Electro in Tuscany

Sandra. "These shadows . . . the sifting of ashes of a dead past." Thus whisper the winds of melancholy around a decaying palazzo in the Tuscan town of Volterra, where Director Luchino Visconti (Rocco and His Brothers, The Leopard) installs Claudia Cardinale as resident tragedienne. In Visconti's modern variations on the Electra theme, Claudia struggles with a role that requires her, at times, to slip off the mantle of Greek tragedy and slip into something like a bath towel.

Married to a pipe-smoking, cameratoting American (Michael Craig), Claudia returns home after many years to witness the unveiling of a memorial to her late father, a scientist who died at Auschwitz. He was denounced to the Nazis, Claudia believes, by her mother (Marie Bell), who has since remarried and gone mad. Claudia's brother, played with a nice sense of wasting vitality by Jean Sorel, is less interested in vengeance than in incest, about which he has written an autobiographical novel. Since the family closets are already bursting with scandalous secrets, Claudia begs him to destroy the book. The pair's unseemly sibling passion ultimately leads to disgrace, violence and suicide.

Sandra, though lento-paced and pretentious, does create a bewitching atmosphere of decadence. While the old, ordered world passes into limbo, Visconti savors every detail of a cavernous manse where each drafty, half-lit corridor and every gleaming bit of crystal augurs ill. But finally the decor becomes a bore, and even Visconti's human characters seem used up, lifeless, set into place like figures in a faded tapestry.