Magnani won Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival for her funny and formidable portrait of an accidental activist in this populist comedy. A mother fighting to keep her family afloat in the squalid suburbs of Rome, Angelina (Magnani) rallies her fellow housewives in defiance of corrupt landlords and black-marketeers. Soon she is at the center of a full-fledged movement, and her husband is relegated to serving the pasta—at least until domestic order reasserts itself in the end. Angelina’s leadership is driven not by ideology but by a fierce maternal nature: in the film’s brand of proto-feminism, personality is political.