barely know where to start...

I don't recall seeing this film when it came out but I found it gathering dust on a library shelf recently and I haven't stopped watching it since! I was immediately attracted to it because I am the result of a war-time liaison with a Neapolitan and an American Red Cross hostess, during the war, on Capri. I was almost born there! Having visited my father many times there, I always love to "revisit" through film and photos. And being a war-baby, the war in Italy was always with me, in my DNA, actually.
I must admit Gable's character (and Gable himself, as he isn't "my type") was somewhat off-putting and of course there are the very taboo details (cigarettes, child labor, etc.). Sophia Loren was my idol, and Marietto is endlessly fascinating to watch in this film.
But then the authenticity of the setting, the dialogue, the underlying concepts, started to sink in. One mild quibble: the vehicles that drop Mike off are all coming from the wrong direction...there's nothing out that direction but cliffs, a seawall, and a very rocky beach. Then, as I saw that they were filming pretty well impromptu among the summer crowd, I realized they could not come from the other direction because that's where the funicular goes up, the ships come in, and all the congestion is.
Other than that, nothing in the film is staged. The water is really that color. The bougainvillea does adorn everything. The "piazzetta" in the main village with the clock-tower, the Blue Grotto, the motorboats plying the waters around the Faraglioni rocks...Capri needs no embellishment.
It was also fun to notice how Gable and Loren were worked in with the Capri tourist crowds, who seemed to take it in stride, except for the occasional person who couldn't help staring ("Is that who I think it is?"). Wish I could ask my father about it...
The acting may appear phony to those who have not been to Italy, but it isn't. My favorite, tiny detail was the waiter at the caffe at 1 am, with bottle-thick glasses, perhaps deliberately misunderstanding this cranky American who keeps snarling for coffee. (In 1989 my mother sat at the same caffe and was waited on by the same waiter she had known during the war.) Gable demands to know how people sleep with all the ruckus going on, and the waiter answers, simply, with a wonderful smile to all, as if it's perfectly obvious: "Together." Fabulous!
I never cease to marvel at the grace and style with which Italians conduct everyday life--"la bella figura" is the ideal, the "brutta figura" (which Gable exemplifies here) is highly disapproved. None carries off the bella figura, of course, than DeSica. The dignified strut, each pregnant pause in the flow of words, especially the stiff little bow when one is insulted (intentionally or not), even the self-deprecating humor, is the Italian male at his best.
The neighbors who all show up to support Lucia...maybe a bit overdone for effect, but the man shouting at America to get out of the Middle East ("Oil! Oil!") is priceless. When I first visited my father in Rome in 1962, I was collared by almost everyone, demanding to know why my country was going to war with Vietnam...at 17, like most Americans my age, I didn't even know where Vietnam was!
I was gratified by the script's honesty. Even when the Fifth Army occupied Naples, Italians did not necessarily worship Americans. For more on this, look for "The Gallery" (1947) by John Horne Burns, also with the Fifth Army in Naples in 1944. That was just after the time when Sophia Loren was one of those young girls hiding with her family in the Bagnoli tunnel during the air-raids.
Yet there is a fine, double-edged subtlety too: the catchy spoof on American life ("vuo fa' l'americano, sei nat' in Italy") is both somewhat disdainful but also wistful. Nando is contemptuous of the "man-to-man" thing but he is fascinated by the American's alarm wristwatch. He doesn't "get" the appeal of hamburgers and soda water in cappuccino, but like most poor scugnizz' of the post-war era, he is eager to embrace whatever works best for him. If that means parroting Benjamin Franklin's aphorisms, so be it.
But the lawyer Vitale really nails the issue in the courtroom when he questions--while appearing to endorse--the supposedly higher quality of life in America: NEW SHOES (factory-made), schools with AIR-CONDITIONING. But he drives the point home when he reminds the court that Nando will be encouraged, in America, to look down upon the Italian way of life as inferior--the very way of life that Italians "love and defend to the death."
As for the supposed mix-up of drinks in the club: that was no directorial oversight. No one made a mistake there. As Lucia says, "Hands across the ocean." Following Avvocato Vitale's advice to both of them, each was set on trying to conquer the other.
As the rest of the film unfolds, it turns out that they do just that.
As for the future...one feels that Mike's return to Capri with Nando was just temporary, that he would prevail on taking them both to America with him. It might be just what Lucia was secretly hoping for, anyway. But then, what would happen? American bigotry toward foreigners--especially aliens, the ones that LOST, could become a problem for everyone. One senses that the end of the film is really just a beginning...