Girl with a Suitcase should have been subtitled, The Importance of Being Italian. For few other films have so aptly illustrated the prevailing rule for movie makers: If you can't good, be foreign. If Girl with a Suitcase had been born an American movie, its producers would have been ridden out of town on a rail. But it is Italian, and therefore endowed with the historic decadence of old Rome, the gusty vivacity of the Latin temperament, the sophisticated air of the European continent, and all other benefits automatically accruing to foreign films. It hardly even matters that it's rotten.

Claudia Cardinale is the Girl, with a chest the size of the Suitcase. First, let's get one thing straight: an actress she ain't. Here entire dramatic technique consists of three actions:

1. Wringing her hands, or something in her hands--to indicate concern;

2. Biting her fingers--to indicate discombobulation; and

3. Bouncing her bosom--to indicate running. This repertory doesn't carry Miss Cardinale very far in a 111-minute film. There might be some excuse for Girl with a Suitcase if it served as a vehicle to show off Miss Cardinale's more obvious charms. But it doesn't even do that; the Cardinale form is well covered at all times, and as for sex, it is, like all other human emotion, simply beyond the scope of this film.

The theme of Girl with a Suitcase is an immensely popular one these days. Lorenzo (Jaques Perrin), a 16-year-old stripling, falls in love with Aida (Miss Cardinale), an older and more sophisticated person altogether, after his brother Marcello (Corrado Pani) betrays her (how he betrays her is a mystery). Lorenzo makes sacrifices for Aida, gives her money which is not his, and fights for her honor against assorted lechers while she looks on and tries to figure out what he is getting so excited about. Occasionally, she can understand what drives the boy, but she is too much for him, and at the end of the film they separate.

Among others, two American films--A Cold Wind in August and Goodbye Again--have seized upon the same general idea, and both have been far more succesful. Girl with a Suitcase moves at a snail's pace, even when there is a fist fight going on. Director Valerio Zerlini's method for showing great emotion is to have his principals stare hard at each other for minutes on end, or to focus the camera on one actor, who holds a constant expression, fighting off blinks and nervous tics, until the audience is driven to the far reaches of sanity and/or alertness. And, of course, Miss Cardinale's consummate lack of skill in a part that demands subtle shadings of emotion cripples the movie still further. I found myself reduced to rooting for her attackers, in hopes of seeing some action.

But still Girl with a Suitcase will be acclaimed. It has precisely one good scene, in which Lorenzo sulks as a middle-aged playboy tries to put the make on Aida. Because it is 99 and 44/100ths per cent Italian, however, it floats. The first scene of the movie, for example, shows a car stopping and Aida getting out to relieve herself. In an American movie, this would be deplored as unnecessary crudity, which it is; here, presumably, it is wonderfully realistic. It's about time people began to appraise foreign movies on grounds other than how foreign they are.