Vittorio De Sica's second-to-last movie, released post-humously. The blue-collar heroine, tubercular, is packed off, for a breather from family and factory, to a breathtaking mountaintop sanatorium, and just as she embarks on an extramarital romance with a fellow patient she is pronounced fit and sent back home. Out of this dreamy soap-opera material, De Sica unearths some, but not many, humanist observations that are as bright as any in his neo-realist past (on her way to her first doctor appointment, the heroine stops off to purchase a pair of clean underwear). The social consciousness, such as it is, seems merely face-saving, as most of the best opportunities in the movie are either missed or misplayed. For one example, the gray city scenes at the start are played primarily for their artful, muted, bleary-eyed color harmonies. For a worse one, the casting of the short-term lover, a sensitive Montgomery Clift type with pale liquid eyes and a shy smile, suggests that the heroine's real trouble is rooted not in her class but in her boorish husband. Still, Florinda Bolkan does what she can to develop the central character's sense of dislocation, by counteracting her normal fashion model's poise, stiffening her legs and pointing her feet like a penguin. (1974) — Duncan Shepherd