Chicks Boccacciatore

Anita Ekberg is 60 ft. long. She is lying down. On the great thoracic curve of her earth-mother's body there rises a bosom that suggests Vesuvius trying to whisper to Fujiyama. Ah, but she is only a paper doll. Anita has posed for a billboard photograph. In her hand is a glass of milk. A loudspeaker blares: "Drink more milk--milk--milk."

A man comes out of an apartment house across the street. He is some kind of religious nut who spies on lovers in public parks, then denounces them vehemently; he carries a prayer book in one hand and pinches pretty bottoms with the other. In a soaring flight of pathetic phallacy, he begs Ekberg to come down off that sign and stop damaging the public morals. "All right," says Ekberg. All ten fathoms of her descend from the sign. She plucks up the dirty-minded fellow, removes his trousers, and clutches him to her mammoth mammaries.

No Honey. When the Italians saw all that--at Milan's world premiere of the Italian cinema's long-anticipated Boccaccio '70--they burst forth, some with catcalls and derisive whistles, others with cheers. Produced by Carlo Ponti, husband of Sophia Loren, Boccaccio '70 tells four stories. None derive from the Decameron that Giovanni Boccaccio wrote six centuries ago, but they are designed as modern reflections of Boccaccio's lusty humanism, and the '70 of the title is a wild hope that the film will still be running eight years from now. Judged on the collected talent alone, it would seem to have a chance.

Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita) directed the billboard fantasy, making three-fourths of the Ekberg visible beneath the surface. Vittorio De Sica (Two Women) directed Sophia Loren in a tale about a girl who works in a traveling circus. At each town, a raffle is held and the winner gets Sophia. In one village, Sophia meets and falls in love with a local lad. To cleanse her name and clear her future, she gives the winner of that day's raffle all the money but no honey.

July, Boys. Luchino Visconti (Rocco and His Brothers) directed German Actress Romy Schneider as the wife of a titled amorist who goes for $1,000-a-night call girls and has a bottomless exchequer to assure his supply. His wife decides to leave him, but tells him dryly that he can have her any time he wants her for $600 (she discounts the madam's $400 cut). The segment ends with the wife sadly undressing as the husband pantingly writes out a check.

The fourth story, slightly out of line with the others, demonstrates the triumph of domestic virtue over heartless capitalism, spinning out the saga of a young couple who are wed secretly because his company forbids employees to marry until they have been on the payroll for three years. It will be dropped from the picture when Co-Producer Joe Levine (TIME, Feb. 24, 1961) releases it in the U.S. next July.

The Vatican has greeted the film with an E rating--which would stand for Excommunication if celluloid had a soul, but in reality means Extra-Money-at-the-Box-Office. Boccaccio '70 proved the point by grossing more than $200,000 in its first ten days, milking the Italian population at an even more prodigious rate than La Dolce Vita did.

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