La Visita (The Visitor)

This wonderful Italian comedy by Antonio Pietrangeli (from Raro Video - USA) is the 1st early print DVD version on the story of singles facing a fast fading, fountain of youth disappearing, lonely hearts club, seek-n-find Neo-Realism. Whereby any empty heart can sift through multitudes of possible fake listings to find one special soulmate, discovering you have both whittled down the possibilities of the other as last hope, grapse, barrier against life of loneliness. Hoping beyond any feasible reality, we are treated to a mismatch, worthy the ages, our couple unravel the best in each other. They come under mass community scrutiny, microscopic curiosity, and view from near woods that rains down stones. Yes, they become more dismayed with each other as the truth of buried secrets kept, hop out like rabbits just born, like a cartoon unseen, hordes of wildlife breeding with never a hint, clue for privacy.Using personal ads listed in the biggest national newspapers, reaching the most concentrated demographics wished for, and wondering if those wordy descriptions of those whom walk this life as the "One Is The Loneliest Number" is so easily solved as compromise found/made/agreed. Credit Raro Video for reviving this lost jewel Criterion Collection won't bother with.This is a madcap comedy on par with the stateside illuminates as: The Apartment, Some LIke It Hot, and Baby Doll. Sad meets funny, but life goes on with favorable "letters sent", heart strings strumming in retro reflections, a 24 hour clock ticks, worth everything in this life rushing by. If I still have you, go fetch this awesome film/DVD, which includes three choice interviews, and downloadable booklet if you go to a reputable print shop familiar w/digital print outs.I rank this DVD with the best of any period Italian Neo-Realism that includes: The Law, The Vanquished, Adua and Her Friends, La Rabbia, Il Cappotto, The Railroad Man, Seduced & Abandoned, Mafioso, Big Deal On Madonna Street, and Journey To Italy. You know if you are interested. If so, fetch ASAP. Others - stay safe with your cartoons, video games, and smartphones. I issue no challenge on I Q levels. I promise. Ever. Never.

In my personal opinion this must be my favorite Pietrangeli's film.From what I heard, it took the screenwriter almost a year to write a movie script for this production...back in thosedays they really did pay-close-attention to screenwriting.Romantic-Comedy, or should I say: Quirky Comedy made Italian Style. This is typical Italian humor: honest, brutal and romantic at once.The two main character together with "Cucaracha" (great Mario Adorf) :) give performances of their lives.Call me old-fashioned, but even though I was born in 1980's I can totally relate to 1960's Italy. The entire movie takes placein some provincial Italian small town somewhere up-north. A lot of scenes are shot inside a village house. The male protagonist, wonderful Francois Perier (Frenchman) playing Italian single from Rome by the name Adolfo Di Palma :)---reminds me of the greatcomedians Peter Sellers and Louis de Funes.The humor, characters, dialogue, and movie flow is just amazing...totally recommend this one for people who enjoyed watching: Nights of Cabiria (1957), Mafioso (1962), Seduced & Abandoned (1964), or Divorce Italian Style (1962).

Fun film.

The film is very good and I am very happy.

A little slow...odd ending. Learning Italian so served its purpose.

Antonio Pietrangeli (1919-68) began as a critic and well-connected scenarist, then directed some 15 films before drowning on a location shoot--a verismo scenario worthy of his senior colleagues Visconti or Rossellini. Like de Sica or Capra he was a certified humanist, and like Leisen or Cukor he made woman-centric films with the likes of Cardinale, Sandrelli, Spaak and Signoret. His real muse, however, was the Tunisia-born Sandra Milo, featured consecutively and opulently in three of his best works. These were made just before her two more famous Fellini performances, where she is merely decorative, whilst Pietrangeli celebrates her considerable artistic excellence as an unlikely comedic fusion of Judy Holliday and Jayne Mansfield. We laugh with, not at, the intelligent Mansfield, and we laugh and cry simultaneously over the complex emotions of Milo or Holliday.The glamourous Tunisian is paired with the hapless French lothario of Francois Périer and the German Mario Adorf, as her childhood playmate now the village voyeur/guardian angel. Milo, voluptuously configured in the posterior and even larger of heart, is the tenderly named Pina, a rural Po Valley spinster with fusspot tendencies. Pina's visitor in San Benedetto Po is Périer's Adolfo, an underemployed Roman bookseller with equal--and incompatible--fusspot hangups. Adolfo quickly susses out Pina's bank balance (and the nymphet teenybopper living nextdoor), rearranges or breaks her tchotkes and abuses her pets. The visit culminates in mixed ecstasies at the village's riverside dance, where Adolfo is humiliated as a male golddigger, Adorf's "Cucaracha" loony emerges as Pina's real soulmate, and the two endearingly misallied fusspots temporarily postpone whirlwind courtship.These are universally recognizable mating rituals--Po Valley or San Fernando Valley--very sensitively observed and exquisitely detailed. Milo and Périer are brilliant comedic talents, and Adorf is hilariously touching in his unbridled dance sequence, accompanied by Armando Trovajoli's jaunty Nino Rotaesque score. Armando Nannuzzi photographed the visit in glorious 1963 B/W, giving the Po landscapes and the Milo posterior equal attention and an overall retro tinge of neorealist cinematography. (Italy was beginning to prosper again, artistically and materially, and Pina's carefully modernized villa is electrified, with glass-screen telly, tape recorder and similar modcons.) La Milo flaunts a painfully tight Betty Boop perm, bee-stung lips and sheath frocks a size too small. For all her heart, fussing and loneliness (and annoying door chimes) she's a real Po Valley floozy--cf. Sra. Fellini's Cabiria--influenced by Milanese stylemakers, and watching her mince and shimmy, ensheathed, around tight corners is like seeing Jayne Mansfield perilously negotiate similar civil-engineering challenges in THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT. Not by accident, at the very outset Pina/Sandra confidently corrects, in a comically Tashlinesque way, the nagging engineering problems at Pisa's precarious tower, so engaging the viewer's complete understanding and empathy. Périer might not report back to Rome of a great visit to San Benedetto Po, but viewers making the visit on DVD are rewarded with verismo comedy, real sincerity and that spectacular "Sandra de Milo" curvature generously displayed.