Il richiamo (1921)

Diva Maria Jacobini, Lido Manetti and Carlo Benetti starred in the Italian silent film Il richiamo / The Call from the Past (1921), directed by Gennaro Righelli. The script by Luciano Doria was based on a story by Fausto Maria Martini.


Italian postcard by Ed. S.I.C., Roma. Maria Jacobini in Il richiamo / The Call from the Past (Gennaro Righelli, 1921). Publicity for the Corso Cinema Teatro in Rome.


Italian postcard by G.B. Falci, Milano, no. 92. Photo: Fert. Maria Jacobini in Il richiamo / The Call from the Past (Gennaro Righelli, 1921).


Italian postcard by Ed. G.B. Falci, Milano, no. 95. Photo: Fert. Maria Jacobini and Carlo Benetti in Il richiamo / The Call from the Past (Gennaro Righelli, 1921).


Italian postcard by Ed. G.B. Falci, Milano, no. 183. Photo: Fert. Maria Jacobini in Il richiamo / The Call from the Past (Gennaro Righelli, 1921).

A dramatic colour change in a central scene

The Italian silent melodrama Il richiamo / The Call from the Past (1921) directed by Gennaro Righelli and starring his future wife Maria Jacobini, was produced by the Fert Studios in Turin and based on a story by Fausto Maria Martini.

Maria Jacobini plays a young widow, Giovanna Landi, who loses her own child. She then adopts a boy, Santino, from an orphanage and takes care of him. Once Santino has grown a man (Lido Manetti also known as Arnold Kent), he falls in love with his adoptive mother. She is disappointed and disappears from his life, while he doesn't understand.

Il richiamo had its Roman first night on 17 October 1921. At the time, the Italian press remarked that Maria Jacobini remained a great actress, but Jacobini's beauty was too much hidden under makeup, to make her look older. The other actors were Lido Manetti, Carlo Benetti, Cecyl Tryan and Luigi Duse. The exteriors, shot in Venice by cinematographer Tullio Chiarini, were praised too, but the film's story had too many sidepaths, making it unnecessarily complicated.

A print of this film was discovered in the Komiya Collection at the National Film Center in Tokyo. In 1988, Komiya Takahashi donated what was left of the great collection of his father Komiya Tomijiro (1897-1975) to this centre. Komiya senior, son of a restaurateur, had grown up in Tokyo’s entertainment district, Asakusa, and collected the films of his youth, European productions from 1907 to 1920.

As they catalogued the films and drew up condition reports, Hiroshi Komatsu and the Film Center archivists realised that many were decomposed. But what did survive was precious enough – many unique and matchless colour prints – which were duplicated in 1991. Il richiamo / The Call from the Past (1921) is one of the few Komiya Collection films to survive completely. Thanks to the nitrate decomposition, the character played by Maria Jacobini undergoes a dramatic colour change in a central scene of the film… In 2012, a restored version was shown at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna.


Italian postcard by Ed. G.B. Falci, Milano, no. 101. Photo: Fert. Maria Jacobini and Lido Manetti in Il richiamo / The Call from the Past (Gennaro Righelli, 1921).


Italian postcard by Ed. G.B. Falci, Milano, no. 102. Photo: Fert. Maria Jacobini and Lido Manetti (Arnold Kent) in Il richiamo / The Call from the Past (Gennaro Righelli, 1921).


Italian postcard by Ed. G.B. Falci, Milano, no. 105. Photo: Fert. Maria Jacobini and Cecyl Tryan in Il richiamo / The Call from the Past (Gennaro Righelli, 1921).


Italian postcard by G.B. Falci, Milano, no. 67. Photo: Fert. Maria Jacobini and Lido Manetti in Il richiamo / The Call from the Past (Gennaro Righelli, 1921).

Sources: Vittorio Martinelli (Il cinema muto italiano, 1921-1922 - Italian), Il Cinema Ritrovato, Wikipedia and IMDb.

Addio giovinezza! (1918)

Augusto Genina's silent film Addio giovinezza!/Goodbye Youth (1918) was adapted from the 1911 play of the same name by Nino Oxilia and Sandro Camasio, The film is set in Turin at the beginning of the twentieth century, where a student (Lido Manetti) begins a romance with a seamstress, Dorina (Maria Jacobini), however he is lured away by a sophisticated older woman (Helena Makowska) to Dorina's distress.


Italian postcard by Ed. G. Vettori, Bologna, no. 142. Photo: Itala Film. Lido Manetti, Ruggero Capodaglio and Maria Jacobini in Addio giovinezza!/Goodbye Youth! (Augusto Genina, 1918).


