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.