Italian Cinema E-Book

Barry Forshaw

• Herausgeber: Kamera Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

From the unbridled sensuality of silent Italian films, to the neorealist classic Bitter Rice, to the astonishing imagination of Fellini and the more cerebral and fascinating movies of Antonioni, Italy has a filmic legacy unlike that of any other nation. And then there are the popular movies: the lively sword and sandal epics of the peplum era through to the inextricable mix of sexuality and violence in the gialli of such directors as Mario Bava and Dario Argento. All the glory of Italian cinema is celebrated here in comprehensive essays, along with every key film in an easy-to-use reference format. This new and greatly expanded edition takes in major modern hits such as The Great Beauty/La Grande Bellezza. The new generation of Italian film and TV successes, important directors and movements of the past are are all given fresh and incisive evaluations, with every kind of film examined, from arthouse classics to the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone and co., and the stylish, blood-drenched thrillers and horror films that redefined their respective genres.

Leseprobe

From the unbridled sensuality of the orgy scenes in silent Italian cinema, through a topless Sophia Loren in a 1950s historical epic, to the erotic obsessions of Fellini and the more cerebral but still passion-centred movies of Antonioni, eroticism is ever-present in Italian cinema. And then there are the popular movies: the acres of tanned flesh (both male and female) on offer in the many sword and sandal epics of the Peplum era through to the inextricable mix of sexuality and violence in the gialli of such directors as Mario Bava and Dario Argento, in which death and sex meet in a blood-drenched, orgasmic coda.

Of course, there’s far more to Italian cinema: it is one of the most glorious and energetic celebrations of the medium that any nation has ever offered. For many years, this astonishing legacy was largely unseen, but the digitial revolution is making virtually everything available, from Steve Reeves’ muscle epics to long-unseen Italian art house movies.

The one characteristic that most of the great (and not so great) Italian movies have in common is the sheer individualism of the directors. And this applies to the populist moviemakers as much as to the giants of serious cinema. While Fellini, Visconti and Antonioni have rightly assumed their places in the pantheon, so have such talented popular auteurs as Sergio Leone, who was doing something with the Western that no American director would dare do, so radical was the rethink.

All the glory of Italian cinema is celebrated here in comprehensive essays, along with every key film in an easy-to-use reference format.

Barry Forshaw is one of the UK’s leading experts on crime fiction and film. His latest books are Euro Noir, Nordic Noir, British Crime Film and British Gothic Cinema. Other work includes Death in a Cold Climate: A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction, The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction, and the Keating Award-winning British Crime Writing: An Encyclopedia, and the first biography of Stieg Larsson. He writes for various national newspapers, edits Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk), and is a regular broadcaster. He has been Vice Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association, and has taught an MA course at City University on the history of crime fiction.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR NORDIC NOIR

‘Entertaining and informative companion... written by the person who probably knows more than anyone alive about the subject’

- The Times

‘Highly accessible guide to this popular genre’

- Daily Express

‘The perfect gift for the Scandinavian crime fiction lover in your life.’

- Crime Fiction Lover

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR BRIT NOIR

‘Unsurprisingly Barry Forshaw’s Brit Noir is a wonderful reference book that any self-respecting and serious connoisseur of crime fiction needs to have on their book-shelf.’

- Shots Magazine

‘Brit Noir is a book to dip into but also, as I did, to read from cover to cover. I’ve always considered Forshaw to be an honest reviewer and the book very much reflects his personality. It made the book a stimulating and, at times, amusing read.’

- Crime Pieces

‘UK critic-author Barry Forshaw long ago established himself as an authority on Englishtranslated Nordic mysteries, producing the guide Nordic Noir in 2013, which he followed up a year later with Euro Noir. Now comes Brit Noir: The Pocket Essential Guide to the Crime Fiction, Film & TV of the British Isles (Oldcastle/Pocket Essentials).’

- The Rap Sheet

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR EURO NOIR

‘An informative, interesting, accessible and enjoyable guide as Forshaw guides us through the crime output of a dozen nations’

- The Times

‘Entertaining, illuminating, and indispensable. This is the ultimate road map for anybody interested in European crime books, film, and TV.’

