Word: neapolitan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Performed with unbridled Neapolitan gusto by Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, this hilarious, sentimental, fiercely moral old tear-jerker is only a cousin by marriage to Pietro Germi's memorable comedy, Divorce-Italian Style. Its inspiration is the same rigid divorce laws that make marriage a last resort for Italian males and a Sisyphean challenge for the women who have to weep, cheat, wheedle and trick them into it. Under Director Vittorio De Sica (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow), the two stars pour themselves into their work and set charm flowing like strong red wine...
...woman of the title (Annie Girardot) is a freak: a poor thing covered from head to foot with a coat of long, brown, silky hair. The leading man (Ugo Tognazzi), a Neapolitan spiv, finds her working as a scullion in a convent kitchen. "Mamma mia!" he gasps. "She really looks like an ape. I could start a freak show and clean up." The idea scares her half to death. She's not very bright to begin with, and on top of that she is painfully ashamed of her affliction. But the spiv aggressively jollies her out of her objections...
Some mixed marriages simply won't do, even in Cannes, and Italy's La Donna Scimmia (The Monkey Woman) is at the head of the list. The hero is a Neapolitan con man who marries a girl covered tip to toe with monkey fur (played by pretty Annie Girardot, who spent two hours getting hairy every day, three hours shaving every night). He has a purpose: he figures he can put her in his sideshow and his fortune will be made. He does, he prospers, then-alas-she gets pregnant. Worse yet, she dies in childbirth...
Died. Rico Lebrun, 63, Italian-born West Coast painter and sculptor, a wistful, wiry Neapolitan whose lifelong preoccupation with the grotesque and the macabre led critics to think of him as a 20th century Goya, produced a savage, semi-abstract body of work illustrating grim themes classic and modern, from Dante's Inferno and the Crucifixion to Dachau and Buchenwald; of cancer; in Los Angeles...
...revised standard version. "O, that this too too solid flesh would melt," for example, has become "Why doesn't this flesh, this heavy carcass of meat, dissolve?" The play is done in Italian in an almost corner-of-the-mouth modern idiom, with the gravediggers speaking in hoodsy Neapolitan accents and Hamlet's pentametric arias flatted with words like "procrastination" and "bureaucracy...