The Big Screen

by David Thomson

  Beneath this growing chaos, we are more than ever haunted by the terror that started with the Nazis and the fearsome test between resistance and collaboration that emerged from the French experience of war. We go back to those stories because they are not settled yet, and we wonder if such issues will come again. In his old Germany, Billy Wilder in A Foreign Affair (1948) gazed down at the ruins of Berlin with the music playing “Isn’t It Romantic?” That felt rueful, not superior. Very little known is Der Verlorene (1951), the film Peter Lorre went back to Germany to direct, in which he gives an agonized performance as a doctor who may have been involved in Nazi experiments. That is only a few years before Night and Fog, Alain Resnais’s stringent documentary on Auschwitz, the testament that would be shown in schools in so many countries and which stood for the world’s belated recognition of what concentration camps had been, and what meanings they left.

  In Poland, Andrzej Wajda chronicled the Polish resistance movement from the outbreak of war to the Russian takeover—A Generation (1955), Kanal (1957), and Ashes and Diamonds (1958) were major events in their time, but they are neglected now. In Russia, Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent (1977) was just one version of the war between partisans and German invaders—and it is still close to unbearable, despite too much religious reference at the conclusion. It is impossible to consider the work of Andrei Tarkovsky without constant reference to war, whether in terms of Russian response to the Second World War (Ivan’s Childhood, 1962, and The Mirror, 1975) or of being suspended under the threat of a new, more infinite shadow (The Sacrifice, 1986).

  Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) is not ostensibly a war film, but its action takes place on broken waste ground best explained by the passage of some devastating conflict. So many recent films, sometimes under the guise of “sci-fi,” have sought to create the end of our world. The Terminator films are examples that entertained a huge audience and in which Arnold Schwarzenegger, a formidable opportunist, went from dread pursuer to desirable ally.

  Designing and filming the end of the world is a queasy speculation, and Armageddon has its own clichés now, but in Stalker, Tarkovsky ends with the audacious mystery of a large, unexplained shaking. The same sort of thing happens in The Sacrifice, and it feels as if the theater, the screen, the film, and our culture are about to be shaken to bits.

  If we compare Fred Zinnemann’s box office hit From Here to Eternity (1953) with Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998), the linkage of James Jones as author seems implausible. Zinnemann made a picture about the army as an institution, a small but intense tragedy, and the scarring of several novelettish lives. For its day, that film was a breakthrough and a stirring display of acting. In contrast, The Thin Red Line is about a Pacific island where, for a moment, a war occurred. It is a botanical panorama in which the soldiers scurry and rant, like furious insects, lost in their attempt to win and survive. The island, its foliage, its fauna, and its light endure—as if the war was just a passing rainstorm. So war is put in its place, but only with a detachment that confined Malick’s film to a small audience.

  Our toughest films now are ruminations on our terror and the uncertainty as to whether life will go on, or deserves to. I do not mean the colossal, pluperfect battle scenes of Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and Avatar. I mean the settling gloom in No Country for Old Men (2007), where a shrewd and dutiful sheriff looks forward to death or retirement in a landscape where the drug trade is the war. I mean the confused loneliness of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now who has gone up the river on the current of soldiering and found disenchantment, the horror.

  Italian Cinema

  Some books tell you the Italians waited for the disasters of war to create their own modern cinema, and that they then laid down the principles of something called “realism” in a landscape and a funding system that had little else to offer. It was never as simple as that, just as “realism” keeps receding from our eager grasp, disarmed by the essential equivocation of the medium. If we like to think of “neorealism” as the movement made clear by three people—Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, and Vittorio De Sica—then it is plain that all three had active careers well before the end of Italy’s war. That they were stimulated and provoked by the end of Italy’s war is beyond question. Savage destruction of the fabric of a country does urge its inhabitants to consider what is real and what is not.

