THE HARDENING IRONIES OF ITALIAN FILMS

...An official reaction to neo-realism set in —although there was recognition that the style had performed a function of historical importance...

...That the same sex-and-gestures ingredients could be added to views of urban crime as well as of rural poverty, was proven in Too Bad She's Bad, in which Sophia Loren was able to look more undressed as a city-clothed girl than Lollobrigida barefoot and in country rags...

...The neo-realist classic, De Sica's The Bicycle Thief, had approached thievery as an inflammation of sores of war and defeat, infected by poverty and desperation...

...The two films, in fact, are releases of the same company, Ti-tanus Films—just as the great neo-realist classics were products of an industry turning out soggy tear-jerkers, elephantine spectacles, and dubiously cinematic records of favorite operas—not to speak of imitations of French imitations of American gangster epics...

...But crime in Too Bad She's Bad had become part of an Italian merry-go-round, with everyone gaily taking turns as crooks or victims —unless they were odd men out for a round, when they could be policemen...

...Non-professionals were recruited as actors, and photographed in their natural surroundings among the ruins of the cities and the land— a technique facilitated, if not aeter-mined, by the general practice of the Italian industry of dubbing in dialogue after shooting, using the voices of actors who could be selected without regard to appearance...

...Hollywood's bread-and-butter footage may differ in crust, flavor, and even ingredients...

...The new realism of the Italians impressed film makers throughout the world...

...The stories were not merely "true to life," but were intended as dramatic indictments of the terrors and debasements that had made a people into rubble themselves, living among ruins...

...Conversely, Renato Castellani's bitterly comic Two Cents Worth of Hope had pointedly exaggerated the hopelessness of mere hopeful honesty where there is no other way to live except by some form of masked dishonesty...

...The big money, it gradually appeared, could be tapped by extrapolating the more sensational elements of the first neo-realist successes, packaging them for shipment abroad so that "Made in Italy" on a movie could signify a recognizable brand of goods...

...The new comedies played forehead-slapping, gesticulating Italians for laughs, recreating with a vengeance stereotypes which used to keep the Italian government, and Italian-American groups here, in a constant uproar of complaints against Holly wood movies...

...market, to distribution principally among the "art houses" which show off-trail and foreign films to relatively small audiences...

...In fact, Ophuls may be said to have proven here conclusively the waste of De Sica's talents in Rome, and of Boyer's in his years in Hollywood...

...There was an implicit contempt in the caricature—for the Italians themselves, and for foreigners like us, who could be sold phony pictures of Italians for souvenirs...

...With La Lollobrigida as a peasant girl running around without shoes—and barely much else—and Vittorio De Sica as a Carabinieri commander in a part that was pure pro-sciutto, no matter how artfully he sliced it, the film managed to mix sex and caricatured Italianisms with just enough realistic photography of poverty-ridden peasants in a rocky, arid country...

...To create filmic works of artistic integrity presupposes a vast complex of technology and commerce: the system whereby people pay the cost of what they see, be it art or not...

...For once, it seemed that the aesthetic-industrial paradox of the cinema was being resolved for more than one film at a time...

...A third film in the series, so far entitled Bread, Love, and . . . , has yet to be shown...

...Federico Fellini's The White Sheik, offering an opportunity to follow the development of an important new talent, is an uneven farce about the "Fumetti," the photographically-illustrated equivalents of romantic comic books—somewhat reminiscent of Merlon Of The Movies...

...and others, the movie cameras were taken out of the studio atmosphere of controlled falsity...

...A culture should not be judged only by its trash—although a great deal may be learned, as archaeologists have proven, from what turns up in the garbage...

...De Sica may personify the paradoxical synthesis of art and commerce in Italian films—and the ironic meaning of his double role may become clearest whenever invidious comparisons are made of the relative commerciality of the films of each country...

...The basic situation was Miss Loren's blithe deceit—interminably repeated —of an honest, but dense cab-driver, Marcello Mastroianni...

...The new sexy comedies offered it with an invitation to leer in an Italian accent at the feminality of Silvana Mangano, Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, and a spicy salsa of others...

...In fact, it may be that he is caricaturing himself in his younger roles, most of all, in his parts in such films as those of the Bread, Love, and . . . series...

...In fact, the relationship of non-actors and the director who evokes from them a reenact-ment of their genuine experience is at the heart of the neo-realistic idea...

...At its best, it is of the essence of creative cinema—clearly contrasting with the proficient presentation of carefully confected screen personalities that is the nature of most movie making for entertainment, everywhere...