- Euro But Not Trash

‘An exhilarating tour of Europe viewed through its crime fiction’

- Guardian

‘Exemplary tour of the European crime landscape... supremely readable’

- The Independent

Also By Barry Forshaw

Nordic Noir

Euro Noir

Brit Noir

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My grateful thanks, for help and inspiration, to:

Dr Louis Bayman

Dr Fabrizio De Donno

Dr Nicoletta Di Ciolla

Christopher Fowler

Dr Pasquale Iannone

Kim Newman

Dr Giuliana Pieri

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. Neorealism: Key Directors

2. Personal Cinema: Fellini, Antonioni and Others

3. Gialli and Horror: Bava, Argento and Co.

4. The Italian Western: Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci

5. Magpie Mayhem: Poliziotteschi

6. Italian Cinema: The Films

7. Into the Twenty-First Century

8. Films since 2000

9. Italian Crime Television after 1999

10. Key Film Stars

Index

Plates

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

Is sexuality the key to Italian cinema? From the unbridled sensuality of the orgy scenes in silent Italian cinema through a topless Sophia Loren in a 1950s historical epic to the image of Silvana Mangano, her skirt provocatively tucked into her underwear in the neorealist classicBitter Rice(Riso Amaro), up to the erotic obsessions of Fellini and the more cerebral but still passion-centred movies of Antonioni, eroticism is ever-present. And then there’s the popular Italian cinema: the acres of tanned flesh (both male and female) on offer in the many sword and sandal epics of the peplum era through to the inextricable mix of sexuality and violence in thegialliof such directors as Mario Bava and Dario Argento. The latter may be said to be the final exhausted sigh of Italian concupiscence: a full-onliebestodin which death and sex meet in a blood-drenched, orgasmic finale.

Of course, there’s far more to the genius of Italian cinema than this one motivating factor, and, while the industry may have been in abeyance for decades until its renaissance in the twenty-first century, its history represents one of the most glorious and energetic celebrations of the medium of cinema that any nation has ever offered. For many years, this astonishing legacy was largely unseen, but the DVD revolution has made virtually everything available, from Steve Reeves’ muscle epics to long-unseen Italian art house movies, the latter often known to cinephiles by name only. The element of social commitment, often a key theme in neorealism, gave way as the years progressed to delirious experiments with other genres (often with a strongly surrealistic overtone), but the one characteristic that most of the great (and not so great) Italian movies have in common is the sheer individualism of the directors. And this applies to the populist moviemakers as much as to the giants of serious cinema. While Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti and Michelangelo Antonioni have rightly assumed their places in the pantheon, such talented popularauteursas Sergio Leone have acquired a copper-bottomed following over the years, after the almost derisory reaction that their otherwise highly successful movies initially received – mainly due to the fact that Leone and co. were using a popular genre, the Western, and doing something with it that no American director would dare to do, so radical was the rethink.

With the astonishing contributions over the centuries to the world of the arts (notably painting) for which Italy was responsible, it was hardly surprising that early silent Italian films were shot through with the same visual richness as the great works of such painters as Veronese and Caravaggio. Italian silent cinema is best remembered as a great flowering of the epic and historical costume drama, notably the swarming, extras-packed Roman epic.The Taking of Rome(La Presa di Roma) in 1905 is often celebrated as the first important narrative movie, with its plot of the breaching of Porta Pia by Italian troops in the nineteenth century handled with great panache. A synthesis with the other arts was evident in the provision of music to accompany this film; this was, of course, the era of Respighi, whose highly coloured music is often disparagingly referred to as being like film music, as if that were the most deadly of criticisms.

The director Giovanni Pastrone (1883–1959) showed an exuberant grasp of cinema inThe Fall of Troy(La Caduta di Troia, 1911), which demonstrated tremendous assurance in its use of massive crowds within equally massive sets. The same director’sCabiria(1914), possibly the best known of all Italian silent films, and Mario Caserini’sThe Last Days of Pompeii(Gli Ultimi Giorni di Pompei) in 1913 inaugurated a theme that was to recur in the grand days of the peplum epics. Few later versions of these tropes had quite the panache of Pastrone’s and Caserini’s work.Cabiriawas extensively hand-tinted (a technique utilised most notably in the US with Lon Chaney’sThe Phantom of the Opera), and the staging of such scenes as the one in which the heroine Cabiria is to be sacrificed to Moloch, the Carthaginian god, transcends the limitations of the silent era, and is still awe-inspiring even today.

