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A marvelous little joke establishes the hearty-droll tenor, the first scene finds the rakish doctor (Vittorio De Sica) in the middle of the surgery of the day, plucking a hair from Anna Magnani's eyebrow. Strapped for money and besieged by a trio of creditors (Mussolini's buffoons, who believe believe that "unity is strength" while scuffling for the comfiest chair in the room), he has no choice but to take up his impresario father's offer and become a health inspector. The orphanage he's assigned to is a città di donne with something of a Suspiria whiff to the matronly management and castor oil as the official cure-all. ("Well, severity doesn't seem to work," he shrugs at a cheerily unruly cherub.) One of the orphans (Adriana Benetti) is a great thespian's daughter, carrying on the theatrical tradition with bits of makeshift Shakespeare in the attic. If the kitchen sweeper dreams of becoming a principessa, the scattered heiress (Irasema Dilián) fancies herself a poetess and gets mistaken for a maid, the doctor loves one but steals a kiss from the other and finds himself forcibly engaged. Keeping its complications whirling with svelte technique in the d'Arrast-La Cava-Leisen vein, De Sica's white-telephone screwball romance contrasts with Shoeshine as fascinatingly as Buñuel's El Gran Calavera complements Los Olvidados, and with just as many comic gems: Dilián reciting inane rhymes while painting the tennis court, the ex-stableman butler polishing boots like horseshoes, and the gowned and plumed Magnani nonchalantly vamping before a line of chorines as the theater director begs for more emotion. With Virgilio Riento, Guglielmo Barnabo, Elvira Betrone, and Olga Vittoria Gentilli. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |