ID this movie with a breastfeeding scene

I may be sending you on a wild-goose chase, in that it’s possible that I just dreamed this, but if I did I’ve had the impression it’s a scene in a movie I saw. At the time, it puzzled me, in that I didn’t understand what was going on.

Here’s what I remember:

  1. I was about 10, so this movie came out in theaters around 1963. OTOH, I could have been as young as 8 or as old as 12, I suppose.

  2. the movie was black and white, I think.

  3. It wasn’t for kids. It was, I think, a war movie, set in Italy during the second World War.

  4. As I remember it, a lot of Italians were living in crowded conditions, and their town was under attack. These could have been partisans, or Mussolini supporters, or almost anything, but I think they were sympathetic to the American war effort.

  5. at some point, a woman with a baby had to feed her baby, in this crowded room, and she bared her breast and stuck his face in it. Nothing too sensational, but I was all “What the hell is THAT?” and then the scene was over, and the war picture resumed.

Any ideas what I saw? Or what I dreamt?

Stromboli perhaps. That was a 1950 neo-realist movie by Roberto Rossellini.

I think you can find Stromboli on Hulu Plus. It sounds like something Rossellini would do.

My first thought was La Ciociara (released as Two Women in the U.S.) But perhaps it’s too early (1960) to fit your timeline and according to IMDB, the scene I’m thinking of isn’t quite how I remembered.

Maybe. It wasn’t released in NYC (I can remember the theater I saw it in, oddly) until May of 1961. Why I would have been watching a Loren movie at age 8 is baffling.

Probably the thing that makes the most sense is to look up every film that theater showed from 1962 through 1964 and see if that triggers anything…