Word: italianize
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...encountered throughout a lifetime. The great and lowly alike are brought to life with a few deft words: de Gaulle, Nehru, Ben-Gurion, Willa Cather ("Aunt Willa...a rock of strength and sweetness"), Bela Bartok ("a composer to bear comparison with the giants of the past"), the family's Italian cook, a hotel porter in Leipzig, Solzhenitsyn, Glenn Gould ("that most exotic of my colleagues") and Jacob Epstein ("like his sculptures, he seemed as if God had formed him with a few grand strokes, not attending much to detail...
...Italian Actor Marcello Mastroianni happily gorged himself in La Grande Bouffe, Italian Director Marco Ferreri's savage comedy about four men who eat themselves to death. A glutton for punishment, Mastroianni has been lured back for another Ferreri satire. Called Bye Bye Monkey!, it is about an aging, asthmatic gardener who wanders down to a dump in a nameless large city and finds the remains of a movie monster named Macho Kong (no kin to King Kong). Hearing a whimpering sound within the monster's body, Marcello the gardener pulls out a baby chimpanzee, whom he treats like...
Sophia Loren turns up in worthy screen roles so infrequently that it's easy to forget just how luminous an actress she can be. A Special Day revives one's fondest memories of her talent. This somber Italian film-yet another meditation on the Mussolini era-gives Loren her richest part in years, and she responds in kind. Not only is she as beautiful as ever at 43, but her beauty seems inseparable from the soul of her performance. When Loren addresses the camera with this much intensity, no audience in its right mind would dare turn away...
...Special Day is not always equal to the gifts of its star, but it is an elegantly designed film that offers original insights into a historical chapter that has already been examined exhaustively by such Italian directors as Wertmuller, Bertolucci and Visconti. Essentially a two-character drama, the movie is set on the May day in 1938 when all of Rome turned out to rally for Hitler. Loren and her most durable costar, Marcello Mastroianni, play the only tenants of a cavernous apartment building who remain at home during the festivities. Antonietta, an ignorant working-class housewife, has stayed behind...
...sexual underpinnings of Fascist ideology. As the downtrodden Antonietta falls in love with the sensitive Gabriele, she suddenly begins to question the macho ethic of her tyrannical husband. She senses, too, that there may be a correlation between her miserable married life and the authoritarianism of Mussolini's Italian state. Even though Gabriele eventually reveals himself to be a homosexual, Antonietta takes him to bed. Having discovered freedom, the heroine must sample it while she still has the chance...