Word: magnani
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starring Anna Magnani and Ettore Garafolo...
...film features one-time prostitute Mamma Roma (played by Anna Magnani, one of the most popular actresses of neo-realism, with whom Pasolini had ideological as well as artistic disputes, but who nonetheless plays exquisitely what she had called "the most important role I have played so far"). After her former pimp, Carmine (Franco Citti), marries a well-to-do lady from the countryside, Mamma Roma attempts to lead a respectable life, selling vegetables in an open air Roman market. More importantly, she brings her son, Ettore (Ettore Garofolo), to Rome, with the hopes of providing him a good education...
Fellini once played God: he was the vagabond whom a peasant (Anna Magnani) mistakes for Jesus in Roberto Rossellini's The Miracle (1948). For Fellini, however, God was a goddess and woman was the world -- everything in the world that excites and frightens, forbids and enchants. To Marcello in La Dolce Vita, woman is "mother, sister, daughter, lover, angel, home." How small and sad and funny men are in comparison! At one end of the spectrum they are like the midget bluenose in Boccaccio 70 (1962) overwhelmed by Anita Ekberg as a sexual giantess -- it's the attack...
...cinema grew from fairground fad to worldwide obsession, it seasoned its content for the broadest tastes: no nudity, no naughty words, no violence. And, until the case of The Miracle in 1952, no constitutional cloak. In that year, ruling on Roberto Rossellini's parable of a peasant woman (Anna Magnani) impregnated by a bearded stranger (Federico Fellini) whom she believes to be St. Joseph, the Supreme Court ruled that films were a form of expression deserving of the First Amendment shield...
...right now." She told Libya's dictator, Colonel Gaddafi, that she was going to conduct a "kind of trial" of him to find out "why you are so little liked in the world." She says of herself: "I make scenes, I yell and scream." As the Anna Magnani of interviewers, she gets memorable quotes...