Roger's
reviews have appeared in McClatchy-Tribune News
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Orlando Magazine Autoweek Magazine among others.
He is the founder and editor of Movie
Nation.
Sophia
Loren has been a screen and fashion icon so long, famous
as one of the most voluptuous women ever to grace the
screen, that it’s easy to forget how brilliant an
actress she’s been.
Earthy
in Italian dramas, regal in costume epics and aloof and
amusing in Hollywood romantic comedies, from “Scandal
in Sorrento” to “The Millionairess”
to “Man of La Mancha” and even “Grumpier
Old Men,” Loren effortlessly wears the label her
“El Cid” co-star Charlton Heston gave her
to this very day — “a force of nature.”
She
was never better than in her Oscar-winning turn in her
frequent collaborator Vittorio De Sica’s masterpiece,
“Two Women.” Playing a widowed mother fleeing
the air raids on Rome during the Allied invasion of 1944,
she inhabits the role so thoroughly that one can barely
see a “performance” in there.
Through
her, the viewer experiences a WWII odyssey as her character,
Cesira, and her daughter take to the rails and the road
in a country about to undergo a coup, unleashing lawlessness
and reprisals a head of invading forces that took forever
to march up the boot of Italy.
Titled
“La ciociara” or “Woman of Ciociara”
in Italian — named for the impoverished, mountainous
region southeast of Rome — this gorgeous black and
white classic exists in its original Italian or expertly
dubbed by the multi-lingual Loren herself when it was
released in the U.S. and Britain in 1960-61.
Cesira
dotes on her tween daughter Rosetta (Eleanora Brown),
who survives an air raid, causing her mother to vow to
leave the Eternal City for the village where she remembers
“sleeping in the chicken house…eating one
meal a day.” Rosetta, she tells the neighbors, has
a “weak heart.” But anything would be better
than staying in a Rome under siege.
She
talks the handsome Giovanni (Raf Vallone) into watching
her store and apartment while they’re gone. She
barely notices, as she lays out her reasons and plans,
as Giovanni closes the doors and then the windows and
curtains of his coal and firewood business, one by one,
to seduce her.
Independent and contemptuous of mere male lust, the woman
who married an older man simply to escape the poverty
of the countryside eventually submits to Giovanni. But
we can see the calculations beneath the desire in her
eyes.
At
least he’ll be inspired to guard her property, and
escort her and Rosetta to the train the next day.
Their
train ride is interrupted by bombing. She teaches Rosetta
how to carry loads on her head, the way Italian women
have for millennia, and they continue on, surviving an
Allied fighter plane’s strafing, through the town
of Fondi, where they’re hustled by the locals and
threatened by fascist militia hunting for “deserters.”
And
then they arrive at her home village of Sant Eufemia,
and the dangers that hung over their picturesque and even
picaresque journey subside. Or so we think.
Because
although they’re among family and old friends —
the “idealist” student Michele (Jean-Paul
Belmondo) pines for her — the war is still just
down the boot of Italy, as the Allies landed “too
far south” to make quick work of the crumbled Italian
army and the Germans who supplanted them.
“I
love you, Cesira!”
“With
the troubles we have, you say THAT?”
We
know what she knows, that civilians or ex-combatants in
a now “occupied” country, Mussolini in or
out, the war is coming for them, and a reckoning with
it.
Veteran
cinematographer Gábor Pogány (“Valdez
is Coming”) frames such lovely images that “Two
Women” can play like an “Italy as it Once
Was” travelogue, with Loren our earthy, sensual
tour guide. Mountain vistas, haystacks piled to the sky,
every building old, bathed in shadows or stark sunlight,
it’s as inviting a depiction of a war zone as the
cinema has ever presented.
The
simple struggle to buy food for herself and her daughter
among understandably-hoarding neighbors in a collapsing
economy is a daily grind. But as the seasons change and
the debates about politics (Michele in a nascent communist,
who just doesn’t know it), the just-ended fascist
“empire” and chess matches, wine-drinking
and Michele’s story-reading among his illiterate
friends and relatives move indoors, the menace makes its
way back into their lives.
“Anzio”
is never mentioned by name, but referred to. British commandos
ask for their help and hear every Italian excuse for not
giving it. A German anti-aircraft officer (Curt Lowens)
lectures any Italian within earshot about unmanly “Italian
cowardice” and the injustices borne by a country
that still has “peasants.”
And
then the worst happens, a sequence still shocking over
60 years later, still poignant even if you don’t
buy into Italian victimhood, still realistic and historically-defensible
even if the modern viewer’s first instinct is to
wonder if Italy’s infamous racism plays into its
depiction.
Through
it all Loren is defiant but human, always nurturing, pragmatic,
canny and wary yet capable of letting her guard down,
a strong woman with one maternal priority and yet a simple
helpless refugee swept up in the tides of war.
Thanks
to his long collaborative friendship with Loren, De Sica,
already a legend for “Bicycle Thieves” and
“Umberto D.,” added a third classic to his
Holy Trinity of Italian masterpieces. Hers is a great
performance anchoring one of the true masterpieces of
the filmmaker who made “neo realism” the benchmark
of all dramatic cinema star.
