Calling all film buffs! Calling all film buffs! Be on the lookout for Mamma Roma, the 1962 drama from iconoclastic Italian auteur Pier Paolo Pasolini. After more than a decade, this cloistered gem is finally being released in the US via Milestone Film & Video Inc. and filmmaker Martin Scorsese.
Mamma Roma is played by the fiery diva Anna Magnani, Oscar-winner for The Rose Tattoo and arguably the finest dramatic actress of Italy's postwar cinema. Magnani gives a volcanic performance as a prostitute, whose streetwalking days are over when her pimp gets married to a country girl. With money saved up from during her working years, Mamma Roma opens a vegetable stand in a Roman outdoor market and attempts to orchestrate a respectable life for herself and her teenage son, Ettore, who was raised in the country unaware of his mother's profession. But life deals cruel cards as Ettore falls in with hoodlums and Mamma Roma's ex-pimp returns to reestablish their partnership.
Declared obscene by local police when premièred at the 1962 Venice International Film Festival, the film (Pasolini's second work following his acclaimed début production, Accattone) was released throughout Europe with various scenes snipped away by bluenose censors. Despite US acclaim for Pasolini's moody and unsettling productions - most notably the neo-realist The Gospel According to Saint Matthew and the orgiastic Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom - and his cult-like following rising from his sensationalist murder by two street hustlers in 1975, no distributor has ever brought Mamma Roma to the US. The film has remained one of the more elusive treasures in the realm of classic celluloid.
Scheduled to make the rounds of the art-house circuit in more than 100 cities, starting with New York's Film Forum on January 18, cinemaniacs can now enjoy their first look at this Roman treasure. Bravo, Pasolini! Brava, Magnani! Ciao, Mamma Roma!
Mamma Roma, by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Playing in select US theaters nationwide beginning in January.
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