C'era una volta

Some time back TCM had a day of interesting love story movies, which gave me the chance to record a couple more movies I hadn't seen before. Among them was More Than a Miracle.

After a 1960s MOR song by Roger Williams with choir, we finally, mercifully get to the action of the story. Omar Sharif plays Prince Rodrigo, the prince of somewhere in Spain. He's busy breaking a horse, which rather irritates his mommy, the Queen (Dolores del Rio), who would rather he do his princely duties and get married and start producing more heirs to the throne. Rodrigo doesn't seem to care, so he rides off with the horse until it throws him.

After searching for the horse, Rodrigo comes upon a monastery where there's a flying monk (not played by Sally Field) named Giuseppe sees Rodrigo in torn clothing from the fall, so he (and nobody else) seems to know that he's a Spanish prince. Giuseppe gives him some magic flour and tells him to make seven dumplings from it and eat them, before giving Rodrigo a donkey to get back home.

On the way home, Rodrigo finds his horse, which is now being used by a peasant woman Isabella (Mrs. Carlo Ponti, Ponti having been the producer; of course, Ponti's wife was Sophia Loren) to carry the harvest. Isabella understandably doesn't want to surrender the horse and doesn't like this insistent man who keeps begging her to make those seven dumplings. Finally, just to get rid of him, she does, but she eats one of them herself.

The end result of all this falderal is that Rodrigo and Isabella wind up falling in love with each other, but it's going to take them a long time to get back together and wind up in love in the last reel. Isabella enlists the help of some witches, but later some of Rodrigo's men stick her in a barrel where she's supposed to stay for five days with only bread and water, except that the barrel starts rolling all the way to the sea. Don't ask, I don't think it's supposed to make sense.

Ultimately Rodrigo is going to be married off whether he likes it or not, and Mom has selected seven princesses as candidates, each having some political advantage. Poor Rodrigo isn't even going to get to pick, as the bride will be whichever princess wins an odd homemaking contest of washing a large stack of dishes as quickly as possible while breaking as few of them as possible. Aren't these princesses going to have servants? Isabella worms her way into the contest, and looks like she's going to win, but....

As you can tell from the snark in the preceding paragraphs, I had a lot of problems with More Than a Miracle. Now, the fact that magic and witches are involved could, I suppose, be used as an explanation for why the plot doesn't make much sense, jumping from point to point. But I don't think it's a good enough explanation. The movie is also quite slow, taking way too long to get to the conclusion even though it only runs 103 minutes.

The other problem might be guessed from my title for the blog post. More Than a Miracle was an Italian-French production that MGM somehow got the rights to distribute in the US. But it was originally filmed in Italian, with the American title release More Than a Miracle being dubbed into English, and not too well. I'd guess that Sophia Loren and Omar Sharif did their own voices with Ponti intending from the start for the movie to be dubbed for American audiences. But the rest of the cast is badly dubbed, especially the main witch and a group of ragamuffins who sound much older than they look. It's highly intrusive.

More Than a Miracle, having been distributed in the US by MGM, did get a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive.

Una giornata particolare

I don't think I had done a blog post on a foreign film recently, so I decided to watch A Special Day off the DVD since it's on DVD courtesy of the Criterion Collection.

In 1938, German Führer Adolf Hitler visited Italy to meet with Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini and sign a treaty. Mussolini wanted to impress Hitler, so large cheering crowds were arranged all along the train's route and a big military parade was organized in Rome.

Antonietta Taberi (Sophia Loren) is a housewife and mother of six living in a cramped apartment with her husband Emanuele (John Vernon) and those children. All of them have a part to play in those cheering crowds at the parade, except for Mom, who's going to stay home to clean the apartment and make certain the family has dinner ready when they get home from the parade. It's not much of a life for Antonietta, whose only joy in life seems to be her mynah bird.

Worse for Antonietta, the bird escapes from its cage and flies out the window, landing on the sill of an apartment across the way. In that apartment lives Gabriele (Marcello Mastroianni), an announcer for Italian National Radio who isn't working that day because, well, that will be explained later in the movie. Gabriele catches the bird and invites Antonietta over to pick up the bird.

