Matrimonio all’italiana
Vittorio De Sica (1964)
Pietro Germi’s 1961 comedy Divorce Italian Style (Divorzio all’italiana), starring Marcello Mastroianni, tells the story of an impoverished Sicilian aristocrat and the lengths to which he goes in order to extricate himself from marriage to a plain and loyal wife and tie the knot instead with a younger and beautiful cousin. The film was an international hit and, in 1963, won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay; Germi and Mastroianni were both nominated for Oscars too. In December 1964, Marriage Italian Style was released in Italy and America. Mastroianni was again the leading man but Vittorio De Sica’s film isn’t a companion piece to Germi’s: the later film’s title is rather a blatant attempt to suggest an affinity with the earlier one, and to cash in on Divorce Italian Style‘s success. I’m guessing that this was the idea of the producer, Carlo Ponti, rather than De Sica’s, and that Marriage Italian Style was developed by Ponti as a vehicle for his wife, Sophia Loren. In this sense, the film was an unarguable success: it made money abroad and earned Loren a second Oscar nomination, just three years after she’d won for her performance in De Sica’s Two Women.
The source material for Marriage Italian Style is Eduardo De Filippo’s 1946 stage play Filumena Marturano, which has proved durable in the English-speaking theatre as well as in Italy. In the adapted screenplay – by Renato Castellani, Tonino Guerra, Leonardo Benvenuti and Pierro De Bernardi – the story extends over a period of some twenty years, beginning during World War II. Domenico Soriano (Mastroianni), a wealthy businessman, meets Filumena Marturano (Loren), a young country girl, in the brothel where he’s a punter and she’s a prostitute. In the years that follow, Domenico returns to Filumena each time he visits the brothel; he eventually sets her up in his house – officially to take care of his elderly invalid mother, in fact as his mistress. The mother dies; the mistress ages; Domenico finds a younger woman and plans to marry her. Filumena, by feigning mortal illness, tricks him into marrying her instead. Once they’re husband and wife, she explains the motive for her cunning deception: unbeknown to Domenico, Filumena has three illegitimate sons, one of whom he fathered. Domenico manages to get the marriage annulled but he’s nagged by curiosity. He urges Filumena to tell him which of her three sons he sired but she refuses to do so, insisting that he must be a father to all three. Filumena’s resourcefulness and tenacity eventually make an honest man of Domenico and they remarry – with all three of the candidates for sonship in attendance at the ceremony. (Is this scenario what sort-of inspired the inverted set-up in Mamma Mia! decades later?)
Eduardo De Filippo’s play was written as a tribute to, and with a starring role for, Titina, his elder sister. (She died shortly before Marriage Italian Style reached the screen and the film is dedicated to her.) In the late 1970s, an English translation of the play by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, called simply Filumena, was produced on the London stage. Directed by Franco Zeffirelli and starring Joan Plowright and Colin Blakely, the production transferred to Broadway in 1980, where it was directed by Plowright’s husband, Laurence Olivier. The play was revived nearly twenty years later in London by Peter Hall, with Judi Dench and Michael Pennington in the main roles. A noticeable feature of the casting of Marriage Italian Style and of these two English-language productions of De Filippo’s play is the various ages of the actresses concerned. Judi Dench was in her mid-sixties; Joan Plowright was pushing fifty; Sophia Loren was barely thirty. The same pattern obtains in the casting of the male lead although the age range is nothing like so pronounced: Mastroianni was forty, Blakely in his mid-forties and Pennington in his mid-fifties. In the play, Filumena is nearly the same age as Domenico and they conduct their arguments as a middle-aged ‘couple’, referring to the past. The very different narrative structure of the film moves through the many years of their relationship to the present day.
I didn’t admire or enjoy Marriage Italian Style. It felt like an attempt to package ‘typical’ Italian behaviour for an international audience, with an implication that such behaviour – excessively demonstrative, in a supposedly comic register for the most part – is inherently entertaining and harmless. Marcello Mastroianni’s dry expressions of impatience are sometimes agreeably restful amid the prevailing emotionality but his innate believability makes Domenico’s exploitation of Filumena more offensive than it might have been with a shallower, more histrionic performer in the role. Sophia Loren doesn’t seem to age much in the course of the film; as in Two Women, her natural authority tends to contradict the vulnerable aspects of her character but she plays Filumena as if she believes in what she’s doing. In the circumstances, that’s a real accomplishment. Loren invests Filumena’s big outburst at Domenico, for how he’s treated her over the years, with what comes across as a genuine sense of outrage. There’s no sense of a community life going on around the central story – just overacting. Filumena’s three sons (Gianni Rodolfi, Genoroso Cortini and Vito Moricone) are pretty dull but this comes almost as a relief from the hyperactive characterisation going on around them, although Aldo Puglisi is amusing and likeable as a loyal retainer who carries a torch for Filumena. The stage origins of the material are increasingly evident: each of the exchanges that lead up to the eventual reconciliation and marriage of Filumena and Domenico takes place, but for no evident good reason, in a different external location.
29 August 2015
