The pending threat of litigation notwithstanding, Italy's film industry did big business during the 1970s by making (at times smudgy) carbon copies of such Hollywood hits as The French Connection (1971), The Exorcist (1973), and Jaws (1975). Egypt-born Italian film distributor turned filmmaker Ovidio G. Assonitis chased the success of his Exorcist clone Beyond the Door) with Italy's answer to Jaws, swapping out Steven Spielblerg's mechanical shark for a remote controlled octopus in Tentacles (1977). Taking a tip from the disaster film cycle that had produced The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974), Assonitis collected an all-star cast to bedazzle his tale of a coastal community plagued by a supersized cephalopod, his vacationing luminaries including Shelley Winters, John Huston, and Henry Fonda (whose footage was shot at his Beverly Hills home while the ailing actor recovered from open heart surgery). Appearing in his first lead role, as a marine biologist who becomes a reluctant and unlikely hero, is Sam Peckinpah trouper Bo Hopkins; despite prominent parts in such prestige films as John Schlesinger's Day of the Locust (1975) and Alan Parker's Midnight Express (1978), Hopkins returned to B-movies post-Tentacles and worked exhaustively in television, playing semi-regulars on such series as The Rockford Files and Dynasty. Named CEO of the prolific B-movie mill Cannon Film Group in 1990, Ovidio Assonitis sold to Universal Pictures the remake rights to Dino Risi's Italian language Profumo di donna (1974); as Scent of a Woman (1992), the remake won Al Pacino his first and only Academy Award.

By Richard Harland Smith