The most enormously popular of the fifties comedies were also the most escapist of the lot: Pane, Amore e Fantasia generated the Italian cinema's highest box-office to that date, and spawned a whole series of spicy "Bread and Love" comedies. Like Dino Risi (see Il Segno di Venere, June 21), Luigi Comencini was a former documentarist with firm roots in realism whose career soared when he found the perfect formula: high comedy set in a "realistic" framework. But in this peasant village near Abruzzi, realism gives way to a more entertaining fantasy of poverty and the local peasants, who are painted in broad strokes and played tongue-in-cheek by Gina Lollobrigida, Vittorio De Sica and company. Lollobrigida was the quintessential "maggiorate"; she was bread, love and dream all rolled into one. But this village gamin, whose rags can't quite cover her almost animal "femininity," is not the ne'er-do-well people take her to be, and, as Mira Liehm has written in her book Passion and Defiance, "(she) ends up living happily ever after because she is modest, goes to church, never complains about her misery, and believes in good and evil, just as the priest has always taught her." The fun is in getting to the "happily ever after," at which point the series may as well stop. In Bread, Love and Dreams, a romantic quartet is set in motion: De Sica, the town official, desires to end his bachelorhood in the arms of the village midwife (Marisa Merlini), and when this fails he goes after Lollobrigida, who in turn is in love with Roberto Risso. In the end, all the proper knots are tied...only to be untied in Bread, Love and Jealousy, when the whole crazy farce starts up again, with some new twists.