While Italian Neo-Realism was casting its spell on international cinema, the home market headed to melodramatic soapers from Raffaello Matarazzo. Execrable stuff to judge by this morbid Cinderella variant with ‘everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end’ as Thelma Ritter put it in ALL ABOUT EVE/’50. Statuesque Yvonne Sanson (a big-boned Drag Queen-ready 5'10" beauty) is the put upon daughter doing all the chores as she & gentle Papa suffer under the glacial cruelties of her evil step-mother. Caught on a date with fiancé Amedeo Nazzari*, they’re thrown out and head to Rome where his promising business deals implode, leading to a mistaken charge of murder separating groom & pregnant bride. Yikes! Now with a little girl, she’s stuck washing dishes when who should show up but her Fairy Godfather! (Really an old love-struck neighbor.) Alas, Sanson proves too voluptuous for her boss to keep his hands off her. So, back to her now widowed Step-Mom (Papa having died of a heart attack after learning all), and a promise to dutifully raise the chronically ill little girl as her own, but only if Yvonne cuts all family ties and enters a sanatorium for wayward women. Ludicrous as this sounds (and there’s much more to come), these things can work a certain magic with stylists like Douglas Sirk or John M Stahl in charge. Here, not so much. (Ah, to go back in time and watch half the audience weeping buckets while half weep from laughter.) Some critics have been trying to raise Matarazzo’s rep (this film part of a Criterion Trio package), but how much dross can one endure in hopes of epiphany?
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK: *If Amedeo Nazzari looks familiar, it’s not only because he could pass for Errol Flynn’s Italian Uncle, but because Federico Fellini cast him as the world weary movie star who loses his date and picks up Giulietta Masina for a evening on the town in NIGHTS OF CABIRIA/’57. And that’s not the only connection with great Italian cinema as Assistant Director ‘Franco’ Rosi would soon be directing classics as Francesco Rosi. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/08/le-notti-di-cabiria-nights-of-cabiria.html
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