The two talk, and one thing leads to another, with Antonietta eventually bringing Gabriele back to her place for conversation to bring something into her lonely life, and perhaps a bit more. The two spend most of the rest of the day together, revealing some secrets about themselves.

Surprisingly, that's mostly what happens in the movie, although Gabriele's secrets drive the plot. He's got friends who have political views and lifestyles that have gotten them in trouble with the Fascist regime, and Gabriele is the same, so certainly trouble for him can't be far behind; indeed, he already lost that job at the radio station. And Antonietta seems to be committed to Fascism, or at least politically naïve enough to keep a scrapbook of the virile Mussolini.

So instead, A Special Day is a character study of these two very lonely people, one who has no life outside her family and the other a subversive. The two have the lion's share of the dialogue, with Antonietta's family showing up in the first and last scenes, and the apartment complex concierge coming in from time to time to snoop on the ad hoc couple that's not really a couple.

Unsurprisingly, the character study works because of the strong acting from the two leads; would you really expect any less from either Loren or Mastroianni? From the moment we see Gabriele we can tell that he's keeping something deeply secret, while with Antonietta it's so obvious that she's lonely and looking for any escape from her humdrum life.

In the print TCM ran (which I'd guess is the Criterion print, although I don't have the DVD), there was a card at the beginning mentioning this is a restoration, and specifically mentioning the color timing. Indeed, the production design and the color is itself almost as much of a character as the two leads. Antonietta's apartment is suitably cramped, drab, and run-down, helped by a washed-out color scheme that is mostly browns, with some dull green and a few reds in the Italian and German flags. As noticeable as this is, it's also quickly unobtrusive.

For anybody who doesn't need their movies to be full of action, explosions, and special effects, I can definitely recommend A Special Day.

Marriage Italian Style

A couple of months back, Ben Mankiewicz sat down with Sophia Loren's son Edoardo to show a night of Sophia's movies. Among them was Marriage Italian Style.

Loren plays Filumena, who at the start of the movie has suddenly fallen ill, much to the distress her long-time lover but not yet husband, Domenico (Marcello Mastroianni, Loren's frequent co-star), who owns a successful bakery in Naples. We then get a flashback to their life together and what led up to this day.

Many years back, during World War II, Filumena was a young woman barely of legal age trying to make a living any way she could, which meant working at a brothel in a capacity I'm sure you can figure out. Domenico shows up there and when the air-raid siren goes off, the two wind up alone together in a non-sexual capacity, and wind up falling in love.

The two begin a love affair that goes through a lot together. Domenico introduces Filumena to his elderly mother, although Filumena can't be seen at the funeral when Mom finally dies. Domenico goes abroad for business -- one assumes he has more business interests than just the bakery -- leaving Filumena to manage the place whenever he's away. Domenico, doesn't marry Filumena because he seems just as interested in having affairs with the various female cashiers. It's when Domenico announces his intention to marry one of the cashiers that Filumena suddenly falls ill.

Filumena is apparently dying, so she wants some respect as a final wish; respect that she can have by dying a married woman. Domenico accedes to this wish; after all, if she does die quickly he can get married to that cashier. Except that it turns out Filumena's illness was a ruse to get Domenico to marry him. She's not on her deathbed, and she's not even ill, getting up to tell Domenico he's been had. So of course he wants an annulment.

And Domenico is well in his legal rights to get that annulment. Filumena, for her part, has one more trick up her sleeve. She's been about as faithful as Domenico, revealing that she's got three sons that she placed with foster mothers, funding them from Domenico's gifts to her. She tells Domenico that one of the sons is his, but there's no way she's ever going to tell him which one. (Who knows whether just one of the sons is his, or if all of them or either none are?) Domenico tries to figure out which son is his, but....

I had actually not seen this one before, and went into it thinking it was a straight comedy since most of the synopses tend to mention it being a comedy. While there are certainly any number of humorous moments, Marriage Italian Style is much more of a drama than a comedy. I think because of that, I have a bit less positive view towards the movie than I would have had if it had been a straight-up comedy.

It's not that the movie is bad; Mastroianni is good and Loren is excellent. The color cinematography is good, deftly showing the poverty of post-war Italy. It's just that the movie came across to me as a bit heavy at times when a lighter touch was called for.