Other elements that were to feature throughout the history of Italian cinema are also handled with great assurance here: elaborate special effects and cinematic trickery that create an operatic sense of scale from limited resources. Italian audiences of the day flocked to these immense epics, and it is a testament to their ambition that their characterisation is still more subtle than one would expect of the era (although it is necessary for modern viewers to grit their teeth through some semaphore-style silent film acting).

Cabiriaalso saw the arrival of an iconic figure who was to feature (along with his myriad progeny) in many muscleman films of the 1960s: the super-strong hero Maciste. InCabiria, he was played by the non-actor Bartolomeo Pagano, a strapping Genoan dockworker who became a star after his appearance in the film. Maciste was a tremendous hit with audiences, and he later returned to fight against insuperable odds in many Italian epics of the 1960s, although his films would be retitled in the US and Britain as non-Italian audiences were not familiar with the character: Maciste often became Hercules or Goliath.

Rather like the British cinema, the Italian film industry enjoyed periods of success followed immediately by hardship and turmoil. A particularly swingeing economic crisis decimated the industry after the First World War, despite the fact that Italian films had been selling successfully in the American market. The films, however, continued to be made for appreciative local audiences, often built around the burgeoning star system, carefully cultivated by the filmmakers of the day. And while these stars (such as the charismatic Lyda Borelli) are little known today, the acting style employed is often surprisingly low-key and modern, as evidenced by Borelli’s seductive performance in Mario Caserini’sLove Everlasting(Ma l’Amore Mio Non Muore, 1913). The sexuality of the films of this era is often surprisingly up-front:The Serpent(La Serpe, 1919), Roberto Roberti’s erotic epic, is full of imagery that remains deeply sensuous even to this day. The silent era was dominated by celebrated actresses such as Maria Giacobini and Diana Karenne, with some equally charismatic male stars making an impression.

The other arts continued to influence the cinema, and often various movements – such as the Italian Futurists – attempted to utilise the medium for their own purposes. After Marinetti’s celebrated manifesto (which took the art world by storm when it appeared inLe Figaroin 1909), it was only natural that the Futurists would be fascinated by the apparatus of cinema, with their preoccupation with the interaction of movement, the human figure and machinery. The essayThe Futurist Cinema(September 1916) made a strong plea for the cinema to embrace its essentially visual nature and become both impressionistic and dynamic.

Certainly, the darkest days of the Italian nation were the Fascist era, and if Italian cinema of the day simply provided no more than escapism, there were (inevitably) few chances for the directors to do much else. Various sloe-eyed Lolitas seduced their male co-stars, while Maciste battled various nemeses (both natural and supernatural). The dark days began in earnest in 1934 with the appointment of Luigi Freddi as head of the Direzione Generale per la Cinematografia, an organisation that was as sympathetic to the Fascist movement as Freddi himself. A fund for Italian filmmaking was created, and one of the key elements of Italian cinema also dated from this period: the now famous film complex Cinecittà, which no less a figure than Mussolini himself opened in April 1937. As Italy continued to be ruled by a Fascist government (from the 1920s to the 1940s), Mario Camerini became a key figure. HisRails(Rotaie, 1929) was a powerful study of love, which avoided dealing with the political realities of the period, as did Alessandro Blasetti’sSun(Sole, 1929), now a lost film. Blasetti made an important historical spectacle withPalio(1932).

Looked at today, refreshingly few of the films produced during the Fascist period show the crushing political orthodoxy one might expect – there are far fewer, for instance, than the endless paeans of praise to Stalin made under duress by Russian directors after the communist revolution. But there were such films as Augusto Genina’sThe Siege of the Alcazar(L’Assedio dell’Alcazar), which described a Fascist victory (Franco’s forces fighting the far greater numbers of a republican army). The award of a Mussolini prize hardly covered the film with glory, looked at from the post-Fascist era.

But on the horizon was Roberto Rossellini’sRome, Open City(Roma Città Aperta, 1945), which added a new level of sophistication and ambition to the Italian cinema and took it far beyond the kind of material produced by the journeymen directors of Mussolini’s regime. Around the time of Il Duce’s fall, Rossellini produced such films asA Pilot Returns(Un Pilota Ritorna, 1942); while still recognisably a propaganda piece, the Rossellini of the future was clearly in evidence.

