On Screen

...There are a few laughs, but the humor is farcical and none of the episodes even faintly credible...

...partly to Suffrin's script, which manages to achieve a kind of macabre poetry in some of the exchanges between the derelicts, especially those between the protagonist, Ray Salyer, and his older sidekick, Gorman Hendricks...

...On SCREEN By William Murray Two Slum Films: On the Bowery' Is Art, Gold of Naples' Tired Myth On the Bowery is a remarkable film, a study of human degradation that makes no compromises with either commercialism or propaganda and so succeeds in rising above the level of mere artiness to that of art...

...the least successful one features Silvana Man-gano in a wheeze about a warmhearted prostitute...

...In any case, the version you'll see in this country includes only four of the six episodes originally filmed, each one starring a different colossus of the Latin industry...

...As directed by Vittorio de Sica, its main purpose is to entertain us with cute and picturesque little vignettes of the destitute but happy inhabitants busily cheating and plundering each other...

...Usually, they just set up the scene and told the bums what to talk about: subjects having to do with their pasts or the daily problems of life on the streets...

...But any careful documentary could have accomplished that much...

...Gold of Naples also deals with life in the slums—in this case, the back alleys of Naples—but is another kind of film entirely...

...Scenes involving minor characters had to be completed on the spot because things change so fast on the Bowery: People disappear overnight, they get banged up or arrested or just drop dead...

...The most successful vignette presents us with Sophia Loren as an adulterous pizza vendor and Paolo Stoppa as a hilariously bereaved husband...

...This makes it hard for me to be terribly sympathetic to a film like Gold of Naples, which is peddling that tired old myth again, especially when the director of it happens to be the same man who gave us Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief...

...Hendricks died shortly after completion of the film, as did quite a few others...

...But though I've spent a considerable amount of time in Naples at various periods in my life, I've never, for some inexplicable reason, succumbed to this delusion...

...In between, we have de Sica as an impoverished nobleman addicted to gambling and reduced to playing scopa with the janitor's tiny son, and Toto as a town crier afflicted in his own home by a sponging tough guy...

...Using the framework of a simple story about what happens to one man during the course of a two-day binge on Skid Row, producer Lionel Rogosin and cameraman Richard Bagley manage to convey an exact and devastating impression of life among the flophouses, bars, tenement doorways and mission houses of the Bowery...

...What makes On the Bowery an extraordinary experience is that somehow Rogosin, Bagley and Mark Suffrin, who is responsible for the script, succeeded in making a movie from within—a movie that is the Bowery, not an outsider's appraisal of it...

...For some reason I have never been able to fathom, Naples is almost everywhere regarded as a kind of pauper's paradise in which all the vices flourish and are somehow to be tolerated, nay embraced, because the sun shines all the time and the Neapolitans are charming and lovable people...

...The trio worked with only the outline of a script and a few specific lines of dialogue written to move the story along...

...One idiot once confided to me that Naples was the only place in the world where he didn't mind being robbed...

...Although the film took about four months to complete, all the synchronized sound sequences were shot in five sleepless days...

...Carl Lerner also deserves praise for brilliant editing...

...It is quite the best American movie of its kind I've seen since The Quiet One a few years back and, in my opinion, superior to it in every way...

...There is no beautiful, uplifting message to mar the integrity of this unusual venture into the depths...

...Partly this quality is due to the direction (mostly Rogosin) ; partly to Bagley's merciless camera, which misses nothing, moves when it has to, and isn't afraid to hold still long enough to record some of the most revealing facial close-ups you've ever seen...

...A few of the scenes, therefore, have a forced, static quality, but most often what these men say to and about each other and themselves has the poignant and unbearable ring of truth, not untouched by flashes of beauty...

...The film misses nothing, even managing to convey such subtleties of human relationships as a social code that enables these men to help each other with one hand, steal from each other with the other, and still remain friends...