La legge

This drama with brief touches of comedy deals with an unfortunate girl called Marietta (Gina Lollobrigida , though both , Carol Baker and Scilla Gabel , had been contacted to play Marietta's part) , servant of aristocrat Don Cesare (Pierre Brasseur) , she is a beautiful woman living in a Sicilian little town where people gather nightly in the tavern for the 'game of the Law' , selecting one by lot to boss and humiliate the others . Marietta , who is pursued by every male in town , is in love with Enrico (Marcelo Mastroianni) , an equally impoverished agricultural engineer . There are various love stories : the judge's wife (Melina Mercouri) chases Francesco (Raf Mattioli) , son of crime mobster Matteo , who is after Marietta . Meanwhile , local boss Brigante (Ives Montand) wants to make sure that his son Francesco doesn't get too involved with the unsuitable Lucrezia , the judge's wife . And Marietta wants engineer Enrico for a hubby , but he claims he's too poor to marry . Marietta then decides to rob herself a dowry from a tourist . Furthermore , there appears the Comissario (Vittorio Caprioli) and her lover Giuseppina (Lidia Alfonsi) , the Judge , Tonio (Paolo Stoppa) and other villagers (Franco Pesce) . All of them are living in a small fishing village near from sea . The whole events lead to disagreeable deeds with fateful consequences .

This film -in which illicit as well as interwoven passions abound- has comedy , drama , emotion , social habits but also contains some embarrassing situations . This ¨Dramedy¨ is pretty well , but sometimes results to be slow-moving and a little bit boring . Director Jules Dassin directs this predominantly romantic drama in which stands out themes about power excesses and various triangular romances that pervade in the Sicilian town . Sympathetic acting by the gorgeous busty Gina Lollobrigida who comes up with an unique way to get money for her dowry , robbing a lot of cash . She is the Bellezza of an Italian town , while Gina is the flame , Ives Montand is the fuse that sets them on fire . Secondary cast is frankly excellent , such as the French Pierre Brasseur and the great Melina Mercouri who co-starred opposite Jules Dassin in his film Never on Sunday (1960) , Rififi (1954) and Phaedra (1961) . In addition , it appears their son : Joe Dassin, who was a popular French singer in the 1960s and 70s . The picture packs an evocative cinematography shot on location in Carpino , Foggia , Apulia, Italy . Atmospheric and appropriate musical score by Roman Vlad .

The motion picture was professionally directed by Jules Dassin , though has some flaws and gaps . At his beginnings Jules became a stage actor and was a member of a Jewish troupe , as he played character roles in Yiddish . At that time , he joined the Communist Party of the United States , but left the party in 1939 , he said , disillusioned after the Soviet Union signed a pact with Adolf Hitler . He subsequently turned into filmmaker , Dassin's best directorial works for Hollywood include such a dated patriotic flag-waver titled Reunion in France (1942) with John Wayne , Joan Crawford ; a fantastic comedy titled The Canterville ghost (1944) , and criminal dramas as The brute force (1947) , starring Burt Lancaster ; The naked city (1948), one of the first police dramas shot on the streets of New York ; and Night in the city (1950) starring Richard Widmark as a hustler in London who is caught up in his own schemes . While he was assigned by producer Darryl F. Zanuck to make the film , Dassin was accused of affiliation with the Communist Party in his past . As Jules was in the ¨Black List¨ during McCarthy time . He left the United States for France in 1953 and struggled during his first years in Paris . He was not fluent in French , and his connections were limited and at his early stay had little success . At that time , the anti-Communist witch hunt in America was fading , and Dassin was accepted again . However , Dassin's low-budget film , Rififi (1955), famous for its long heist sequence that was free of dialog , (1964) , won him the Best Director Award at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival . Dassin received two Academy Award-nominations for directing and screen-writing for Topkapi , his greatest hit smash . Jules , finally , directed two failed movies as A dream of passion (1978) and A circle of two (1980)

(1958) Law/ La legge (In French with English subtitles) DRAMA

"Law" as the movie is called is a type of game this small village sometimes plays, and yet somehow echoes like this in real life. Based on a novel written by Roger Vailland, which takes place in a Mediterranean community, where jobs are scarce and the people living their appear to help one another. The movie has film veteran, Marcello Mastroianni as Enrico Tosso which they nickname l'agronomo comes to visit a wealthy baron, Don Cesare (Pierre Brasseur) requesting for his daughter Marietta to be his servant for a reasonable amount of money. She declines but rather want to be married to him instead. What's resonating is the fact that it centers on this small community and it is interwoven together in which we as viewers can identify with, since things were different back then. Was this about what happened when the Great Depression hit or when stealing was the only means of making a living? Director Jules Dassin does not say, for he just presents the characters as they're without worrying what the audience thinks about them.

