Word: sicilianism
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Died. Jon Corbino, 59, U.S. painter, a Sicilian-born romantic realist who specialized in turbulent canvases of full-blown nudes and writhing horses caught in shipwrecks and floods, scoffing at abstract artists for their attempt "to achieve a literature with a language none but they understand"; of cancer; in Sarasota...
Seduced and Abandoned. The girl's name is Agnese, a raven-haired sylph with the face of a Botticelli angel. Head high, eyes cast demurely downward, she moves with easy grace through the cobblestone streets of the small Sicilian village while the camera follows, falling slowly in love with her. So does the audience. Thus Director Pietro Germi eases smoothly into a black and bitter tragicomedy that shows his worldly, wildly wicked Divorce-Italian Style to be an exercise in restraint. In Seduced and Abandoned, by contrast, Germi's underlying despair keeps burning to the surface. "This time...
...ludicrously crude goat operas, but once in a while somebody really gets Sicily on acetate. Pietro Germi did it once (Divorce-Italian Style); Luchino Visconti did it twice (La Terra Trema, The Leopard); and now Alberto Lattuada serves up ten or a dozen small but gloriously garlicky slices of Sicilian village life...
Ignore the plot: something standard about a Sicilian boy (Alberto Sordi) who makes good in Milan, comes home to visit the old folks, and suddenly finds himself, his pretty young wife and his two darling daughters involved in the insidious toils of La Mafia, the feudality of terror that for several centuries has ruled Sicily with poniard, pistol and poison. Smile a bit sadly when Sordi, a born comedian, tries to play the hero straight. And wink when the director, obviously afraid his customers will get sick of all that lumpy peasant pasta, slyly introduces a piece of smooth Brazilian...
...miss a splotch of the local color: a massive bowl of sinister black spaghetti that turns out to be white spaghetti slathered with an old Sicilian specialty, squid-ink sauce; a battle-royal between two skinny, toothless, fierce old men who roll about the rocky landscape hissing and ripping and snapping at each other like a couple of scorpions; a statue of the Virgin held in particular veneration by the Mafia: she has big soft, sentimental eyes-and her hand supports a skull...