Word: sicilian
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...years, ex-Navy Steward Hubert Ashe had to live with the harsh consequences of a dishonorable discharge. Though he had served from the Sicilian invasion to the Japanese occupation, Ashe was barred from 46 Government benefits, including free education, hospitalization, housing, unemployment compensation and burial in Arlington National Cemetery. Like other ex-servicemen in the same fix, Ashe had no right of appeal in any court. It was, he says, "really like dying...
...Explosions. Vespas bursting into the left ear and out the right. Trucks with wheels of stone rumbling down the middle of the bed." Thus two Americans awake to the "normal havoc" of a Sicilian morning. Howard is a huge, blond, earnest young graduate student; Sarah, his wife, is a humorous, easygoing girl with honey-colored hair and long shapely legs. They have come to Agrigento to inspect the Grecian ruins and enjoy the local color; but they stay, as Author Tom Cole relates in the superb novella that dominates his first book of stories, because Sicily seizes them...
...mind invites convulsion. Convulsion begins: a Bacchic ecstasy of vino nero, roaring scooters, rock 'n' roll. Howard, a tidy Nordic, draws back in distaste. Sarah, a subliminal Mediterranean, is drawn toward delirium. One morning, imagining her intentions innocent, she lets a young bull of a Sicilian kiss...
...liveliest of the film's ten encounters, Director Mario Monicelli (Big Deal on Madonna Street, The Organizer) exuberantly parodies such earthy Sicilian comedies as Pietro Germi's Seduced and Abandoned. Posing as a doctor, Mastroianni offers his protection to a dishonored country girl (Yolanda Modio) and becomes so inflamed by the nearness of her murderous menfolk that he begins biting buttons off her dress. Another stylishly funny sequence, indebted to Fellini, drums up elegant corruption at a villa where a deaf aristocrat's mistress (Marisa Mell) tries to persuade Mastroianni to kill for her. In pursuit...
...background of Giovanni's Sicilian wanderings are the gigantic industrial complex in which he works and the windmills and huts of the peasants. Olmi makes a point of the contrast, but he makes it gently. The two contests through which Giovanni wanders, yet in which he has no roots accentuate his loneliness, and contribute to the pervasive sadness which is part of the sense of life that Olmi communicates...