A Special Day (1977)

          “I don’t think I’m anti-fascist,” the well-dressed man remarks. “If anything, fascism is anti-me.” Those simple words, revealing a world of sociopolitical significance, epitomize what makes the Italian drama A Special Day so resonant. By viewing cataclysmic historical events through the prism of one very specific relationship, the picture brings the past to vivid life while also conveying timeless truths about subjects ranging from compassion to tyranny. A Special Day is also noteworthy as one of the best collaborations between classic Italian stars Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. Whereas many of their celebrated onscreen pairings are romantic comedies, A Special Day uses their easygoing chemistry in a more imaginative way, which nets powerful results.
          Set in 1938, the movie takes place in Rome on the day Adolf Hitler made a state visit to confer with Italy’s fascistic strongman, Benito Mussolini. The action revolves around a huge apartment building with a massive inner courtyard. In the morning, bedraggled housewife Antonietta (Loren) rouses her large family. Her husband, Emanule (John Vernon), is a staunch Mussolini supporter, so he plans to take all their kids to a rally celebrating Hitler’s visit. Given her backbreaking obligations of cleaning and cooking for the big family, Antonietta stays home. Once the apartment building is nearly empty, she happens into a conversation with a neighbor from across the courtyard, Gabriele (Mastroianni). We discover things about Gabriele gradually, learning that he’s a radio announcer recently fired from his position for mysterious reasons, and that just before he encountered Antonietta, he was close to attempting suicide.

          Giving away the other revelations about his character would diminish the experience of watching A Special Day, so broad strokes must suffice—over the course of a long day comprising conversations, flirtations, and intimacies, Antonietta discovers through her new friend a world of emotion and ideas and nonconformity that rocks her existence. By the end of the day, she’s almost a completely different person than the woman who first met Gabriele. And because the things we learn about Gabriele speak directly to the dangers of living under a totalitarian regime, he changes, too, if only in the sense of emerging from shadows by sharing provocative secrets with a friend.

          Directed by the acclaimed Ettore Scola, A Special Day achieves that rare trick in movies, presenting characters who are so fully realized they seem like real people; accordingly, even the most fanciful turns in the movie’s central relationship have credibility and depth. At different times, we experience Antonietta’s fear, loneliness, pride, and warmth, just as we experience Gabriele’s dignity, humor, joy, and sadness. Loren downplays her signature glamour, hewing closer to the earth-mother aspect of her screen persona, while Mastroianni effectively tweaks his urbane image. (Modern viewers may flinch at some aspects of the characterizations, but the portrayals fit the period during which the story takes place.) Also worth noting is the picture’s unique visual style. Scola and cinematographer Pasqualina de Santis employed a desaturated color scheme, putting the look of A Special Day somewhere between black-and-white and color, and while the look is jarring at first, it makes sense after a while; this is a story that exists between the margins of history, so it warrants an offbeat presentation.

          Given the way the horrors of World War II loom just outside the narrative, there’s something fundamentally grim about A Special Day. Surely, not every character we meet is destined to survive the next few years. Yet within the darkness, A Special Day provides much that is bright and uplifting, conveying how real human connection is the only way to bridge divides. Many well-deserved accolades came the film’s way, including two Oscar nominations (for Best Foreign Film and for Mastroianni as Best Actor), as well as a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film.

A Special Day: RIGHT ON

Firepower (1979)

          A bad movie that occasionally manages to hold the viewer’s attention through a combination of familiar faces and spectacle, Firepower tells a convoluted story about mercenaries trying to kidnap a reclusive billionaire whom the U.S. government hopes to prosecute for criminal acts. Helmed by British action specialist Michael Winner, best known for Death Wish (1974), the picture showcases a truly odd collection of actors: James Coburn, Sophia Loren, and O.J. Simpson are the big names, while the supporting cast includes Billy Barty, Anthony Franciosa, Vincent Gardenia, Victor Mature, Jake LaMotta (!), and Eli Wallach.

