Fine Italian Ham

Two Women (Embassy). Sophia Loren is a fine Italian ham, but unfortunately most U.S. directors can't see the prosciutto for the melon. Vittorio (The Bicycle Thief) De Sica knows better. In Gold of Naples he cast her as the main dish in a penny-a-pizza palace, proved her a comedienne with wit as well as It. In Two Women he demonstrates that given astute direction and the chance to play in her own language, Actress Loren can also fill a tragic role.

Based on a novel (TIME, May 12, 1958) by Alberto Moravia, Two Women tells how a Roman grocer's widow (Loren), sick of the war and scared of the bombing, packs her bags and takes her teen-aged daughter (Eleonora Brown) back to the mountain hut where she was born. There they work the stony fields and chatter away the evenings with the peasant women.

"What do you think of the Duce?"

"That face. You couldn't make love to him."

"Well, turn out the light." "Mother, what are you talking about?" "Politics."

Before long, mother and daughter are half in love with the same shy young intellectual (Jean-Paul Belmondo), the son of a local tradesman. As the Germans retreat, they eagerly start back to Rome, but on the way they are captured and raped by what looks like a gang of goums, wild mountain fighters from French Morocco.

The daughter, badly shocked, survives as a sort of spiritual absentee, her feelings annulled, her values voided. She hardly even seems to know her mother. She cannot even cry. She can only in stunned rote repeat her "disgrace" with the first man she happens to meet. The mother pleads, rages, weeps, despairs. The girl is, as the alienists say, "out of contact." Then comes word that the young intellectual they both loved is dead, killed by the Germans. Sobbing, the two women fall into each other's arms, revived by death, healed with suffering.

The moment is rich with meaning. It might have been richer if the film, like the book, had firmly stated and thoughtfully evolved its theme: only those who can suffer can love, only those who can love can live. Instead, the picture lolly-gags along, until the hideous orgy of the goums, like a nice, country-faced, un-soaped soap opera. As such, it is nevertheless lively and diverting. Belmondo, who in Breathless emerged in one catlike bound as the French Bogart, here plays the polar opposite of that part and plays it with wit and sensitivity. And Loren, though hardly the woman Moravia had in mind, makes a superlative tigress. Cunning, selfish, sensual, ferocious and above all female, she leaps on her passions and tears them to spectacular tatters.

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