Pastryman's Tart

Marriage-Italian Style. Pathetically, the dying Filomena lifts her eyes to Domenico, the prosperous pastry merchant she has adored and been kept by for 20 years. "Do you love this woman?" asks an old priest. "You know about us," the merchant shrugs. Someone throws a pillow at his feet, he finds himself kneeling at her bedside, and at death's door they are joined in wedlock. Moments later, Domenico glances at his watch, tiptoes away to phone the nubile cashier he will marry when Filomena dies. Behind him suddenly the curtains are swept aside, and there stands Filomena blooming with health, the image of triumphant Italian womanhood. "The Madonna has granted a miracle!" she announces. "Where's my revolver?" he bellows.

Performed with unbridled Neapolitan gusto by Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, this hilarious, sentimental, fiercely moral old tear-jerker is only a cousin by marriage to Pietro Germi's memorable comedy, Divorce-Italian Style. Its inspiration is the same rigid divorce laws that make marriage a last resort for Italian males and a Sisyphean challenge for the women who have to weep, cheat, wheedle and trick them into it. Under Director Vittorio De Sica (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow), the two stars pour themselves into their work and set charm flowing like strong red wine.

The story, based on a popular Italian play, relishes every step of a slut's progress from a bawdyhouse to a legal bed. At 17, driven by wartime necessity, Filomena meets Domenico on the job. In her 20s, he sets her up in a little flat. In her 30s, he takes her home to care for his invalid mother. In her 40s, Filomena is running his business and his house, and Domenico at 50 is still running around.

Duped at last into marrying his tart, the pastryman naturally seeks an annulment, charging fraud. But Filomena has other aces up her sleeve: three stripling sons, whose identities she has concealed for years. "One of them is yours," she purrs, and goes away letting him wonder which. He wonders himself into a state of unconditional surrender.

Though Marriage occasionally creaks like a piece of stage machinery, Director De Sica cunningly transforms its back street romance into an earthy, exuberant paean to virtue. Mastroianni's vain, middle-aged gallan-checking the coxcomb at every mirror, sneaking into a little dance of smug self-satisfaction -smacks of the satyr that most men yearn to be when the moon is right. And Sophia has become far too perceptive an actress to squander her talents as a mere prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold. Now wild, now touchingly woebegone, now coolly indomitable, she is Everywoman, Italian style.

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