          The plot is as overstuffed as the cast. In the opening sequence, Adele (Sophia Loren) watches in horror as her husband, a pharmaceutical researcher, dies in a lab explosion. Convinced her husband was murdered by operatives of a mysterious industrialist named Karl Stegner, who owns a drug company that’s under government investigation, Adele provides incriminating evidence to federal agent Frank Hull (Gardenia). Frank wants to arrest Stegner, but Stegner lives on a remote estate in the Caribbean, protected by anti-extradition laws. And that’s when things get really confusing.

          Frank seeks help from mobster Sal Hyman (Wallach), who offers to kidnap Stegner in exchange for a blanket pardon. Sal then calls in a favor from retired assassin Jerry Fanon (Coburn), who agrees to do the Stegner job for $1 million. Yet Jerry’s got a secret of his own. Jerry enlists his twin brother, Eddie, to . . . seriously, it’s not even worth explaining. Firepower is bewildering from a narrative perspective, but one gets the sense Winner realized he was building a giant heap of nothing, because he cuts the movie at an absurdly fast pace, rushing from chose scenes to double-crosses to explosions to gunfights to nighttime invasions. At any given moment, lots of colorful stuff is happening, even if it’s virtually impossible to know who’s doing what to whom, or why.

          Coburn somehow manages to emerge unscathed, his coolness seeing him through the movie’s muddiest sections, though others don’t fare as well. Loren seems perplexed by her constantly changing characterization, so she spends most of her time posing for Winner’s myriad ogling shots of her cleavage. Simpson delivers his usual perfunctory work, while stone-cold pros ranging from Gardenia to Wallach try to ensure that individual scenes make as much sense as possible. For all his shortcomings on this project as a storyteller, Winner compensates somewhat by shooting violence well, so it’s possible to absorb the most vivacious scenes of Firepower as straight shots of adrenalized nonsense.

Firepower: FUNKY

The Priest’s Wife (1970)

          A dreary dramedy about a woman who tries to persuade a priest to leave the church so they can marry, The Priest’s Wife is undoubtedly more palatable in its original, Italian-language version. As released in the U.S., it’s dubbed into English, but it appears that producer Carlo Ponti—husband of leading lady Sophia Loren—had the actors mouth English-language takes to ensure a useable international cut. This has the effect of making The Priest’s Wife slicker than the average Italian film repackaged for stateside consumption, but glossy presentation can’t compensate for substandard narrative content. Among other problems, The Priest’s Wife moves with such leaden pacing and unearned gravitas that it’s as if the filmmakers thought they were the first people to depict a man of the cloth experiencing forbidden love. Worse, the movie never really goes anywhere, because nearly all of the screen time is consumed with repetitive scenes of the priest negotiating with his superiors while Loren’s character entreats him to pick up the pace. So, even though The Priest’s Wife is basically humane and sincere, it’s so thin as to barely exist.

          The movie starts off fairly well, with Valeria (Loren) instigating a car chase with her no-good boyfriend, whom she has just discovered is married to another woman. Valeria runs the guy off the road, bashes his car to bits, and then beats him about the head and body for good measure. After this effective introduction to a strong woman who won’t let a man rule her life, however, the movie does an about-face by showing Valeria contemplating suicide. She calls a suicide-prevention hotline and speaks with Don Mario (Marcello Mastroianni), who offers life-affirming counsel. Ignoring his words, Valeria overdoes on pills but fails to kill herself. Upon recovery from her near-death experience, Valeria reaches out to Don Mario because she was infatuated by his voice on the phone—only to discover he’s a priest and therefore unavailable.

          None of this quite works. Valeria seems like she has multiple personalities because she’s a different woman in every scene, Don Mario’s interest in Valeria seems only to manifest once he realizes she’s voluptuous, and it’s unclear why Valeria was so impressed by someone who failed to do the one thing she asked of him. Beyond the logic problems, the picture gets stuck in a groove for most of its running time—The Priest’s Wife features a long series of bland courtship scenes, which are filled with play-acting (Don Mario tells people that Valeria is his sister) and slapstick. Yawn. That said, The Priest’s Wife has fine production values, and the Loren-Mastroianni duo is beloved by many. (The actors made nearly a dozen films together.) Beside fans of the stars, however, it’s tough to envision anyone succumbing to this movie’s meager charms.

