Tales with Stings

Made in Italy is a mosaic of ironic episodes that attempts to provide a portrait of modern Italy. A good many of the scenes are merely blackout sketches, some as brief as a minute: a beautiful girl stares wistfully at a bridal gown in a shop window; the camera pulls back to show her nun's habit. A group of starving peasants gaze at a wall poster reading "Help India." An inquiring reporter asks a man without TV what he does to amuse himself.

The man gazes at his pregnant wife and their eight children and roars with laughter. An Italian and his wife, scouring Florence in search of a Raphael painting, find that only the foreign tourists know where it is. A farmhand in a field stops pitching hay--long enough to nurse her baby.

The longer stories come equipped with stings in their tales and often seem to be born out of O. Henry by Moravia. In one of the most moving incidents, a girl (Catherine Spaak) puts on airs with a boy she has just met, describes Capri as a passe resort, and puts down her wealthy parents as "bourgeois." When he escorts her to her Roman town house, she climbs up the stairs--and then climbs down again as soon as he is gone. After descending still farther, she goes into the janitor's basement apartment, where her father greets her with a curse and a vicious slap across the face. When the boy telephones to wish her good night, she masks her sobs as laughter.

The film's funniest episode stars Anna Magnani as a middle-aged mother hen trying to herd her brood of three children, her terrified husband and her aged mother-in-law across a highway. Screaming at policemen, interfering with drivers, Magnani is a law unto herself as she belts the offending cars with her purse and shouts epithets at everything that dares to move against her. In a series of bright sight gags, she dashes between wheels and fenders, rescuing children, husband, and finally her mother-in-law's shoe--only to find that the store she is seeking is back where she started from. Wearily she sits down, preparing to face her sworn enemy, traffic, once more. The camera lingers lovingly on her face--humorous, furious, infinitely attractive, and altogether Italian.

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