The title, Poor but Beautiful, actually refers to the boys--two years later, Dino Risi would make Belle ma Povere, about the girls--in a series of films about the everyday adventures of sex-starved youths (the Italian screen's own brat pack) roaming the streets of Rome. Marisa Allasio stars as a young woman who leads two neighborhood boys on a merry chase before settling on (or for) an older man. Dino Risi's series, along with Luigi Comencini's Bread and Love films, represented the start of a wave of optimistic (and more explicitly escapist) comedies that critics called "pink neorealism." For they still retained the location shooting, the use of non-professional actors, the slight, basically realistic plots--the marvelous spontaneity--of neorealism in their observations of the lives of penniless people. (Risi leaves behind Comencini's "idyllic" rural villages for the urban slums.) Marisa Allasio joined the ranks of the 'maggiorate,' the all-too-female national archetype whose natural exuberance was as often as not misunderstood as a come-on (the basis of much of the comedy in a male-oriented genre). But they often had the last word in the mocking humor of such talents as Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren.