Word: sandrino
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Miraculously, from this carload of sentimental clichés Germi weaves a compassionate, richly detailed reminiscence of the commonplace tragedies that every generation endures. The best of the film is seen through the eyes of Andrea's ebullient small son Sandrino (Edoardo Nevola), a lad who must learn to live among fallen idols. The boy's tongue-tied despair is eloquent when he comes upon his married sister in a parked car arguing with a stranger. So is his quiet exultation when he accompanies his father to the wineshop where former friends awkwardly welcome him back...
...Sandrino Verges! was on the lookout for the ideal woman. For an angel-faced Italian youngster of 16, his tastes were rather special. "First she resists, and then she lets you gradually kill her, bit by bit . . . I want the feeling of having something that defends itself and that you slowly crush and crush and crush until the life's crushed out of it." In the next room to his, sharing the same grubby apartment house, Sandrino finds someone to his sadistic little heart's desire...
Virginia is a lonely widow with a melony figure and a melon for a head. She is old enough to be Sandrino's mother, and for a while she acts the part. Mornings, she shoos him off to his haberdasher job. Noons, she carts him his lunch topped with his favorite dessert, persimmons. When the weather turns nippy, she digs into her skimpy bank balance and buys him a coat. Then one day her jealous joshing about some unknown girl across the street gives Sandrino his cue-the poor woman is hopelessly in love with...
Over all of Sandrino's twisted personal behavior hovers a political fantasy: that Fascism will make a comeback in Italy. To hurry X-day along, he signs over Virginia's remaining lire to some underworld sharpies. For a receipt they give him a bit of black cloth, purportedly from Mussolini's death shirt, soon leave him holding...
...Sandrino has one eye on revenge and the other on the girl across the street when Virginia suddenly announces that she is pregnant. In a grisly finale, Sandrino impales her head on a pike fence till it becomes a slippery, lifeless pulp...
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