Film School: Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren

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Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren loved each other, and they loved working together.

Loren said of Mastroianni: “Every time I was asked to do a film with Marcello, I said, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ without reading a script. Because I knew that with him everything was going to be alright. Because he knew me and I knew him. His sense of humor. His way of improvising.”

And Mastroianni of Loren: ”She is my favorite actress, and indeed my favorite colleague. I love her very much. We have made ten films together, which is a record, and we are really very good friends. She is an intelligent woman, and a Neapolitan, so she has a sense of humor too. I like to work with people who are both beautiful and nice.”

The rapport between the two great friends was the best part of every one of the movies they made together. As we touched on a fortnight ago, it was three buoyant comedies during the 1950s—Too Bad She’s Bad, The Baker’s Beautiful Wife and What a Woman—that cemented them as Italy’s most beloved screen pairing, and helped audiences discover the duo could bring magic to even the silliest of productions.

Those three films were released in 1954, 1955 and 1956 respectively. There’d be a seven-year gap before their next team-up. In the meantime, Loren solidified her stardom in America, and Mastroianni began his game-changing collaboration with Federico Fellini. In the ‘50s, they’d been appealing up-and-comers; in the ‘60s, they were megastars. 

Mastroianni and Loren reunited on Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, an anthology film (mid-century Italian cinema was full of them!) which featured the two in three different guises. In the first, Loren is a poor woman who keeps getting pregnant to avoid incarceration for a petty crime; Mastroianni is her loving but exhausted husband. In the second, they are having a sordid affair, until a car accident makes him see her true nature. In the third, she is a high-class sex worker and he her besotted client, but her embroilment with the saga of the troubled young priest in the apartment across the way keeps interrupting their liaisons. 

The winner of 1965’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar (besting The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Woman of the Dunes), Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow was bouncily directed by Vittorio De Sica, who helmed many of the pair’s movies, and had actually starred alongside them in Too Bad She’s Bad and What a Woman. It was an excellent showcase for Loren and Mastroianni’s most common dynamic—she as the leader, determined to bend whatever situation to her will; he as her harried, occasionally resentful, but ultimately adoring acolyte. Mastroianni was never too arrogant to play second fiddle to his favorite actress. The English-speaking press was ever (somewhat xenophobically) keen to paint him as a “Latin Lover,” but the flustered men he usually portrayed opposite Loren were anything but.

That dynamic was on show again in their collaboration the following year, Marriage Italian Style (also helmed by De Sica). Mastroianni plays a sleazy businessman, Domenico, and Loren’s sex worker Filumena is his kept woman. Filumena is frustrated that Domenico refuses to make their relationship official and, spurred on by the need to provide for her children (whom she’s been keeping secret), decides on desperate measures to persuade him into marriage.

Though often described as a comedy, and not without its humorous moments, Marriage Italian Style was at its core, a melodrama. Mastroianni is a sleazebag (replete with the appropriate mustache), who lets Loren down at every turn; Loren’s determination to provide for her kids at any cost harkens back to classic Hollywood women’s pictures like Stella Dallas and Mildred Pierce. Though her status puts her at a disadvantage, she manages to get what she wants, and it’s a joy to see her take Mastroianni’s roguish scoundrel down a peg or two on the way.

By the dawn of the ‘70s, both Mastroianni and Loren were separately well-established as accomplished dramatic actors, but they had yet to tackle a downbeat project together. That changed with their next film, 1970’s Sunflower, again directed by De Sica. 

The action starts during WW2. Our leads play Giovanna and Antonio, who decide to marry very early in their courtship in order to get Antonio a state-mandated 12-day reprieve before he is sent off to the Russian Front. They fall ever more in love, but then the inevitable comes, and they are separated. At the end of the war, Antonio doesn’t come home, and Giovanna spends years searching for him. Eventually, she goes to Russia, and discovers that he is living with a woman who rescued him from near-death during the war—and they have a child. 

A tragic, lush, Sirkian weepie, replete with a tremendous Oscar-nominated Henry Mancini score, Sunflower was a striking change of pace for the duo. And, broadly speaking, it was not a welcomed one. Reviews were largely unkind (it made The New York Times’ 10 Worst Films of the Year list, although in company that suggests Vincent Canby’s critical faculties were askew that year!), and it underperformed financially. 

That disappointment started the twosome on a dry spell. Released the same year, The Priest’s Wife saw Loren woo hot priest Mastroianni out of his cassock, but the film’s awkward tone, lurching inelegantly between drama and comedy, led to a muted reception. 1975’s Gun Moll tried to recapture the fleet-footed entertainment value of the comedies the pair had been making two decades earlier. It did not succeed. 

Their following collaboration, however, would prove amongst their very best. 

1977’s A Special Day takes place in 1938, in Fascist Italy. Hitler is coming to pay Mussolini a visit, and almost everyone is attending a rally to welcome him. The only ones left behind in the apartment complex where the movie is set are Antonietta (Loren), an exhausted and undervalued mother of six who is trying to catch up on the housework, and Gabriele (Mastroianni), a gay ex-radio announcer at risk of being taken away by the Fascist authorities. 

Shot in sepia tones and underscored throughout by the drone of the Fascist rally, A Special Day presents a bleak, claustrophobic, hateful world, lit solely by that ineffable Mastroianni-Loren chemistry; though that chemistry is of a different tenor than audiences were accustomed to. Antonietta—who would have really liked to go to the rally—doesn’t trust Gabriele, but she’s attracted to him nevertheless; Gabriele (who doesn’t tell her he’s gay until late in the movie) finds Antoinetta a breath of fresh air, even with her misguided beliefs. Despite a wealth of complications, they’re drawn together, and find in each other respite from their oppressive environment. 

A Special Day is a quiet film, devoid of the humor and exuberance that defined most of the duo’s shared work. It was just Mastroianni and Loren, in some dreary rooms, talking—but that was all they needed to bring the frustrations and histories and hopes of their characters to vivid, aching life. Mastroianni would garner his second Oscar nomination for his performance as Gabriele, and the movie was a favorite for the Palme D’or. It was so widely loved amongst critics, a minor controversy was stirred when it didn’t win; some quietly suggest that discomfort with the two playing so much against type—Loren deglamorized, Mastroianni as gay—prevented it from taking home the top prize. 

Other collaborations followed—underwhelming films with Lina Wertmüller and Robert Altman—but A Special Day was the last movie Mastroianni and Loren made that fully showcased the depth and strength of their connection. It proved that even after acting together for a quarter of a century, they could still find new facets to their bond. 

And all these years later, there’s never been another screen pairing like them. You’d have to go back to the days of Myrna Loy and William Powell, or Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, to find a duo with a similarly extensive body of work—and though both of those pairings resulted in some delightful movies, neither exhibited the range of Mastroianni and Loren’s shared filmography. 

 “They are the missing parts of a puzzle, each commanding the respect and attention of the other, each able to take the upper or lower berth in the battle,” said critic Tony Crawley, in The Films of Sophia Loren. Mastroianni and Loren were two tremendously accomplished actors who loved to work together, had fun together, were not rivals, and weren’t afraid to take risks with the projects they chose. Those qualities, and the sheer length of their partnership, immortalized them in cinema history. 

Sure, the risks they took didn’t always pan out. But even when the material was not worthy of them, it was always—it is always—worth spending a couple of hours in the company of Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren.

Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.