The Priest’s Wife: FUNKY

Man of La Mancha (1972)

          Convoluted circumstances worked against the makers of Man of La Mancha, a troubled film adaptation of the enduring stage musical that premiered in 1964, so it’s no surprise the picture earned enmity during its original release and has failed to curry much favor during the ensuing years. Bloated, grim, miscast, old-fashioned, and over-plotted, the picture seems utterly bereft of whatever charms have captivated fans of the stage version throughout decades of revivals. Even the picture’s magnificent look, courtesy of cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno’s painterly images and enough production-design eye candy to make Terry Gilliam jealous, is insufficient to hold the viewer’s attention as Man of La Mancha lumbers through 132 very long minutes.

          Reviewing some of the tortured history behind the project reveals why it was doomed to mediocrity, if not outright failure. In 1959, CBS broadcast a dramatic play for television titled I, Don Quixote, written by Dale Wasserman. In the story, which is set during the Spanish Inquisition, author Miguel de Cervantes gets thrown in jail and put on “trial” by his fellow inmates. Then he defends himself by describing his in-progress novel, Don Quixote, about a madman who thinks he’s a knight. All of this material, of course, was a riff on the real book Don Quixote, written by the real Cervantes. After the TV broadcast, Wasserman was invited to transform the play into a musical. Hence Man of La Mancha. A trip to the big screen seemed inevitable, given the success of the musical and the ubiquity of the musical’s theme song, “The Impossible Dream.” (Everyone from Cher to Frank Sinatra to the Temptations had a go at the song while Man of La Mancha was still on Broadway, and it briefly became a staple of Elvis Presley’s act.) Actors, directors, and producers dropped in and out of the project while debates raged about whether or not to include the music.

          When the dust settled, journeyman director Arthur Hiller inherited a cast featuring James Coco (as Cervantes/Quixote’s sidekick), Sophia Loren (as the hero’s love interest), and Peter O’Toole (as Cervantes/Quixote). O’Toole was many things, but a singer was not one of them, so the die was pretty much cast when he was given the lead role. O’Toole is potent in the film’s dramatic scenes, speechifying gloriously about dreams and honor, but it’s irritating to watch him lip-sync while John Gilbert’s voice flows on the soundtrack. Equally frustrating is watching Loren struggle with her singing chores, since her voice lacks beauty and singularity.

          And then there’s the jumbled storyline. The sequences in the dungeon require much suspension of disbelief, and the play-within-a-play bits are weirdly stylized—some exterior scenes were filmed on location, while others were shot on a soundstage with glaringly fake backdrops. Once the play-within-a-play gets mired in messy subplots during the middle of the movie, Man of La Mancha goes off the rails completely, resulting in tedium. The filmmakers would have been better served by a bolder choice—either diving wholeheartedly into musical terrain by presenting something as chipper and treacly as the music, or veering all the way back to Wasserman’s dramatic source material. Hell, even making a straightforward film of Don Quixote, with the same cast, would have been preferable. Man of La Mancha isn’t an excruciating mess, like so many other overwrought musicals of the same era, but it’s a mess nonetheless.

Man of La Mancha: FUNKY

Lady Liberty (1971)

