La Ciociara (1961) from Tuna and Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

La Ciociara, aka Two Women, was written and directed by Vittorio De Sica, and garnered Sophia Loren a Best Actress Oscar. To the best of my knowledge, the is the only case of a non-American receiving Best Actress for a foreign language film.

Note: The DVD I screened is a green, mushy and under-contrasted 4/3 transfer, with inconsistent brightness and is dubbed in English. There are three different DVD's available at Amazon

It was the last war which seemed clearly necessary and the last in which the cause seemed clearly just. Soon there will nobody left with first hand memories. It has been 57 years since the great war ended, and the only people who can still remember it are old, their memories dimming. It was fought by my dad's generation, and it was as important a thing as any generation has ever been asked to do. They did it well, and with as much honor as ever a war could be conducted given the nature of war to begin with. When it was over, the United States, unlike Russia, treated the liberated countries and the defeated countries with compassion and integrity. European winners and losers alike were nursed back to prosperity. The same generation again rolled up their sleeves back home in peacetime, built a powerful economy, and raised their families in prosperity and innocence, sheltered from the war and starvation which had characterized their own childhoods in the 30's and 40's.

I love to hear the old people in Europe talk about the war, because they had so many unique experiences. I hope that the great writers and filmmakers are preserving all those memories, because nobody could create them from imagination alone. I worked with an older man who was a young boy when the Germans marched through. He ran from them, and before he could hook up with others, he spent about four nights sleeping alone in the forests and wetlands and wherever he could hide safely from the enemy soldiers. His most vivid childhood memory was the sound he heard during those nights, the sound of the cattle lowing, in horrible pain, begging to be milked, but with no human hands to milk them.

Two Women shares several of those unique memories with us. Tuna refers to one in his nudity comments. A woman has lost her baby to the war, but has breasts full of milk. All around her, people are starving to death. What is more logical than to offer her milk to others?  To me, this quiet moment defines the time with great clarity and insight.

I like Vittorio DeSica's films very much, and I think it's about time that somebody started to assemble his classics in deluxe DVD's with remastered originals and clean transfers. Nobody is better at telling the story of wartime and post-war Italy than DeSica (The Bicycle Thief), and "Two Women" is an important film about this period. It deserves better than the shabby DVD's which are available now.

Although DeSica's name is generally well remembered and recognized by film lovers, all of his great films were written or co-written by Cesare Zavattini, who is largely forgotten. Together they were one of the greatest and longest-running artistic tandems in history, their partnership lasting some 30 years.