WHAT SCOUNDRELS MEN ARE!

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I was at the BFI anyway, and so to make my visit worthwhile I thought why not dip into whatever was available, which happened to be this Italian romantic comedy from 1932.

The story is quite thin, running to just over an hour, with the odd moment of nice comedy scattered throughout.  Fortunately the two lead actors are each very charming in their own way.  

There's not much of a 'meet cute' to kick the romance off - Bruno, a chauffeur/mechanic, sees Mariuccia, a shop girl, one morning at a kiosk, is instantly smitten, and immediately follows her around on his bicycle in a way which some might find annoying but which amuses Mariuccia.

He 'borrows' his employer's car so as to impress her on their first date.  Needless to say this goes wrong, leading to misunderstandings and him losing his job, before they meet again at the Milan Fair, and we reach a happy ending in which they declare their love to each other in the back of a taxi.  The taxi driver is Mariuccia's father, which makes for some comedy to cap the film off nicely.

There's a lot of location shooting which adds an attractive freshness and lightness to the film.

At this time young women were becoming more independent (think of the flapper girls in the US, for example) and Mariuccia and her friends can be thought of in this light, even though Mariuccia herself is a very gentle soul, compared with her US counterparts of the time, played by the likes of Katherine Hepburn, Jean Arthur or Rosalind Russell.

At one point she ends up against her will on a date of sorts with an older and rich man. She’s thoroughly miserable but instead of sticking up for herself she simply gets upset and wanders off crying. It’s a scene which tonally is a little out of tune with the rest of the picture.

This film made Vittorio De Sica, who plays Bruno, Italy's most popular romantic actor, due to his youth, good looks and impudent charm, but in the 1940s he became a leading neorealist film director, his most famous film being 'Bicycle Thieves', a remarkable change of career. 


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