ItalianGerry's reviews

This marvelous film about a group of children in the town of Berat, Albania was virtually unknown outside of its country of original until fairly recently. Its appearance on TCM should make it familiar to many more. From the end of World War II until the 1990s Albania was a closed society, one of the most restrictive Communist nations on the planet, rivaling that of North Korea. (I recommend seeing Gianni Amelio's 1996 film "Lamerica" which dealt with the nation's collapse and the outflow of refugees resulting from its turmoil.) The children here have an ongoing feud with the occupying German soldiers who have taken over their playground. They develop some patriotic consciousness and assist the local partisans in combatting the intruders, in a way we also saw in Rossellini's classic "Open City." The boys (and the occasional young girl) are all fine troupers as is their mascot dog Tuli and a little goat, and the adults as well. The woman director Xhanfize Keko was remarkably skilled in eliciting natural performances from the young cast and apparently made a number of other films with a youthful roster. The opening shot with the group of kids cheerfully walking together, and accompanied by lilting background music, sets the tone for this very nice movie.

I've had the opportunity to watch this film in both its Italian version and English-dubbed release version. There are some great women in the cast, including Linda Darnell, Valentina Cortese, Lea Padovani, and Giulietta Masina before she appeared with Quinn in "La Strada." This obscure little rarity is a noirish character study about three dispossessed prostitutes evicted from a bordello and about a sucker (Anthony Quinn) who wants to run off to Venezuela with one of them. Giulietta Masina became friendly with Quinn during the filming, introduced him to her husband Federico Fellini, and got him the role of Zampanò in "La Strada." Unlike "La Strada," where Quinn was dubbed in Italian for the home version, here he spoke his own Italian, probably coached by Valentina Cortese and Masina. Although the reviews were not overly kind to this picture, it is worth seeing because of its atmosphere, its extraordinary cast, and its rarity.

The program booklet for the 1963 New York Film Festival (first one ever) shows that "Il mare" was scheduled for one screening on September 17 at 6:30. The blurb made reference to the Venice Film Festival showing where the movie had been "greeted by one of those sessions of prolonged booing, hissing, and cat-calls that, at festivals, generally herald a masterpiece." Later the film received non-theatrical distribution in 16mm by Audio Brandon Films. I do not believe it was shown commercially anywhere in the U.S., though it may have had minor runs and was shown by film societies on college campuses and elsewhere before the prints were withdrawn from distribution. I first saw it in Providence in April 1980 when the local Italian American Cultural Society sponsored one showing at the Cable Car Cinema.

I recently saw it again on an unsubtitled DVD from a private source. What I remembered of the film, its stark atmosphere and the special beauty of off-season Capri, superbly photographed, still held true for me. Also holding true was the stunning pretentiousness and Antoniennui (to borrow Andrew Sarris' clever coinage)of the whole piece, like a directorial wet-dream inspired by the island sequences of "L'Avventura." It has fine photogenic actors speaking some impossible dialog. It is a synthesis and time-capsule and reductio-ad-absurdum of early 1960s art house cinema, beautiful yet unbearable, requiring multiple cups of the free espresso the art cinemas of that epoch used to supply their patrons to kick-start them back into the world of the living.

I first saw this early film by Martin Scorsese at an intercollegiate student film festival at Brown University in Providence on April 16, 1965. I was not a Brown student but I used to attend film showings there, of which there were many, and they formed the nucleus of my education as a film buff. I saw a few other movies in that festival held at Alumnae Hall, but "It's Not Just You, Murray" was the one that caught my attention at the time, because of is brash and entertaining qualities. I remember in particular the amusing image of the Italian mamma coming in with a big plate of pasta, eager to feed her boy. Later I would find out that this mamma was actually played by Scorsese's own mother Catherine, whom we would see later in the documentary "Italianamerican", about both the directors parents, as well as in other cameo roles, including one in "Goodfellas," where her character is kind of an extension of the earlier role in "Murray." The movie got a top award at that Brown festival, not surprising. I filed away a memory of it, taking care to note the director's name. I suspected he would be going places. Later when "Boxcar Bertha" opened in Providence at the Strand Theatre, I went to see it on the basis of the name Scorsese and I was not disappointed, and of course greater films were yet to come in his remarkable career.

This short film by renowned documentarian Luciano Emmer gives us a bucolic view of the peasant area around the village of Predappio, Italy, where Benito Mussolini was born and raised. The title means "His Land." The camera roams here and there, over hills and streams and fields which the "Duce" would have been familiar with. Interiors of the house of Benito's birth are shown as well, and we see the matrimonial bed where presumably he was conceived, as well as framed photos of his mamma and papà. It is reported that after it was shown to Mussolini, he considered it such a bad omen (why?) that he ordered the destruction of the film. The surviving print does not have the original music track, which is lost, and other music has been substituted.