The echoes of Fellini's "Nights of Cabiria" and "La Dolce Vita" are obvious and Pasolini was a screenwriter on both of those projects. That said, this stands on its own as a deeply felt look at one part of Italian society, circa 1962. Watching it, I understood a mother's love for her son and the roots of present-day Italian society better than I had done. That's not a bad achievement! It's also a tremendously attractive time capsule, a window into that moment in time and place. As an aside, I wonder how this film would have been perceived had Pasolini not made "Salo". I think it might have been taken rather more seriously. Watch and make up your own minds.

If Sarah Palin wants to support what she calls her "Mama Grizzlies," she should have Mamma Roma in her stable. This woman (Anna Magnani - The Rose Tattoo, The Secret of Santa Vittoria) is one tough grizzly, especially when it comes to her son, and trying to keep him on the straight and narrow.She used to be a woman of the evening, until her pimp (Franco Citti - Accattone!, Godfather III) marries a country girl and retires, letting her reclaim her now teenage son (Ettore Garofolo in his first film) and move to Rome.He soon falls for a loose woman and in with some unsavory characters. That's when the grizzly rears on her hind legs and goes to work.Director Pier Paolo Pasolini (The Gospel According to St. Matthew, The Decameron, and the last before he was murdered, Salò) used Citti in many of his films. His films, while critically acclaimed, could draw moral outrage. Five minutes were cut from this film by the Italian authorities; although I can only guess where. He still was one of the best, and directed a winner here.

Mamma Roma is the first film I've seen from controversial Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini and it will probably be the last for quite a while. This film is very much in the Italian Neo-Realist tradition, something I found odd since most films from the movement were made several years earlier. As I watched the film, which was filled with unsympathetic low-life characters, I kept wondering what the point of it was or rather why Pasolini made it. I don't think that every film should necessarily be a work of art or a work of entertainment; in fact I think there are all sorts of different reasons a film can exist. I just couldn't think of a good one for this film.I can most definitely say that I didn't find this film to be at all entertaining or artistic. Actually, the only reason for this film I can think of is as a venue for Pasolini to spread his political message; his contempt for the bourgeois is quite obvious here. The film seems to be all about how society works against the lower class to keep them down. I don't necessarily object to a film having a political message but it needs something more to justify its existence. The only other thing I could find was some very cynical and depressing melodrama. There is also heavy handed religious imagery and parallelism between Mamma Roma's son and Christ but I fail to see how it adds anything to the film. For that matter, some of the content of the film itself seems to be working against what I took to be its political message.On a technical level, I was mostly unimpressed with Mamma Roma. The acting ranged from poor to above average and a lot of the cinematography looked very nice. At the same time, however, the editing was often quite abrupt and the film often felt disjointed as crucial plot points were mentioned instead of shown while less important events often were covered more thoroughly. Finally, I feel that I have to mention the distracting score which alternated between overbearing and not appropriate to the action.

When her pimp gets married, Mamma Roma decides to retire from the horizontal business and focus wholly on her one son, Ettore, who, without any education, grows up in the countryside. She brings him to Rome and enables him to enroll to a school with the money that she earned from prostitution. She buys an apartment in one of the better Roman neighborhoods and starts her new business as a green-grocer. However, Ettore feels lost in the big city to which he is not used and joins a gang of youngsters around the beautiful Bruna with whom he falls in love. Since he cannot bring up enough money to buy gifts for her, he starts to steal, even items from the household of his mother. When Mamma Roma gets wind from that, she takes him from the school and organizes him a job as waiter. At the same time, she tries to turn him away from Bruna by sending him to a former colleague of her. The misery is perfect when Mamma Roma's old pimp turns up again and demands from her to prostitute herself again, since otherwise he wants to tell her son that his mother is a whore. Desperately she goes back to her old profession in the evenings, but it does not help: Bruna tells Ettore everything. Here, his breakdown starts: he quits work and is from now on a professional street-robber. When he and his colleagues rob patients in a hospital, Ettore is caught in flagranti by the police and brought into a psychiatric clinic, where he dies.The German psychiatrist and writer Dr. Oskar Panizza wrote, towards the end of the 19th century, a story, entitled "The 'Trinity' Inn". This very special inn in Southern Germany is hold by an old man who speaks Hebrew, a blond, thin asthmatic youth named "Christus" and his mother, a once good looking woman named Mary whose profession is that of a whore. A very similar familiar constellation appears in Panizza's "The Council of Love" which has been filmed by Werner Schroeter in 1982. It would be very interesting to know if Pasolini knew Panizza's work, since without any doubt (at least for people who know Pasolini's work), we find in the figures of Mamma Roma the Virgin Mary, in Ettore Christ, in Carmine the pimp St. Joseph and most probably in Bruna the character of Maria Magdalena (exactly this role the actress Bruna - Silvana Corsini had played one year before in Pasolini's "Accattone". What we therefore have in front of us is a wonderfully perverted Holy Family in the suburbs of Rome.