In Loren's case the accusation was sharply pointed: Last April a Rome prosecutor charged her and producer husband Carlo Ponti with illegally exporting $10 million in currency and art works from the financially troubled motherland. A warrant for Ponti's arrest was issued. Not surprisingly, the 64-year-old Ponti hasn't set foot in the country since Sophia was detained at Rome's Fiumicino Airport in March 1977 and subjected to a nine-hour interrogation. Though both have given up Italian for French citizenship and live in a triplex penthouse on Paris' Avenue Georges V, they are scheduled to go on trial later this month in Rome.
Reportedly distraught over the film workers' protest—La Simpatica has taken pride in her democratic relations with her associates at all levels—Sophia retreated behind the muscular bouncers who, as usual in a Wertmuller production, guard the set. While filming at Palombara Sabina in the hills east of Rome—one of which is known as Sophia, for morphological reasons, and another as Gina—Wertmuller's Italian stallions even seized the village photographer's camera and destroyed his film.
Loren, the erstwhile siren, plays an earthy widow in this Wertmuller work, typically and exhaustingly titled A Blood Feud between Two Men of Comitini Because of a Widow: Political Motives Suspected. Love—Death—Shimmy—Lugano Bella—Tarantella—and Happy Ever After. The role, like the frumpy housewife she played in last year's A Special Day, suggests a strategy on Sophia's part to take the place of the late Anna Magnani as the fiery earth mother of Italian movies. Given the temper of the times, this kind of casting may do a lot more for Loren's career than the elegant, bejeweled sex symbol of the past—in the country of her birth, at least.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
