Women of the World (1963)

I don't know about you, but it's Friday, the end of another trying week, and I find myself craving some Mondo.  So, here we have the opening titles of the 1963 classic Mondo Women of the World.  Made by the same team that brought us Mondo Cane, the original Mondo which birthed the entire genre, Women of the World is, compared to their earlier efforts, a tad disappointing.  With its focus narrowed just to the subject of the female of the species and their differing roles in different cultures, it lacks some of the free wheeling outrageousness  of its immediate predecessors.  Not surprisingly, to contemporary audiences the whole approach of the film comes over as somewhat patronising, if not misogynistic.  But what else would one expect from a sixties Italian exploitation film?

Nevertheless, like the first two Mondo Cane films, Women of the World is beautifully filmed, capturing many remote and exotic locations in their full glory at a time when seeing such things in widescreen colour was still a novelty for most cinema audiences.  Living in an age when no corner of the world is any longer so remote that it can't be invaded by hipster back packers, it is hard to remember that, not so many years ago, there was a time when the only way to experience such places was through the cinema screen.  Much of the footage used in Women of the World was, supposedly, left over from the shooting of Mondo Cane. Like the earlier film, Women of the World was marketed on the promise of naked female flesh and sex - in reality, what's served up is pretty tame, especially by contemporary standards.

In what was to become the established Mondo 'format', the last part of the film turns to more serious subject matter, touching on such things as cosmetic surgery, Arabian women risking life and limb to collect battlefield shrapnel to sell as scrap metal and even the Thalidomide scandal.  As with ll Mono movies, to what extent the footage shown is genuine and how much was staged by the film makers is questionable.  Although, living as we do, in an era when so called 'reality TV' has blurred the lines between what is real and what is fake on our screens, this seems an increasingly irrelevant question. There is supposedly an English language version of the film with an 'amusing' and 'ironic' narration by Peter Ustinov, but I've never yet encountered this.  The only English language versions I've seen have all featured the same anonymous narrator.   As it stands, Women of the World remains a fascinating time capsule of early sixties western European attitudes, not just toward women, but also so called 'primitive cultures'.  It was a time when the world seemed bigger and more mysterious and western civilisation was still confident of its global political, economic and cultural hegemony.  How things would soon change.