Essential Cinema

Sunday, February 19th at 11:00 a.m.
and Tuesday, February 21st at 7:00 p.m.
FREE ADMISSION / 35mm Presentation
**Suggested donation: $5.00**
Film introduction starts on the hour, film starts approximately 15 minutes after the hour.

BRAND NEW 35mm FILM PRINT!
Starring SOPHIA LOREN and MARCELLO MASTROIANNI, directed by VITTORIO DE SICA (The Bicycle Thief)!

ESSENTIAL CINEMA is The Loft's FREE monthly series of classic art films on the big screen. See old favorites, hidden gems and exciting re-discoveries the way they were meant to be seen!

1965 ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE! Best Foreign Language Film and Best Actress (Sophia Loren).

"Wonderfully flamboyant ... rich and delicious! Ms. Loren is delightfully eccentric and Mr. Mastroianni is marvelous." - Bosley Crowther, THE NEW YORK TIMES

"EDITOR'S PICK! A deeply involving masterpiece. Director Vittorio De Sica's assurance is astounding." - NEW YORK MAGAZINE

"A heart-rending comedy/drama. Loren is truly magnificent here, a force of nature ... Not even Mastroianni could stand up to her ferocious performance." - Jeffrey Anderson, COMBUSTIBLE CELLULOID

In 1964 Naples, a middle-aged Sophia Loren is so stricken she must be carried in a chair up to her apartment, while an extremely dapper Marcello Mastroianni, never without a boutonnière, is trying on his cashier/fiancée’s silly hats in the back of his bakery restaurant while she dresses for their wedding. And then the flashbacks begin, as customer Marcello discovers a teenage Sophia cowering in a closet in his favorite bordello during a wartime air raid, and a twenty-plus year relationship is revealed.
The immediate follow-up to director Vittorio De Sica's Oscar-winning Loren/Mastroianni romantic comedy Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, MARRIAGE ITALIAN STYLE is very different in tone. Despite its marketing as a naughty sex comedy, featuring some of Loren’s most gravity-defying costumes (most notably a see-through lingerie, modeled by Loren on a scandalous LIFE magazine cover), it's really more of a "Neapolitan Scenes from a Non-Marriage," as two stereotypes — the preening, self-absorbed Mastroianni, and the perpetually loving, giving, selfless Loren — gloriously take on three-dimensionality, and the heart-stirring surprises keep on coming.
Mastroianni’s role fits him like one of his very elegant gloves, but Loren, in an Oscar-nominated tour de force, does the bulk of the heavy lifting in terms of her astonishing performance, which moves from frightened young woman, to perhaps her most glamorously flamboyant loveliness, to a surprisingly gutsy matron, complete with sturdy middle-class values; all to a slyly ambiguous but deeply moving conclusion. Adapted from the play Filumena Marturano by legendary Italian writer Eduardo de Filippo.

Read the original 1964 New York Times review of MARRIAGE ITALIAN STYLE:
http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9F07EED71F3DE733A25752C2A9649...