La Ciociara [Two Women] **** (1961, Sophia Loren, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Raf Vallone, Eleonora Brown) – Classic Movie Review 2361

Co-writer/director Vittorio De Sica’s vintage 1961 drama stars Sophia Loren who won Best Actress awards at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival and the 1962 Oscars for her glorious tour-de-force. Speaking in her native Italian, Loren triumphed in the first non-English-language performance to win an Oscar. She also won the 1962 Bafta Award as Best Foreign Actress. The film won the 1962 Golden Globe as Best Foreign Language Foreign Film.

Loren gives an admirably full-bodied, warm-blooded performance as Cesira, a young Italian widowed mother meeting disasters on the run with her 13-year-old daughter Rosetta (Eleonora Brown) during the Allies’ World War Two bombardment of Rome in 1941.

They journey to the village where Cesira was born, but they both get raped by soldiers hiding in a church. A young intellectual called Michele (Jean-Paul Belmondo) falls in love with Cesira, but she has suffered a breakdown and does not know what to do with man’s advances.

Esteemed Italian director De Sica, working from Alberto Moravia’s novel, makes the tough-edged wartime melodrama believable and heart-rending. The film features several other excellent performances, and also stars Raf Vallone as Giovanni, and features Renato Salvatori as the truck driver Florindo and Carlo Ninchi as Michele’s father. It is produced by Loren’s husband Carlo Ponti, and was remade by Loren as an Italian TV movie in 1989.

The movie was restored in July 2002.

Moravia’s 1957 novel of La Ciociara is based on real-life mass rapes by the Moroccan Gourmiers in the Ciociara region after the Battle of Monte Cassino in World War Two. Monte Cassino, 80 miles southeast of Rome, was captured by the Allies on 18 May 1944 and the next night thousands of Goumiers and other colonial troops scoured the hills surrounding the towns and the villages of Ciociara.

More than 60,000 women, from 11 to 86, suffered from violence, when village after village came under control of the Goumiers. Civilians who tried to protect their wives and daughters were murdered.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2361

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