A housewife and a homosexual, two slighted types in virile Fascist Italy, have a one-day fling in their evacuated tenement, as everyone else in Rome is thronging the streets to take part in a big reception for Adolf Hitler. There's some good stage business about the uncomfortable host-guest relationship between apartment-house neighbors, but the movie is mainly just bread-and-butter Italian humanism, beginning with one of those squalid family breakfast scenes: the boy smoking furtively in the john, the girlie picture hidden under the pillow, the teenage sexbomb doing her whorish makeup, and the bedraggled mother bumping her head routinely on the low-hanging kitchen lamp. Sophia Loren, doing without her normal eye makeup, and Marcello Mastroianni, professing his homosexuality moments before he beds Sophia for the umpteenth time on screen, both act is if they are making great personal sacrifices in a noble, liberal cause. Directed by Ettore Scola. (1977) — Duncan Shepherd
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