nice, sad, predictable. gray, salted, seductive. a great cast. an ordinary story. crumbs from Visit of Old lady. and scene for extraordinary performance. a film about laws of poverty and people as toys. about power, cruelty and different worlds. about a game as root of so many feelings, emotions, hopes. and about the cold death of dreams. it can be a parable. or slice from reality. in fact, it is itself. a picture of a place. few characters. Bette Davis , Silvana Mangano , Joseph Cotten and irresistible Alberto Sordi around a table, playing cards. so, a meeting. a rite. shadow of life ashes. and strange image about your world. because it can be, in many senses, a manifesto. not about sins or fall, but about borders of gestures. cold, nice, seductive, bitter. a source of reflection. and testimony about a way without end.

Poverty and wealth confront each other over a (not very) friendly game of cards in this often nerve-wracking black social comedy. From her luxurious Italian villa overlooking the ghettos of Rome, a rich, miserly American widow extends her annual invitation to a poor young local couple for an evening of Scopone, the regional variant of bridge. Every year it's the same story: the old widow lends them money before ruthlessly winning it back, building their anticipation and then dashing their hopes for victory and a quick fortune. But this year the desperate Italian couple has been practicing their strategy, unaware that their pragmatic young daughter has been doing likewise, with different motives and with chilling consequences. The casting of Hollywood veterans Bette Davis and Joseph Cotton is relatively meaningless since their voices have been (poorly) dubbed into Italian, but the film is both sharp and lively, and the climactic showdown at the card table generates surprising intensity, too much to be simply funny.

Fairy tales are usually dark but very rarely are this human or that funny for that matter. Bette Davis plays a wealthy American with an addiction to card playing and to winning. She has become an expert on the local card games of different countries around the world where she owns houses. Bound to a wheel chair, the card games are her only close connection with the world of the living. In Rome, the card game is called "scopone" and she summons a married couple to be her adversaries. The couple, a magnificent Alberto Sordi and an unrecognizable Silvana Mangano, are the poorest of the poor, with a family of five children. As soon as Bette arrives to Rome, she calls them and gives them one million lire to play with. Sistematically, every year she will win the million back. Sordi and Mangano spend the rest of the year practicing, dreaming that one day they will win. The building up to the climax is one of the most painfully funny things I've ever seen. Pathetic and uplifting at the same time. Bette Davis is superb as the capitalist torturer/benefactor with a great Alberto Sordi at her side. Try not to miss it.

One of the previous respondents compares Commencini's work on this film to Billy Wilder, and I can't agree more. In fact, this yarn reworks Sunset Boulevard into a full-bodied Italian comedy about how the tyrannical rich use their money to string along the poor and humble.Remember, there was a card game in Wilder's film too! Here, Bette Davis, as poised, professional, and grandly self-assured as ever, is the Norma Desmond character. She's shrewd, not crazy, but she's got everyone twisting their lives out of shape to humor her in much the same way. Joseph Cotten is the Max von Mayerling character - the artist who threw away a brilliant career to serve this imperious creature. The twist is that Commencini replaces William Holden's wry screenwriter, Joe Gillis, with Alberto Sordi and Silvana Mangano as the poor couple who've unwittingly staked their lives on whatever they can get from the old lady. Ultimately, of course, it's not just them, but their entire neighborhood who Davis is leading on her merry chase -strictly for her own amusement. The twist at the end is just as perfect, in its own, thoroughly Italian way, as the finale of Wilder's film.Absolutely delightful - especially the wonderful body (and facial) language of all four principals at the cardtable. They could have kept it up twice as long and it would have been just as amusing. Four expert screen actors, directed to perfection.Can the bizzers-in-charge PLEASE find a decent print of this and DVD it right away?