ONE OF the constant and attractive values of film culture, if we think of it from the viewpoint of specific or consistent screen roles, is its offer of exploration, understanding, and definition of ourselves. This sort of working relevance of film culture to viewers is possible because dedicated creative film-makers are themselves part of human society, and inevitably share many basic human values, problems, pleasures, etc, despite their diverse cultural, social, or geographical origin.
However, such a practical or relevant human offering, via film culture, seems threatened today by the indifference of partly a Hollywood commercial trend of making movies completely removed from everyday real life, especially its pleasures.
Such movies, like digital games, are made more by technical laboratory expertise, because they concern illusionary, or fantastic, or spectacular events, which in turn render films as mere scientific products, like newly invented gadgets, whose whole point, despite their thrilling stimulation,  rests on their ineffectual relation to ourselves among the dominant truths we encounter in common everyday life.
The films of Sophia Loren come from — and in fact preserve and project — a vivacious and fertile time-span when cinemas across the world provided the social atmosphere of cities and neighbourhoods with the fragrance of life’s diverse contemporary social pleasures and pains.
Not all films, nor even all of Loren’s, offered such an effect, of course, but a great many did; maybe more than half of all Hollywood and European film productions. The fact that cinemas were an impersonal (out of one’s home) social pleasure and past-time indeed had an effect on many film productions themselves, which reflected or added to the same exciting gregarious social atmosphere created by cinema-going.
In other words, the very optimistic, celebratory vivacity older cinema-going fans remember nostalgically today, comes from the quantity of films whose topics also concerned vivacious social interactions. In addition, the fact that cinemas in their heyday, especially in nations outside the USA and Europe, simply showed films that existed, regardless of their date of production, meant that the pleasure of cinema-going was 50% more real than simply being forced into the limited role of showing only recent or new films, as if all films that were not recent or new were automatically used-up, old-fashioned, out-of-date and irrelevant to contemporary life.
Most of Loren’s films are part of that vivacious and compelling bonanza of 1950s and 60s films, which were like a fragrant current floating out of cinemas with their exhilarated patrons. This quality was one of the first major pleasures provided by the cinema via many of its first female stars, in particular those who brought the screen to life with their personal style between the 1920s and 40s; actresses like Clara Bow, Jean Harlow, Myrna Low, Ginger Rogers, Joan Crawford and others, whose films, if seen by today’s generation, might shock and surprise them with their exhilarating freedom.
Sophia Loren’s films added a new and perhaps more engaging involvement with this prior tradition. What was Loren’s creative cinematic contribution? Herself; her distinct physical and attitudinal presence, which jelled to a definition of ‘woman’.
How this actress achieved popularity via the cinema cannot be separated from the almost magical circumstances of her social origin in post-War, poverty-stricken Naples, and her early desire to climb out of it via her development as a screen star.
As a skinny teenager, promoted first by her mother, then married to the cultured Carlo Ponti (a man  more than twice her age, who saw her screen potential and provided for her higher educational tutelage), Loren blossomed into one of the screen’s and Italy’s most physically beautiful women, who, as part of Italy’s dynamic 1950s cinematic culture’s ‘Pink Vamps’ (heavily made-up girls with sex appeal; Gina Lollobrigada was another), found work modelling her assets for the sensually provocative covers of novels, posters, etc.
Loren’s gift to the world as a film-star, however, is the use of  this personal physical beauty (like the naturally  magical reason for her artistic calling, enhanced by a particular temperament and attitude) to lead us by the eyes and mind into other areas of social awareness concerning ancient cultures, rustic rural lifestyles, feminine charm, ethnic customs, materialistic vanity,  intellectual snobbery, social freedom and romantic vulnerability, etc, which became the sub-text of her films, despite their apparent fleshy, sexy, mainstream appeal on a deliberate surface level.
Sophia Loren lured audiences into cinemas playing her films by her physical and temperamental beauty. This is nothing, or WAS nothing extraordinary in the cinematic profession, but such a tactic has important relevance for female viewers, who, if they know that Loren was also tutored or educated extensively by reading high-quality literature, and taught to appreciate modern painting, sculpture, classical and popular music, Italian and otherwise, film history, and fashion, should find such data a real-life inspiration to themselves as women, rather than become interested in this star, simply on the level of fantasy, infatuation, or even jealousy, which apparently is a defect in today’s fan world fed by extraordinary film roles and celebrity gossip magazines, where film stars and other creative professionals are not seen as simply developing artists, but privileged and even envied persons through disrespect  for their real-life struggles and privacy.
Loren’s artistic potential as a screen-star escalated in 1958 when she arrived in Hollywood from Italy, after already making a number of films for US or joint US/Italian film companies in Europe, on locations in Italy, Greece, and the UK; films like ‘QUO VADIS’ of 1949, her first film as an extra, where she would be interesting to be identified in her brief scene — like many other fledgling stars such as Elizabeth Taylor — among others in this famous lavish production.
Later, she began to develop into a full-blown actress in ‘WOMAN OF THE RIVER’ (1955), ‘BOY ON A DOLPHIN’, ‘PRIDE AND THE PASSION’, and ‘TIMBUCTU’ of 1957, and ‘THE KEY’ of 1958. Loren’s transfer to Hollywood in the late 50s built a significant bridge between US/European films and foreign film fans in tropical, lesser wealthy modernizing societies, especially in South America and the Caribbean.
The choice of Loren to be a major female screen star of  such a cultural venture was the brainchild of  brilliant Hollywood producers whose sociological insight into individual/social circumstances beyond immediate US/European locations helped make the 50s and 60s peak decades in US/European film excellence, and international relevance.
If we focus on just three of Sophia’s films made in Europe before she transferred to Hollywood in 1958:  ‘Woman Of The River’  1955; ‘Boy On A Dolphin’ 1957;  and ‘The Key’ 1958, the emphasis on hot, rustic, riverine ethnic environments and everyday problems become obvious.
Here, Loren’s tanned, tropical, earthy Latin roots, her voluptuous physical dimensions and supplementary sensuality act as a captivating introduction to stories involving domestic and peasant labour, the relation of rustic cultures to their archaeological artifacts, the role of pleasurable female friendship and companionship to transient seamen involved in vital transportation work between distant ports.
I remember seeing ‘Boy On A Dolphin’ at the beginning of the 60s at the Doreen Cinema (a wonderful, newly-renovated older cinema once named Rialto in the Guyanese coastal village of Kitty), and at the end of the film, walking home among villagers who had left the cinema on breezy Vlissengen Road — where Doreen (now demolished) once stood about eight hundred yards away from the visible seawall, wild beach and Atlantic Ocean — and seemed exhilaratingly aware of the similarity of the rustic coastal Mediterranean scenes they had just seen, and the natural seacoast village community to which they belonged.
We have come a long way since films like ‘Boy On A Dolphin’, with a relaxed Alan Ladd as the conscientious art lover and professor exuding a guiltless pleasure via the big screens of public cinemas.
Sophia Loren’s sun-drenched hedonistic aura highlighted the cinematic style of ‘Boy On A Dolphin’s’ director, Jean Negulesco, a Hollywood master who replaced his early classic dramatic and emotional intensity with a refreshing series of zesty, colourful cinemascope features, where pleasure fills the surface of the screen and the minds of international film fans.