Marriage--Italian Style (1964) - APRIL 28

In 1961, Marcello Mastroianni starred in Divorce Italian Style. It's a comedy about killing your wife so you can marry your mistress. I know. Hilarious.

The point is, it was a comedy, so when Mastroianni teamed up with his most frequent and most famous on screen partner, Sophia Loren, to make Marriage--Italian Style in 1964, the presumption must have been that this would be another comedy.

That's what I assumed when I first saw the film some years back. But this is hardly a straightforward comedy. I don't even know how to describe it. Certainly it's a drama, achingly poignant and honest at moments. At others, it is intensely and memorably funny. If social media had been around in 1964, the young people would have written, "Just saw Marriage--Italian Style. I totally RF'd" (and yes, I had to Google "laugh out loud" in Italian. It's "ridere forte").

Mastroianni is Domenico, a businessman who visits a brothel in Naples during the Allied assault on the city in 1943. He meets a young, frightened prostitute, Filomena. They see each other again after the war, and she eventually becomes his exclusive mistress. Soon, she's involved in his professional and personal life, running his pastry shop and household, and taking care of his senile mother. But she does all this as his mistress, not his wife.

Eventually Domenico proposes marriage-- not to Filomena--but to the younger, newer, beautiful cashier at the pastry shop, promoting Filomena to engage in one of the all-time great movie ruses.

This is Filomena's movie: The story of a prostitute with three sons (one of whom she insists is Domenico's), trying desperately to legitimize herself and her boys in a society that, at best, marginalizes women like her and, at its worst, remains aggressively indifferent to her plight.

At the 2015 TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood, I was honored to interview Sophia Loren on closing night before we screened Marriage--Italian Style. With her backstage was her son, writer-director Edoardo Ponti, who speaks English with much greater ease than his mother. During my interview, Loren paused for a moment, "My son told me say that this film is not a comedy or a drama," she said to the audience as she brought her hand toward her face, where I could seen she'd written a word on it in black ink. "It is a dra-medy," she said, reading the word on her hand in the beautifully accented English that sounds as if it should be the official language of seduction.

So I guess Marriage--Italian Style is a dramedy. Sophia Loren says so.

by Ben Mankiewicz