A randomly comprehensive survey of extraordinary movie experiences from the art house to the grindhouse, featuring the good, the bad, the ugly, but not the boring or the banal.
After the neorealist movement won a foothold in America by providing reliably scandalous product for the nation's growing numbers of arthouses, the Italian film industry started firing the big guns. The movies, once noted for an ascetic modesty in their attention to ordinary folk, grew epic in length, and sometimes in scope, as acclaim fueled directors' ambition. Along with Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti was one of the biggest guns, matching Fellini's three-hour blockbuster La Dolce Vita with his own 176-minute monster while joining forces with his peer for the colossal portmanteau piece Boccaccio '70. Unlike Fellini, Visconti appeared with Rocco e i suoi fratelli to remain true to neorealism's ideal focus on common people, though he'd follow Rocco with a still-more stupendous historical epic about an aristocrat, The Leopard. However, Visconti had preceded Rocco with a modernization of Dostoevsky, White Nights, and Rocco itself retains a lot of the "loose, baggy monster" quality of 19th century Russian novels. In fact, Rocco and His Brothers reminds me most of another master's questionable attempt to modernize and relocate Dostoevsky, Akira Kurosawa's The Idiot. Besides length, both films share an arguably Dostoevskian obsession with the depths of human abjection and self-destructive passion.
There goes the neighborhood; the Parondis in Milan. A neighbor's one-word description? "Africa!"
Long film, simple story: Rocco Parondi (Alain Delon in one of his breakthrough roles) and his three brothers, along with their mother (Oscar-winner Katina Paxinou) quit their southern hardscrabble farm to move to Milan, where eldest son Vincenzo already has a job and a fiancee. They immediately create a scene at Vincenzo's engagement party when the matriarch expects to move in with her full brood. Instead, they get thrown out into the street, and Vincenzo has to scramble to get them temporary housing. Starting with odd jobs like shoveling snow to earn their way, each brother ventures forth to seek his fortune. Rocco takes a variety of jobs and serves a stint in the army before following brother Simone (Renato Salvatori) into a boxing career. While Simone proved a gutless tomato can as a fighter, Rocco rises to contention.
Alain Delon and Annie Girardot in good times and bad.
Rocco also outdoes Simone as a suitor for Nadia (Annie Girardot), a prostitute who works the projects, but Simone isn't going to take that humiliation lying down. He and his lowlife droogs beat Rocco up while Simone rapes Nadia in front of him. While Mama Parondi bemoans how the wicked woman is ruining her boys, Rocco effectively surrenders Nadia to Simone out of some misplaced sense of family responsibility. This solves nothing. Simone seeks deeper and deeper into gambling debt while a contemptuous Nadia flounces around the house making life miserable for Mama. Things get so bad that the other brothers are willing to raise funds for Simone to get him out of town, but the offer only goads the lousy layabout to ask for more money. He also gets dangerously antsy about his future with Nadia. The film builds to a double climax, cutting from Rocco's big fight to Simone's shocking showdown with his girl, before resolving itself into one more family conflict as responsible Alfa Romeo worker Ciro (Max Cartier) tries to make sure Simone gets what he deserves while his mother and brothers still desperately try to protect their kin....
Who's crucifying who?
Rocco's length is debatably justified by Visconti's novelistic ambition, but I couldn't help thinking that Warner Bros. could have told the same story just as well in half the time. It seems to be regarded as socially conscious in some essential way, as if "the city" or "modernity" is to blame for the Parondis' plight, but I'm not sure that Visconti himself actually felt that way about it. I detect no more innate social consciousness, much less any political consciousness, than I would in some American counterpart film like A Streetcar Named Desire or God's Little Acre -- I thought it safe to cover a lot of territory. As with many a "white trash" saga, the portrayal of human wretchedness and depravity seems to be an end unto itself. The climax of the Simone-Nadia storyline certainly seems designed to set a new standard for violence in an otherwise-respectable production, and that scene helped sell Rocco as a scandalous yet pretentious shocker when it invaded the U.S. in the summer of 1962.