Italian postcard by Ed. G. Vettori, Bologna, no. 430. Photo: Itala Film. Maria Jacobini and Lido Manetti in Addio giovinezza!/Goodbye Youth! (Augusto Genina, 1918).


Italian postcard by Ed. G. Vettori, Bologna, no. 431. Photo: Itala Film. Maria Jacobini and Lido Manetti in Addio giovinezza!/Goodbye Youth! (Augusto Genina, 1918).


Italian postcard by Ed. G. Vettori, Bologna, no. 429. Photo: Itala Film. Maria Jacobini and Lido Manetti in Addio giovinezza!/Goodbye Youth! (Augusto Genina, 1918).


Italian postcard by Ed. G. Vettori, Bologna, no. 1048. Photo: Itala Film. Maria Jacobini in Addio giovinezza!/Goodbye Youth! (Augusto Genina, 1918).

Maria Jacobini's tribute to her killed boyfriend

Addio giovinezza!/Goodbye Youth (1918) was adapted from the 1911 play of the same name by Nino Oxilia and Sandro Camasio. The play had already been adapted to film in 1913 for Itala Film and directed by Camasio and would be adapted (directed again by Genina) in 1927, while a sound version was done in 1940 by Ferdinando Maria Poggioli. Giuseppe Pietri also turned the same play into a popular stage operetta in 1915.

Augusto Genina was also responsible for the script. Addio giovinezza!/Goodbye Youth is set in Turin at the beginning of the twentieth century. Mario, a student (Lido Manetti), begins a romance with a seamstress, Dorina (Maria Jacobini), the daughter of his landlady. However, he is lured away by a sophisticated older woman (Helena Makowska) to Dorina's distress. With the help of Leone, Mario's friend, Dorina manages to have a talk with Elena, convincing her to give up the boy.

Elena, the lady, is willing to give up Mario after hearing the pleas of Dorina, but Mario, arriving too late, becomes angry with Dorina and leaves her. After many comical and dramatic scenes, misunderstandings, love and quarrels, Mario and Dorina say goodbye after his graduation before he returns to his natal town.

Addio giovinezza!/Goodbye Youth (1918) was produced by Itala Film of Turin. Shooting of the film started a few months after the death of Nino Oxilia. Oxilia, who should have directed the film, fell in battle at the age of twenty-eight on Mount Tomba on 18 November 1917 and was substituted by Genina. Maria Jacobini, who had been Oxilia's girlfriend, was the star of the film. The work was heralded in the press as a tribute to Oxilia by the diva and their friend, director Augusto Genina.

On its release (6 December 1918), in a very difficult historical period (the war had just ended), Addio giovinezza!/Goodbye Youth! was not as successful as hoped. While in Europe all prints and even the camera negative of Addio giovinezza were lost, a copy found its way, most likely in the 1920s, into the collection of Tomjiro Komiya, a restaurateur in Tokyo and a great fan of European cinema from the 1910s. After being restored by the Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin and the National Film Center in Tokyo, it was presented in 2014 at the Festival del Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna.


Spanish cromo (collector card) by Chocolate Imperiale, card 1 of 6. Photo: Distr. J. Verdaguer, Barcelona / Itala Film. Maria Jacobini in Addio giovinezza!/Goodbye Youth! (Augusto Genina, 1918). The Spanish release title was Adios, juventud!


Spanish collector card by Chocolate Imperiale, card 2 of 6. Photo: J. Verdaguer, Barcelona / Itala Film. Helena Makowska and Lido Manetti in Addio giovinezza/Goodbye Youth! (Augusto Genina, 1918).


Spanish collector card by Chocolate Imperiale, card 3 of 6. Photo: Distr. J. Verdaguer, Barcelona / Itala Film. Maria Jacobini and Lido Manetti in Addio giovinezza!/Goodbye Youth! (Augusto Genina, 1918).


Spanish collector card by Chocolate Imperiale, card 4 of 6. Photo: Distr. J. Verdaguer, Barcelona / Itala Film. Maria Jacobini and Helena Makowska in Addio giovinezza!/Goodbye Youth! (Augusto Genina, 1918).


Spanish collector card by Chocolate Imperiale, card 5 of 6. Photo: Distr. J. Verdaguer, Barcelona. Maria Jacobini and Helena Makowska in Addio giovinezza!/Goodbye Youth! (Augusto Genina, 1918).


Spanish collector card by Chocolate Imperiale, card 6 of 6. Photo: J. Verdaguer, Barcelona / Itala Film. Maria Jacobini in Addio giovinezza/Goodbye Youth! (Augusto Genina, 1918).