A comedy that’s almost completely bereft of laughs, Lady Liberty stars the venerable Sophia Loren as an Italian factory worker who travels to New York for a reunion with her fiancé, a fellow Italian who moved to America after stirring up trouble with political activism in Europe. Sophia’s character brings along a large sausage as a gift, but when U.S. Customs officials say she’s not allowed to bring the packaged meat into the country, she takes a principled stand. Then, when her fiancé proves to be a coward and a heel by bowing to American law without a fight and by telling Sophia’s character what to do, Our Heroine finds herself adrift—and at the mercy of various predatory men. Suffice to say the sausage benefits from more character development than any of the people in the movie. Lady Liberty is filled with annoying stereotypes, from the leading character (a hot-blooded signora who seems incapable of rationality) to the supporting characters (a conniving journalist, a mama’s-boy policeman, an opportunistic politician, etc.). Much of the film’s comedy comprises scenes of Loren yelling at people or throwing food at them, and the film’s would-be romantic lead, William Devane, plays such a creep that watching him talk Loren into bed is enough to make the skin crawl. Worse, Lady Liberty is so dissonant that there’s even a joke about the Devane character’s kids holding razors to their wrists and threatening to commit suicide. From start to finish, director Mario Monicelli and his collaborators seem unsure about what sort of film they’re trying to make. At various times, Lady Liberty traffics in feminist propaganda, political satire, romantic musicality, and slapstick. Yet not one of these elements is executed well. Further, the movie needlessly portrays early-’70s New York as being populated solely by narcissistic scumbags. Even the character whom a young Susan Sarandon portrays in one scene is nasty and shrill. Had Loren managed to rise above the fray with effortless charm, Lady Liberty would have been moderately watchable. Alas, that’s not the case—she makes her character seem so impulsive, judgmental, and unhinged that one strains to imagine how any of this looked good on paper.

Lady Liberty: LAME

The Voyage (1974)

          The final feature directed by venerable Italian filmmaker Vittorio De Sica, The Voyage is little more than a maudlin soap opera with the trappings of an art movie. Starring Richard Burton at his most disinterested and Sophia Loren at her most earnest, the movie is brisk and watchable but almost laughably trite. Why so many talented people combined their efforts to generate something this fundamentally mediocre is a mystery. Still, as romantic tearjerkers go, one could do worse than spending 102 minutes enjoying Burton’s mellifluous baritone and Loren’s legendary physical gifts. Set in turn-of-the-century Sicily, the movie begins with the reading of a will. After their father dies, brothers Cesare Braggi (Burton) and Antonio Braggi (Ian Bannen) are bequeathed control over the family’s considerable fortune. As the older brother, somber Cesare is charged with looking after business—including the arrangement of marriage between Antonio and Adriana de Mauro (Loren), the daughter of a working-class family with social ties to the Braggi clan. The complication is that Adriana and Cesare have been in love with each other for years, though they’ve never made their feelings known. (The reason why the would-be lovers kept their affection secret remains unclear throughout the film, creating a significant plot hole.) Adhering to his father’s wishes, Cesare oversees the marriage, and then suffers in silence—until circumstances introduce tragedy, happiness, and still more tragedy into the lives of the characters.

          Considering De Sica’s reputation for sophisticated social realism, it’s shocking how little material of substance makes its way into The Voyage. There’s some lip service given to class differences, but mostly the picture is preoccupied with Cesare’s operatic martyrdom, Antonio’s simple-minded innocence, and Adriana’s difficulty reconciling cultural expectations with romantic desire. Working in the film’s favor are lush production values and a quick pace, though the film’s brevity is partially enabled by the use of bluntly expositional dialogue. (Full disclosure: I committed the ultimate foreign-film travesty by watching the dubbed English-language version of The Voyage, so the use of language in the original version may be more graceful.) Burton, as always, is interesting to watch even when it’s clear he doesn’t give a shit about his work—his command of language and his natural intensity shine through. As for Loren, perpetually more noteworthy as a screen presence than as an actor, she’s beautiful and endearing, though the apex of her performance borders on camp. Yes, dear readers, Ms. Loren gets to play that old movie-queen song of a noble heroine suffering a disease without unattractive symptoms.

The Voyage: FUNKY

Brass Target (1978)

          Crammed with big-name actors, colorful locations, and complex schemes, Brass Target should be a rousing thriller. Unfortunately, the team behind the picture tried to do too many things, and the starring role was unwisely given to John Cassavettes—who by this point in his career preferred directing low-budget films to acting in Hollywood flicks—so the combination of a confusing script and a phoned-in leading performance makes it difficult to appreciate the picture’s many admirable qualities. Set in 1945 Europe, just after the defeat of the Nazis, Brass Target begins with an exciting robbery: Mysterious criminals attack an Allied train and steal a fortune in Nazi gold. The theft divides Allied powers, because Russians blame Americans for the loss, so belligerent U.S. General George S. Patton (George Kennedy) vows to recover the gold and prove his country’s innocence. And then the movie veers off-course.

