Word: matteo
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Angelo is a blond four-year-old mulatto--a present from an American G.I. to an Italian married woman. The G.I. is killed during the war and the mother dies in childbirth. Matteo, the woman's husband, returns after five years in jail to find himself the negro child's legal father...
...Matteo's initial reaction to Angelo is disgust and repulsion; he tries to prove that his wife committed adultery, and that therefore he is not legally responsible for the child. But an old cynical lawyer tells him that before God the mulatto is his equal, and before...
Gradually Matteo's attitude towards the mulatto changes. When he sees the other boys picking on Angelo, he finds himself asking some embarrassing questions. He wonders why this mulatto, who cries like any other white child, is not their equal. Matteo is humbled by Angelo's simple faith in God and in the goodness of man. His initial repulsion becomes pity and--almost--love...
...theme of this type can easily become too moralizing and too artificial, but in this Italian film it doesn't. Don Genna--a friend of Matteo who regards life as one enormous joke--and other humorous relief keep the picture from being just another sermon...
Next day, bespectacled, precise Ivan Matteo Lombardo bravely tried to remind his fellow Socialists that the lion, no matter how softly he purrs, is a carnivorous animal. "We must look to the Marshall Plan," he began quietly, "from an Italian point of view, not from that of the Cominform." His next words were drowned by cries of, "You are the Voice of-America...