If Hollywood offered up Marilyn Monroe as its sex goddess, Italy replied with Sophia Loren. A new Blu-ray set, “Sophia Loren Award Collection,” gathers three of her signature movies, the Oscar-winning Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963), Marriage Italian Style (1964) and Sunflower (1970), plus the quartet Boccaccio \'70 (1962), starring Loren in one of the film\'s four self-contained segments.
Wherever she went, Loren was always the alluring star, the inescapable focus of every picture, though she shares the heated glow in the Collection\'s first two selections with Marcello Mastroianni (La dolce vita), Italy\'s answer to Paul Newman. At home in comedy and playful sex romps, Loren played impetuous, headstrong women who navigated the shoals of the Italian man\'s man\'s man\'s world with a wink and a sharp elbow. However, she was able to work outside her usual emotional zone. In the melancholy Sunflower, her protagonist goes in search of a husband lost in World War II during Italy\'s ill-conceived invasion of the Soviet Union. The subject of the documentary Vittorio D, the Collection\'s fifth disc, directed Loren in all four films. The package could have been called the Vittorio De Sica Collection, but Loren\'s face will understandably sell more copies.
De Sica is a fascinating figure, important in the direction of world as well as Italian cinema, and, according to Woody Allen, Leonard Maltin, John Landis and others interviewed for Vittorio D, hugely inspirational. The movies De Sica appeared in during the 1930s and directed in the early \'40s were, from the glimpses included in the documentary, Italian reflections of Hollywood. But in the rubble of postwar Italy, De Sica turned from necessity to shooting in the streets, often with everyday people playing characters close to their own lives. His Shoeshine (1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1948) were at the vanguard of the neo-realist movement, which lured even Hollywood from its dream factory and into the grittier sides of town.
De Sica usually smuggled a conscience into his films, and unlike many advocates of cinematic realism, admitted the possibility of magic into his perspective and was, in any case, eager and able to entertain audiences rather than merely point his camera at problems. According to those who knew him, he was a serious man who lived life lightly, leavening his aristocratic bearing with humor and sensitivity. With Loren, De Sica found the ideal vehicle for his vision in a marriage of camera and actress.
