WOMAN OF THE RIVER
(Columbia-Ponti-de Laurentiis) ACert. ITH considerable good looks and a primitive vitality and passion that (as I’ve said before) has something of Magnani in it, Sophia Loren is about the most torrid young actress in films today. Dancing a mambo and taking a pillion ride in Woman of the River, she almost sets the screen on fire, and I began to suspect that Mario Soldati, who made the film, was taking us for a ride as well. Personally I could always take a pretty big dish of undiluted Loren anyway, but there’s much more than her sultry charms to this film. For one thing, there’s the Po River and its people, which since Paisa has always had a special attraction for me. The second half of the film is set among the cane cutters of its great delta, captured in some fine Eastman colour, and that would be worth seeing even if Miss Loren were not there, carrying her story of the village orphan Nives a significant stage further. Woman of the River is mainly a love story, for Nives has, after a show of resistance, taken as lover an unpleasant philanderer (Rik Battaglia)-he’s also a smuggler-who deserts her while she is bearing his child. This much, and a bit more, happens against a background of
the riverside village where Nives lives, the eel-curing factory where she goes each day by bicycle and ferry, the local carnival (where she does that mambo), and the nocturnal comings and goings of the cigarette smugglers. More disturbing, however, than any of this is a quite unnerving search for,a lost child in the second part of the film. Based on a story in which Alberto Moravia had a hand, Woman of the River is all the better, one must add, for a characteristic Italian concern with the lives of ordinary neople.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19571025.2.26.1.2
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 950, 25 October 1957, Page 16
Word count
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310WOMAN OF THE RIVER New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 950, 25 October 1957, Page 16
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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