...Carlo Battisti, who achieves a harrowing dignity in this role, had never acted before—like most of the people in De Sica's films...

...The more popular the art, the more pressing is the problem of the weight of money on works of the spirit...

...The dietary problems, however, are more alike than not...

...The scenes between these two masters have a wealth of meaning far beyond run-of-the-reel standards of film acting, revealing that genius for acting with other actors that is a rarity in films...

...The formula was so profitable that it was repeated immediately in Bread, Love, and Jealousy, a sequel that appeared in theatres in the United States as Frisky...

...Its outlook was considered too grim, and discouragement for a revival of tourism...

...In his long, extraordinary career in the theatre and in films, De Sica has been a successful performer and manager, a wildly worshipped matinee idol and universally respected character actor...

...Around cafe tables, people interested in films may have talked about aesthetics and ideologies...

...Several interesting films indicative of the persistence of vigor in Italian film making may soon appear here...

...In scenes which are among the most grimly excruciating ever filmed, De Sica depicts the treatment of people by people—the evidence of a society's respect for itself in its respect for one old man, who is at once symbol and personification of what modern, civilized humanity may live and labor a "useful" lifetime to become...

...The film was supposed to be a farce about light-hearted larceny in Rome...

...If Rossellini made the first great neo-realistic films after the war, Open City and Paisan, De Sica has made the greatest: Shoe-shine, The Bicycle Thief, Miracle In Milan—a synthesis of realism and fantasy—and Umberto D. The last named, the finest fruit of his collaboration with writer Cesare Zavattini, is quite possibly the masterpiece of the style, the film De Sica himself regards as his best...

...But the mockery-for-money of the sex-and-gestures comedies is a kind of simony...

...Again, Vittorio De Sica provided ham with an Italian spice as Miss Loren's father, a master crook contemptuous of the inept journeymen of modern crime...

...In his acting, De Sica manifests the insight into the realization of character that is the obverse face of his own greatness as a director—reflected, unquestionably, in his unique control of non-professional performers in his neo-realistic films...

...Representing the ideals and techniques of neo-realism at their most uncompromising best, the film surpasses easy moralizing or doctrinaire propaganda about the treatment of the aged by a hypos-tatized "society...

...Poverty and crime can be comic, to be sure...

...Already receiving an erratic distribution is Augusto Genina's Maddalena, with Marta Toren, Gino Cervi, and Charles Vanel: a parable of pious hypocrisy in a mountain village, as a prostitute is tragically inveigled into portraying the Virgin in a miracle play...

...In Italy, neo-realism revitalized the film industry, with the products of the cameras providing one of the chief dollar-earning exports of a chaotic economy...

...The films made money...

...The right kind of laugh can be the clearest illumination, and the deadliest indictment—and there are times when we might as well laugh, for all that we can do anything else...

...Its philosophy was regarded as negativistic, and there were rumbles—with considerably good reason—that it was less honestly self-critical of Italian faults than expressive of pro-Communist influences in the studios...

...This may introduce Fellini's more important / Vitelloni (The Wastrels), with Franco Fabrizi and Franco Interlenghi, a satire of small town depravities, and La Strada (The Road), with Giulietta Masina, Aldo Silvani, and two Americans, Anthony Quinn and Richard Basehart—an attempt to unite the mystical and realistic, to build a symbolism of tragedy in a drama of pathetically stupid carnival folk...

...And yet, it may be only because he is himself, as an actor, one of the great screen personalities of the world, that De Sica the director can dedicate himself to his ideals of cinema...

...The consideration of values in international trade, however, brought a change in the balance of art and commerce...

...In the United States, the film astonished the industry, getting distribution beyond the "art" circuit, and building huge grosses—as did Anna, again with Miss Mangano: a compound of sex and sordidness, shown here with dialogue dubbed in English, that was called "too clever" and "artificial" even by Italian critics...

...Most exciting is the prospect of 77 Tetto (The Roof), a drama of life among the homeless poor, on which Vittorio De Sica has been working...

...The joke about the respectable criminality of the De Sica-Loren menage, and the hapless honesty of the young man, was attenuated with much loud anguish, waving of arms, and behavior to make that old Hollywood Italian, Henry Armetta, seem phlegmatic by comparison...

...The neo-realistic films had treated the explosive enthusiasms and violent apathies characteristic of Italians as matters of fact, but with an affection that could see them as entertaining...

...The cinema— for the archetypal example of modern, popular art—must be an industry before it can be an art, and an art all the while it is an industry...

...In Open City, Paisan, The Bicycle Thief, Shoeshine...

