Pain, amour, ainsi soit-il

Vittorio de Sica is retiring from the Caribinieri, returning to Sorrento to become head of the Police Department. He comes equipped with an elderly governess, a brother who is a priest, and a great variety of uniforms, all with white gloves. What he lacks is a place to live. His family apartment has been occupied since the War by Sophia Loren, a widowed fishwife. She has a boyfriend with whom she fights a lot. This does not, of course, prevent her from coming on to de Sica, who easily loses his head over women -- it's Loren, who wouldn't? -- to keep the apartment and get her boyfriend a job with the police. The boyfriend objects to her methods. Meanwhile, de Sica is staying at the home of Lea Padovani, a highly religious and insanely repressed woman, as a favor to the priest.

I have the feeling that the movie's length of 110 minutes, although long for a comedy, is trimmed. Miss Padovani's sequences seem rather abrupt and Miss Loren, while startlingly beautiful, gives a performance that is rather harsh and monotonous; it's true she was only 20 when she made this, but she soon showed herself a capable farceur and actress of considerably greater range. Perhaps the producer and director simply lacked confidence in her abilities.

Despite these misgivings, this is a good comedy, mostly because of de Sica, who plays his well-written role of a mature and intelligent man who becomes a gibbering poet at the sight of a beautiful woman, with the beautiful freedom of a true clown.

This kind of reminded me of the Greek love dramas I used to watch when I was younger. Though I don't remember the age gaps, which surely must have existed in many of those movies too. It was all about love. In this case that's not entirely true. Esepecially for the female main character in this. Sophia Loren had a reputation as a person, which one cannot seem to be able to distinguish from some of her roles.

What can she do though? She had the looks, it's not like she isn't or wasn't able to play anything else. Which I think she's proving even now in a recent production on Netflix. I haven't seen that one yet, but just from some flashes of the trailer one can tell, she has not lost her touch. And speaking of which, her touch is something two men crave here. One older, the other one younger. With all the teasing and all the other stuff happening too. A drama that will touch some and will others indifferent. But you can't blame the movie for not keeping it real amongst all the fun it has ...

I don't know, this Sorrento scandal seemed pretty mild to me. There's a small town and Sophia Loren is in the town and so more than one person wants to be with Sophia Loren and there are some sort of comedic moments and then it kind of ends.

It gets by because Loren had star power, and because it's a colorful film that makes good use of its seaside setting. I guess to some extent, I appreciated how drama-free it was, with little sentimentality or forced tension/conflict later in the film. It really just felt like it was trying to be a fairly gentle comedy about some love-related chaos, and a little escapism as a result.

It's not essential and probably won't be memorable in time (to me), but it felt like it did what it wanted to do. Scandal in Sorrento isn't really ambitious at all, from what I can tell, but it does succeed at being decent. That's more than can be said for some movies, and I do also want to go a tiny bit easier on this one because of its age.

With all the praises that Sophie Loren received throughout her long career, I expected more. Her role (like all the female roles of the film) is stereotyped at excess. Plus, she overplays it.

The dialogues always explain to the viewer visual jokes. I found that incredibly annoying and unnecessary.

Vittorio De Sica's role is why I don't give this film a lower-rating. In fact, his character is the only one that feels really like a character, he has depth and real psychological evolution. But, make no mistake, I'm not saying that his performance was brilliant.

I came to this film 65 years after it was made. Sophia Loren is a phenomenon, and if you watch "The Life Ahead" before you watch this, her extraordinary contribution to world cinema is even more apparent. This is Italy less than a decade after the end of World War II, yet the film is apolitical and concentrates on the lives of real people trying to make their way in a nation that suffered enormously from war but also from its own delusions and acquiescence to the "charms" of fascism.