Sunflower 1970

Sunflower 1970

Sunflower (Italian: I girasoli) is a 1970 Italian drama film directed by Vittorio De Sica. It was the first western movie to be filmed in the USSR. Some scenes were filmed near Moscow, while others near Poltava, a regional center in Ukraine

An Oscar nominee for Best Score (Henry Mancini), Sunflower is a grandly emotional melodrama featuring a stunning performance from Sophia Loren

In another of the actress’s great collaborations with director Vittorio De Sica (The Bicycle Thief), Loren plays Giovanna, a steel-willed Italian woman on a desperate search to find her husband Antonio (Marcello Mastroianni), who has gone missing on the WWII battlefields of Russia. Making the grueling overland journey years after the end of the war, she tracks Antonio down and finds him a changed man. This heart-wrenching reunion will forever alter the course of their lives

The third and final film that Mastroianni made with Sophia Loren under Vittorio De Sica’s direction is a sublimely stirring saga of lovers swept up in the tide of history. In the midst of World War II, Giovanna (Loren) and Antonio (Mastroianni) marry hastily just days before he’s shipped off to fight on the Russian front

After years go by without word from her husband, Giovanna travels to Moscow (where the film was shot on location) to find him, a search that culminates in an exquisitely understated, dark-and-stormy-night climax. The pervading air of romantic melancholy is borne along on the swelling strains of Henry Mancini’s Oscar-nominated score

“Sunflower,” the English dubbed Italian film that opened yesterday at the Ra dio City Music Hall, is a big, artificial romantic drama that ‘hustles love, war, physi cal dislocation and theme music by Henry Mancini. Its stars are Martello Mastroian ni, who plays an Italian sol dier reported missing on the Russian front during World War II, and Sophia Loren, as the wife who sets out to find him years later

Sunflower (1970)

Sunflower (1970)