Antonio Pietrangeli

Quote:
The Four Queenly Virtues are Constancy, Fidelity, Chastity and Honor.

Four unrelated short comedies by four different directors. “Queen Sabina”chronicles the sexual misadventures of a teenage girl on the road home. “Queen Armenia” centers on a self-serving opportunistic gypsy babysitter who uses her employer’s kids for her own gain. The third episode, “Queen Elena” centers on a husband who learns a lesson about the perils of infidelity after he succumbs to the wiles of the seductive wife next door. The last vignette, “Queen Marta” centers on a wealthy woman who, when drunk, uses her butler as an outlet for her lust.Read More »

Quote:
Miseries, grandeur, daily life of Celestina, orphaned country girl who arrives in Rome to be a maid, at first in a well-to-do houshold, then for a couple of loving retirees, then in a wealthy family. She falls in love with a plumber, gets pregnant, attempts suicide, then decides to survive for the child that will come.
The first film by scriptwriter A. Pietrangeli (1919-68), and the beginning of a rich gallery of female characters, which is perhaps his greatest title of glory.Read More »

Quote:
Following the gorgeous, seemingly liberated Adriana (Divorce Italian Style’s Stefania Sandrelli) as she chases her dreams in the Rome of La dolce vita, I Knew Her Well is at once a delightful immersion in the popular music and style of Italy in the sixties and a biting critique of its sexual politics and the culture of celebrity. Over a series of intimate episodes, just about every one featuring a different man, a new hairstyle, and an outfit to match, the unsung Italian master Antonio Pietrangeli, working from a script he cowrote with Ettore Scola, composes a deft, seriocomic character study that never strays from its complicated central figure. I Knew Her Well is a thrilling rediscovery, by turns funny, tragic, and altogether jaw-dropping.Read More »

Synopsis
Forced to leave her village because of a scandalous love affair with a seminarian, Dora looks for work and refuge in Parma, where she becomes involved with a petty criminal. Another of Pietrangeli’s bitter comedies of deracination, reflecting the sudden urbanization of Italy during the industrial boom years of the 1950s and 1960s.Read More »

Paolo Anselmi is a happily single man. He lives in a flat with a friend but is forced to leave when the friend gets married. He then goes to a boarding house where he flirts with a girl but ditches her when she proposes marriage. When he goes and visits his mother he finds out that she is also trying to find the right girl for him. Is he going to surrender this time?Read More »

Synopsis by Sandra Brennan
In this drama, a single woman approaching 40 grows bored of her affair with a married trucker and writes to a singles column. She ends up paired with an outwardly conservative bookstore clerk. During their date, he drinks and soon turns into a rude, crude, drunken slob. She is mortified until he apologizes. She forgives him and they have sex. In the morning they resume their former lives. Perhaps they will meet again. Perhaps not.Read More »