Such a frustrating disappointment

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

At twenty-five Sophia Loren was not supposed to be an Actress, she was supposed to be another Sylvano Mangano (another 'sex symbol' who turned out to be a fine actress) or Anita Ekberg but lo and behold she unleashes a powerful, moving and ultimately Oscar-winning performance, the first ever Best Actress gong for an actress in a foreign film (Simone Signoret beat her to it by a couple of years but she was a French actress appearing in a British film). Although she is playing down her sultry siren image both her beauty and sensuality shine through her 'ordinary' housewife persona and if anything her towering performance tends to unbalance a mostly ho-hum cast with, of course, the exception of Eleanora Brown playing her daughter. There's not a lot that's new or that CAN be new about the 'war is hell' story but nevertheless Loren keeps us engrossed.

Sophia Loren and her daughter's survival during the closing days of WWII in Italy.This film has all the flaws of a movie made from a book...it tries to cover 500 pages in an hour and a half....inserting seemingly random isolated things simply because they occurred in the book.As some other reviewer noted this film doesn't flow well.. it is like it had a half dozen directors doing different segments.Combined with these flaws, I had to watch a dubbed English version since this was the only choice on Netflix streaming... this cuts out about three quarters of the actors talent and makes everything just that more artificial, stilted and jarring.The rape scene is incongruous and as another reviewer noted up to this point you wonder where is all the drama here?Over all the film is bad and the fact that Loren won an Oscar proves that gimmicks and the correct formula (lots of PC stuff) and who knows what hidden politics are what wins an Oscar not the quality of the film.DO NOT RECOMMEND

We're suckers for this Italian realist style, which is another word for Communist film-making. We also love all the great films it has produced around the world in the last 60 years, although needless to say, not in the USA. La Ciociara is a novel written by the immortal Alberto Moravia, who was a Communist MEP for the last dozen years of his life.His story, as interpreted by pioneer film-maker Vittorio De Sica, is told from the point of view of Cesira, an uneducated widow (Sophia Loren, in her Oscar-winning role), who inherited a grocery from her older husband. She admits to her lover: "I did not marry my husband, I married Rome!" The world war is happening and her shop is bombed out by the invading Allies (although it hardly matters by whom). She flees the city with her only child Rosetta, 12 (Eleanora Brown, really 12, who only made a couple more pictures before disappearing from film records). The pair have various adventures trying to reach the Signora's home village, during which the film-makers adroitly illustrate the civil war within the European war, within the world war.Communism is represented, a trifle improbably, by Jean-Paul Belmondo, but the Parisian lothario acquits himself quite well in the role, even acting out the wish-fulfilment of the public and piling on top of Cesira to get a load of that fabulous bust and those magnetic lips, for as long as she will allow, because Cesira is a very feisty lady.The film is suffused with a love of the people, and portrays their daily life in the country affectionately, along with the disruption and misery caused by war. In a memorable scene, a stunned young mother whose child has been killed, offers her nipple in public, saying: "Does anyone want my milk?" This is a foreboding of what is to come, for as the third reel progresses disaster befalls both Cesira and Rosetta, a story feature that has been liberally revealed all over this board, but which I will refrain from blabbing about.This film obeys all the classic rules: the heroine struggles against all odds, even total disaster, and somehow triumphs in the end, even if her victory looks pyrrhic. Ultimately, it is not, for we know that victory will ensue and even the awful sufferings of war will be alleviated, peace will heal the wounds, and Cesira and her lovely daughter will eventually thrive.Many things combine to make this a brilliant picture: the profound political commitment of the film-makers, the genius of Moravia, the brio of Sophia Loren in her greatest part, the love of Italy and its inhabitants. Suffice it to say that when the film began we were horrified by the quality of the print, but even in semi-visible monochrome, the passion still came through. This is one for the classics shelf, to view again and again --- when they come up with a decent print!

