Black Angel
The Italian ministry of the arts and culture deemed the production culturally significant and donated 1.6 million Euros to the film's overall budget.,In the beach hut scene the woman who takes her clothes off in front of Helmut and encourages him to follow her into the sea is a poorly chosen body double, with over-large breasts and neat sparse pubic hair, whereas the woman in the underwater scenes appears to be the real Livia with luxuriant pubic hair, neater breasts and a different pattern of moles on her left side.,Helmut Schultz: Husbands kill lovers not the other way round!,References Rome, Open City (1945),Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt (Falling in Love Again)
(uncredited)
Written by Friedrich Hollaender
Performed by Marlene Dietrich,The marketing for this film refers to Tinto Brass's much earlier works, The Key, and Salon Kitty. Although Brass made many films since, this referral is entirely appropriate, as the style of Senso '45 is very much inspired by (if not derived from) these pictures, especially The Key. For the uninitiated: this is soft pornography of the classy kind.

As in both of these films, Brass sets the story during WWII. As in The Key, we have as central character a woman well past her twenties (in this case even well past her thirties) who explores her sexuality. Her lover is a blond SS officer, whose mannerisms recall the character played by Helmut Berger in Salon Kitty. Slightly unusual for Brass is to move from comedic to dramatic territory, but this shift proved useful when it came to depicting the dark and obsessive side of the central relationship.

The casting of Anna Galiena was excellent, and not just regarding her acting abilities. On the one hand, there is no credibility-stretching age gap between her and her husband (as there was between Sandrelli and Finlay in The Key). On the other, she looks fantastic for her age, even in the nude, and thus the sexual chemistry between Livia and Helmut appears quite real, despite the 20 year age gap between Galiena and Garko. Still, Gabriel Garko's SS officer leaves something to be desired, most simply put: his hair colour does. Garko's hair had been dyed straw blond, but he does not look like a blond man at all. Perhaps Italians do not have an eye for this, or, more likely, it was too late to change casting and Brass insisted on a blond SS man for this leading part, so he went ahead regardless. This bit of sacrificed realism is certainly at odds with the drama.,