This film is included in Parker Tyler's "Classics of the Foreign Film," a seminal book published in the 1960s (perhaps updated since then). I saw it for the first time recently through a videotape available at a local university. The film captures aspects of 1950s Rome fairly well, the best segment concerning a Sicilian woman who, having a baby boy out of wedlock, cannot pay for the child's care due to her inability to obtain work. Out of desperation she abandons the child in a park. He is rescued and taken to an orphanage where she tracks him down, admitting to being his mother. Though she is arrested for abandoning the child, the public and court absolve her of guilt due to understanding the situation she had been in. She then becomes a nurse to care for children. If only life had been/was like that. This segment certainly wins in depicting the difficulty of illegitimacy in those days, especially in a very traditional society. Then again, Italian and European cinema were more mature about such things than was Hollywood.
Review of Love in the City