All this being said, Rocco is a pictorially solid and generally well-acted film that satisfies my virtual-tourist urge with its trip through the landscape of 1960 Milan. While the title identifies the film as an early showcase for Delon, Renato Salvatori actually makes the strongest acting impression. The script obliges him to go over the top, especially when he bawls at the end like a big guilty baby, but he is absolutely convincing as the bum of the brothers. Given how much Rocco has to react to Simone's troubles, Salvatori really is the center of a movie that should have been called Simone and his Brothers, if not Simone and his Enablers -- or, to be more fair to all the actors and more Dostoevskian yet, The Brothers Parondi. The film's faults are those of excess, along with a sense that there's more there than there actually is. But there is a lot of indisputably strong stuff here, and despite my complaints (unusual for me) about the length the film did not bore me. It only leaves you with the nagging question of whether it had to be as long as it was, but you might still go away thinking it a great film.
Boccaccio '70 is all-natural Academy Award winner Sophia Loren.
Boccaccio '70 is also a pretty dull comedy of manners with a young, civilized Tomas Milian and a young, pretty Romy Schneider.
But most of all, Boccaccio '70 is a big, barbaric chest-beating yawp by the Italian movie industry at the peak of its prestige, a flag planted in the heart of the wild world of cinema with the declaration that Italy rules the earth. A collaboration between the producer Carlo Ponti, U.S. moneyman Joseph E. Levine, directors Mario Monicelli, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio de Sica, this massive portmanteau film followed two Italian triumphs: the staggering global rollout of Fellini's La Dolce Vita, which was one of the top U.S. releases of 1961, and Sophia Loren's unprecedented Best Actress Oscar win for a foreign-language role in de Sica's Two Women. It didn't hurt that Loren had also been in another international smash, Anthony Mann's El Cid, that same year, or that Fellini's part of Boccaccio was going to reunite him with La Dolce Vita's Anita Ekberg.
Italy is fairly raging with creativity in 1962. Bernardo Bertolucci is about to release his first film, The Grim Reaper. Michelangelo Antonioni will release L'Eclisse, while Gualtiero Jacopetti, Franco Prosperi et al are about to stun the world with Mondo Cane. Mario Bava is taking a breather before unleashing Black Sabbath, The Girl Who Knew Too Much and The Whip and The Body the following year. No one knows what a giallo or a spaghetti western is, but they're all about to learn. Let's say that, going into the decade, the U.S. and Japan are the superpowers of cinema. While France is developing advanced forms of psychological warfare with the Nouvelle Vague, Italy is the doomsday machine of the movie world during the 1960s. Boccaccio '70 was one way of saying that this was going to be their decade.
So naturally the Italians fall on their face practically coming out of the gate. After well-received Italian preview screenings, Ponti decides, apparently under pressure from Levine, that he's going to cut Mario Monicelli's segment out of the international release of the movie. Levine thinks it makes the film too long (it still ends up over 2.5 hours) and it lacks any star names. The decision pisses off the other three directors, who boycott the Cannes festival showing of the movie. The NoShame DVD release of Boccaccio '70 is the first time most Americans will see what was meant to be the opening segment of the film. And it's the best of the four!
Monicelli, now the sole survivor of the Boccaccio team and at age 94 only three years past his last film, may be known to film buffs as the director of Big Deal on Madonna Street. I haven't seen that and I've seen nothing else by the man, but on the strength of "Renzo and Luciana" I'm going to have to fix that. It's a pretty simple story: a young couple of working stiffs have to try to keep their marriage a secret from the bride's boss, since married women can't work for that company. But the pretense of single status leaves her prey to the tubby, icky head bookkeeper's romantic attentions. Meanwhile the couple struggle to establish some kind of private space for themselves, hoping to escape life in her family's crowded apartment. Monicelli's job is to convey how crowded their life is. He manages to make his episode look like it has a cast of thousands by shooting on location at crowded ballrooms, public pools and movie theaters (they take in a vampire movie, but we never see it and I didn't get a good enough glimpse at the poster to tell you what it was). The social comedy rings true, the visuals are spectacular, the music by Piero Umilani is cool. This they cut out because Marisa Solinas wasn't a star. You should have made her a star, morons!
