Bannie du foyer

Anna gets thrown out of her house by her wicked stepmother, her fiancé gets tossed in jail for a murder he didn't commit, she gets pregnant, and her father has a heart attack. And that's just the beginning. Matarazzo puts the "drama" in "melodrama" and at first it's too ridiculous to handle. But then it gets so ridiculous that it's hilarious. And then it gets even more ridiculous and becomes kind of awesome. Some have compared Matarazzo to Sirk, but I see little of that subversive quality here, just pandering (his films were wildly popular in Italy, far more so than neorealism). But it's effective pandering, and you can't help getting invested it, despite -- or perhaps because of -- the absurdity of it all. Yvonne Sanson plays the martyr to the hilt, crying and fainting with all her heart. While I can't say this movie is "good," it is entertaining. I'm cautiously looking forward to the next two in the set, which are supposed to be even more over-the-top.

Tormento can be purchased as part of a Criterion Eclipse Set entitled "Raffaello Matarazzo's Runaway Melodramas," and they do indeed runaway and sometimes get lost--but no matter: the camera always returns to the suffering heroine, Anna Ferrari (lushly played by Yvonne Sanson) who endures heartbreak and loss each time she turns around, and sometimes before she gets a chance to get her breath--just as she loses a job, she gets pregnant and her well-meaning hubby ends up for twenty in the slammer--for a crime we know he didn't commit. This is the sort of 50's weepy stuff churned out by the big studios in 30's and 40's Hollywood, often starring Lana Turner who always wore her grief very well and suffered spectacularly in Technicolor. Just as Lana often did, Anna loses the custody of her child, this time to a Stepmother From Hell, an unforgiving, dessicated old thing that probably eats baby turtles for breakfast. Will Carlo (perfectly played by Errol Flynn look-a-like Amedeo Nazzari) find a Get Out Of Jail Free card? Will the grandchild escape the nasty clutches of the Wicked Stepmother? Will Anna manage to convince the nuns she belongs outside in the sunshine? Your tolerance for this well-made but often risible melodrama depends a good deal on your enjoyment of the well-crafted weeper.

How much torment can you endure without feeling forced by circumstances and the cruelty of others to commit suicide? That's the question that imposes itself here as you are initiated in the grossest possible injustice imposed by circumstances. The man is sentenced to 20 years in jail for a crime he did not commit, and his wife happens to have an atrociously cruel stepmother, who commands her life and forces her into a penitentiary for the sake of her child with the man, although they are married. Yet none of these victims ever enter any thought of anything like suicide. They just endure the unendurable and struggle on with no illusions of any false hopes but just accept the imposed facts as they are. Anna (Yvonne Sanson, as beautiful as Isa Miranda,) rebel heroically indeed with all possible force of a victimised woman, and there is one bright ray of hope, as a former colleague of hers from the conservatory discovers her as a dishwasher and tries to do something about the situation, but he is the only one, a wonderful musical intermission. The stepmother remains a hopeless case in her inhumantiy and is incredibly consistent about it, and the plot is questionable indeed and, as so many of Matarazzo's films, more operatically dramatic than quite realistically convincing in its affected exaggerations. But Matarazzo's direction is as always superb, and the actors are acting their hearts out without overdoing it, and you can't tire of Yvonne Sanson's beauty..