Oh! Sabella

Raffaele, a student from Naples, gets word that his beloved grandmother Sabella is dying and goes straight to Pollena. When he arrives the grandmother is in bed but starts getting better. Sabella's real concern is something else: she wants her grandson married and has chosen the bride herself. Raffaele has other plans in the city. In the village everyone does what Sabella says; nobody tries opposing her. Dino Risi's film comes from Italian comedy as it stood in the fifties: a small town, a crowded family, an order in which everyone is in everyone else's business. Tina Pica, who plays the grandmother, caught on so strongly in the part that several more films were made around the character and Pica became a type in Italy. Peppino De Filippo and a young Renato Salvatori are in the cast. The telling is light but what sits behind it is not: who decides who marries whom.