Marriage Italian Style is available on DVD if you wish to watch it.

Arabesque

With the recent news of the death of Stanley Donen, I decided that I would sit down and watch my DVD of Arabesque from the four-film Gregory Peck at Universal collection and do a fuller review than the one-paragraph mention I gave it some years back.

An opening scene involving an elderly professor getting killed at an eye doctor's office sets the scene that we're in for some sort of espionage. Cut to Prof. Pollock (Gregory Peck), a professor of Egyptology at a British university. The same eye doctor who killed the first professor approaches Pollock, offering him a job decoding some hieroglyphics, but Pollock wants more specifics.

One day after class he goes for his daily jog, which is where Pollock gets waylaid by a Rolls-Royce. That Rolls-Royce has as one of its passengers Prime Minister Jena (Carl Duering). He knows about the paper with the hieroglyphics on it, and that those must be some sort of code for what an opposition businessman, Beshraavi (Alan Badel), is doing. So the Prime Minister would like those hieroglyphics translated. (You'd think that Beshraavi already knows what he's going to do and thus wouldn't need the hieroglyphics translated, but I'm guessing that Beshraavi would have thought that hieroglyphics reveal what somebody else knows about him.)

Beshraavi is a ruthless businessman, keeping a peregrine falcon to go after anybody who is disloyal to him, so Pollock knows he's a sort of prisoner in Beshraavi's house. Also there is Yazmin (Sophia Loren), Beshraavi's lover and a mysterious woman. She realizes that Pollock is in over his head and in danger, suggesting that he try to get away with the piece of paper with the hieroglyphics. When he does, Beshraavi sends one of his men to try to kill Pollock and Yazmin.

They are able to flee to seeming safety, but it turns out there's another faction, led by Yussef Kasim (Kieron Moore) who also wants that paper. It all goes on like this until Pollock is able to determine the importance of this paper with the hieroglyphics, with a lot of twists and turns along the way.

The plot of Arabesque is in many ways a bit of a mess. The paper with the hieroglyphics, it turns out, is not a Macguffin, but otherwise figuring out how Beshraavi, Yazmin, and Yussef all fit into things will probably leave you confused. The fact that everybody's lying because of the espionage games doesn't help. Instead, watch for the various set pieces which come one after another, and are reasonably entertaining.

As for Stanley Donen, he has some rather stylish direction. The sets and cinematography are generally lovely, although there are any number of shots that some may not like, having been photographed through framing objects like chandeliers and various other odd perspectives. Arabesque is firmly dated in the 1960s, but it's a fun 1960s.

Operation Crossbow

One of the movies I watched off my DVR over the weekend was Operation Crossbow.

By 1943, Nazi Germany was losing World War II after defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad. Without the ability to win with conventional forces, they were going to have to turn to something unconventional, which would eventually be the V1 and V2 rockets. At the start of the movie, they're doing research at their facillity at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast, when British intelligence picks up aerial images of strange activity going on there.

British command back in London tries to figure out what's going on, but experts like Professor Lindemann (Trevor Howard) disagree with more political men like Duncan Sandys (Richard Johnson) who wants to bomb Peenemünde. Eventually, Sandys' views prevail, and the British divert some bombing runs toward the facility at Peenemünde. It causes damage, but also causes another problem for Britain when the Nazis decide they're going to move as much of their research underground, and make mobile launching platforms for the V1 and V2.

The only way the British are going to be able to figure out what the Nazis are doing is to get first-hand information out of the Nazi facility, which is going to be difficult, since it's not as if the British can get a hold of anyone there what with the war going on. Instead, they're going to have to send in spies who can play the role of engineers, which considering that they need people with real scientific experience (otherwise their lack of knowledge will be discovered even more quickly than Paul Newman's in Torn Curtain) as well as a damn good command of the German language. Eventually, the British assign three men: Lt. Curtis (George Peppard), Capt. Bradley (Jeremy Kemp), and Henshaw (Tom Courtenay) to parachute into Belgium and from there, get themselves hired at the the Nazis' underground facility.

