Display MoreIf you're looking for a funny romantic movie then… Ten Thousand Bedrooms is not that. Much like The Dam Busters, it's clearly a movie designed for sensibilities that simply no longer exist. With an interminable run time, few songs worth listening to and a meandering barely-a-story that goes nowhere slowly. The sets and the exterior shots of 1950s Rome are nice, though! And the cast is certainly compelling, though their characters are not.
Which is to say that Anna Maria Alberghetti is at least pretty impressive! And we've enjoyed learning about her this past week: she was a successful teen music star who became an actress. She's best remembered for her work onstage but she headlined a number of movies similar to Ten Thousand Bedrooms. And she kept her star power for decades; Secret Ops' writers may have best known her from a series of popular salad commercials in the 1980s where she played herself!
Here's some of her music:
And here's one of those salad commercials!:
But why was she referenced in Secret Ops? We still have no idea. Maybe someone on the team was a fan? Another strong theory is that they were simply looking for a name for the doomed cruiseliner that invoked the famous shipwreck 'Andrea Doria'. But we do think picking Ten Thousand Bedrooms may have hit on something… because her co-star, the rival for Dean Martin's affection, is an actress named Eva Bartok. Bartok… like another name from Secret Ops, Bartok Industries? They're the company that built the TCS Cerberus and they're even named in the game's intro dialogue! Is this some huge coincidence or were Secret Ops' writers taking names of actresses from this specific movie?
One final (barely a) surprise: we were so unhappy with the poorly-upscaled copy of the movie available online that I decided to order a copy on DVD. You can now download as nice a version of Ten Thousand Bedrooms here for a limited time.
Sully was so bored by the movie that he gave up and decided to attack the couch instead.
