Please don't spend money on this.

Great Film overall

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Spoilers. Observations. Opinions.No code here? Lots of female buttocks hanging out behind brief swimsuit-type garments. Sophia, indeed, has the extra hammy yammies to make a voyeur's imagination start wandering. De Sica is the stereotypical leering admirer who implies he is too old to take advantage, even though stuffy Gable is the same age and pretends he is not interested in the excessive skin show.On and on. Sophia shows up in a black bra. This is the early 1960s? This is not an Italian film, but American. Mores in the USA were still quite WASP-ish, and didn't have room for frowzy flimsy lingerie looking itself like an unmade bed.Sophia always looks good, however, dressed down or up. Witness her proper black suit in the courtroom scene. She wants to sway the judge to give the kid to her, of course. Meanwhile, she shows enough leg that De Sica literally thirsts for some contact. She is even sexy in this dress suit. She sways the court. Her appearance says she is not the improper relative with which the boy should thrive.The boy is excellent. All street-smart, all knowing, dumb as a cucumber. Sneaking cigarettes, drinking wine and coffee. He has learned American quips, either from Gable or maybe old wartime American movies.De Sica is a card. He steals the show in his own way. Avvocato and pig, indeed. He is a handsome dog, yet his romantic idea is to be young enough to progress with Sophia.The kid wants Gable and Sophia to hook up, which eventually happens after some usual conflict. The denouement shows a bouquet of balloons, the kid, Sophia and Gable walking off into the cinematic sunset.I am a writer, film historian, actress, film critic and movie reviewer.

Sophia Loren gets a 10/10: at 26 she's at her playful and provocative peak. Clark Gable? All the hair dye in the world can't hide the fact that he's more than twice Ms. Loren's age. Gable's 1930s silver screen smile notwithstanding, the biggest joke in this admittedly cute comedy is the premise that a gorgeous, freewheelin' Italian beauty might fall for a stilted 59 year old senior citizen. Try making that movie today and audiences would write it off as dirty-old-man creepy. (Not nearly a "Lolita"; more a "Gigi".)But still... Sophia Loren! Wow! She alone gets the film part marks.

In many, many ways, this film appears to have later been made as AVANTI (with Jack Lemmon and Juliet Mills). The plots have just too many similarities to be a coincidence. While not exactly a remake, this later film seems like a slight reworking of the plot--with a little bit of gratuitous sex and nudity added to boot.The film begins with Clark Gable going to Italy to take care of arrangements after his brother's accidental death. This no-good brother had apparently been living a double life--with a wife back in the States AND one in Italy! Gable is surprised to not only discover this, but that there is an 8 year-old boy who is apparently his nephew! He's also surprised that the boy's Italian Aunt (Sophia Loren) isn't particularly interested in establishing a relationship with Gable or having the boy go to live in the States. Considering that the boy is a ragamuffin living in a rather bohemian existence, this might just be in the kid's best interest--at least that is what Gable assumes. Over time, the blustering Gable comes under the spell of the island of Capri and Loren's ample charms.Oddly, however, the film makers thought that pairing Gable and Loren romantically made sense and that the public would buy it--and they didn't. The age difference was just too great. Additionally, the styles and personalities of the two were just too different to make such a pairing believable--though at least it worked better than Loren and John Wayne (LEGEND OF THE LOST) and a bit better than Loren and Alan Ladd (BOY ON A DOLPHIN). Why film makers insisted on pairing this sexy starlet with significantly older established American actors is beyond me.So, while the film isn't exactly believable, is it worth watching? After all, although miscast, the film could still be enjoyable. And, for the most part it was, though including a "cute and precocious" kid was, at times, a bit too much of a cliché. He was too cute and way too precocious to be realistic--walking, talking and acting like a 30 year-old man stuck in a kid's body--sort of like Tatum O'Neal in PAPER MOON. Also, some might find its treatment of Italians as a bit patronizing--as they all seem rather lazy and fun-loving--not like real people. As for the look of the film, it was terrific--filmed in exquisite color that really made this Italian island look its best. Overall, it's an enjoyable and nice looking piece of fluff--not bad, just not as good as it could have been.By the way, supporting actor Vittorio De Sica was also a very accomplished director. He acted in quite a few films and was quite good, but as a director he was one of the best, with such wonderful films as UMBERTO D, MIRACLE IN MILAN and THE CHILDREN ARE WATCHING US to his credits--among others.

This movie had everything on paper, a great American actor(Gable), beautiful locations and the ever-adorable Sophia Lauren. But the script is so poor and idiotic that totally ruins everything...So, Gable, your typical Yankee, arives at Naples after his brother's death.He finds out that his brother had a secret second marriage and a child who currently lives with his Aunt (Lauren). Basically what the director wanted was to demonstrate the difference of go-like-it Italians and the more sober, cold, calculating Americans, a premise so stale and stereotypical that would need a special amount of skill to be formed into something watchable. And sadly this was not the case. Actually this movie is pretty brave, in a peculiar way. It has the audacity to denounce the whole neo-realistic Italian cinema where all these poor people struggle through life and it's miseries. Alas, what offers instead is a stereotypical view where poverty is equal to a happy ignorance. All the Italian characters are rude, messy and quarrel but always in a happy and delightfull way... They all try to speak "funny" English and although they are illiterate they manage it pretty good... They are not poor because of the war's damages , they are poor because they like it and they cannot do much better...Even so, if this movie had any kind of charm I could still accept it as your shallow typical romance comedy but, here, every joke literally back-fires at the character's faces. Take for example Nando, the little boy. He is illiterate, smokes and distributes Cabaret leaflets but that's OK because he is Italian and does not need an education. He lives with a prostitute in a dump but he's good and likes fireworks so that's OK... The American again loves hamburgers, tries to teach his nephew baseball etc.His fiancée dumbs him,only because she hears music from the telephone and does not know that in Italy it is OK to play loud music all day and all night...He tries to enlist Nando in an American school that will give him proper education, because all Italian schools must be really bad (they stretch the American school joke so far that you can't possibly imagine...) The acting is also really terrible. Gable stumbles across the film like a joke of his old self,and Lauren tries to be decent but has so little to work with and cannot save herself..This movie in all aspects is a total waste...