The aristocratic Luchino Visconti had been given a book that greatly impressed him: a French translation of James M. Cain’sThe Postman Always Rings Twice. From this he would make one of the great Italian films of sexuality and violence –Obsession(Ossessione, 1943) – and the inglorious recent past of the Italian cinema quickly receded. An explosion of filmmaking was in the offing, with all genres up for grabs. But the overriding preoccupation for most directors of the period, whether they were from working or middle-class backgrounds or had enjoyed a more aristocratic upbringing, as had Visconti, was the life of the common man. Some of the greatest films produced in Italy would result from this preoccupation, before audiences and directors tired of realism and yearned for colour, spectacle and unbridled sexuality. And as the film mentioned above demonstrates, the industry boasted filmmakers perfectly prepared to give audiences just what they wanted – even if their frankness and attitudes upset the all-powerful Catholic Church.

Finally, let’s talk about a death and a rebirth. Almost from the beginning, Italian cinema has had two coexisting strands, one respectable and one thought (wrongly) by many Italians to be meretricious and unworthy of serious attention: the ambitious, artistically serious film and the catchpenny exploitation movie in a variety of genres. While some of the finest auteurs have produced examples of the former, the field of Italian popular cinema might also be said to have launched some remarkable, unorthodox talents who quickly stretched the parameters of the area in which they worked, be it the muscleman ‘sword-and-sandal’ epic, the Western, the thriller or the horror film. It could be argued that the Italian exploitation cinema had simply shut up shop by the 1990s and only intermittently produced the kind of startlingly innovative imitations of American or British cinema that were once itssine qua non. However, in terms of what might be described as arthouse cinema, Italian filmmaking has enjoyed something of a rebirth in the first decades of the twenty-first century, although it still has some way to go to live up to the legacy of its glory days. Several immensely talented directors are producing work that (some would argue) is almost as accomplished as that of any of their great forebears – such as Paolo Sorrentino’sThe Great Beauty(La Grande Bellezza, 2013). The final chapters of this revised edition celebrate both the new talents that have appeared since the year 2000 and those who had already established a reputation before the new millennium. No special pleading is necessary – Italian cinema at its best can still rival the most ambitious work being done anywhere in the world.

NEOREALISM: KEY DIRECTORS

Sexuality is certainly the wellspring of one of the key documents of Italian neorealism, Luchino Visconti’sObsession(Ossessione, 1943). This sultry, highly eroticised version of James M. Cain’s novelThe Postman Always Rings Twicemade the Hollywood version with John Garfield and Lana Turner seem a very buttoned-up affair indeed – it was to be many years before Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange would put table-top intercourse back into the tale. Visconti’sObsession(with Massimo Girotti and Clara Calamai) is a key film in the history of Italian cinema, as it functions on so many different levels. The director had been associated with the writers and filmmakers of the journalCinema(which was, in fact, a project put together by Vittorio Mussolini, the dictator’s son) and he had already set down a manifesto that included a swingeing attack on standard Italian cinema of the day (entitled ‘Cadavers’) and that also articulated his feeling that the everyday life of men and women should be encapsulated in cinema, with a keen and subtle response to the locales in which human dramas took place. The Minister of Popular Culture, Alessandro Pavolini, had rejected a proposed film of a Verga short story,Gramigna’s Lover, as it did not conform to the rules of Fascist cinema. As a replacement project, Visconti considered Melville’sBilly Budd, later filmed by Peter Ustinov, but finally opted for a film based on a French translation he had read of Cain’sPostman, with its betrayal, sexuality and resolutely blue-collar characters. With the assistance of such colleagues as Giuseppe De Santis (who would later become a director himself), Visconti relocated the book to a sultry Italy, and took its classic tale of a couple who murder the woman’s husband for his money and then fall out in an orgy of what ultimately proves to be lethal squabbling and made it quintessentially Italian. The characters of Frank, Cora and Nick become Gino, Giovanna and Giuseppe Bragana (the latter characterised as an admirer of Verdi – an element that would not have displeased the opera-loving Cain). But the principal change to the novel was the removal of the focus on the district attorney and Frank’s lawyer. In their place, Visconti created the homosexual Lo Spagnolo (The Spaniard), an early example of the gay director’s own interest in homosexuality. The first-person narrative of the novel was jettisoned for a cool and dispassionate camera style that brilliantly rendered the baked, arid landscapes with (for the time) impressive novelty. All the elements were brought together in a synthesis that was quite unlike anything that had previously been attempted in Italian cinema. There are details that are far more striking than anything to be found in Tay Garnett’s US version of the story, such as Gino shaving with a straight razor while, in the background, Giovanna massages the overweight body of her husband – as a harbinger of the violent death that ensues, this is a perfect visual metaphor. The film created something of a sensation, particularly among such critics as André Bazin, and it was clear that Visconti had elevated the squalid sex and violence of Cain’s plot into something that was genuinely operatic yet never overblown.