  Realism and fantasy, like the entire history of film and screens, is the story of personality and circumstances making their imprint on action. So “Italian neorealism” is a label, part of the marketing hype of the movies. The history and the stories need to be examined for what they were. Thus our trio of neorealists came from different directions, and went off at remarkable tangents soon after their “collective” years. Was it really a collective? Not beyond the way in which one artist in any medium may see good work by a contemporary and immediately feel the need—a mix of admiration, envy, helplessness, and true education—to steal from it.

  Italy’s special place in the pioneer age—with epics such as Quo Vadis? (1913) and Cabiria (1914)—passed away, and when it comes to the 1920s and ’30s, few of us have seen enough Italian films from that era, because so few of them obtained a release outside Italy. There is even a dismissive school of thought that says Italy in the 1930s was a land of vapid romances and society comedies, called “white telephone movies” because the characters were invariably talking on their stylish phones. Even if that were so, it suggests a reason to be cautious (and expectant): the telephone in American pictures of the same era, white or black, is often a sign of life and fun. Films where people chat on the phone are always more promising than those where they read speeches to one another. And today the cell phone is a steady means of narrative progression and cross-cutting.

  The fascist government of Benito Mussolini did not do as badly by the film industry as postwar revisionism tried to explain. It was under his leadership that the Cinecittà studio was built. A film school, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, was opened. And the first notable film festival, at Venice, was begun. Mussolini liked films, and soon after he came to power in 1924, he joined the then-current Italian notion to remake those epic films from years before that had made such flagrant use of Italian buildings, sunshine, and money. Soon after, there was a second version of Quo Vadis? (1925), directed by Gabriellino d’Annunzio and Georg Jacoby, which imported Emil Jannings to play Nero. It was such a disaster it closed down a studio. Whereupon Carmine Gallone and Amleto Palermi came together to make Gli Ultimi Giorni di Pompeii (1926), with María Corda (the first wife of Alexander Korda) in a lead role. The film cost 7 million lire and it was another disaster.

  Who can blame the fascists for modest retrenchment and for the new wisdom that Italy (with a limited home market and no natural sales overseas) should concentrate on smaller films? Were they great, or good? Who knows now? But one Italian film of the next era was great: it was made in 1934, for Novella Film, with the future publisher Angelo Rizzoli producing. It is the story of an Italian movie star, Gaby Doriot (played by Isa Miranda), or an investigation of her that wonders, if this woman can move so many, who is she at her core, and what does she want? The film is called La Signora di Tutti, and it is directed by Max Ophüls. As such, it is a small masterpiece filled with uncertainty about what happens to an actress, and clearly a movie that clears the way for a film such as Lola Montès (1955) as much as Sunset Blvd. (1950), or Vivre Sa Vie (1962). The editor on the film was Ferdinando Maria Poggioli, a name that might easily slip past with the other credits.

  But we have reason to think that Poggioli is interesting. Born in Bologna in 1897, he was an editor in 1934, about to launch his own career as a director. In one of the few serious attempts to survey Italian film before neorealism, at the National Film Theatre in London in September 1980, Ken Wlaschin played four films by Poggioli and offered the estimate that he might be “major.” These included Addio Giovinezza! (1940), about university life; Sissignora (1942), about a maid work
ing for difficult clients; and Sorelle Materassi (1943), about two sisters whose lives are jolted when a young nephew is discovered.

  The same season ran several films by Mario Camerini, including Il Signor Max (1937), in which a news vendor falls in love with a teacher—the part being played by the young and very appealing Vittorio De Sica—and Darò un Millione (1935), in which a melancholy millionaire pretends to be a poor man so that he can give a million to anyone who treats him well. You might wonder how much this film was influenced by Chaplin’s City Lights; parables of wealth and poverty are quite common all over the world in the 1930s. And the millionaire was played by Vittorio De Sica.

  Almost by obligation, the 1980 season in London played the one other film from Italy in these years that was known in the outside world: Ossessione (1943), by Luchino Visconti, the least likely of our realists.

