See Naples and Live
SIMON, JOHN
ON SCREEN By John Simon See Naples and Live MARRIAGE ITALIAN STYLE-let us forget the title immediately. It must have sprung full-grown from the Herculean brain of Joe Levine, the producer who...
...The simple truth that a circumspect preacher and a shiftless drunkard may be equally incompetent in dealing with their children as long as they are all victims of social injustice would have less impact in any other context...
...After a slew of comically abortive stratagems by means of which Domenico tries in vain to identify his heir, he finally realizes Filumena's full worth...
...Marriage is an adaptation of Eduardo de Filippo's play, Filu-mena Marturano, executed by the playwright and four other writers...
...No less satisfying is the over-all rhythm of the film, masterly in its alternation and dosage of slapstick and sentiment, sensuality and common sense...
...It is a fine example of what assured craftsmanship and independence from the major studios can achieve in terms of significant and (I cannot stress this hard enough) entertaining film-making, One thing, however, lifts this film immeasurably above mere solid cinema...
...And when devotion and decency win out in the end, the victory comes precariously and comes late...
...She finds favor with him and he eventually promotes her to kept woman, household drudge, and business manager...
...they are a struggle for advancement for her sons and herself along the only path open to the likes of her-not labors of love so much as plain labor...
...As others have already observed, it treats Negroes as entirely unspecial people, however special and enormous their predicament may be...
...in Gloria Foster, it skirts stolid resignation, without forsaking humane concern...
...NOTHING BUT A MAN is a well-made and moving film about Southern Negroes...
...Or an effect may be potently auditory-as when a little boy has swallowed cherry pits and a great on-screen ruckus of hysterical adults is happily interrupted by an off-screen barrage from baby's tin chamber pot...
...it is one of those rare cases where the quality of the broth is unimpail ed by the quantity of cooks...
...In outline, the story may sound like yet another dip into that greatest gold bank of all time, the pectoral regions of fictional prostitutes...
...Filurnena, disgusted, raises no obstacles...
...instead, by a stunning stratagem, Filumena tricks him into marrying her...
...The hesitancies and recidivisms are traced with fidelity and tenderness, and as suspicion gradually gives way to headlong yearning and fulfillment, psychological truth and artistic pacing become exquisitely blended...
...If some of them verge on comic types, no matter...
...in Abbey Lincoln, it is most beautiful: the slightly sad smile of a wise child, clothing with melancholy mockery its awareness of absurdity rampant in the world...
...It is a double-bottomed smile whose meaning reaches far beyond any specific time and place...
...To be sure, Brigitte Bardot's behind and quotations from Holderlin have probably never been brought together before...
...Filumena Marturano, a young Neapolitan prostitute, falls in love with Domenico Soriano, a rich profiteer and playboy slumming in a brothel...
...Then there is the acting...
...Its puppets behave with meaningless meanness if not with sheer meaninglessness...
...here she is better yet...
...Every outsize, titubating letter becomes a towering achievement: the invention of the wheel and the building of the Pyramids rolled into one...
...Either because Filumena's story resembles Sophia's own...
...When middle age has overtaken both of them, Domenico, the always unfaithful, decides to marry a young girl...
...And there is no denying that the words are not up to the extraordinariness of the situations...
...He marries Filumena properly but she will never tell him which of the boys is his...
...Mar-cello Mastroianni balances Domenico precisely midway between irresp0noibility and bonhomie, be-tween egoism and charm-if there is such a thing as the pathos of brazenness, Mastroianni embodies it to a fault...
...but tears also, we realize, for the human condition...
...she drops ludicrously on her behind, her feet flapping in the air...
...As for Jean-Luc Godard's Con-tempt, it is portentous without having anything to say, improvisatory without imagination, full of esoteric references without relevance and in-group allusions without interest...
...Even the direction of Michael Roemer and the photography of Robert Young are only substantial, where we might wish for the superlative...
...The idea is to cash in on Divorce Italian Style, a highly successful, entirely different, and considerably less worthy film...
...Cliches are almost too scrupulously avoided, and there is heroic tact about how far one can go before sentimentality or Social Consciousness (with capital letters) gets in the way of sense or sensibility...
...She has stopped loving him, but has, unbeknown to him, three sons who need a respectable name...
...The en-raged Domenico proceeds to get the marriage annulled...
...The director, Vittorio de Sica, and scenarists have turned this into a film that ably combines the old and the new...
...The pace is leisurely and the characters, however minor, are resoundingly real...