Needless to say, the film created a scandal in the censorious atmosphere of Mussolini’s Italy. Il Duce himself looked at the film, but did not halt its distribution; this was left to his son Vittorio, who famously denounced the film after a public screening with the words ‘This is not Italy.’ Perhaps it was not the Italy of the Fascists, but the humanity and power of the film survive long after so many of the dull propaganda pieces of the day have fallen by the wayside.

There is much debate about what the term ‘neorealism’ in Italian cinema actually means, and probably the safest approach is to regard it as a portmanteau concept in which various elements appear: a committed, generally left-wing view of the problems of society; deliberately de-glamorised pictures of Italian life; casts that often feature non-actors (sometimes shored up with professionals such as Anna Magnani); and, in general, working-class rather than middle-class milieus and concerns. There is little question that the form developed as a reaction to Fascism, but its deliberately ‘non-artificial’ aspects are in fact underpinned by a passionate approach to human problems that frequently reminds the viewer that Italy is the home of grand opera; in Italian opera, the verismo movement had produced operas with similar concerns, such as Mascagni’sCavalleria Rusticanaand Leoncavallo’sI Pagliacci. The key figures in the movement were Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, the aforementioned Visconti and Federico Fellini – the latter for his early films, although he is not strictly a neorealist director. All shared a passionate concern for conveying the realities of quotidian working-class existence, a trait that was particularly remarkable in the case of Visconti, with his aristocratic background. Themes that concerned these directors included ones which were then topical: the effects of the war and the resistance activities of the partisans; the degradation of the workforce through unemployment; and the aspects of municipal corruption that destroyed the quality of life for so many Italian working men and women. Rossellini’sRome, Open City(Roma Città Aperta, 1945) was a major box-office success and demonstrated that the movement could be popular as well as revolutionary. Similarly, the director’sPaisà(1946) and De Sica’sBicycle Thieves(Ladri di Biciclette, 1948) enjoyed popular as well as critical acclaim, as did De Santis’sBitter Rice(Riso Amaro, 1949). But, on the whole, the movement was appreciated more by the critics than by mainstream Italian audiences, who still preferred escapism (either of the Hollywood variety or via their own homegrown imitations) to depictions of the lives that many of them were living.

