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*** This review may contain spoilers ***
"La sciantosa" (The Chanteuse) was the first of four films made for Italian television by director Alfredo Giannetti that brought Anna Magnani renewed attention by the Italian public. In it she plays Flora Bertuccelli, a has-been singer on the café-chantant circuit, who is offered a chance to sing for the Italian troops at the front in World War I. By now she has become a crabby, irritable, half-embittered person and takes on this task primarily in the attempt to renew her failing career. She makes the friendship of Tonino, a soldier and band-musician.Something unexpected happens to her when she sings the Neapolitan song "O surdato 'namurato" in front of a wildly appreciative audience of injured soldiers. She is deeply moved, almost breaks down. She realizes the joy she can bring to these men at the front.The epiphany transforms her, so much so that in the end she saves the life of Tonino by acting as a shield for his body when an enemy airplane strafes the vehicle she is being chauffeured in by the soldier.Magnani couldn't be better in this film. It is, I suppose, a vehicle made for her, but what a vehicle! Her presence has an earth-mother vitality (a cliché frequently applied to Magnani in general.) And the image of her with the Italian flag draped about her is one of the most memorable from all her films. Anna Magnani IS Italy!
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