The Doctor... The Student (1976)
Plot: Claudia wants to move to London, and she’ll stop at nothing to get it…
Gloria Guida found herself in something of a rough patch for a few years following the success of The High School Girl (1975). In that time she frequently was employed with director Silvio Amadio for a string of largely interchangable melodramatic sex comedies. While hardly her worst Amadio clearly wasn’t the same after the gialli Amuck (1972) and Smile Before Death (1972). Enamored with Miss Teen Italy 1974 and commedia sexy all’Italiana debutant Gloria Guida, the daftly titled The Doctor… The Student (released back home as Il Medico… La Studentessa and in Spain as Los Caprichos de Gloria or the Whims Of Gloria) was his last big feature. The Doctor… The Student veers fully into sex comedy territory which, unfortunately, wasn’t Amadio’s strong suit. It’s hardly the worst thing Guida has starred in, but it was painfully clear that Amadio’s best days were now well and fully behind him as this has the look of a daytime soap opera. The Doctor... The Student arrived after The Mammon Cat (1975) and That Malicious Age (1975) and it was clear that glorious Gloria would not top the heights of The High School Girl (1975), and Blue Jeans (1975). Thankfully, Fernando Di Leo’s subtextual satire (and deconstruction of the Italian sex comedy) To Be Twenty (1978), or la Guida’s genuine bid for critical approval, was just two years in the future.
In her five-year tenure as the prime Lolita and reigning queen of lowbrow sex comedy Guida had the good fortune of co-starring alongside some of Italy’s brightest and best, whether they were leading ladies (Rosemary Dexter, Dagmar Lassander, Anita Sanders, Rossana Podestà, Annamaria Clementi, and here: Nieves Navarro), leading men (Paolo Carlini, Marco Guglielmi, Giacomo Rossi Stuart, Giuseppe Pambieri, Corrado Pani, Nino Castelnuovo, and Lando Buzzanca), fellow starlets (Ilona Staller, Angela Doria, Lilli Carati, Femi Benussi, Nicoletta Amadio), respected comedians (Vittorio Caprioli, Mario Carotenuto, Enzo Cannavale, and Gianfranco D'Angelo), and rubber faced slapstick buffoons (Lino Banfi, Alvaro Vitali, and Jimmy il Fenomeno, typically). After two years of consistent work on the stage la Guida had perfected her giggle-pout-undress-and-smile routine to the minutest detail. As a proverbial “greatest hits” of the Amadio years you could do far worse than The Doctor… The Student. Later that year glorious Gloria was in the equally uninspired Scandal In the Family and Au Pair Girl (1976). Yes, la Guida was in her own rip-off from Val Guest’s fairly innocuous Au Pair Girls (1972).
Claudia Raselli (Gloria Guida) is a 17-year-old medical graduate living in the city of Trani with her authoritarian conservative father Colonel Oreste Raselli (Jacques Dulfino, with the voice of Luca Ernesto Mellina) and her voluptuous stepmother Luisa (Nieves Navarro, as Susan Scott). Her father is a stuffy military strategist who spents all his time in his office neglecting the sexual needs of his second wife. In his office he’s looked after by his assistant (Riccardo Miniggio, as Ric) and frequently engages in war of words with his leftist janitor Bidello (Enrico Beruschi). Claudia plans to temporarily move to swinging London with her friends and taste the (counter)culture, music, and people. When her father has a fever dream about her being raped in a far off land by savages he revokes his consent at the last minute. Stuck at home and bored out of her mind Claudia spents the summer hanging out with her best friend Daniela (Nicoletta Amadio) and seducing 40-year-old Dr. Filippo Cinti (Pino Colizzi), the handsome next-door doctor/college professor. Claudia stages a bicycle accident or feigns illness just to get his attention, but at every turn he spurns her advances. One day she discovers he’s in a tryst with her stepmother. She decides to get photographic evidence to blackmail the two into doing her bidding. To get her way and visit London Claudia forces doctor Cinti into marrying her, only to break out the inculpatory evidence amidst the wedding ceremony. Now that she has forced the Colonel’s hand he sees no other option but to let her go to London as he tends to the more pressing problem, his current marital crisis.
