Italian Import

The Anatomy of Love (Lux Film Cines; Kassler), an Italian film that tells five short stories, is at its best in the two that star Vittorio De Sica: as a count who has lost everything but his nobility ("I'd decided not to outlive my youth no matter how rich I was"), and as a Naples bus driver, a laughing hedonist who has developed a talent for catching and lifting girls' skirts in the bus's snapping-jaw folding doors. Since it is the bus driver's conviction that the routes of heaven are not to be found by following a regular schedule, he is always ready to swerve off course to answer the invitational glances of a lady or to chase a taxi containing his true love along a seacliff highway.

One story casts French Actor Michel Simon as an old, overstuffed priest. A village washerwoman (Sylvie) tells him that she is 62, tired and alone. For uncounted years she has turned out every morning at 5 to kneel washing clothes until dark, stopping only for a little bread and oil. Would the father and the church now mercifully grant her leave to take her own life? Another story is a screen version of Novelist Alberto Moravia's II Pupo. A straitened young couple have had one baby too many. They try to abandon it in a church, but it cries and a priest throws them out.

Although marquees proclaim Sophia Loren as the female star of Anatomy of Love, the film was made some years ago, and she is little more than a teen-age straight woman for Toto the comedian. She appears only in the final episode, a brief, ridiculous farce. Sophia nonetheless shows the shape of things to come.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.