Thank you for your reply, Katie. Actually, it’s embarrassing to admit it, but I haven’t had much exposure to French art-house cinema at all. I speak French fairly well, and don’t understand German or Italian, but I got into the German krimi, films made between 1959 and 1972 mostly based on Edgar Wallace crime novels. They are hardly art-house fare, but I found them addictive. The first one I watched was also my favourite, “The Hunchback of Soho”, and the lovely Suzanne Roquette was in it, who was also in a later krimi, “The College Girl Murders”. Klaus Kinski actually got his start in the krimi, and I associate him more with “Dead Eyes of London” than more intellectual fare. There were a number of West German-Italian co-productions that were sort of krimi-giallo mélanges. The only one of these I have seen was “What Have You Done with Solange?” so I know about Fabio Testi, who starred as an Italian language teacher, working at a private girls’ school in England, suspected of being responsible for a string of killings of his own students. He was excellent in this very good film.

I believe that Karin Schubert is still living in Italy somewhere with her pet dogs. It was terrible that she got into making hardcore sex films at an age when you would expect a porn actress to be getting out of the industry, and that she tried to kill herself twice. I hope and pray that she is still alive and God is looking out for her. I don’t believe an actress with her body of work would just disappear, dying without anyone taking notice. I had seen her a long time ago in «La Folie des grandeurs» with Yves Montand, where she played the Queen of Spain, but I actually came to «La Punition» after watching her in a mediocre Italian giallo called “The Girl in Room 2D” where she was quite affecting in a small part. A number of German actresses have really taken to Italy. Brigitte Skay, an actress in the krimis whose career in some ways is similar to Schubert’s, lived most of her life in Italy, returning to Germany only when her Italian partner died, and she was herself about to die of cancer. The great Italian director Mario Bava’s penultimate film, “Rabid Dogs”, would never have been released if its German lead actress, Lea Lander, hadn’t purchased the production rights to it, and after much work, finally released a film that had been on the shelf for a couple of decades.

Thank you very much for the recommendation to watch «L'Important c'est d'aimer.» Romy Schneider is a wonderful actress and I see that she won the César for best actress for her performance in that film. I am really grateful, not only to Janice, but to commenters like yourself, who put me in touch with intellectual and artistic efforts I would otherwise be unaware of.