Mondays in April | 17 Movies and 1 Special
Sophia Loren had a hard-scrabble childhood. She was born Sofia Villani Scicolone in a charity ward at a hospital in Rome to a single mother, as her father abandoned the family. Raised in Pozzuoli, a town near Naples, she lived in severe poverty, especially during World War II. She was even nicknamed Stecchetto, aka “little stick,” because she was so scrawny due to a lack of food. Loren was even hit by shrapnel during the war, which left a scar on her chin.
Still, despite the Dickensian upbringing, Loren looked on the bright side of life. She told me in a 2014 L.A. Times interview that she “tried to use the miseries that everybody was going through during the war into something positive. I think maybe one day I would find something else.” She found her “something else” at the movie theater in Pozzuoli. “I found when I went to see films at the cinema…there were wonderful houses, beautiful dresses and great actresses. I was dreaming a lot, but I didn’t think one day I was going to be one of them because I would have thought of myself as a crazy person. But if you believe in life fervently, if you believe in yourself, one day or another, something is going to happen.”
And something did. By the age of 14, Loren was no longer “little stick,” but a statuesque beauty. Her mother entered her in a beauty contest where she placed second. Soon, she and her mother headed to Rome, where they found extra work on the 1951 Hollywood epic Quo Vadis. It was at the Miss Rome beauty contest that she met producer Carlo Ponti, who was a judge at the event. “He said, ‘Why don’t you come to my office in two or three days and talk a little bit?’” she told me in 2011. He guided her career, and “little by little [our romance] started. I was so young. I was 16 years old, and he was married and had two children.” They would marry and have two sons: orchestra conductor Carlo Ponti Jr., now 57, and Edoardo Ponti, 53, who directed his mother to acclaim in the 2014 short film Human Voice, airing on April 27, as well as her last film, The Life Ahead (2020).
Filmmaker Vittorio De Sica hired Loren to star in the 1954 anthology The Gold of Naples as a beautiful 20-year-old pizza maker who loses an emerald ring given to her by her husband. New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael noted that “In De Sica’s hands, Loren blossomed into the most luscious comedienne the screen has ever known.” Loren recalled in a 2008 interview with me that she bonded with De Sica because “we came from the same city, Naples. We understood each other with a look and a gesture. I was like a member of the family. He could make me do anything he wanted. He knew my character. It was just like we were one person.” Hollywood knocked, and soon she was making such movies as Boy on a Dolphin (1957) and Legend of the Lost (1957) with John Wayne, airing April 6.
“America has always accepted me, even in the beginning when I came here for the first time. I was very young, and they gave me a wonderful cocktail party,” she related in 2008. “I will never forget those days. For me, Hollywood was a fairy tale, coming from where I came from, a little town. It was something that I never expected.”
She returned to Italy and De Sica for Two Women (1960). Loren was all of 25 when she played a widowed shopkeeper with a young teenage daughter who flees Rome after an Allied bombing. Initially, Loren was scheduled to play the daughter with the legendary powerhouse actress Anna Magnani, who had won the Oscar for 1955’s The Rose Tattoo, but Magnani turned it down. “She said, ‘We have two strong characters, and we are going to eat each other up on the screen,’” recalled Loren in 2011. “‘If Sopha is in the film, I am not going to be the mother.’” De Sica was upset. But she left De Sica with “Why don’t you let Sophia play the mother?”
De Sica thought it would work. “He wrote me a telegram. I was in Paris. He said, ‘You are going to play the mother, and your daughter is going to be 14 years old.’ I thought I was going to die. I was 25 years old.” Her character’s age was changed to late 30s, and her daughter (Eleanora Brown) was rewritten as 12 or 13. The film is best remembered for the harrowing rape sequence, where both mother and daughter are brutally attacked in a bombed-out church by a group of soldiers who ruthlessly surround them. It was done in just one take. “De Sica said, ‘Take, print.’ I said, ‘No, let’s do it again.’ He said, ‘No, if something goes wrong with the negative, we will do it again. But it’s beautiful.’” Not only did Loren win the Best Actress Oscar for the harrowing drama, which was released in America in 1961, but she made Oscar history as the first performer to win the award for a foreign film.