Now, in order to do all this, they have to take on the identities of real people from occupied countries who have died but whose deaths won't be noticed by the Nazis what with all the confusion going on. Since these are real people, that poses its own set of problems, starting when a woman (Sophia Loren) shows up at the hotel where Lt. Curtis is, and claims to be the wife of the man Curtis is impersonating. Henshaw's man, meanwhile, is wanted for murder in Germany.

Two of the men do get into the underground Nazi facility for the climax, although even then it's not so straightforward since one of them has to work as a janitor since his academic credentials aren't quite clear. But they're able to discover that the Nazis are trying to come up with a weapon that can reach New York (I don't know if the Nazis ever seriously tried that), forcing the British and Americans to act quickly.

Operation Crossbow is surprisingly subdued for a 1960s World War II movie. A lot of the movies in the genre have a lot more action, but this one is rather slower developing until the climax. Not that there's anything particularly wrong with that, just that it's different than what you might expect. Also, some of the characters have unexpected story arcs, which is actually a bit refreshing. There's a solid, if not great, movie lying beneath the surface of Operation Crossbow.

Brass Target

On December 21, 1945, General George Patton died as a result of injuries sustained in a car crash. The 1970s were a period when conspiracy theory books and movies were a big thing, so it is perhaps not surprising that somebody would revisit Patton's death and suggest that it was not a car accident, but an assassination. After all, Patton did have quite a few political opponents. Anyhow, that novel was adapted into the movie Brass Target.

George Kennedy plays General Patton, who at the beginning of the movie is dealing with a pretty substantial problem. A train of Reichsbank gold that was being transported for safekeeping to Frankfurt was waylaid in a tunnel, and the $250 million in gold (quite a sum for 1945) stolen. Worse, the US Army soldiers guarding the train were all killed. So you can see why Patton would want to find out who did it. Plus, the Soviets aren't happy with him.

The first suspect is Maj. Joe De Lucca (John Cassavetes). De Lucca was a former member of US military intelligence, and he came up with the plan for stealing Nazi gold from the Nazis that was used by somebody else to steal the Nazi gold from the Americans. Since military justice doesn't work quite like the innocent until proven guilty of the American system, especially in an occupation zone, De Lucca decides that he'd better investigate the case himself and figure out who did it in order to prove that he didn't.

We learn fairly early that it's an inside job, as a group of OSS men led by Col. Rogers (Robert Vaughn) is behind the heist. Worse, when Maj. De Lucca meets his old girlfriend Mara (Sophia Loren). She discovers that another former boyfriend, Shelley Webber (Max von Sydow), now of a refugee resettlement organization in Switzerland, is really a professional assassin and is being hired by Rogers to kill Patton! Now she and De Lucca have to stop that.

Of course, we know from history that they don't prevent Patton's death, although whether or not he was assassinated is a different question. But Webber leaves a lot of carnage in his wake before the end of the movie.

Brass Target is an interesting idea, but one that doesn't quite succeed in the execution. It's slow, and has a difficult plot to follow. Kennedy has the difficult task of playing Patton when George C. Scott's bravura portrayal of the general was still fresh in the moviegoing public's memory. Kennedy does the best he can, and thankfully it's not the biggest role in the movie. Everybody else tries, but it hamstrung by the poor script.

Brass Target is available on DVD from the Warner Archive, if you want to watch and judge for yourself.

The Pride and the Passion

I've read that producer Stanley Kramer was fond of making message pictures. If that's the case, then the message of The Pride and the Passion must have been, "I'm arrogant enough to think I can put Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra in a costume drama and make it work."

The setting is Spain in 1810. Napoleon was running much of the Continent, and he had put one of his family on the Spanish throne, also occupying the place with a whole bunch of French troops. One company is dragging a cannon around, and it's more trouble than it's worth, so they ditch the thing down a ravine. The British find out, and sent naval man Anthony (Cary Grant) with a British company to retrive the cannon and bring it to the coast at Santander.

He retrives the cannon, but when he gets it to the flat land above the ravine, he's met by Miguel (Frank Sinatra). Miguel leads a bunch of rebels from Ávila, which is well inland. And dammit, Miguel wants to use that cannon to take Ávila back from the French. Miguel has more force with him than Anthony, so you can guess which way the cannon is going to go.

The Pride and the Passion is filled with one trope after another of the sort that you'd see in the wagon train-style western, or a bunch of military movies. One is that there has to be a love interest to be both a source of conflict between the two male leads, and to moderate between them. That part, Juana, is played by Sophia Loren.

