The main character in the 1955 Italian movie, Scandal in Sorrento (a.k.a. Pane, amore e . . .), is a womanizing gent who returns to his hometown—Sorrento—and becomes infatuated with the widowed fishmonger who has been living in his house. She is not a good match for him, and the woman, Violante, in whose elegant home he becomes a lodger begins to love him. However, Violante (expertly acted by Lea Padovani) is a devoted and prudish Catholic, and it is hardly certain what it would mean for the womanizer to return her love, or try to.

Dino Rosi‘s film is a minor comedy with very little plot (which is fine) and few laughs. Those who have called it charming, though, are right, and its characters hold our interest. They held mine, anyway. No great comic acting was needed from Vittoria De Sica and Sophia Loren, who purvey the necessary agility and sparkle. I give credit to Netflix for showing the film: one which is in color and features lovely seaside images. Moreover, Scandal is made in such a way that the whole of Italy seems to obtain here. A nice sensation.

(In Italian with English subtitles)

Based on the novel by Martin Andersen Nexo, Pelle the Conqueror (1987) is a highly commendable film for which director-writer Bille August deserves praise.

Lasse and his son Pelle, impoverished, emigrate from Sweden to Denmark to find work.  Max von Sydow ably, wonderfully exhibits every ounce of Lasse’s simplicity, desolation, false bravado, indignation, and contentment.  Pelle Hvenegaard is pleasingly true (and handsome) as young Pelle.  All the elements of nature appear in the film and awe us when they don’t chill us.  The work concerns the human tendency to settle, or being constrained to settle, for that which is onerous or humiliating—or simply knowable.  Not in every instance is there settling, but certainly the act goes on; and it can be heartbreaking.

(In Danish and Swedish with English subtitles)

Cover of Pelle the Conqueror

Don’t forget the exclamation point.

Loretta Young‘s Ellen, in Cause for Alarm! (1951), finds out just how much harm another person’s paranoid insanity can bring to her. Her invalid husband, George (Barry Sullivan), thinks she and George’s doctor, Ranney, are plotting to kill him and he has Ellen mail a letter about it (little does she know) to the district attorney. After informing her of this, George unexpectedly dies of his ailment. Now the D.A. will think Ellen and Ranney are murderers! From that point on, the movie deals with panic and striving, with Ellen’s frenzied certainty she can’t rely on the D.A. for justice. (She can’t.) She must retrieve the false letter.

Most of the films of Tay Garnett I have yet to see, but he directed Alarm! as finely as he did The Stand-In and Love is News. He insists on clarity and works well with Young to make it her picture, because it’s Ellen picture. In my review of Love is News, I wrote that the comely Loretta “is not a natural for farce but, happily, is never false.” Here, she is a natural for suspenseful drama AND never false, so it’s a grand performance. Irving Bacon does nicely as a whiny postman, and the scenes with him and Young are very sturdy.

Don’t forget the exclamation point.

Loretta Young‘s Ellen, in Cause for Alarm! (1951), finds out just how much harm another person’s paranoid insanity can bring to her. Her invalid husband, George (Barry Sullivan), thinks she and George’s doctor, Ranney, are plotting to kill him and he has Ellen mail a letter about it (little does she know) to the district attorney. After informing her of this, George unexpectedly dies of his ailment. Now the D.A. will think Ellen and Ranney are murderers! From that point on, the movie deals with panic and striving, with Ellen’s frenzied certainty she can’t rely on the D.A. for justice. (She can’t.) She must retrieve the false letter.

Most of the films of Tay Garnett I have yet to see, but he directed Alarm! as finely as he did The Stand-In and Love is News. He insists on clarity and works well with Young to make it her picture, because it’s Ellen picture. In my review of Love is News, I wrote that the comely Loretta “is not a natural for farce but, happily, is never false.” Here, she is a natural for suspenseful drama AND never false, so it’s a grand performance. Irving Bacon does nicely as a whiny postman, and the scenes with him and Young are very sturdy.

For The Virgin Suicides (1999), Sofia Coppola directed amiably, cleverly and fancifully, and I like her screenwriting (based on a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides) as well. Therein, five young sisters in the Lisbon family of Detroit, during the 1970s, commit suicide. The girls are ever in the thoughts of the teen boys who took them to a party, except for the perplexing Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett), who forsakes the prettiest Lisbon girl, Lux (Kirsten Dunst).

The film is about living with the unfathomable (such as the girls’ suicides). It is about—and it shows us—a free-floating rejection of important things: of life, Trip’s rejection of Lux, Mrs. Lisbon’s rejection of further schooling for her daughters. The characters behave this way because they see it as the only way to behave. There is no real alternative for them. Thus The Virgin Suicides is quietly gloomy, though with odd humor. It is a tenebrous seriocomic examination of human absence. It is limited as a personal film for Miss Coppola—limited in a way her Somewhere is not—but it is personal. . . Writing apropos of Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, critic Ross Douthat indicated that the lady’s movies are more notable when they “feature not just mild dissatisfactions, but the shadow of the guillotine.” The present film does just that, and more than the shadow.