Word: sica
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Brien was a figure of unintentional transition. After the war directors like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica took kids right off the streets of Rome. In England, Director Carol Reed put Bobby Henrey in Graham Greene's exacting psychological study, The Fallen Idol, which was about the abrupt and shattering end of childhood...
...senses something wrong with the television effort when one realizes that two or three black-and-white concentration-camp still photographs displayed by Dorf-the stacked, starved bodies-are more powerful and heartbreaking than two or three hours of the dramatization. The last 15 minutes of Vittorio De Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, in which Italian Jews are rounded up to be taken to the camps, is more wrenching than all the hours of Holocaust...
Died. Count Luchino Visconti, 69, Italian aristocrat who became a movie director at the age of 30 and made an international reputation with a handful of meticulously wrought and highly atmospheric films; of a heart attack while suffering from influenza; in Rome. An early neorealist, along with Vittorio de Sica and Michelangelo Antonioni, Visconti used Sicilian villagers instead of actors in La Terra Trema (1947), the drama of a poor fisherman's family. In Rocco and His Brothers (1960), he described the brutalizing of a farm family moving north to Milan. Visconti's later works tended toward operatic...
Similarly, Hollywood films during the Depression present the conflicts that wracked American society but ultimately reaffirm the American Dream. Films such as De Sica's A Brief Vacation and Scorcese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore pose the issues of women's oppression but resolve them romantically. The key to such films' failure to transcend the problems they raise lies in their use of the stereotyped plots and characters of romantic comedy and tragedy. The logic of these genres leads either to a happy ending brought about by Fortune or an unhappy ending brought about by Fate; in either...
...might expect a woman in her situation to have: the easiest exit from the drudgery and stark misery of factory and tenement is assimilation into the elite through physical beauty and seductive charm, as the heroines of mass culture from Cinderella to Marilyn Monroe have discovered. Had De Sica treated the contradictions in Clara's self-awareness with the sardonic tone whose subtle pinpricks enabled Flaubert to deflate Madame Bovary's romantic illusions. A Brief Vacation might have been a penetrating analysis of the obstacles that inhibit working women's emancipation. Because it founders in its heroine's false consciousness...