"The Temptation of Dr. Antonio" is most likely more famous than the film itself. This is Fellini's first go at color and it looks as pretty as you might expect, but the genius of it is everything the director and his effects team does to set up the illusion of the giant advertising poster of Anita Ekberg (exhorting Italians to bevete piu latte: drink more milk!) coming to life to torment the prudish citizen who finds the billboard obscene. There is a real giant billboard built on location, and there are models of the same location and surrounding cityscape that would do Toho Studios proud. Fellini films from high and low angles, makes use of oversized and undersized props, and blasts close-ups of Ekberg's face across the giant screen to convey her size. Maybe it's the color and maybe it's her outfit, but I think she looks better here than in La Dolce Vita. I'll let the pictures tell the story from here.
The symbolism in the shot above is just gross; that's what's funny about it.
If this is the meaning of "latte" then maybe the future people of Idiocracy were onto something.
Luchino Visconti apparently didn't get the memo about making things big. "The Job" is a chamber piece by comparison to the previous episodes, though I'm sure he spent lavishly on interior decoration. He gives us Tomas Milian during the early matinee-idol phase of his career before his more famous work as spaghetti western bandit heroes or degenerates in Seventies crime films. It's another simple story: a German-Italian wife of Milian's aristocrat bargains with him to save him from scandal when gossip papers publicize some of his indiscretions and becomes a kind of prostitute herself when she compels hubby to pay her for sex, partly under pressure from her father to earn her own way in life. As I suggested above, this is the weakest part of the film, but it's still easy on the eye, thanks largely to Romy Schneider, whom Levine did choose to publicize as a new star, though she'd been working for a decade in Europe. Nino Rota did the music for this episode as well as for the Fellini, and I rather like this one better than his all-too-characteristic noodlings for his usual sidekick.
It's not that Visconti doesn't do anything interesting with the camera, but the small-scale story of poor little rich folk is a complete comedown after the Monicelli sprawl and the Fellini madness.
With Carlo Ponti producing, it was probably inevitable that the Sophia Loren episode would climax the film. De Sica is far away from Umberto D. or Bicycle Thieves territory in this ribald comedy, but everyone's been trying to live up to the film's concept, which is what sort of stories Giovanni Boccaccio might tell if transported to the 1960s to update his Decameron for a 1970 edition. In "The Raffle," the prize in the local spinoff of the Italian national lottery is a night with Loren, who runs a carnival shooting gallery. The complication is that she's falling in love with a local tough, but has to honor the terms of the lottery, which has been won by a local nebbish, or the Italian equivalent of such a person. This leads to some slapstick, some plain old slapping of Sophia's face, and an enticing display of the Loren legs. It ends, ending the picture, with a sort of happy ending for everybody.
Sophia Loren emerges like an apparition from a fog of fireworks in "The Raffle."
Keep your legs together, Sophia; it's gonna be a bumpy ride!
I suppose I like the Monicelli episode best because it has a lot of location shooting, and that appeals to the time-tourist in me. But the Fellini is also a kind of masterpiece, even if it lasts just a little too long, or long enough to go overboard with the Fellinisms like someone on a swing or people dancing in circles. As you've noticed, if I had to cut something the Visconti would go, but I can see how people with different sensibilities might prefer this one to the over the over the topness of Fellini or the crassness of the final story. And the De Sica is just a funny story with possibly the most beautiful woman in movies at the time to recapture your attention and wind things down. It's nothing great but it reestablishes that bustling exuberance from the first two stories that Visconti lost track of. But I forgive Visconti since I know he had The Leopard on his mind. He even does some product placement to preview his next feature by having Milian flip through an English-language edition of the Lampedusa novel.
