Sophia Loren has been a screen and fashion icon so long, famous as one of the most voluptuous women ever to grace the screen, that it’s easy to forget how brilliant an actress she’s been.
Earthy in Italian dramas, regal in costume epics and aloof and amusing in Hollywood romantic comedies, from “Scandal in Sorrento” to “The Millionairess” to “Man of La Mancha” and even “Grumpier Old Men,” Loren effortlessly wears the label her “El Cid” co-star Charlton Heston gave her to this very day — “a force of nature.”
She was never better than in her Oscar-winning turn in her frequent collaborator Vittorio De Sica’s masterpiece, “Two Women.” Playing a widowed mother fleeing the air raids on Rome during the Allied invasion of 1944, she inhabits the role so throughly that one can barely see a “performance” in there.
Through her, the viewer experiences a WWII odyssey as her character, Cesira, and her daughter take to the rails and the road in a country about to undergo a coup, unleashing lawlessness and reprisals aheading of invading forces that took forever to march up the boot of Italy.
Titled “La ciociara” or “Woman of Ciociara” in Italian — named for the impoverished, mountainous region southeast of Rome — this gorgeous black and white classic exists in its original Italian or expertly dubbed by the multi-lingual Loren herself when it was released in the U.S. and Britain in 1960-61.
Cesira dotes on her tween daughter Rosetta (Eleanora Brown), who survives an air raid, causing her mother to vow to leave the Eternal City for the village where she remembers “sleeping in the chicken house…eating one meal a day.” Rosetta, she tells the neighbors, has a “weak heart.” But anything would be better than staying in a Rome under siege.
She talks the handsome Giovanni (Raf Vallone) into watching her store and apartment while they’re gone. She barely notices, as she lays out her reasons and plans, as Giovanni closes the doors and then the windows and curtains of his coal and firewood business, one by one, to seduce her.
Independent and contemptuous of mere male lust, the woman who married an older man simply to escape the poverty of the countryside eventually submits to Giovanni. But we can see the calculations beneath the desire in her eyes.
At least he’ll be inspired to guard her property, and escort her and Rosetta to the train the next day.
Their train ride is interrupted by bombing. She teaches Rosetta how to carry loads on her head, the way Italian women have for millenia, and they continue on, surviving an Allied fighter plane’s strafing, through the town of Fondi, where they’re hustled by the locals and threatened by fascist militia hunting for “deserters.”
And then they arrive at her home village of Sant Eufemia, and the dangers that hung over their picturesque and even picaresque journey subside. Or so we think.
Because although they’re among family and old friends — the “idealist” student Michele (Jean-Paul Belmondo) pines for her — the war is still just down the boot of Italy, as the Allies landed “too far south” to make quick work of the crumbled Italian army and the Germans who supplanted them.
“I love you, Cesira!”
“With the troubles we have, you say THAT?”
We know what she knows, that civilians or ex-combatants in a now “occupied” country, Mussolini in or out, the war is coming for them, and a reckoning with it.
Veteran cinematographer Gábor Pogány (“Valdez is Coming”) frames such lovely images that “Two Women” can play like an “Italy as it Once Was” travelogue, with Loren our earthy, sensual tour guide. Mountain vistas, haystacks piled to the sky, every building old, bathed in shadows or stark sunlight, it’s as inviting a depiction of a war zone as the cinema has ever presented.
The simple struggle to buy food for herself and her daughter among understandably-hoarding neighbors in a collapsing economy is a daily grind. But as the seasons change and the debates about politics (Michele in a nascent communist, who just doesn’t know it), the just-ended fascist “empire” and chess matches, wine-drinking and Michele’s story-reading among his illiterate friends and relatives move indoors, the menace makes its way back into their lives.
“Anzio” is never mentioned by name, but referred to. British commandos ask for their help and hear every Italian excuse for not giving it. A German anti-aircraft officer (Curt Lowens) lectures any Italian within earshot about unmanly “Italian cowardice” and the injustices borne by a country that still has “peasants.”
And then the worst happens, a sequence still shocking over 60 years later, still poignant even if you don’t buy into Italian victimhood, still realistic and historically-defensible even if the modern viewer’s first instinct is to wonder if Italy’s infamous racism plays into its depiction.
Through it all Loren is defiant but human, always nurturing, pragmatic, canny and wary yet capable of letting her guard down, a strong woman with one maternal priority and yet a simple helpless refugee swept up in the tides of war.
Thanks to his long collaborative friendship with Loren, De Sica, already a legend for “Bicycle Thieves” and “Umberto D.,” added a third classic to his Holy Trinity of Italian masterpieces. Hers is a great performance anchoring one of the true masterpieces of the filmmaker who made “neo realism” the benchmark of all dramatic cinema.
Rating: unrated, violence, sexual situations
Cast: Sophia Loren, Eleonora Brown, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Curt Lowens and Raf Vallone
Credits: Directed by Vittorio de Sica, scripted by Cesare Zavattini, based on a novel by Alberto Moravia. An Embassy Pictures/MGM release on Tubi, Mubi, etc.
Running time: 1:41
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