Luigi Comencini's The Scientific Cardplayer is an unusual entry in both the commedia all-Italiana genre, and the careers of its two American stars, Bette Davis and Joseph Cotten. Times were hard for many of the Forties biggest stars by 1972: Cotten would appear in Mario Bava's cheap-and-cheerful Baron Blood the same year, and Bette Davis had already taken the unusual—for a star—step of advertising for work ten years earlier. Happily, the film offers the pair dignified and entertaining roles which build on their status rather than demeaning it.The true heroes of the film, however, are Italian comedy legend Alberto Sordi and glamor icon Silvana Mangano, incidentally the wife of producer Dino De Laurentiis. They play an unbelievably impoverished couple with four kids to support, who supplement their various awful jobs (the youngest son literally scrapes a living shaving corpses at the local funeral parlor) in...
- 8/1/2018
- MUBI
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