Heller in Pink Tights 1960

Heller in Pink Tights

Heller In Pink Tights is a 1960 American Technicolor Western film adapted from Louis L’Amour‘s 1955 novel Heller with a Gun. It stars Sophia Loren and Anthony Quinn and was directed by George Cukor

  

The movie is noted for its lavishly ornate costumes by Edith Head and its unique visual style influenced by technical advisor George Hoyningen-Huene

As in L’Amour’s novel, there is no character in the film named Heller

A Western in name only, Heller in Pink Tights is an imaginative, formally daring reflection on the relationship between art and life

Sophia Loren plays the star of a theater troupe touring the Old West, with Anthony Quinn as her poker-faced husband and Steve Forrest as her hired-gun object of desire

The result is a warm-blooded romantic comedy packed with teases and deceptions and mutual desires, one of Cukor’s most sexually outré films

But it’s also an aggressively stylized meta-movie in which every onscreen magic trick or optical illusion, every splotch of bright primary color, and every tongue-in-cheek nod to Western genre convention suggests either that the movies are radically divorced from real life, or that life itself is a game—or both

Heller in Pink Tights 1960

Heller in Pink Tights 1960