Both opulent and humanly scaled, director Vittorio Cottafavi's Messalina (1960, aka Messalina Venere Imperatrice) is a rare Italian-made historical spectacle headlined by a solo-above-title female star, the ideally cast English-born Belinda Lee, in one of the final roles of her tragically shortened life. Playing the young beauty plucked from country life as the Vestal Valeria