...And the parturifacient concentration with which Filumena's face helps along her vile Italian hand is a tragicomic delight...
...even as your fingertips itch with desire to touch, your retinas are never overpowered...
...De Sica's best effects are often truly visual, such as the progress across a Neapolitan square seen in a long shot: the middle-aged Filumena, late for her long-awaited wedding, rushing and fussing with her dress...
...this may be considered one of the definitive performances in the contemporary cinema...
...There is spectacular integrity in the understatement of what might scream at us and in the truthfulness of the details: When a young husband knocks down his pretty wife, she does not fall gracefully, pathetically, or terrifyingly...
...ON SCREEN By John Simon See Naples and Live MARRIAGE ITALIAN STYLE-let us forget the title immediately...
...The scene in which the scarcely literate Filurnena is obliged to affix her name to a document-beautifully directed and written as it is-becomes a masterpiece thanks to Miss Loren's performance...
...And that, strange to say, is the facial expressions of its gifted actors...
...It must have sprung full-grown from the Herculean brain of Joe Levine, the producer who provided the theater and movies with the collective appellation "entertainment arts,' in contradistinction to, say, music and poetry, doubtless to be known henceforth as "boredom arts...
...that the perception of character, though honest and lively, is less than profound...
...Sophia Loren has often been excellent...
...The psychology and dialogue of Michael Roemer and Robert Young's scenario never slip into condescension, idealization, glossing over, farcical or melodramatic exaggeration...
...But she tells him that one of the boys is his-without revealing which...
...behind her, tiny and hobbling, her old servant also fussing with the gown...
...True, Armando Trovaioli's music lacks subtlety, and the subtitles lose a good bit of the flavor...
...Whether as a brothel novice of 17 or as a tired but dogged fighter for her human rights of 48-or at any of the intermediate ages and stages-she is always cajolingly or fiercely female as well as humbly or burstingly human...
...I do not know whether these facial expressions constitute a histrionic or directorial achievement...
...Yet even if the camera seems at times infatuated with mere kinetic energy, even if mood and ambiance tend to pass for insight, the picture is still good enough to stand not on "the Negro problem" but on its own feet...
...But Filumena is not nearly so golden-hearted as she is sensible and tough: Her protracted toiling for Domenico and endurance of his contumely are not mere emotion...
...But probably the most tenaciously haunting sequences in the film are those in which Domenico's respect for Filumena is aroused, grows into admiration, and finally brims over into love...
...But there are also newer devices such as making free and easy with the time sequence (though never losing the narrative thread), or using zoom and stop shots with youthful verve (though never without integrating them into a structural logic), If this happy wedding of the old and the new carries about it also something borrowed and something blue-the bordello scene must contain at least one unbuttoned fly-there is nothing into which an abundance of life and humor has not been breathed...
...It is true that some of the picture's prestige comes from the mere fact that it deals with Negroes in Alabama and is, in that sense, unearned...
...Until we get an article from Miss Sontag proclaiming Contempt a near-masterpiece, we shall have to consider it trash...
...the tradition being the dual one of Neapolitan theater and the city of Naples, "an infinitely suggestive and dramatic milieu...
...or simply because Miss Loren has finally become an absolute, no-nonsense actress...
...There is enough humanity and artistry here for the pride of the viewers to be second only to that of the makers...
...I am inclined to think that, rooted in something deeper, they transcend both...
...the life of the commedia dell' arte, on native ground, remains inexhaustibly buoyant...
...Not only his business but also his heart needs her-just as all three young men need a father...
...The work of Eduardo de Filippo, as Eric Bentley noted long ago in a perceptive essay, represents "what it means to Jive in a tradition-as against merely believing in tradition...
...Its con-summation is tears: tears of joy, certainly...
...In Ivan Dixon, it is tinged with defiance, however guarded...
...De Sica's perfect desinvolture is always handsomely complemented by Roberto Gerardi's camera work, which gives colors a muted, velvety richness...
...if it is short on several requisites of a first-rate work of art, it nonetheless goes well beyond mere documentary convincingness, technical adequacy, and high-mindedness...
...But never mind...
...but Godard might have pondered another passage from the Holderlin poem quoted and pontificated about: "Doch es zwinger/Nimmer die weite Gewalt den Himmel"-far-ranging willfulness never conquers the heavens...
...But how much have we the right to expect from a pioneer effort...
...They are the silences at the core of art in which roars the inexpressible...
...Every look is a look of courage...
Vol. 48 • January 1965 • No. 2
