Word: sica
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Better & Better. While Hollywood was struggling to bring forth a new era, most European moviemakers were apparently killing time in the waiting room. Some of the best foreign pictures-Henri-George Clouzot's Le Salaire de la Peur and Vittorio de Sica's Umberto D-were not shown in the U.S., because exhibitors thought they would not make enough money. Even so, the continental-import trade was a little shoddy. The British did somewhat better. They produced a top-notch musical (The Beggar's Opera), a funny farce (The Captain's Paradise), a first-rate...
...courtroom farce in which a bombastic attorney (played by famed Director Vittorio De Sica) successfully defends a voluptuous murderess (Gina Lollobrigida) by playing on the emotions of a susceptible judge and jury...
With a few old cameras, with war-battered city streets for sets and with amateurs for performers, directors like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica have given the world some of the finest movies ever made. They gave Italy a major industry, and treated moviegoers everywhere to the likes and looks of fiery Anna Magnani and smoky Silvana Mangano. Italian painters and sculptors, artistically confined under the Fascists, have broken free. The earthy realism of such Italian novelists as Moravia, Berto...
...probable that everyone who sees Vittorio De Sica's will reach for some symbolic meaning, but I doubt there really is one. Miracle in Milan is a modern fairy tale, no more. The evil tycoons and down trodden mass are simplifications made for the sake of fantasy rather than ideology. Its hero, a poor, virtuous boy, could easily be Jack the Giant Killer or Aladdin with a magic lamp (though in this case it is a dove...
...Sica heightens his fantasy with a cast of unbelievable, but highly amusing characters, a grouchy tramp who longs to possess a silk hat, an effervescent, scatterbrained old woman, who dies and becomes an equally bouncing angel, and a weak-kneed general. To put across such unreal nonsense as Miracle in Milan, all the actors must show no signs of farcical acting. Since they do not, the motion picture is delightful...