Friday | August 21, 2015 9:00 pm

La spiaggia

Screening on Film

Directed by Alberto Lattuada.
With Martine Carol, Raf Vallone, Mario Carotenuto.
Italy/France, 1954, 35mm, black & white, 100 min.
Italian with English subtitles.
Print source: Cineteca di Bologna

Alberto Lattuada is best known in this country for collaborating with Fellini on the latter’s first film, Variety Lights, but his career stretched from the 1940s to the 1980s and shows him contributing to every major strain of Italian cinema. He was one of the architects of the “pink neorealism” of the 1950s, which combines melodrama and comedy to examine the workings of social class and the changing mores in everyday life. A fine example of the genre, La spiagga follows an elegant woman on vacation with her daughter on the Riviera. Posing as a widow, she is ultimately unmasked as a prostitute; the threatened scandal darkens the film’s mood and gives Lattuada a chance to denounce the sexual hypocrisies of the day.