Boccaccio '70 is an essential stop on anyone's wild world of cinema tour, if for the Fellini alone. But Fellini and Anita will have done some honest work if their gorgeous monstrosity attracts viewers to this sampler of Italian cinema in its golden age of global influence.
A trailer, too? But of course! And you'll get to hear "Soldi, soldi, soldi," which I guess was the hit tune from the movie.
One of my favorite Italian movies is Luchino Visconti's The Leopard from 1963. Visconti is part of what I suppose is the "A" team of Italian cinema, alongside Fellini, Antonioni, etc., with Mario Bava leading the "B" team of directors whose work is more often discussed here. But Italy ruled across the board from the 1950s through the 1970s, equaled only by the U.S. and Japan, to my knowledge, in its level of achievement in high and low cinema. The Italians have knockout cinematography and music in common across generic lines, and these are the primary qualities, along with some strong acting, of Visconti's last film.
This is adapted from an 1892 romantic novel by Gabriele D'Annunzio, and Visconti is consciously in a tradition of "quality" cinema, opening L'Innocente with the tried-and-true shot of hands turning the pages of a book, though the titles are superimposed on the scene rather than printed on the pages. It's a pretty simple story. Giancarlo Giannini plays Tullio, an aristocrat carrying on an affair with a brazen female played by Jennifer O'Neill. He's married to Laura Antonelli in the role of Giuliana, whose nude scenes make you question his judgment in cheating, but this was probably some arranged marriage that his heart wasn't in. Yet he's broadminded enough to treat the missus as a confidant, hiding nothing from her and admitting that the mistress is kind of a chore sometimes with her demanding ways. He regards Giuliana more like his sister than as a wife, until he gets suspicious that she's having an affair of her own. His suspicion translates into fresh infatuation. He makes love with her more passionately than he ever did before, and tells her he wants to think of her as his mistress. But when she proves to be pregnant, he can't shake the suspicion that another man is the father. Those suspicions have terrible consequences.
Don't mistake Laura Antonelli's veiled sentiments here for modesty. Check out the faux trailer below for proof to the contrary.
"The Innocent" reminds me of the late work of other major directors in that Visconti seems to have outlived his own time -- he died a year after this came out. It carries a 1976 date, but except for the nudity (full frontal, both male and female, though neither O'Neill or Giannini) it could just as easily have been made in 1956. It has an old-school look on top of being a period piece, but it looks pretty nice anyway. This is pretty much an interior drama so there's nothing of the outdoor spectacle that embellished The Leopard, but the interior design of the various mansions Visconti filmed in makes the movie look more lavish than it actually may have been. Cinematographer Pasqualino de Santis (who worked frequently with Visconti as well as with Robert Bresson, and went on to do Sheena [!])worked with old-school Technicolor, making the imagery richer still. Franco Mannino's score won the David di Donatello award, the Italian Oscar, which I assume had to be an awesome competition in those days -- though I learn that they didn't always give a music award. The music here is actually fairly minimalist, befitting the chamber tone of the whole film, but it does sound good and contributes effectively to the mood of the piece.
Jennifer O'Neill makes a grim discovery: Lucio Fulci is directing her next Italian film, Sette Note in Nero.
The story is probably a little too plain to really impress me, but I thought that Giannini and Antonelli carried the show with their acting, which no doubt required some effort to avoid being upstaged by the decor. I can recommend L'Innocente to anyone who appreciates movies for pictorial beauty above all, including the natural charms of the leading lady.
Don't despair, genre fans! L'Innocent is actually sort of a martial arts film, for a few scenes.
I couldn't find an original trailer for the film, so here's OdinEidolon89's effort to cross the Italian generic divide by creating a trailer that treats L'Innocente as a horror film. This clip happens to contain nudity, so treat it according to your own scruples.