This is another fine early effort by the man who would eventually be credited with belatedly introducing the horror genre into his country; like the just-viewed DON CESARE DI BAZAN (1942), it is an opulent costumer similarly showcasing an up-and-coming international star i.e. Vittorio Gassman (here billed with a double 'n'!). Incidentally, I was not aware this one dealt with the notorious Venetian womanizer Giacomo Casanova – though his exploits here involve at least as much action as romance; for the record, this famous historical figure is featured in at least four other titles currently in my unwatched pile!
In fact, the plot (written by Freda along with two notable future directors, namely Mario Monicelli and Steno) starts off with his brother being tortured in a dungeon (an image that predates the typical horror atmosphere) on account of a letter apparently compromising the wife of the current Doge; despite being barred from the city, Gassman determines to save his sibling and presents himself before the woman concerned offering to retrieve it for her. The danger-fraught adventure takes him first to Austria (where he manages to infiltrate the sect in possession of the incriminating document and intent on selling it to a foreign power) and, then, the Russian court of Catherine The Great (played by future tearjerking diva Yvonne Sanson) – the revelatory note's ultimate destination. Interestingly, Gassman (and, for that matter, the movie's producer Dino De Laurentiis) would return to the latter setting for the colourful star-studded epic TEMPEST (1958).
While one would have expected the film's rather generic title to be attributable to the hero, it actually refers to the person engaged to dispatch the all-important memo to Sanson: ostensibly a count, it emerges to be a woman (though how anyone in his right mind could mistake the shapely Gianna Maria Canale, Freda's long-standing partner, for a male is beyond me!) who, naturally, ends up seduced by Casanova – as does the Empress herself, by the way. Still, a young maid (Maria Mercader) in the aforementioned Austrian section is the one who apparently captures the protagonist's heart – whom he runs into again, and loses definitively to a gunshot, in the Russian steppes as he is fleeing Catherine's wrath after successfully accomplishing his mission. A final note: the movie was broadcast on late-night Italian TV as part of a Freda marathon but, since its programming started immediately after the screening of the excellent Canale peplum vehicle THEODORA, SLAVE EMPRESS (1954), I had to laboriously fast-forward through that entire title in order to get to the one under review!