Two Women is powerful not just simply for its final half hour, even if that is, arguably (and I'd argue on the side of "yes"), some of the best drama Vittorio De Sica and his screenwriter Cesar Zavatinni created. It's a view into lives that, at least at the time, didn't get much time on cinema screens. We understand that this young mother, Cesira (VERY well deserved Academy Award winner Sophia Loren), has a kind of hard protective shell of the fiery, strong woman that today might seem to verge on being something to expect in an Italian or Spanish drama, but here is meant to be just that- a shell to guard off from the wretched horrors of a war which repeatedly she asks "will it end soon?" She also has to be strong for her thirteen year old daughter Rosetta (Eleonora Brown, excellent even if not considering it's a first performance), who still has a little innocence and admiration for those who are more good-hearted, if not as resourceful.This type as mentioned is in Michel (Jean Paul Belmondo, a curiously low-key performance considering his big hype as a suave star in France), who is a resistance fighter that Cesira and Rosetta come across while traveling away from Rome during bombing raids. We see them (Michel and Cesira) getting close, maybe too close, though she recognizes in him one of the only vestiges of common sense and decency, even if in a slightly shrewd (or just practical) manner that she can't totally grasp. She's been through the war, right along with her daughter, and there's layers that Loren grasps that pierce through the character; De Sica knows that she's capable of reaching these very real dimensions even before she has to go full tilt into the tragedy of the rape scene in the church. Loren's absolutely stunning in her gorgeous beauty, but in a way that works to make a comment on how her character has to keep guarded as well. Sometimes a look is just enough to suggest something. Other times, men might get a little more forceful. There's suggestion beneath some of the bigger scenes, and Loren is fantastic at grabbing them for all their worth.From the start, De Sica and Zavattini set the tone: people walking on a street, suddenly the alarms sound, running, bombs drop. Should be business as usual, but it's still staggering for the mind to grasp. In a way, Cesira and Rosetta are in the midst of a kind of apocalyptic atmosphere, and we as the audience, even as we know where history will lead the characters, get wrapped up in the maelstrom of violence (one moment that's important is when the mother and daughter walk along a quiet road, a man on a bicycle passes, and a plane swoops down, shooting, the women duck, but the man is killed - the women look startled for just a moment, but hide it and go on their way) and with some political discourse thrown in from time to time as well (these might be the only weak spots of the film, but still very good scenes with a quick pace and sharp attention to mixing real actors and "non" actors, a slightly elevated neo-realism). And there are memorable scenes before that last half hour- just seeing the Germans appear up in front of the Italians, menacing in an almost surreal two-dimensional fashion, verbally abusive, taking bread. Scenes precede this, like a couple of brutes who threaten Cesira with a gun. But this one strikes it hard: a state of mind in war cripples the mind.Finally, they come to the abandoned church, and the infamous scene occurs (filmed with a very effective zoom lens on Rosetta's eyes at a crucial moment, a kind of approximate exclamation point). It's a very careful study in the disintegration of the human spirit at this point, and more than once, De Sica and his writer, as in times before, pull sincerely and harshly at the heart strings. This time, however, is like seeing a Lifetime TV movie as done by the most sincere dramatist, ready to gage the emotions just by presenting the devastation straight on, and enhancing a theme: the futility of escape in this environment. Rosetta can't stand that her mother didn't protect her more, she's almost shell-shocked, and after a tense scene riding back with an opera singing trucker (a small, great scene), she awakes at night to see she's run off with the trucker from before. She comes back, Cesira is furious, but not simply for that. A much greater tragedy has occurred, and it all comes crashing down. Even the most hardened and cynical moviegoer will be hard-pressed to hold back from crying as Loren brushes back her daughter's hair in the church, or tries to look away in the truck. And that final shot, however in sentiment as the final shots of Umberto D and Bicycle Thief, drive it on home like a dagger.One of the best films of 1960; a touching masterpiece in Italian cinema from one of the masters (if that's over-praising it much forgive me).