  Born in Milan in 1906, as a count and then a duke, Visconti spent a decade breeding and training thoroughbred horses on his estate before, all of a sudden, he chose to leave Italy and find a place in filmmaking. Something must have happened to make life awkward. But Visconti moved in high circles, and it was the designer Coco Chanel who recommended him to Jean Renoir. He has no credit on a Renoir film, but it seems to be the case that he worked on or attended Toni (1935), Partie de Campagne (Cartier-Bresson recalled Visconti as a silent observer), and Les Bas-Fonds. Visconti would say later that, after fascist Italy, he was refreshed by the left-wing attitudes of Renoir and his associates in the time of the Popular Front. But Visconti made no move to leave Italy. Indeed, he went home to help Renoir make La Tosca in Rome, and he stayed on finishing that picture when Renoir left for America. As a parting gift, Renoir suggested to Visconti that he try a film of the James M. Cain novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (published in 1934).

  Which doesn’t make Ossessione a Renoir-like film so much as a clever transposition of Cain’s melodrama to the Po Valley countryside. Although Visconti made no efforts to acquire or honor Cain’s rights, Ossessione is quite faithful to the story of the drifter, the innkeeper, and his disaffected wife; the love affair; the murder; and then the falling-out between the murderers. The film is shot on location, but the title gives away Visconti’s sense of fate and disastrous passion. So the narrative line is as ordained as in an American noir film. Massimo Girotti and Clara Calamai as the lovers are sexy, attractive, just as iconic as figures from an American film, but more interesting and credible than John Garfield and Lana Turner, who did the overrated and undersexed American version in 1946. The “realism” in the Italian film is a superficial but classy look of rural grunge ably photographed by Aldo Tonti on one of his first jobs.

  The picture had censorship problems in Italy, not because of any political or antifascist daring. Far more, it was the sordidness of the action and the unadorned amorality of the characters. The most realistic thing about the film must be Visconti’s detachment—his literary distance from the film, his interest in seeing a certain hardboiled glamour in these wasted lives. There is no hint of a concern for the country people being depicted and no suggestion of a link between this story and the real circumstances of Italy in 1942. Ossessione could take place anywhere, which is a way of saying that it is occurring in Visconti’s imagination.

  The years of greatest turmoil in Italy, 1943–45, saw Visconti doing nothing. But then, with some funding from the Italian Communist Party, he went to Sicily. He was apparently preoccupied with the “southern problem,” the predicament of that extreme of Italy, cut off from government or understanding. He proposed to make a trilogy, about the fishermen, the peasants, and the sulfur miners, and in a six-month shoot his plans extended but frustrated him. It’s true that there was an immediate concern with social problems. The whole film was shot on location in Sicily with nonprofessionals. But the first scheme was abandoned so that the final film, the 160-minute La Terra Trema, is a portrait only of the fishermen. It is documentary-like, but it is also very beautifully shot (by G. R. Aldo) and a picture that cries out for a symphonic score. In a way, it can be compared with Orson Welles’s aborted It’s All True, ostensibly an attempt to present South America to Western audiences but, in the event, hopelessly compromised by Welles’s romanticism and his inability to finish the job.

  Once upon a time, especially among leftists, La Terra Trema was highly regarded. But it has gone way out of fashion now. As Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (an ally to Visconti) said,

  Visconti brought to the project a great amount of revolutionary fervor, and an even greater ignorance of actual conditions. The whole project can be fitfully compared to Eisenstein’s really grandiose and even less successful Que Viva Mexico! Like Que Viva Mexico!, La Terra Trema suffered from being abstractly conceived and unrealizable from the outset. Even (which was unlikely) if Visconti had received full cooperation from his producers and financiers, he could never have made the film as originally conceived. The contradiction was too great between what he wanted and what was there for him to see.

