Word: sica
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Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita) directed the billboard fantasy, making three-fourths of the Ekberg visible beneath the surface. Vittorio De Sica (Two Women) directed Sophia Loren in a tale about a girl who works in a traveling circus. At each town, a raffle is held and the winner gets Sophia. In one village, Sophia meets and falls in love with a local lad. To cleanse her name and clear her future, she gives the winner of that day's raffle all the money but no honey...
Italian priest Joseph of Cupertino in The Reluctant Saint, both scheduled for release later this year. He is now in hot demand, and his next film will probably be Jean-Paul Sartre's The Prisoners of Altona, with Sophia Loren, to be directed by Vittorio De Sica...
Vittorio de Sica's Bicycle Thief (1949) typifies the post-war Italian film of realism; it shows simple, poor people enmeshed in an uncomplicated but terrifying trap. Unemployment, hunger and injustice close in on Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani); he commits an unsuccessful robbery and the film ends on a note of despair...
...very easy to let social pathos of this kind slip into the maudlin, nor is it difficult to err the other way and harden a story to the point where it no longer engages sympathy at all (for example, The Four Hundred Blows. De Sica chooses the middle way, recording scenes that smack so authentically of life that the viewer often feels as though he were intruding. The actors, who are really non-actors chosen because they had no previous experience, respond to each crisis with simplicity, and without stagy affection. They are what they are: normal, undevious people...
...Sica's camera moves everywhere unobtrusively, creating a documentary effect, never indulging in special, lush shots that would make the world of his film seem more ordered or more wonderful than the world of day-to-day experience. But the "real" world suffices well enough indeed as a backdrop of malignity, Screaming traffic, hostile crowds and dark, spectral buildings frame this drama of the streets which is not just a slice of life, but seems to have been wrenched whole-cloth from...