Another discovery

The rediscovery of Addio giovinezza!/Goodbye Youth! (1918) led to a further discovery: Claudia Gianetto, then head of the film archive of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin, recognised Segundo de Chomón in a shot together with Jacobini at minute 01:08:06:23 of Addio giovinezza!. This would be the only film fragment in which the famous film pioneer and special effects master of the silent classic Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914) is immortalised.

In 2016, a study on Addio giovinezza!/Goodbye Youth! (1918) was published in which author Patrizia Deabate pointed out how director Augusto Genina had realised a kind of wartime actualisation of the story, inserting an implicit parallelism between the farewell to love of the seamstress Dorina and the real one of Maria Jacobini, who had tragically lost her partner.

Indeed, at the time of its first release, G. Lega already wrote in the journal La Cine-Fono: "Today with the beautiful, pure face of Maria Jacobini you [Dorina] have returned for us. And this singular actress, first among the first, was able to give you all her faith as a woman, all her aristocratic finesse as a performer. [...]

We have lost many things with you, Dorina; and also many very precious things. Behind the flowering gardens of our dying hopes open boundless cemeteries and our surviving youth has gone away with you. [...] And, almost, today one can no longer weep over memories because the strong people - the ones in charge - say it is cowardice. Everything, you know, Dorina, everything today is forbidden to us. Even loving. Mario was much happier than us, even in his tremendous pain; and his 'goodbye' is for us, now."

In 2020 Addio giovinezza!/Goodbye Youth! (1918) was included in a DVD box with four films by Augusto Genina, released by Il Cinema Ritrovato, which also includes the 1927 version starring Carmen Boni. The box, 'Augusto Genina. Il prezzo della bellezza/The Price of Beauty', curated by Mariann Lewinsky and Andrea Meneghelli, also contains La maschera e il volto (1919), with Italia Almirante Manzini, and Prix de beauté (1930), with Louise Brooks.


Spanish postcard by Leonar. Union universal de correos. Photo: Itala Film. Maria Jacobini in Addio giovinezza!/Goodbye Youth! (Augusto Genina, 1918).


Italian postcard by Ed. G.B. Falci, Milano, no. 698. Photo: Films Genina. Carmen Boni in Addio giovinezza/Goodbye Youth! (Augusto Genina, 1927).


Romanian postcard. Clara Calamai as the rich seductress Elena in Addio, giovinezza!/Goodbye Youth! (Ferdinando Maria Poggioli, 1940).

Sources: Gian Luca Farinelli and Claudia Gianetto (Il Cinema Ritrovato), Wikipedia (Italian and English) and IMDb.

Maria Jacobini

According to the late film historian Vittorio Martinelli, Maria Jacobini (1892-1944) was an island of serenity among the Italian divas. Jacobini was the personification of goodness, of simple love. Her weapon was her sweet and gracious smile. However, in some Italian and later German films, she could also play the vivacious lady, the femme fatale, the comedienne, the hysterical victim, or the suffering mother or wife.


Italian postcard by Ed. Vettori, Bologna, no. 346. Sent by mail in 1926. Maria Jacobini in Onestà del Peccato/The Wife He Neglected (Augusto Genina, 1918).


Italian postcard by Milano, Uff. Rev. Stampa, no. 891. Portrait of Maria Jacobini by Tito Corbella.


Italian postcard by Ed. Romeo Biagi, Bologna, no. 649.


Italian postcard by Dist. Ed. SARPIC, Bucarest, Romania, no. 330.


Italian postcard by G.B. Falci Ed. for Unica - Ciocolato Talmone al latte. Photo: Pittaluga Film. Maria Jacobini in Beatrice Cenci (Baldassarre Negroni, 1926).


Italian postcard by Ed. Bettini, Roma, no. 145.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 3953/1, 1928-1929. Photo: Terra-Film.

Seductive man-eater

Maria Jacobini was born in Rome, Italy, in 1892. She was the sister of actress Diomira Jacobini. Their older sister Bianca had also started as an actress but interrupted her career after four films. Maria studied at the Accademia di Arte Drammatica di S. Cecilia, where her teachers were Virginia Marini and Eduardo Boutet. She made her stage debut at the company of Cesare Dondini Jr., where she mainly played secondary parts.

She was noticed by Ugo Falena, artistic director of the film company Film d'Arte Italiana. He offered her to work in the silent cinema. Her first short films were Lucrezia Borgia/Lucretia Borgia (Ugo Falena, 1910) featuring diva Francesca Bertini, and Beatrice Cenci (Ugo Falena, 1910), but her first important role was in Cesare Borgia (Gerolamo Lo Savio, 1912) again starring Bertini.

