Too Bad She’s Bad

“The spark between us was immediate… We played our roles guided by instinct, and with a panache that for me was a revelation,” Sophia Loren said of the film that announced her and Marcello Mastroianni as one of cinema’s most magnetic on-screen duos. Too Bad She’s Bad charts the mayhem that ensues when an honest cabbie (Mastroianni, in his first major comedic role) gets caught in the middle of a car theft by a working-class, thieving father and daughter—a smooth-talking Vittorio De Sica and his soon-to-be muse Loren. Alessandro Blasetti’s irresistibly charming and funny adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s short story “Il fanatico” roots its screwball antics and rapid-fire, overlapping dialogue in the economic reality of postwar Rome, and gives Loren a role tailor-made for her inimitable, commanding power to mince and subvert male desire. 4K digital restoration by Cinecittà.