One of the things Don actually admits to, under extreme interrogation by Bobby and extreme alcohol intake, is he likes the movie La Notte! Well, what a svelte cineaste Don is. Notte was directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (Story of a Love Affair, Blow-Up), it stars a personal favorite actor, and Draper-esque prototype, the above pictured Marcello Mastroianni.

Have you ever read James Joyce’s The Dead? Imagine that, but way more Italian. There’s a focus on memory and the resurgence of the past, on intangible relationships, on wandering through life like sleepwalkers, half alive, half dead. (But keeping with the Italian thing, there’s also some DANCING.) It’s about a man and his wife who engage in flirtations and affairs until the end, when she wakes up one morning and tells him she doesn’t love him anymore. Hmmmmm.

There’s a big party scene where Giovanni, the husband, socializes and gladhands while his wife lingers on the edges of things, there as a trophy, lonely in a crowd of people. The similarity should strike you pretty quickly if you recall Don and Betty at the Kentucky Derby party.  It doesn’t end there. Giovanni is a restrained man-child, someone who has everything he could want but can’t manage to connect to the happiness those trappings ostensibly entail. His indecisiveness, his recklessness, and his creative frustration (he is a writer) remind us of our own leading man.

P.S.! As a film history side note, are you interested in why Don loves foreign film so much? Well, I’ll tell you! The educated consumer, middle class, with tendencies toward art, totally gave up on American cinema around the 50s and into the 60s. In short, this is because American 50’s cinema sucked. Badly. It was all gimmicks and wide screen and teenage idols like James Dean romping around — not serious enough for a man of Don’s taste. This is when imports took off, and in particular, Italian cinema boomed. The neo-realist movement, referred to by some as “male weepies”, really got an American audience interested. The French Nouvelle Vague and the British working class “Kitchen Sink” movement was also right around this time, and provided a foreign escape route from the American chaff of the day.

• footnote - by Natasha Simons