The Doctor… The Student effortlessly manages what was previously imagined impossible: to make a radiant presence like Nieves Navarro look plain and ordinary. In her prime Spanish minx Navarro was probably the most iconic blonde this side of Barbara Bouchet. Unlike Bouchet, Nieves wasn’t gifted with the same comedic timing and versatility. Whereas Bouchet was a superstar in both giallo and commedia sexy all’Italiana alike and maintained her high profile through out, Navarro had starred in Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion (1970), Death Walks on High Heels (1971), All the Colors of the Dark (1971), So Sweet, So Dead (1972), Death Walks at Midnight (1972), and Death Carries a Cane (1973) but towards the end of the decade ended up working with Joe D’Amato on Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (1977) and Orgasmo Nero (1980). Her association with, and sometime marriage to, Luciano Ercoli thankfully saved her from the murkier depths of exploitation and directors like Andrea Bianchi, Claudio Fragasso, Bruno Mattei, and in her native Spain, Jesús Franco.
If you feel as if you’ve seen The Doctor… The Student before, that’s because you have. Apparently Silvio Amadio was on autopilot and The Doctor… The Student has none of the flair of his gialli. Together with writer Fernando Popoli he reconstituted a number of plot elements and iconic scenes from The Minor (1974), That Malicious Age (1975), and Sins Of Youth (1975) and merged them into a recombinant possessing just enough of a pulse to warrant a cursory viewing, but has not much going for it otherwise. Which is a really elaborate way of saying that The Doctor… The Student frequently feels more like a tangentially related set of vignettes rather than a real melodrama, sex comedy, or bedroom farçe. Perhaps more than anything else The Doctor… The Student lacks flavor, color, and spark. What it does not lack is an abundance of glorious Gloria in the buff. And no matter how drab or mediocre the feature wherever miss Guida went gratuitous naked shenanigans (situational or otherwise) usually followed.
For those keeping track of such things, there’s the dream sequence and seducing of an older man from The Minor (1974), the open window striptease from That Malicious Age (1975), the blackmail subplot from Sins Of Youth (1975), and a devious ploy to get her way that was later recycled wholesale in The Landlord (1976). Thankfully Gloria also refrains from her usual caterwauling and there’s no bouts of disco singing and improvised dancing like in The Night Nurse (1979). The "ravaged by savages" subplot was later repurposed in its entirety in German sex comedy Three Swedes On the Reeperbahn (1980). Had this had Gloria in a cut-off micro jeans, a tiny blue bikini, and/or her running through the woods naked The Doctor… The Student would have been the quintessential Guida composite. Alas, it has not and rather than transcending the rampant mediocrity this, sadly, wallows so generously and completely in it. In the Guida sex comedy canon, this one remains sturdily on the dull side of average.
This is probably what Sins Of Youth (1975) with a dash of The High School Girl (1975) would have looked like. At 21 Guida was bit long in the tooth to continue passing herself off as a student (okay, she’s a college student here) but, as always, that largely was a preamble to have her naked and in compromising positions as early and often as humanly possible. Now at the height of her physical prowess there was no excuse or good reason not to showcase miss Guida at every turn and in every position. There was, after all, no Italian piece of ass quite like glorious Gloria – except maybe Femi Benussi. Not only director Amadio had lost the plot likewise is director of photography Antonio Maccoppi not able to rekindle that old magic. At the very least he’s able to line up a few good shots of our girl Gloria. The problem is that The Doctor… The Student is neither here nor there. It lacks the vigor of The Minor (1974), That Malicious Age (1975), and Sins Of Youth (1975) and expecting this to be even on remotely the same level (or have the same madcap energy) as Edwige Fenech comedies like Wife On Vacation… Lover In Town (1980), Cream Puffs (1981) or An Ideal Adventure (1982) is both folly and futile. It clearly is not. Even by lowly Guida standards The Doctor… The Student is terminally mediocre and and horrendously, painfully routine in execution.
While hardly the worst that Gloria Guida lend her name and formidable figure to The Doctor… The Student is shockingly, maddeningly mediocre on all fronts. Not all directors are fortunate enough to experience a late-career revival. In the late 1970s Lucio Fulci was considered nothing but a comedy and giallo director past his prime. His tenure with producer Fabrizio De Angelis and director of photography Sergio Salvati brought him back from the brink of irrelevance. No such thing would be happening for Silvio Amadio. Amadio would only direct two more features but none seem to have gained much traction outside of Italy. What is perhaps even more fascinating is that somehow the great giallo boom and the gothic horror revival of the mid-seventies passed la Guida by without her partaking in either. Which is strange to say the least considering how much of a cult icon she was at the time. Why exactly was la Guida denied her own giallo? Some things truly boggle the mind. Amadio was too good for low-hanging cinematic fruit like this. Hell, even la bella Gloria did better on average. In the end The Doctor… The Student is not melodramatic nor sexy enough to warrant anything more than a one-time viewing for history’s sake. The High School Girl (1975) from the year before and To Be Twenty (1978) from two years later are plain better.
