Peccato che Sia una Canaglia (Too Bad She’s Bad). 1955. Italy. Directed by Alessandro Blasetti. Screenplay by Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Alessandro Continenza, Ennio Flaiano, based on the short story “Fanatico” by Alberto Moravia. With Marcello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren, Vittorio de Sica. In Italian; English subtitles. 4K digital restoration by Cinecittà. 94 min.
Underlying all of Sophia Loren’s performances as women of loose morals was an awareness of her sly intelligence and utter self-regard: she always had the upper hand. In this, her first major role after her head-turning appearance in Vittorio De Sica’s L’oro di Napoli, she plays the working-class seductress who charms a taxi cab driver (Mastroianni) out of his car and then eludes the Italian carabinieri to rejoin her gang of fellow thieves. De Sica himself lends his formidable charms in the role of her father, a swindler of the old school. The winning triumvirate of Loren, Mastroianni, and De Sica would reward Italy with two of its biggest commercial hits in the 1960s: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow and Marriage, Italian Style. Loren would recall fondly that “the spark between us was immediate…. We played our roles guided by instinct, and with a panache that for me was a revelation…. De Sica set the tone; Marcello and I immediately went along with it, imbuing our acting with verve and subtlety that characterized the many films we would make together later on.”