Other tropes involve getting that cannon over, around, or through a whole bunch of obstacles. There are mountains, a river, a treeless plain, a bridge for a detachment to blow up, and a whole bunch of French patrols they have to avoid. Commanding those forces from Ávila is General Jouvet, played by Theodore Bikel who is about as well cast as Grant and Sinatra.

And then there are the silly ones, like the "village" that has a cathedral and thousands of people dressed in what look like Ku Klux Klan outfits, complete with pointy hoods, doing some sort of religious ritual. Oh, and there's the priest who doesn't want to hide the cannon in his cathedral; you wonder why.

It all goes on like this for a runtime of 132 hours. Well, it only feels like 132 hours; the running time is actually 132 minutes, which is still entirely too long. Poor Cary Grand and Frank Sinatra are terribly miscast, leading this viewer to laugh at a whole lot of this movie, which was clearly not the intent. And then there's the music. At times it's overpowering, with the musical cues being blatantly obvious.

Even the lovely Technicolor cinematography of Spain and of Sophia Loren can't save this one. But it's the sort of thing you might want to judge for yourself. The movie is available on DVD and Blu-ray from the TCM Shop. Amazon, meanwhile, seems to be running a special deal that's only available to those who have Amazon Prime. Not that I have any plans to buy this one.

Sophia Loren at the TCM Film Festival

Ah, today is day thta the annual TCM Classic Film Festival starts in Los Angeles. Nobody got me tickets, so I won't be there. Anyhow, it seems to be the case now on TCM the cable channel that they use the current year's film festival to promote something they did at the previous year's festival, that being one of the older-time actors they scored an extended interview with. In the past they've done Luise Rainer and Peter O'Toole (both no longer with us), as well as Eva Marie Saint.

Apparently, last year they interviewed Sophia Loren. That's because the interview with her will be airing tiwce tonight on TCM. Between and after the interviews will be a night of Loren's movies. As is often the case with TCM premieres, there's an airing at 8:00 PM for the benefit of people on the east coast, and then another airing after one feature film for the folks out west. This year, there's actually a feature and a short. At 9:15 PM, there will be the 2014 short Human Voice starring Loren as a woman trying to reconnect with an old boyfriend. TCM showed it last year and it was worth one viewing, but not something I'd call particularly great. Then at 9:45 PM there's Marriage Italian Style, which has her tricking Marcelo Mastroianni into marriage after a lengthy affair, only to tell him after he discovers the trick that she says only one of her three sons is his, and she won't tell him which.

Sophia Loren night schedule heads up

If you're an avid TCM viewer like me you probably download the monthly TCM schedule. Sometimes, especially when it comes to scheduling those shorts which are part of the programming feature -- that is, things like a series of two-reelers in Silent Sunday Nights as opposed to the Traveltalks or other shorts that don't wind up on the printable monthly schedule -- TCM has some problems. Tonight, I think, is one of those nights.

TCM's spotlight on Sophia Loren begins with a short called Human Voice, based on a play by Jean Cocteau and directed by Sophia's son Eduardo Ponti. IMDb, and the daily schedule, both list the short as being 26 minutes, which I'd presume is right. The original monthly schedule, has it at 35 minutes, which is clearly wrong since it's being put in a 30-minute time slot. More noticeable, however, is that the monthly schedule lists it running three times tonight. The last of those airings is the one that's not goign to take place. The monthly schedule ends with Man of La Mancha at 3:30 AM, followed by the alleged third airing of Human Voice at 5:30 AM. However, Man of La Mancha is 129 minutes, and so clearly can't fit in a 120-minute time slot.

As for airing Human Voice at all, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of agreement to run this in exchange for getting Sophia and Eduardo to come to the TCM Film Festival. I haven't seen it, so I can't comment on whether it's any good. For the record, the two airings that will be on are at 8:00 PM, and again at 10:30 PM.

TCM is also padding out the night's schedule with quite a few shorts. Unfortunately, cutting one airing of Human Voice and shorts that don't pad out the 10-15 minutes between the end of one feature and the start of the next would have only freed up an hour if I've counted correctly, so there wouldn't have been time to include an extra feature-length film. Since one of those shorts is a promo for Loren's movie Madame, it would be nice if TCM could actually show that (the feature, not the trailer).

