Italian Masterworks (2002)

ITALIAN MASTERWORKS presents two of the most famous post-World War II Italian films: TWO WOMEN and PAISAN.

TWO WOMEN: In Vittorio De Sica's TWO WOMEN, Cesira (Sophia Loren) and her young daughter (Eleonora Brown) leave Rome for the comfort of the Italian hills, hoping to remain safe during WWII. When the Allied troops start moving north, Cesira and her daughter feel secure enough to head back to Rome, but tragedy ensues when they encounter a group of Moroccan soldiers. Sultry Sophia Loren dominates this dark drama in a role that won her an Oscar for Best Actress.


PAISAN: Beginning with the sound of a gun being fired, PAISAN, Roberto Rossellini's excellent treatment of WW II Italy, is divided into six vignettes about life in the war and its consequences for people all over Italy. Using an English-language narrator, but including English, Italian, and German dialogue, the film is a tricky masterpiece of filming and storytelling, cowritten by Rossellini and Federico Fellini. The movie illustrates the way that war brought people together and made them understand each other in different ways--overcoming barriers of nationality, cultural and class difference, language, religion, and gender. Each of PAISAN's vignettes is captivating and enlightening while examining serious, sometimes harrowing, and often murderous war situations. In the first, an American soldier and a young Italian girl spend the night guarding the American barracks in the ruins of a castle by the sea, until they are attacked by German troops. In another vignette, an African American officer befriends a peasant boy, only to find himself unable to cope with the boy's poverty. In Rome, an Italian girl waits in the rain for an American soldier who promised to come for her at the beginning of the war; and, in one of the most brilliant and truly funny sequences in Italian film history, three American soldiers--one Protestant, one Jew, and one Catholic--share a religious visit with the monks of a conservative Italian monastery.