However, these films (and such classics as Rossellini’sGermany, Year Zero[Germania Anno Zero, 1948] and De Sica’sShoeshine[Sciuscià, 1946]) absolutely defined the movement and have proved timeless, still having a powerful impact today when the sociological concerns of the directors are now history. WithRome, Open City, Rossellini threw down a gauntlet for the cinema of the day. In many ways it was a classic example of guerrilla filmmaking, with most of the shooting taking place on location, and even the film stock being obtained by clandestine means. Rossellini did not enjoy the luxury of access to daily rushes, and all the sound in the film is post-synched as there was no budget for any live sound recording – in this, however, the film adopted a long-established Italian approach, whereby most of the dialogue is looped in the studio later. The film itself is a striking synthesis of radically different techniques: the documentary aspects of the film are set against operatically heightened emotions, and the partisan struggle against the German invaders is conveyed with both a dispassionate realism and an attention to violence and tension that makes most contemporary Hollywood (or British) efforts seem contrived. The characters are a partisan priest, Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi), who fights alongside partisan leader Manfredi (Marcello Pagliero) against the Nazis. Manfredi, however, is doomed when his treacherous lover Marina (Maria Michi) betrays him to the Germans (in the person of the psychopathic Major Bergmann, played by Harry Feist). Despite Fabrizi’s astonishingly nuanced performance, however, the character most viewers remember is, of course, the working-class Pina – an incandescent Anna Magnani – who is a friend of Manfredi. Her fate in the film at the hands of the Nazis, along with that of the brave priest, remains as powerful an image as ever it was when viewed in the twenty-first century, and if the Germans are allowed little nuance, this is part and parcel of Rossellini’s attempt to deliver his message with maximum force. The fact that the Nazi Bergmann is portrayed as a homosexual in a further effort to convey his perversion is not, in fact, an action that can be attributed only to straight directors; the gay Visconti also treated several of his homosexual characters in an unsympathetic fashion, and it can perhaps be read in the same way as the treatment by such directors as Hitchcock of his gay villains – a dramatic truism of the day that may not meet today’s standards of political correctness but that functions as a metaphor for transgression. Similarly, Bergmann’s colleague Ingrid is a predatory lesbian who is responsible for Marina’s traducing of Manfredi, seducing her with drugs and baubles. The pending marriage of Pina and the typesetter Francesco is a central image, making the final tragic denouement all the more powerful. But despite the fates of its central characters, there is a humanistic embrace of a possible future lying beyond the grim present. What still strikes the modern viewer is the richly drawn documentary surface, into which the more conventional film-star performance of Anna Magnani is perfectly integrated. The suspense sequences still pack a considerable punch, such as the moment when Fascist soldiers ransack workers’ apartments in the Via Casalini for hidden resistance fighters. It is, though, the death of Magnani’s character (shot in the street by soldiers) and the cruel torture of Manfredi by a drunken Nazi that stay in the memory, and Don Pietro’s execution remains one of the most harrowing scenes ever committed to celluloid.

WithPaisà, Rossellini moved even more resolutely into documentary mode, with a disjunctive narrative dealing with the Allied invasion of Italy. A voice-over and images of the movement of troops stress the documentary aspects, as does actual documentary footage bookending each separate section of the film. The individual episodes within this structure function brilliantly, and the relationship between the Italians and the liberating American soldiers is encapsulated in the very title: ‘paisà’ is a demotic term signifying countryman or friend, and was the standard form of address between the natives and the American GIs. The most memorable episode involves a black GI, with his fantasies of a return in triumph to the USA finally playing out in a tragic denouement, as he realises that his status as a black man in a racist America puts him in line with the disenfranchised Italians he finds himself among. The structure of the film, which details various events that give a patchwork picture of the Allied invasion, is powerfully convincing. Rossellini’s son Romano had died in 1946, and the director’s method of dealing with his grief was to shoot another film,Germany, Year Zero(Germania, Anno Zero); this was dedicated to his son, and the film foregrounds a youthful central character. After a somewhat portentous opening title, we are shown the destruction brought about in Berlin after the war, while a narrator tells us that we will be watching a truthful vision of this large city lying in ruins. The construction of the screenplay follows a more linear line thanRome, Open Cityand concentrates on the young Edmund, who lives with his father and sister in desperate circumstances. His father is ill, and his sister obtains money from Allied soldiers for sexual favours. Edmund’s brother Karlheinz was formerly a Nazi soldier and is in hiding. We are told that Edmund had denounced his father when the latter tried to end his involvement in the Hitler youth. Another negative, corrupt homosexual figure is portrayed in the Nazi schoolteacher Herr Enning, who sells records of Hitler’s speeches to the soldiers using Edmund as a go-between. At the same time, he lectures the young man on the Nazi philosophy in which he still passionately believes, and, working on the principle that the strong should survive while the weak fall by the wayside (one of the many simplifications of Nietzschean theory that the Nazis were responsible for), Enning persuades Edmund that he should murder his sick father. The ending ofGermany, Year Zerois as bleak as one could imagine. The effect of the film is occasionally schizophrenic, in that the documentary verisimilitude is undercut by the almost operatic horrors of the human story. The picture we are shown of ruined German landscapes remains immensely impressive, and the portrayal of the youthful Edmund (a perfect encapsulation of Nazi youth) is striking. Again, the concept of perverted ideology being married to sexual corruption is aired in the figure of Herr Enning, but the detail is often more sophisticated than this schematic set-up might suggest.