...But around conference tables, it was argued that neo-realistic films skim only the topmost cream of the box-office...

...These notions, however, may have been merely supports for a kind of cash-register pragmatism that Europeans like to regard as a typically Hollywoodian characteristic in matters of art...

...It is surely ironic to be looking forward to The Roof, directed by De Sica, at the same time that we might expect something to arrive called Scandal in Sorrento, in which De Sica appears again with Sophia Loren...

...The film industry in Italy is heavily subsidized by the government, and bureaucratic interest in what the screen shows inevitably influences what the camera sees...

...They are limited, in the prime U.S...

...Urged to express their people's anguish after years of war, defeat, and occupation, and stimulated by the documentary reportage of the war films, they revived the style of screen realism...

...Working at first with out-dated film and creaking equipment, men like Roberto Rosselini, Vittorio De Sica, and Luchino Visconti discarded the grandiose propaganda that had made Italian movies of the Mussolini heyday mere masks for a sickened society...

...The Hardening Ironies Of Italian Films By MARTIN S. DWORKIN NO EPITHET of contemporary aesthetic criticism has greater muzzle velocity than "commercialism" —and rightly so, once we are clear about those critics who seem to believe that nobody need care anything about a work of art for it to have value...

...No irony of the ambiguous directions of Italian films, in fact, is more revealing than the role of De Sica as both creator of masterpieces of neo-realism, and as actor in many of the sexy comedies which have commercialized—and often perverted—the qualities of the style...

...The laughter seems for the wrongest reasons...

...Dedicated to his father, after whom it is entitled, Umberto D is a narratively simple account of an old man's desperate struggle for life and dignity on an inadequate pension...

...In the neo-realistic films, sex had been treated with frankness and affirmation, as the expression of vitality amidst destruction and despair...

...The arts of the modern industrial age compound the dilemma into perpetual paradoxes...

...In it, "socially significant" realism about miserable working conditions of women workers in the rice country of northern Italy was tricked out with some cops-and-robbers melodrama, and puffed out with big bosoms and bare thighs among the flooded fields...

...To make a film requires great capital and complicated machines and processes...

...It is again ironic that audiences outside Italy—and especially in the United States—have had so little opportunity to see De Sica in any but floridly comic roles...

...Both industries eat regularly, but they do not live by bread—alone or even first of all...

...The essential atomism of film production, with each shot relating to the others through the conceptual grasp of the director much more than through the performer's projection of the intentions of the screen play, creates problems for actors which are seldom appreciated...

...nor is there comfort in the feeling that the American screen at its stereotypic worst had not shown Italians such disrespect...

...In the United States, elements of its style could be seen at once in films like Boomerang and Crossfire, and later in On The Waterfront— and in innumerable television dramas, notably two made into films, Marty and The Catered Affair...

...Bitter Rice, with Silvana Mangano, was a turning point—in the direction of bigger box office...

...To be sure, his ham has a texture and flavor that is incomparable...

...These not-so-secret ingredients for a huckster able product turned out to be, not unpredictably, a peculiarly Italianate expression of sex, and a deliberate cartoon of the volatile Italian temperament...

...Just after World War II, the arguments over the box-office value of creative film making received a terrific lift from a group of Italians...

...But for the statesmen of new directions for Italian movies, the "old" neo-realism now had certain disadvantages...

...There could be a lesson here for those—Europeans and Americans— who seem to think that the problem of living with the paradoxes of cinema, the art that must create its integrity within an industry, is something peculiar to Hollywood...

...Has there ever been so masterfully grandiose a portrayal ol courtroom histrionics as his defense of Lollobrigida (on the principal ground that her endowments made her a national monument, hence beyond censure for mere murder) in Blassetti's Times Gone By} It is only when the fortunes of film distribution bring us such a film as The Earrings of Madame De, made by Austrian Max Ophuls in France, with De Sica, Charles Boyer, and Danielle Darrieux, that we may fully appreciate his subtle eloquence...

...It was a comedy, Bread, Love and Dreams, however, that enabled us to watch neo-realism hit the real stride of its decadence—and to laugh, it must be added, even as we shook our heads...

...Italians continue to create works of serious cinematic art, even as their film industry tries to out-Hollywood Hollywood in star-frenzy and banality-manufacture—with some assistance from the French, with whom there is an increasing amount of collaboration, often disconcerting to those disaffected cultural pluralists in the little theatres and film groups, who count upon European films not only to exemplify serious cinematic quality, but to prove by indirection that America has a monopoly of vulgarity...