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While Commander Mature—for whom it seems to be much easier to catch an octopus than to pronounce it—strains his brains over a problem of chemistry that turns out to be about as difficult as mixing a highball, the moviegoer has plenty of time to enjoy the seascapes off Cuba, where the film was made, and to get monumentally bored by the story. Things pick up toward the end, though, when Actor Mature himself takes to the water to make the final test. For a little while, as the sharks circle closer and closer, there seems to be a very good chance that they will get him.
Woman of Rome (Ponti-DeLaurentiis; D.C.A.). In the novel by Italy's Alberto Moravia, the most important thing about La Romana is that she is a dark beauty who loves men and money. In the movie version, the most important thing about her is that she is played by Gina Lollobrigida. Gina's mother, an impoverished ex-model, leads her daughter into her old profession, hoping that it will lead Gina into an older and more profitable one. Mother proudly proclaims that "there was not a figure like [Gina's] in all Rome." As the movie opens, Gina strips in an artist's studio and poses. It is merely another proof that mother is always right.
Soon men move into Gina's life. The first is a cad; worse, so far as mother is concerned, he is a chauffeur. When Gina learns that he will not marry her because he is already married, what is there for her to do? She is disillusioned, bursting with "physical exuberance," and full of motherly advice that she has a body to sell. She sells it. Comes the dawn, and Gina wants to die. Instead, she keeps going—from one man to another. The principal ones (the time is the mid-'30s) are a fascist police official, who loves her madly, a craven anti-fascist student, whom she loves madly, and a psychopathic brute, who makes love to her madly. All three lovers meet violent deaths, and at movie's end Gina is pregnant (by the student not, as in the novel, by the brute), to face the future alone.
By U.S. standards, Woman of Rome is an unusual movie, but its grey-toned realismo is hardly a match for the novel's. In its transposition to the screen, the story retains its rather sudsy plot but has lost the perceptive insights that stitched the novel into a meaningful tale. In fleeting images, however, the movie does at times catch the heroine's fatalistic amorality, the pathos of her situation, and even the sense that this ignorant girl has capacities of emotion surpassing those of her "respectable" lovers.