The April 13 programming highlights some of the leading men she worked with in Hollywood, such as Gregory Peck in the stylish Stanley Donen romantic thriller Arabesque (1966). Next up are the two films she made with Cary Grant, who fell in love with Loren. They first met while making Stanley Kramer’s The Pride and the Passion (1957). Despite being wooed by Grant, who was still married to Betsy Drake, Loren married Ponti by proxy in Juarez, Mexico, in 1957. (Loren and Ponti’s union was eventually annulled or else they would have faced bigamy charges. They remarried in 1966 and remained together until his death in 2007.) Though Grant was less than thrilled about doing their second film together, 1958’s romantic comedy Houseboat, audiences and critics loved the film. And so did the Academy; it earned nominations for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay for Jack Rose and writer/director Melville Shavelson and Best Song for “Almost in Your Arms (Love Song from Houseboat”). Loren also performs the peppy “Bing! Bang! Bong!”
Rounding out the programming on April 13 is Lady L (1965), in which Loren plays a gorgeous laundress in Paris at the turn of the century who recounts the men in her life, including an anarchist and thief (Paul Newman). Though Loren found Newman nice, she recalled he was shy. “I was always amazed that each time I looked at him, I would say to myself, ‘My God, I am working with Paul Newman. God, look at his eyes, look at his mouth. He is so handsome,’” she noted in 2011. “I don’t know when he was looking at me, what he thought, but anyway, I was absolutely amazed.”
The 1967 comedy A Countess from Hong Kong is on tap for April 20. The film, which also stars Marlon Brando, was a bomb with the critics and audiences despite the fact that it was Charlie Chaplin’s swan song as a writer/director. It didn’t matter to Loren. She admitted if he had given her the phone book, she would have done it. “He was like a director of an orchestra with me. He would just tell me behind the camera in the emotional scenes [with his hands] to give more or less.” Hong Kong is followed by the charming 1960 comedy It Started in Naples, directed by Melville Shavelson. Clark Gable, in his penultimate film, plays a no-nonsense lawyer who travels to Naples to settle his late brother’s affairs. Unbeknownst to him, his brother left an eight-year-old son behind. His aunt and guardian, played by Loren, performs in a nightclub, and her rendition of “You Wanna Be Americano” steals the film.
The April 20th programming features two films starring her favorite leading man, Marcello Mastroianni. Loren received her second Oscar nomination for the 1964 comedy Marriage Italian Style, directed by De Sica. Based on the Eduardo De Filippo play “Filumena Marturano,” Loren plays a prostitute who has a 22-year relationship with a businessman (Mastroianni). Loren received accolades for her performance in Ettore Scola’s 1977 drama A Special Day. Set in Rome in 1938 on the day Hitler visited Mussolini, the period drama finds Loren as a housewife and mother of six and Mastroianni as her gay neighbor.
Loren, who worked with Mastroianni from 1954-94, discussed her relationship with the actor for the Criterion Collection: “He knew me, and I knew him. His sense of humor, his way of improvising. His way of not learning his lines, ever. And sometimes he would come on the set with his eye open like this and say, ‘What am I going to say now?’ And I’d say ‘No, it’s your problem, you should have woken up in the morning a little and learned your lines.’”
The final evening on April 27 features the musical Man of La Mancha (1972) with Peter O’Toole, More Than a Miracle (1967) starring Omar Sharif and The Priest’s Wife (1970) with Mastroianni joining Loren in the drama directed by Dino Risi.
In 1991, Loren was awarded an Honorary Academy Award for her outstanding career. She made her final film to date in 2020. At 91 years old, she still has that stunning smile that has lit up the screen in The Gold of Naples. “You have to enjoy life,” Loren once said. “Always be surrounded by people that you like, people who have a nice conversation. There are so many positive things to think about.”
