In six episodes, Vittorio De Sica’s L’oro di Napoli finds “gold” in its Neapolitan characters of diverse age and status. The splendid script by Giuseppe Marotta, Cesare Zavattini, and De Sica launches an uncommonly rich work, one that brilliantly entertains and offers a host of terrific performances that encompass hilarious comedy, profound sadness, even ironical, […]
Tag Archives: Vittorio De Sica
War, love and life are all a damn pain: this is the message of Vittorio De Sica’s I girasoli, an opulent and very dreary melodrama that misapplies sweeping camera gestures, and lush color, to what ought to have been an intimate story about ordinary people. From Italy, the U.S.S.R. and France, the film also seems […]
Of the two versions, Vittorio De Sica’s cut and David O. Selznick’s version re-edited for U.S. consumption, the director’s version is superior—as is always the case. Apparently Seznick was spooked by bad reviews that Stazione Termini drew; but the principal fault lay with the central love story, not the material around the edges, the ordinary […]
Writer-director Marcello Pagliero’s Roma città libera presents a grim portrait of postwar Rome. It is 1945, and the city, having been liberated by the Americans, is “free”; but life isn’t easy. Three impoverished individuals exemplify this fact: a career burglar; his potential mark, a man whose suicide attempt the burglar, since he happens to be […]
Despite four years of meticulous care, the superficial result of Vittorio De Sica’s Il tetto, scripted by Cesare Zavattini, helped end the movement of neorealismo in Italian cinema. (Through today, it still exists as a style of filmmaking.) Indeed, this merely sealed a demise that had been in the making for quite some time, with […]
Dennis Grunes 