Word: pratolini
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...pathetic tale of no particular significance. However, it is told with care and tenderness in this Italian film adapted from a novel by Vasco Pratolini. The pace is lento, sometimes troppo lento, but the color photography tactfully subtends the mood of green and yellow melancholy, and Director Valeric Zurlini develops a very real and moving relationship between the hero (Jacques Perrin) and his older brother (Marcello Mastroianni). It is fascinating to watch Mastroianni, who in his recent films (La Dolce Vita, La Notte, 8½) has emerged as the Clark Gable of existentialism, play a simple, decent human being...
...engineered by such masters as Stendhal, Flaubert, de Maupassant, are pitted in spots, but glow with the patina of timelessness. The Italian stories, put up in the hurry and scurry of the post-World War I decades by such contemporary literary architects as Alberto Moravia, Carlo Levi and Vasco Pratolini, rock with life, and occasionally with shaky craftsmanship. American readers, surfeited with New Yorker-like tales of muted discontent, may find both collections refreshing reminders of what Italy's Ignazio Silone calls "the really important events of life-birth, love, suffering, death...
...food, wine and making love, and with the remorse which is the shadow of that sun." Serving up life as if it were a huge platter of prosciutto and melon, the Italian authors offer highly palatable reading on such subjects as the folly of an old fool in love (Pratolini's A Mistress of Twenty, Italo Svevo's This Indolence of Mine), the dark rapture of revenge (Cesare Pavese's The Leather Jacket), and the metaphysical pingpong of illusion v. reality (Luigi Pirandello...
Suffering and sighing through puppy romances, they took turns loving the lovely Marisa, a girl who was at least as strong on sentiment as she was on sex. It was all very serious, of course, but also a little comic, and Pratolini does a neat job of simultaneously pitying and teasing his adolescents. He also succeeds in capturing the look of young love. "My companion," muses Valerio, "was a girl of 16, with a crown of golden hair, a shining innocent face; she wore green wool gloves and shoes with medium heels and knitted stockings that came...
Like most recent Italian novels, The Naked Streets is skimpy on plot, oversimple in characterization, but redeemed by a strong feeling for the fragile emotions of adolescence. Its true hero is the Santa Croce quarter, which Novelist Pratolini describes with the affectionate accuracy of a man remembering his childhood haunts. Symbol of common miseries and memories, Santa Croce binds the characters together until the troubles of growing up descend upon them, and meanwhile, declares Valerio wistfully, "we were glad to be friends...