Tag Archives: Italy

Marco Bellocchio’s My Mother’s Smile was deemed blasphemous by the Roman Catholic Church for what the Church referred to as Bellocchio’s “systematic destruction of family and religious values.” Contrary to the Church’s presumptions about Bellocchio, My Mother’s Smile is a fascinating portrait of a man (Sergio Castellitto as Ernesto) who is forced to reconcile with his own atheism after receiving a shocking appeal from the Church requesting his participation in the canonization of his “saintly” mother.
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Lucio (Vittorio Gassman) and his sidekick (Adolfo Celi) accidently gets mixed up with a gang of international counterfeiters in this fast-moving and suspenseful comedy with music from Ennio Morricone. The crooks hope to upset the U.S. economy by flooding the world with bogus bills. Lucio is an overworked businessman who only wants a little rest and relaxation. Instead, he is skiing in Northern Italy on one day and the next day enduring the searing heat in the Egyptian desert.
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Rafael is the best salesman in the biggest department store of Madrid. He is a fascinating man; all his colleagues fell in love with him. He tries to live a high-standard life. He is definitely ambitious and aspires to be the new head of sales on his floor. But he has to beat Don Antonio: the best salesman in the man wearing sector. Competition gets harder and harder, until Rafael kills Don Antonio! Lourdes, the ugliest woman in the store, unexpectedly helps Rafael to hide the corpse, but her help isn’t for free. Rafael will soon start considering a new crime. A new perfect crime.
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During the Second Punic War, the commander Scipio Africanus (Marcello Mastroianni) is in a crisis because the Roman army can not defeat the many Carthaginian legions of Hannibal Barca. Teaming with his brother Scipio Asiaticus (Ruggero Mastroianni), Africanus manages to destroy the troops of Hannibal at Zama and to win the war. When he returns triumphant to Rome, he realizes that he has been manipulated like a puppet by the consul Marcus Porcius Cato, called “the Censor” (Vittorio Gassman). Scipio, disgusted by the poor Roman politics, withdraws from his rank of general, while Cato plans to destroy with a third war the cursed city of Carthage.
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Eleven separate vignettes are presented. In each, celebrities, playing semi-fictionalized versions of themselves (with the exception of the characters of various wait staff, and one actor playing a lookalike cousin of herself), meet in a food service establishment with coffee/tea and cigarettes involved. Beyond the topic of discussion that brought them together, they often talk directly about coffee and cigarettes, more often that coffee and cigarettes, and by association caffeine and nicotine, are not healthy, especially if they are the only things constituting lunch. Other recurring themes include the Lee family, cousinhood, celebrity worship, the connection between the medical and musical careers, and Nikola Tesla’s belief that the Earth is a conductor of acoustic resonance. In all cases, the coming together for coffee/tea and smokes acts as a bridge to overcome disagreements, and/or makes uncomfortable situations less uncomfortable.
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Timido, goffo e petulante, Alberto cerca in ogni modo di fare colpo su Margherita. Con la speranza di vincere il primo premio, partecipa a una corsa. Da un soggetto di Sordi sceneggiato dall’attore con Cesare Zavattini e Vittorio De Sica (che si dice abbia diretto gran parte del film), un filmetto un po’ melenso ma interessante come specchio della Roma postbellica. Nel suo primo film da protagonista Sordi ha voluto portare sullo schermo i temi, i modi e l’umorismo di un suo popolare programma radiofonico.
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Peter Sellers plays Aldo Vanucci (aka the Fox), one of the greatest criminals of the world, and master of disguise. After Aldo escapes from the Italian prison he was held in, he meets again with his friends, and plans to retrieve the “gold of Cairo” a large shipment of gold, that waits to be unloaded somewhere in Italy. Aldo devices the perfect plan. Posing as a famous director, he finds the ideal coastal village to unload the shipment, and persuades the entire population that he has chosen their village as the set for his new movie. Everybody, including the idiot chief of the local police is so excited, that they can’t even imagine that in fact they are helping the Fox to get the “gold of Cairo”…
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A wife escapes her pressure-filled marriage only to have her husband haunt her literally and figuratively.
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Clelia comes from Rome to her native Turin, to set up a new fashion salon. On her first night, the woman in the next room of her hotel takes an overdose of pills. Clelia becomes involved with this woman, Rosetta, and three of her rich women friends, Momina, Nene, and Mariella. Momina is older than the others, and lives apart from her husband. Her current lover is Cesare, the architect of Clelia’s salon. Nene is a talented ceramics artist, and lives with her fiance, the painter Lorenzo. Mariella is a flighty woman only interested in having a good time. Clelia becomes attached to Carlo, the architect’s assistant, but the other women look down on him as he comes from a working class background. Momina, with the help of Clelia, discovers that Rosetta fell in love with Lorenzo as he was painting her portrait. Momina then encourages Rosetta to go after Lorenzo, even though he and Nene were supposed to marry soon.
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Through the childhood and the adolescence of Giacomo Casanova (from his memoirs), this is a description of how people live in the Venice of the 18th century: customs, habits, medicine, religion and most of all – the omnipresence of hypocrisy.
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