"Too Bad She's Bad" (1955)

I get a kick out of discovering a new old film.

I remember a very late sleepless night long time ago running into a Japanese film. It was in black and white and subtitled and I soon noticed that there were no monsters attacking paper models of Tokyo and toy cars. Instead there were bald guys wearing diapers and carrying formidable swords, sploshing around in mud and taking on marauders attacking a village of peace loving ...
Wait a minute. I sat up in my seat after twenty minutes of viewing. This plot is familiar...
Five minutes later, it struck me: The Japanese stole this story from "The Magnificent Seven".
I was embarrassed to relate the tale to a friend who corrected me: the movie I was watching was Kurosawa’s "The Seven Samurai", from which the American Western was derived. Oops.

Anyway, there is something riveting about watching foreign films with subtitles. Like silent movies, they demand a degree of concentration and involvement from the viewer that far outstrips talkies in one’s own language.

The other day I caught a film on TCM that I had never seen and before I knew it I was stuck for the next hour or so.

It was an Italian import from 1955 titled in English, "Too Bad She’s Bad", starring Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroiani and Vittorio De Sica. It is a screwball like story of an honest cabbie, Mastroiani, who becomes victim of a family of thieves, including Loren and her father, De Sica, her brothers and even her sweet old grandmother.

The tone and plot turns of the writing and rapid fire pace of acting traces the tropes of American pre-war screwball comedies that funned authority (especially the police and politicians), the rich and pompous.

The plot has several laugh-out-loud scenes, including dialogue (even with the sporadic translations) that reminds you of classics like "Bringing Up Baby", especially when Loren and De Sica twist the logic of morality and family values, exasperating the straight faced Mastroiani. De Sica creates a character that cons with the best of Groucho Marx and W.C. Fields, but is more sophisticated and European. Loren’s character is less ditzy than Hepburn in "Baby", maybe because she has more serious equipment available to keep our attention - her traffic stopping face and figure, for instance.

Reading about the film later, I discovered that Loren was only 20 years old when this film was made. It was her first or 15 pairings with Mastroiani, several of the best directed by De Sica. The director of this movie was Alessandro Blasetti, a veteran of Italian cinema, and a co-writer was Alberto Moravia.

Now my attraction to this film began to make sense. Moravia, I knew, was a novelist whose writings were considered existentialist, some overtly erotic, and often left leaning. His books had been filmed by Godard ("Contempt"), Bertolucci ("The Conformist"), and De Sica with Loren winning the Oscar ("Two Women"), among others. Like my favorite American screenwriters of the 30's and 40's, Moravia had earned his living as a journalist, his politics was anti-fascist, and his social commentary was satirical and ascerbic, including spicy dialogue.

Although Italy’s post-war cinema was mostly noted for the gritty neo-realism of dramas by Rosselini, Fellini, and De Sica, the comedies of the era displayed the same expression of sarcastic viewpoints toward society.

Watching this movie I was reminded that Sophia Loren was a far more powerful presence in Italian films than in her American or international films, even though she mastered the English language well enough to charm co-stars like Paul Newman, Gregory Peck, Clark Gable, and Cary Grant.

In that element, she is the forerunner to Penelope Cruz, whose looks and talent are sometimes compared to Loren’s. Cruz has become a star in English language movies (e.g., "Elegy" and "Vicky Christina Barcelona") but has done her best work in her native Spanish for Pedro Almodovar ("Volver"), her De Sica.

The DVD of "Too Bad She’s Bad" is not yet available on Netflix.