          Instead of focusing on Patton and the conspirators who want to impede his investigation, the picture shifts to an Army detective, Major Joe De Lucca (Cassavettes), who digs into the robbery while dealing with myriad personal melodramas. Among other things, he’s got a fractious friendship with Col. Mike McCauley (Patrick McGoohan), a schemer who trades in stolen war loot, and both men love Mara (Sophia Loren), a European who survived the war by sleeping her way to safety. The movie’s plot gets even more complicated when the conspirators—primarily Col. Donald Rogers (Robert Vaughn) and Col. Walter Gilchrist (Edward Herrmann)—hire an enigmatic European assassin (Max Von Sydow) to kill Patton lest the general discover their crime.

          Any one of these storylines would have been enough for a satisfying movie, so Brass Target ends up giving each of its component elements short shrift. More damningly, the best scenes, which depict the assassin’s meticulous planning of an attempt on Patton’s life, feel like repeats of similar scenes in the acclaimed thriller The Day of the Jackal (1973). Nonetheless, Von Sydow gives the picture’s best performance, especially since the other acting in the movie is highly erratic.

          Cassavettes preens and scowls like some sort of irritable peacock; Loren looks lost, which is understandable seeing as how her character is anemically underdeveloped; Kennedy plays Patton as a foul-mouthed bully, his acting inevitably suffering by comparison to George C. Scott’s Oscar-winning turn in Patton (1970); and McGoohan is terrible, his accent shifting inexplicably from one line to the next. Still, Brass Target has tremendous production values, and the milieu of the story—postwar Europe as a lawless frontier—is fascinating. Plus, the central gimmick of the narrative, a conspiracy-theory explanation for the real Patton’s death in 1945, is imaginative. One suspects, however, that the premise was explored to stronger effect in the Frederick Nolan novel from which this film was adapted. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Brass Target: FUNKY

The Cassandra Crossing (1976)

          A runaway train meets a viral outbreak in the overwrought disaster flick The Cassandra Crossing, which has just enough florid acting and gonzo energy to remain lively for all of its 129 absurd minutes. Things get started when terrorists attack the headquarters of the International Health Organization because they’ve learned U.S. officers at the IHO are holding a sample of a deadly plague. Most of the attackers are killed, but one of the terrorists gets exposed to the toxin and escapes, slipping onto a train heading from Geneva to Stockholm. Soon after, the terrorist’s infection spreads to other passengers.

          The official tasked with containing the situation, U.S. Army Col. Stephen Mackenzie (Burt Lancaster), reroutes the train to Poland, where it will pass over a decaying bridge known as the Cassandra Crossing. Mackenzie’s civilian counterpart, Dr. Elena Stradner (Ingrid Thulin), realizes the colonel plans to collapse the bridge beneath the train, killing everyone aboard as a means of preventing the plague from reaching any major population centers, so she reaches out to one of the train’s passengers, neurologist Dr. Jonathan Chamberlain (Richard Harris), for help—because, of course, a super-genius scientist happens to be on board. With Stradner’s guidance, Chamberlain tries to quarantine victims so Mackenzie’s scheme can be halted.

          Director and co-writer George P. Cosmatos gooses this pulpy storyline with melodramatic subplots involving Chamberlain’s ex-wife (Sophia Loren), a larcenous May-December couple (played by Martin Sheen and Ava Gardner, if you can picture that peculiar combination), and other random characters. (Also populating the grab-bag cast are John Philip Law, Lee Strasberg, O.J. Simpson, and Lionel Stander.) Borrowing a page from Hollywood’s master of disaster, producer Irwin Allen, Cosmatos fills the screen with so much noise that viewers are constantly distracted by changes of scenery and tone. Thus, the movie capriciously flits between, say, torrid domestic squabbles involving a caustic Harris and a haze-filter-shrouded Loren, and grim command-center showdowns involving idealistic Thulin and merciless Lancaster. Interspersed with the dramatic scenes are handsomely mounted shots of the train zooming across the European countryside, and, of course, it all leads to a carnage-filled climax.

The Cassandra Crossing: FUNKY