Visconti's retelling of the Electra story starts with Sandra/Electra (Claudia Cardinale) returning to her ancestral home in Italy. On the eve of an official ceremony commemorating the death of her Jewish father in a Nazi concentration camp, she revives an intimate involvement with her brother (Jean Sorel), which troubles her naive husband (Michael Craig).
As ever with Visconti, he is ambivalently drawn to the decadent society he is ostensibly criticising; and Armando Nannuzzi's camera lovingly caresses the creaking old mansion, set in a landscape of crumbling ruins, where the incestuous siblings determine to wreak revenge on the mother (Bell) and stepfather (Ricci) who supposedly denounced their father.
The title, culled from the poem "Le ricordanze"[1] by Giacomo Leopardi, could be translated as "Glimmering stars of the Great Bear", and has a strong resonance with the movie's plot:
Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa, io non credea Tornare ancor per uso a contemplarvi Sul paterno giardino scintillanti, E ragionar con voi dalle finestre Di questo albergo ove abitai fanciullo, E delle gioie mie vidi la fine.(...)
English translation:
Glimmering stars of the Great Bear,
I never thought I'd be back to see you
Shining down on my father's garden,
Nor talk to you ever again from the windows
Of this house where I spent my childhood
And saw the last of my happiness vanish.(...)
The movie was shot on location in Volterra, a Tuscan town fifty miles southwest of Florence. Casa Inghrami and the Palazzo Viti were both used as settings for the family mansion there.[2]
It was initially reported that the principal actors would voice their own parts in the English-language version of the film.[3] Ultimately though they were dubbed by others.