The Law exists somewhere in the realm between a Hollywood soap opera and a European art film, with a dash of sexploitation.

This film is all about power--how one gets power, how one can use power (to lay down The Law, or lose power, and how power relates to sex. This film is all about sex. Sometimes, it feels like it's all about Gina Lollobrigida's boobs.

The all-star European cast are all good, especially Lollobrigida and Yves Montand, who has the meatiest role in the film, as a complicated local hoodlum who wants his son to become a lawyer, who wants to be the one to lay down The Law, and who very badly wants Gina Lollobrigida, who doesn't want him in the slightest.

Sometimes, the film approaches high camp, such as a couple of odd and unexpected musical numbers, and when Marcello Mastroianni and Gina Lollobrigida romp in the surf amidst a flock of sheep, or when Gina Lollobrigida is strapped to a table by her mother and a couple of jealous maids and whipped (and with a bowl of hot chilis behind her head that's photographed to look like a halo).

It's a gorgeous film to look at. There's Gina Lollobrigida's boobs. And then there's the quaint, crumbling little backwater Italian fishing village, sumptuously photographed in that deep, saturated mid-century black and white. And there's the sea. It looks straight out of a Fellini film.

Jules Dassin's direction is lively and stylish, and keeps the film eminently enjoyable throughout. He veers effortlessly between the comedic and the sinister and the sexy, often in the same scene.

But, although I found the films very enjoyable to watch, I do have some problems with it. It felt sometimes that Dassin was trying to cram in as much of the material from the novel as possible, even when it didn't best serve the film. There were multiple storylines unfolding, but the film's two-hour running time was not enough to accommodate them in any depth. And so the film meandered back and forth between characters and situations without a great deal of focus. I think Dassin would have done well to trim a couple of the storylines entirely, which weren't fleshed out enough anyway.

Still, though, this was solid entertainment. 8/10

In the Italian fishing village of Porto Manacore, the men gather in the local tavern in the night to play a game called "The Law", where one of them is selected as "The Boss" after an allotment and the others are humiliated by him. The real boss of the town is the powerful aristocrat Don Cesare (Pierre Brasseur), an old man in his last days but still in the command. The young and sexy small time crook Marietta (Gina Lollobrigida) is the servant of Don Cesare and sexually disputed by the hoodlum Matteo Brigante (Yves Montand), by her brother-in-law Tonio (Paolo Stoppa) and by the engineer Enrico Tosso (Marcello Mastroianni). Marietta wants to marry Enrico, but she is too poor and does not have a dowry. The local Inspector Attilio (Vittorio Caprioli) is an unfaithful husband and the naughty Giuseppina (Lidia Alfonsi) is his mistress. Donna Lucrezia (Melina Mercouri) is the judge's wife that has a crush on the lawyer student and Matteo's son Francesco (Raf Mattioli). When Marietta steals a large amount of a Swiss tourist, she sees the chance to marry Enrico, but the police are investigating the case.

"La Legge" is a minor movie that recalls a soap-opera of the great director Jules Dassin but it is still enjoyable and entertaining. The story takes place in a small fishing village in the South of Italy, where nothing happens but sex, infidelities and gossips. The real power is in the hands of an old aristocrat, and the dwellers dispute a despicable game of power where most of the participants are humiliated as a sort of compensation. Gina Lollobrigida is extremely sexy, her beauty is amazing and there are many erotic scenes considering that it is a movie released in 1959. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "A Lei dos Crápulas" ("The Law of the Debaucheries")

This could have been a great movie, but it is almost unbelievable the way in which Dassin looked at Southern (I repeat: SOUTHERN) Italy in the Fifties of 1900. I was a boy, I did not live there, but in that South I spent my holidays. The best holidays I ever had, due surely to my (then) splendid age and to my (then) splendid country.

A young woman dressed like Gina Lollobrigida could never be seen in those years walking the streets of a southern Italian village.

The magnificent place where the movie was partly made is Peschici (Gargano, Puglia). The name Manacore, in fact, was later used for a very elegant and costly touristic place. I spent several holidays there in the Sixties, and (let alone the Fifties!) never saw a woman dressed that way. And, as far as I remember, they did not go to the beach albeit wearing a diving apparatus (complete of snorkel).

And the music in the local festivals (dedicated to saints, with parades, priests, candles and so on) was very different, almost always neapolitan.

Mrs Mercouri and Ives Montand are surely not at their best (to be kind), but we really re- discover a woman which was at most considered a pin-up, and on the contrary was really a great actress: Gina Lollobrigida.

Brasseur is OK, very human and credible. Marcello Mastroianni as usual shows how one can be a great actor with the minimum of mannerisms (or not at all).

A movie which unfortunately aged very badly.