MAMMA ROMA Movie Review

The great Anna Magnani is Mamma Roma, the Roman prostitute who hopes to turn her life around and win respectability for the sake of her 16-year-old son. In his second feature film, director Pier Paolo Pasolini clearly implies that Magnani's feeling for her son goes somewhat beyond the traditional mother-son bond, but that doesn't diminish the purity or sincerity of Magnani's mission to provide him with a better life than she has given him until now. Tragic complications get in Magnani's way—as we might predict from the tense and raucous wedding reception for her pimp that opens the film—and her son finds it all but impossible to avoid the pitfalls and temptations of the city's mean streets. Beautifully written and directed, and featuring one of Magnani's most electrifying screen performances, Mamma Roma was nevertheless the target of heated criticism when it was first presented; denounced as immoral and scandalous when it premiered at the 1962 Venice Film Festival, the movie's overtones of incest and its raw, overheated melding of Catholicism, eroticism, and crime kept it out of most theatres. Despite five minutes’ worth of cuts the producers thought would make it more palatable, Mamma Roma went unreleased in the United States for 33 years. It was 1994 when Martin Scorsese and the invaluable Milestone Films arranged for the restored Mamma Roma’s American premiere. This is the video version now available, and it's a must—a major, no-longer-missing link between the neo-realist tradition and the incendiary street dramas of Scorsese himself.

NEXT STOP … Accatonel, The Gospel According to St. Matthew, Mean Streets

1962 110m/B IT Anna Magnani, Ettore Garofolo, Franco Citti, Silvana Corsini, Luisa Loiano; D: Pier Paolo Pasolini; W: Pier Paolo Pasolini; C: Tonino Delli Colli. VHS CVC