Profumo di Donna might seem like a cheesy Italian romance and it does have its overly melodramatic moments, but due to the subtle acting of Gassman and the great chemistry between Gassman and Momo the movie has a well-balanced narration. It cannot simply be reduced to sex jokes and lewdness, although Fausto's jokes sometimes are rather crude. The writing is spot on and the message of a broken old army captain is fantastically presented against the backdrop of some of Italy's most beautiful cities.Overall 7/10 Full review on movie-discourse.blogspot.de

Al Pacino made famous the American remake, and the original Italian film has the same basic outline. A blind army captain is assigned a young assistant as a guide. Vittorio Gassman is the captain in the first version, which is much less flamboyant than the Pacino portrayal.The captain is traveling from Turin to Naples to meet an army buddy who was injured in the same accident. The aide doesn't realize that the captain is planning a suicide with his friend. He asks his companion to describe the women they meet on their trip but the captain claims that he can see what a woman looks like by her scent. He is ashamed of his handicap and carries a picture of Sara, the girl he is in love with. The journey is an eventful one and Gassman is excellent as the captain. Pacino brings a more over the top attitude to the part, but both are good.

I came to this film expecting to see something transcendent. After all, the remake of Scent of a Woman with Al Pacino had been so wonderful. And I had never yet seen a Hollywood remake that even approached the original in quality. They are usually shattering disappointments.So I fully anticipated that Vittorio Gassman's version would far surpass Pacino's.But Surprise, Surprise. Finally. Who would have thought it. A Hollywood Remake that Ruled!!! Yay! It was not even a close contest, in my opinion. This film with Vittorio Gassman was for me flawed beyond redemption. I'm bewildered to read that it was even nominated for an Academy Award and has received other very prestigious awards.True, Gassman got the blind part of his role down. He had obviously done a lot of research and put in long rehearsals. And he had the potential to be great.The trouble was with the script. Gassman's character was a pig. An entertaining pig at times, an interesting pig at other times but never more than a full-fledged PIG.So while the film could engage you in the spectacle sense, it was really difficult to care about what happened to the characters or to root for them. The script just put them in a series of scenes, the common denominator being coarseness and then more coarseness.What was most offensive about this film were the scenes near the end in the Nepalese restaurant. Apparently Gassman had been friends with this family for many years -- since their daughters were children. So he was like a uncle figure.Then when this film catches up with them, the girls have grown into young ladies. And the Gassman character is shown treating them very disrespectfully (to put it mildly), exploiting them and preying on them.Except for the one he apparently loves. But why was it OK for him to exploit the other young girls? This predatory aspect of the film was so beyond offensive that it ruined the entire film and made it irredeemable and indefensible.Go see Al Pacino's Scent of a Woman instead. Pacino is brilliant. And the remake has heart and soul -- both of which are sorely absent from the original. The original has noisy drama but it is a hollow soulless drama.

Honestly, I'm only writing this to counteract absurd comments by other users. One comment and I'll say no more about it:-----Start rant----- I HATE substandard, big star, corporate, homogenized movies. I hated the Bird Cage, I hated Point of No Return, I hated City of Angels, I hated Shall We Dance?(US) and every other movie that simply took a decent foreign film and photocopied it with familiar names in starring roles with dumbed-down dialogue because nobody thought that YOU were smart enough to understand the original. The whole world enjoys movies from other countries, enjoys visions of life in other places represented through film except the good 'ol USA that simply puts a veneer of saccharin over anything internationally successful to create unnecessary and boring hybrids. You don't have to be an intellectual to enjoy foreign movies, you simply have to have a brain in your head. -----End rant-----The film is delicate, and presents a wonderful array of issues related to Italian culture at the time: inadequacy in the face of a changing world, individual impotence when fronted with social and personal injustice, and of course, that strange version of love only the Italians can put on screen.The film has had a remake, and I found it inferior in just about every way. The original is simply good film-making, not an obvious ripoff that's been pasteurized to cater to a fast-food audience. Gassman is subtle, his manners and style give the film a slow pace, sometimes too slow for my tastes, but it's forgivable if you focus on other facets of the film, like the camera work and the faithful representations of culture through the dialogue. I've never liked Pacino, he's always seemed incredibly boring and stale to me, and his idea of subtlety is whether he should speak a bit more loudly or a lot more loudly. Except for maybe the first Godfather where he was fresh and not yet ruined by the studio life.If you don't speak Italian, you'll have to read along, but the translation I saw on the DVD was pretty good.See this film when you've had a bad day at work and you want to see how life could be worse AND better in one fell swoop...