La ciociara

You probably wouldn't recognize the title La ciociara, unless you happen to speak Italian. The movie was relased in the United States with the title Two Women. It's airing tomorrow morning at 7:15 AM on TCM.

Sophia Loren stars as Cesira, a widow with a teenaged daughter who is scraping out a living in Rome during World War II. The Allies are advancing, and Cesira, having no idea that the Allies were more or less going to bypass Rome on their way through Italy, decided that the best thing for her daughter would be to flee back to her home town in the countryside. Life may not be much more prosperous there, but at least it's likely to be safer. And it is safer, at least for a while. Cesira meets Michele (Jean-Paul Belmondo), an intellectual who is doing everything he can to sit out the war. Cesira takes a shining to him, but unfortunately so does her daughter Rosetta, although it seems fairly clear that Michele would never end up with Rosetta.

As I said, village life was safer for a while -- but only a while. There's still a war on, and the Allies have taken Rome and are advancing on places like Cesria's home village. The Nazis are retreating, and on their retreat wind up in Cesira's town, expecting the villagers to help them because the Nazis have guns and can do terrible things to the villagers if they don't help. Specifically, they want Michele to show them the way to get back to the rest of the Nazi lines and bypass the Allies. Cesira decides once again that becoming a refugee is the least bad option, and heads with her daughter back to Rome. What happens next is, well... something I don't think I should mention.

Sophia Loren gives an outstanding performance in Two Women, and well deserved the Academy Award she won for it. If anything, she completely takes over the movie to the point that we don't particularly care about the plot, which is really rather threadbare. Cesira lives one place for a while, then lives another place, then heads back to the first place, and it's only toward the end that something happens that makes us take notice. The whole Nazis being in the area thing seems almost like a Macguffin serving as a backdroup for a slice-of-life story into the life of a widow with an adolescent daughter. It's not a perfect movie, but Loren is so good that she spectacularly covers up all the imperfections.

Two Women has made it to a bunch of low-budget DVD releases; I don't know about the print quality of any of those DVDs, however.

Sophia Loren times three!

For those who like anthology movies, TCM is airing an Italian film from the genre tomorrow morning at 4:45 AM: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.

THe movie is billed as telling three stories of the ways in which women use their bodies to get the things they want, and that's more or less accurate. All three stories star Sophia Loren as the woman, and Marcelo Mastroianni as the man in her life. First is a story called "Adelina", in which Loren plays a woman in the slums of Naples. She's incurred a debt for the furniture in the house she and her husband live in, and it's gotten to the point where she can go to jail for fraud. However, there's an exemption in Italian law (or so the movie claims) that a mother who is pregnant or nursing can't be put in prison. So Adelina gets the brilliant idea that she can avoid going to jail as long as she's either pregnant, or nursing her latest child. And boy does she get pregnant! You'd think she'd hit menopause eventually, but what happens first is that her husband (Mastroianni, of course) is unable to put out with the racket from all those kids.

In the second segment, Loren plays Anna, the wife of a wealthy industrialist. Her husband is always away on business, so she spends her days driving around not so much aimlessly, but with the intention of picking up her man on the side (Mastroianni) somewhere where they won't be noticed. This will let them enjoy a romantic tryst and, they hope, not get caught. All goes to plan until the two get in an argument over who can drive better, and they end up crashing the car. Oops.

The final story has Loren as a prostitute who uses her own apartment to entertain her guests. She also likes to exit her apartment out onto the terrace rather scantily clad, which means she entertaining the people in the apartment across the way. The problem with this is that the grandson of that apartment's owner is a young man who's studying for the seminary, and Loren's beauty is getting him entierly too excited....

Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow is more about Loren than Mastroianni, and she shines. The stories are pretty good, but more in service of Loren's beauty and acting ability. That, and the beauty of Naples, and in the second segment some of the countryside around Naples. This is a movie that in more ways than one is lovely to look at. Don't let that make you think the stories are inferior; they should entertain you too. Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow has been released to DVD, so you don't have to worry that it's on at such an ungodly hour.