Ragazze da marito

Eduardo De Filippo occupied a place, with the film transposition of his plays, similar to that of Marcel Pagnol in France. (besides, unlike Pagnol, appearing as an actor in numerous films directed by others.) Both men were not great visual stylists or inventors of cinematic form but profound humanists who foregrounded realistically observed writing and believable character creations. De Filippo centered his work on his native Naples the way Pagnol did with Marseilles and Provence. Here though the story is set in Rome with its government bureaucracy and its dog eat dog post WWII economic struggle, though the plot takes us away for a while to Capri. De Filippo stars with his brother Peppino (playing a bumbling and conniving friend) and his sister Titina (as the mother) quite a talented little troupe. His scruples at slowly and carefully processing license applications at his office desk are tested when, after losing a wad of lire saved by the 3 daughters so they can go to a beach resort to meet possible husbands, he is offered bribes to speed licenses through ahead of others. The bittersweet culmination is that the daughters manage to find husbands, all right, but not exactly the way it was planned, and the father faces an uncertain future because of what he has done. The scenes set in Capri offer a satirical look of another kind, at the leisure set ,some of whom speak English . This underrated film didn't get a US release though it turned up in the early 90s on a short lived series of classic Italian movies presented on local tv channels in places like New Jersey and San Francisco.