La chance d'être femme

LUCKY TO BE A WOMAN was the third film that featured Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni together. It is a breezy, inconsequential, but likeable comedy about a photographer, Corrado, played by Mastroianni, who snaps a picture of a Rome beauty, Antonietta, played by Loren. The photo, much to Antonietta's surprise, winds up on the front page of a magazine. She wants to sue! At the instigation of Corrado the girl allows herself to be courted by the Count Senetti, whose specialty is launching cinema careers of potential female stars and sleeping with them. The lewd count takes a sexual interest in Loren. It is dashed by the sudden appearance on the scene of the count's legitimate wife (played by the long-time Blasetti favorite Elisa Cegani.) The movie's most delicious scene is when at a restaurant table with her cheating husband and Antonietta, the wife orders a salad, complete with Worcestershire and raw egg, only to launch the concoction into her lecherous husband's face. She steals the show. Throughout it all, Loren and Mastroianni, though constantly sparring, nurture a thinly concealed love for each other, which leads to the inevitable "bacio and abbraccio" and promise of a marriage by the time the film ends. This movie followed on the heels of Blasetti's very popular TOO BAD SHE'S BAD, made a year earlier.