Fiorenzo Serra as The Grand Duke Pina Bausch as The Princess Pasquale Zito as Count Bassano Linda Polan as Ines Ruffo Saltini Philip Locke as Prime Minister Jonathan Cecil as Ricotin Maurice Barrier as Ilya Ziloev Fred Williams as Sabatino Lepori Elizabeth Kaza Colin Higgins as Police chief Vittorio Zarfati as Second Master Rubetti Umberto Zuanelli as First Master Rubetti Claudio Ciocca as Second officer Antonio Vezza as The Captain Alessandro Partexano as Official Domenico Pertica as Pastor Christian Fremont Marielle Duvelle Helen Stirling Janet Suzman as Edmea Tetua The singers: Mara Zampieri as Ildebranda Cuffari Elizabeth Norberg Schulz as Ines Ruffo Saltini Nucci Condò as Teresa Valegnani Giovanni Bavaglio as Fuciletto Carlo Di Giacomo as Sabatino Lepori Boris Carmeli as Ilya Ziloev The Serbs: Elizabeth Norberg Schulz as 1st Soprano Bernadette Lucarini as 2nd Soprano Bruno Beccaria as Tenor Other performers: Umberto Barone as Scala Monica Bertolotti Danika La Loggia Roberto Caporali as Dorotea's father Franca Maresa as Dorotea's mother Savatore Calabrese as Banker Johna Mancini as Superintendent's secretary Filippo Degara Francesco Scali Cecilia Cerocchi as Superintendent's wife Pietro Fumelli Franco Angrisano as The cook Ugo Fangareggi as The bartender Critical reception Screened out of competition at the 40th Venice Film Festival, the film received a fifteen-minute standing ovation. Writing for the Italian weekly magazine L'Espresso, novelist and film critic Alberto Moravia saw the film as an intuitive critique of European society that preceded the First World War. "What is brilliant," explained Moravia, "is the intuition that European society of the Belle Epoque had emptied itself of all humanism leaving only an artificial and exhaustive formalism. The result was a society founded on a continuous yet contemptible melodrama. The other genial intuition is that of the fundamental unity of the world back then which was completely bourgeois or utterly obsessed with the bourgeoisie. This idea comes through magnificently in the scene where immaculate opera singers perform leaning over the iron balcony of the engine room as sweat-grimed workers cease stoking the furnace with coal to listen to the splendid voices." The film ranked 7th on Cahiers du Cinéma's Top 10 Films of the Year List in 1984. The film has a 80% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 10 reviews with an average rating of 6.8/10. See also List of submissions to the 56th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film List of Italian submissions for the Academy