This beautiful poster features Italian icon Gina Lollobrigida and was executed by Yves Thos, who painted memorable promos for La dolce vita, Spartacus, and Goldfinger. He also painted magazine covers, book jackets, and advertising imagery. This poster and the one below, also by Thos, are in French, but La loi was made in Italy and known there as La loi. Interestingly, the mostly Italian cast perform their dialogue in French. We haven’t found the reasons for that yet, but the movie’s production info lists both French and Italian backers, so maybe in a violent cage match to decide filming language the French won. Anyway, La loi premiered in France today in 1959.
Working from a prize-winning source novel by Roger Villand, La loi gives us Gina Lollobrigida as a beautiful woman in an Italian fishing village called Porto Manacore, a place dominated by smalltime crook Yves Montand. When agronomist Marcello Mastroianni arrives as part of a project to create more farmland, he’s caught up in a psychosexual drama that centers on Lollo, who he can only scarcely understand. We can sympathize. Her character is another of those devilish wild child types you see in Italian cinema, traipsing and skittering about like something feral. You can’t control her. You can’t even hope to contain her. She’s a dangerous, thieving, amoral minx, but one with—possibly—a good heart underneath.
At one point some villagers ponder whether Lollobrigida will fall into the bed of handsome young outsider Mastroianni, or Montand. They’re answered by one man who shrugs and says, “I believe in tradition,” by which he means “the old, powerful guy.” That moment captures the question at the center of La legge: Do old rules still govern the new Italy? Lollobrigida personifies Italian riches, ultimately ripe for the taking. Meanwhile there’s a discussion of who rules Porto Manacore, and by allegory, what type of person rules the country. The question is symbolized by a nightly drinking game—la loi—in which one man in the local bar is chosen as the law and others must submit to his humiliations.
La loi is stagy and dated, but it looks nice, with exteriors shot in the towns of Carpino and Foggia. There’s also interesting visual commentary, such as during a crane shot down the front of an apartment house revealing to viewers the state of each domicile within, and when Lollobrigida is whipped while her head rests on a bowl of chile peppers, forming a sort of halo. This is all thanks to director Jules Dassin, who had helmed noirs such as Night and the City, Thieves’ Highway, and Brute Force, but had been blacklisted in Hollywood by the HUAC repression squad. Dassin continued his career in Europe, with La legge being one of the results. Generally well regarded today, we think there’s only one word for it: Lollotastic.
