TWO WOMEN (1960) B/W widescreen 105m dir: Vittorio De Sica

w/Sophia Loren, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Eleanora Brown, Raf Vallone, Renato Salvatori, Carlo Ninchi, Andrea Checchi, Pupella Maggio, Emma Baron, Bruna Cealti

From The Movie Guide: "Mama Mia! Loren deservedly won a Best Actress Oscar --- the first to a non-American actress in a foreign-language film --- for this Vittorio De Sica film, adapted by Cesare Zavattini from an Alberto Moravia novel. It's not a great De Sica-Zavattini collaboration; much of the movie suffers from poor pacing and listlessness, but Loren is a marvel to behold.

"She plays Cesira, a young widow in 1943 Italy who leaves her grocery store in San Lorenzo in the hands of her sometime lover (Raf Vallone), fleeing Allied bombing with her teenage daughter, Rosetta (Eleanora Brown), to return to her native village. There, after an arduous journey, she meets Michele (Jean-Paul Belmondo), the intellectual son of a local farmer with whom Rosetta falls in love, though he falls for her lovely mother. As the town grows increasingly besieged by bombing and shortages, Michele is forced to guide some fleeing German on an escape route, while Cesira and Rosetta go back to Rome for safety. Along the way, mother and daughter suffer a tragedy that changes both their lives forever, despite Cesira's best efforts to protect her child from the ravages of war. Loren also won the Best Actress Award at Cannes and the same honor from the British Film Academy; more important, she demonstrated in this film that she was a mature actress with talent to match her looks. And that, deglamourized, she was still magnificent. But Eleanora Brown's role (originally meant for Loren, with [Anna] Magnani to play the mother; the latter refused) is underwritten, Belmondo's character is a rehashed cliche, and Loren's affair with Vallone has had all the sex sucked out of it. It's almost as though everyone pinned their hopes on a big, international success for Loren, so they side-stepped her earth mother getting too carnal. But if the plot turns feel predictable, Loren rises to their occasions with the primal maternal force almost as old as time itself.

"De Sica (who also won an Oscar for the film) and Zavattini's previous collaborations included SHOESHINE, THE BICYCLE THIEF, and UMBERTO D. While TWO WOMEN doesn't match the greatness and simplicity of these neo-realist masterworks, it remains a remarkably moving, humane vision of individual struggle in an inhumane world."