  That observation predicts the progress Visconti would make. He was by inclination an aesthete, and a man who loved opera and theater as much as film. So he moved steadily away from realism: Bellissima (1951) has Anna Magnani over even her top as a stage mother; Senso (1954) is Visconti’s first intoxicated re-creation of the nineteenth century, with Alida Valli and Farley Granger, and still a satisfying film. In time he found himself in the curious fusion of nostalgia and disgust in period pieces such as the exquisite, stately The Leopard (from Lampedusa, and with Burt Lancaster) and the embalmed Death in Venice (blending Thomas Mann, Mahler, and Dirk Bogarde into one of the first prestigious end-of-the-world pictures for affluent audiences). Along the way, in Rocco and His Brothers (1960), Visconti returned to the Sicilian figures he had encountered on La Terra Trema, but now he had them played by actors such as Alain Delon, Annie Girardot, and Katina Paxinou, where dubbing, art house pretension, and an unwholesome mixture of Dostoyevsky and Puccini turned the film into something only Visconti could have made. Realistically, he was set on being himself in an age of art house movies where directors were encouraged to look at their imagination more than the outside world.

  A more intriguing and complicated case is presented by Roberto Rossellini, born in Rome in 1906, the son of a man who built movie theaters—so the kid got free admission and fell in love with the medium. He started off in the early 1930s doing sound effects; he became an editor and an assistant director; and thus, in the fascist period, he began directing pictures: La Nave Bianca (1942), Un Pilota Ritorna (1942), L’Uomo dalla Croce (1943). Later on, Rossellini was vague or forgetful about those films, but they were part of the time and spirit, one of them made with Vittorio Mussolini, son of Il Duce. Why not? Rossellini would reveal himself later on as a lively opportunist, despite valiant critical attempts to make a hero and a saint out of him. It’s easy enough to believe that he loved the medium more than its possible message, though that verdict is still at odds with the reputation Rossellini would win.

  Something happened, which may have been a matter of self-discovery or simply that Rossellini found himself suddenly in a situation of chaos where life hung in the balance and his country’s future seemed up for grabs. So in the years when Visconti did very little, Rossellini became a driven man, begging, borrowing, or stealing ends of unexposed celluloid (or claiming that), wangling equipment, and devoting it all to Rome, Open City (1945). It began as a silent film, just because they had no means of recording sound—all that was dubbed in later. Just two months after the actual liberation of Rome, they began shooting a story of Rome and its resistance under the Germans. Yes, the movie looked rough and awkward sometimes, if only because of the physical difficulties it had faced. It felt “real” in that it told a story of resistance, occupation, torture, and sacrifice soon after the actual events. But if you look coolly at the film, you will observe that Rossellini has a natural facility with the camera. For example, look at the camera movement that links the several rooms at Nazi headquarters s
o that we feel the shocking adjacency of torture and relaxation; and witness the bravura melodrama of the scene where Anna Magnani is shot down in the street. And why are all the women in the film so attractive?

  Magnani is an important figure in this story. Born in Rome (or Alexandria in Egypt—there were rumors) in 1908, she had been working since the early 1930s, in musicals, comedy, and drama. She had been married to the director Goffredo Alessandrini, and a star of the fascist period, making many successful films—including De Sica’s Teresa Venerdì (1941). To most non-Italians, Magnani was a scorching presence and a newcomer in Rome, Open City, but she was an established actress, and by then she was also Rossellini’s mistress. He was well aware of her glorious excessiveness: “You feel that she’s extremely capable but in certain films it is too much. If you are fed too much cream, after a bit you don’t want any more cream.” Still, they were a team. When they ran out of money—as they ran out of everything except imagination—Rossellini and Magnani sold many of their possessions to keep Open City moving.

  The film opened in Rome in September 1945 and in New York (cut by some fifteen minutes because of violence) in February 1946. The New York Film Critics Circle voted it Best Foreign Film of 1946, and it won a prize at the resumed Cannes Festival in the same year. More to the point, it got a limited release in the United States, and thus it was that a young woman in Los Angeles, passing the time of a bored day, could walk in on the picture and be changed by it. Her name was Ingrid Bergman.