Word: sica
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...mood, mixing farce and tragedy, is endlessly complex. Yet De Sica continually achieves the casual visual epigram. His camera, like a wise old pickpocket, filches its riches unobtrusively. And the actors seem to fulfill the creator's intentions as naturally as if they were his hands and feet-even De Sica does exactly what De Sica wants. Toto, Italy's Chaplin, is exquisitely funny. Loren's parts fit beautifully into the whole. Mangano for once is convincing, and Paolo Stoppa, as a man who wants all the pleasures of suicide without its aftereffects, is superb. Perhaps best...
Gold of Naples (Ponti-De Laurentiis; DCA). Once there was an aging nobleman (Vittorio De Sica) who, having gambled away the better part of his estate, was registered incompetent and placed in the legal guardianship of his wife. The lady, of course, cut off her husband's funds at once, and his fever for the tables raged in impotence. Every day, when he went for his walk, the count would bully the doorman, who, fearing for his job, would force his son (Piero Bilancioni), a boy about ten years old, to play cards with...
...Gambler is one of four good reasons why the latest work of Vittorio De Sica (Shoeshine, Bicycle Thief, Umberto D) to be released in the U.S. is a notable example of the rare sort of laughter that leaves in the mind a melancholy aftertone. The three other reasons, equally good, are the other episodes in this masterly collection of Giuseppe Marotta's tales of Naples, translated to the screen by Marotta, De Sica and Scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini...
...Italy's censorship. In 1952, complaining that the neorealist school of moviemakers had formed a gloom brigade that was ruining the foreign market for Italian films, the Italian government forced its state-subsidized movie industry to lower standards and raise skirts. Nevertheless, in Gold of Naples, Director De Sica has managed to say with a smile what he could not have said with a sneer. The four stories are variations on the same theme of human bondage that De Sica develops in all his serious films, and he plays his variations with no less passion and poetic irony because...
...full life requires the taste of a connoisseur and the instincts of a gambler. "Never economize with life," she warns. "It never gives anything back." Carmela suddenly acquires the confidence of her own sexual power and beauty. It shines through to a film director (clearly modeled on Vittorio De Sica) who screen-tests the young beauty at just about the time that the old countess looks up from her deathbed to ask, rather like a child at party's end:"What? Is life over already?" Via Veneto Glitter. Amid the eerie indirections of the countess' mind, Novelist Druon...