After Rossellini, the other patron saint of neorealism is De Sica. Vittorio De Sica was, in many ways, a more conventional filmmaker than his peers, and his success as an actor (initially as a romantic lead, then as a much-in-demand character actor in Hollywood) chimes with his more traditional approach. His first films as a comic actor do not wear well today, but when he took up directing in the early 1940s his true artistic calling was within his grasp. Utilising the screenplays of Cesare Zavattini, he created a body of work that continues to impress today.The Children Are Watching Us(I Bambini Ci Guardano, 1944) has a more structured feel than those films that display the more improvisatory qualities that are now seen as the hallmark of neorealism. The plot involves a woman’s infidelity, which results in the loss of her son’s love and her husband’s suicide; the presentation (seen through the eyes of the child) was remarkably successful, even though De Sica utilised everyday cinematic tropes to emotionally involve the viewer with his characters.Shoeshine(Sciuscià, 1946), the first major De Sica film in the neorealist canon, once again deals with the theme of the destruction of youthful ideals in the face of a cynical and bitter adult universe. Pasquale and Giuseppe, two shoeshine boys, save up to buy a horse. Unfortunately, they find themselves involved in a black-market scheme and are sent to an Italian borstal for juvenile criminals. Giuseppe escapes and meets an accidental death, which, however, is blamed on Pasquale.

The tragedy through which the boys’ friendship is destroyed is handled with masterly assurance by De Sica, and the cinematic language employed is much more sophisticated than that utilised by most Italian neorealist directors (not that they did not know how to use cinematic technique in a sophisticated fashion; rather, they chose not to). The performances of the boys (Rinaldo Smordoni as Giuseppe and Franco Interlenghi as Pasquale) are astonishing, and make most portrayals of childhood in the cinema (particularly the Hollywood variety) seem hollow. The horse – emblematic of the boys’ freedom – is a complex visual symbol that both opens and closes the film: its escape in the last reel is a metaphor for what has been lost between the two boys. De Sica is unsentimental about the boys; when Giuseppe’s brother is betrayed by Pasquale in prison (which occurs only because Pasquale is deceived into believing that Giuseppe is being beaten), the revenge taken by Giuseppe has disastrous consequences for both boys.

One aspect of neorealist cinema that now appears to have had variable results (although it was much lauded at the time) is the use by directors such as De Sica of non-professional actors. The two non-professional children inShoeshineare coached into giving remarkable performances, such is the empathy with which De Sica directs them. De Sica’s own skills as an actor made him hyper-conscious of the artificiality that a professional can slip into, but the great performances throughout the neorealist canon (such as those by Anna Magnani) often throw into perspective the limited range of the non-professional players. However, the triumph of the method is to be found inBicycle Thieves(Ladri di Biciclette, 1948), which is both De Sica’s masterpiece and one of the defining films of the neorealist movement. It is discussed in the next section.

AfterShoeshineandBicycle Thieves, De Sica presented his other great neorealist testament inUmberto D.(1952). This was the director’s own favourite film, which he financed himself, and its box office failure was a tremendous disappointment to him. At the time, it was viewed as sentimental and a falling off from the ideals of neorealism, but its reputation has subsequently grown considerably and it is now regarded as one of his great works.

Pensioner Umberto (Carlo Battisti) has been living a quiet and uneventful life until the series of disastrous events that we are shown in the course of the film. In a remarkable performance, Battisti presents the old man’s life in a series of well-observed tableaux with both his pet dog and a youthful maid who lives in the same apartment.

Battisti was a Florentine who had been a university professor, but such is De Sica’s direction of this non-professional that it is impossible to think of him as a non-actor. The theme of the film is the position of the old in modern society, and it remains as pertinent in the twenty-first century as when it was made – particularly as De Sica keeps in check the sentimentality that occasionally creeps into his films. This strategy is most marked in the presentation of Umberto D. himself, who is often shown to be an unsympathetic and bad-tempered character.

WhileBicycle Thieveshad revelled in itsnon pareilexterior photography, De Sica set himself the problem of filming indoors, but the Cinecittà interiors are brilliantly designed. This utilisation of studio resources never undercuts the neorealist agenda of the film, and the visual effects are extremely well handled. WhileBicycle Thieveswill remain De Sica’s signature work, it seems more and more likely thatUmberto D.will join it in the pantheon of neorealist masterpieces. Zavattini’s writing, too, is perfectly in accord with the director’s vision.