by his greatest role, as the cold-blooded villain Maj. Jack- son in Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966). After Django, Fajardo was fea- tured in literally dozens of Italian Westerns, including Corbucci’s Il mercenario/The Mercenary (1968), Tulio Demichelli’s Arriva Sabata!/
A FASCINATING overhead shot of the filming of the dining room scene. At the bottom end of the table stand Mario (at left) and Lamberto Bava (gesticulating, at right), while director of photography Cecilio Paniagua stands beside the camera.