Italy: Seduced & Amended

It is a little hard to imagine Lyndon Baines Johnson staking his Administration's prestige over recent performances by Carroll Baker or Kim Novak. But in the land that produced Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida, the movie industry is seen in a deeper perspective. Last week the uneasy coalition government of Christian Democratic Premier Aldo Moro was threatened with a crisis over censorship of the cinema.

Recently the Vatican, mostly through its daily, L'Osservatore Romano, has been lambasting the nudity and immorality in Italian movies. Marriage, Italian Style was bad enough, but a worse offender now is a current boxoffice success called Le Bambole (The Dolls), which features Gina Lollobrigida playing a bored wife who falls for the nephew of a bishop attending the Vatican's Ecumenical Council. Her ef forts to seduce him succeed only after a daring striptease before the keyhole of his connecting room and a final confrontation at a distant rendezvous, where she awaits him gingerly clutching a bed sheet. This week a Roman magistrate will hale Gina, along with Producer Giovanni Lucari, into court to answer charges of violating Article 528 of the penal code, banning immoral exhibitions.

Hoping to please the Vatican, some Christian Democratic Deputies, over the objections of their coalition partners, the Socialists, introduced an amendment to a bill providing subsidies to Italian film makers. The amendment required subsidized movies to "exhibit respect for the ethical and social principles on which the Constitution is based." To everyone's astonishment, the amendment was adopted by a vote of 219 to 195, with the aid of the Monarchists and neoFascists, but mainly because more than 100 Communists, Socialists and Liberals (conservatives), all of whom were against the bill, happened to be away from Parliament when the vote was taken—possibly at the movies. The bill now goes to the Senate, where the Christian Democrats, Monarchists and neo-Fascists have 150 out of 320 seats, and Premier Moro is in a double bind. If the bill becomes law, Socialist Vice Premier Pietro Nenni may carry out his threat to walk out of the coalition and bring down the government. If Moro amends the amendment, back to the bill's original text, he will offend the Vatican.