In 1912, Maria started to work at the Savoia company of Turin, as a seductive man-eater in short films like Pantera/Panther (1912), La zingara/The Gypsy (Sandro Camasio, 1912), and L'onta nascosta/The Hidden Shame (1912).

From 1913 on, she played her more dramatic roles as the lead in Giovanna d'Arco/Joan of Arc (Ubaldo Maria del Colle, 1913), In hoc signo vinces/The Triumph of an Emperor (Nino Oxilia, 1913) and Ananke (Nino Oxilia, 1915) with Leda Gys and her sister Diomira Jacobini.

Jacobini worked for pioneering film studios like Pasquali and Celio. Maria gave good performances in the melancholic Come le foglie/Like the Leaves (Gennaro Righelli, 1916) based on Giuseppe Giacosa's stage play, and in the touching Addio Giovinezza/Good-bye Youth (Augusto Genina, 1918). She made a series of films with director Gennaro Righelli such as Il viaggio/The Journey (1921), based on a novel by Luigi Pirandello, and Cainà - la figlia dell'isola/Cainà - the Daughter of the Island (1923), shot in Sardinia.


Italian postcard by Ed. A. Traldi, Milano, no. 713.


Italian postcard. Photo: Tiber Film. Publicity still for Come le foglie/Like the Leaves (Gennaro Righelli, 1917), based on the stage play by Giuseppe Giacosa. Father Giovanni (Ignazio Lupi) unites his daughter Nennele (Maria Jacobini) with his cousin Massimo (Guido Guiducci). Translation caption: Nennele: Shall I call him? Massimo! Content of the film: After a life of spendthrifts, the Rosati family is ruined. Father Giovanni (Ignazio Lupi) accepts work from his cousin Massimo (Guido Guiducci). Hitherto neglected as too serious and workaholic, Massimo becomes the head of the family and takes care of the son and daughter of Giovanni, Tommy (Alberto Collo) and Nennele (Jacobini), and their stepmother Giulia (Floriana). Tommy and Giulia remain weak spirits, but after an attempted suicide, Nennele realises Massimo's force and unites with him.


Italian postcard. Photo: Tiber Film, Roma. Publicity still for Come le foglie/Like the Leaves (Gennaro Righelli, 1917). Maria Jacobini (Nennele) and Alberto Collo (Tommy). Translation caption: Nennele: You don't know what you're saying! Farewell, Tommy, farewell, poor Tommy!



Dutch postcard by E & B, no. 518. Photo: HAP Film, Den Haag / Bens Film. Possibly this card uses a still from L'onestà del peccato/La fine di un vile/The Wife He Neglected (Augusto Genina, 1918), in which Jacobini wears a similar dress. The film was restored by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin and shown at the Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna in 2017.


Italian postcard by Ed. G.B. Falci, Milano, no. 101. Maria Jacobini and Lido Manetti in Il richiamo/The Call (Gennaro Righelli, 1921).


Spanish collector card in the Escenas selectas de cinematografia series. Maria Jacobini in La Bohème/Boheme - Künstlerliebe (Gennaro Righelli, 1923), based on the novel by Henri Murger, which later was turned into an opera by Giacomo Puccini.


German postcard by Ross Verlag for Trianon Film-Verleih G.m.b.H., Berlin. Phot: Walter Lichtenstein. Maria Jacobini as Katja in Orient - Die Tochter der Wüste/Orient (Gennaro Righelli, 1924).


Italian postcard by G.B. Falci, Milano, no. 348. Maria Jacobini in the silent film La bocca chiusa (Guglielmo Zorzi, 1925).

Berlin

After the First World War, the Italian film industry was in a deep crisis, and director Gennaro Righelli and his star Maria Jacobini decided to move to Germany.

In Berlin, the new centre of the European film industry, Jacobini and Righelli were enlisted by producer Jakob Karol and they founded a separate company called Maria Jacobini GmbH.

Jacobini first starred in Bohème - Künstlerliebe/Bohème - Artists Love (Gennaro Righelli, 1923), playing the tormented and suffering Mimi. Her film partner was Wilhelm Dieterle, who would later become known as Hollywood director William Dieterle.

She often performed in Righelli's German films and other directors' films. She was directed by Jaap Speyer in Bigamie/Bigamy (1927), Robert Dinesen in Ariadne im Hoppegarten (1928) with Alfred Abel, Richard Oswald in Villa Falconieri (1928) opposite Hans Stüwe, and by Fedor Ozep in the German-Russian coproduction Der lebende Leichnam/Zhivoy trup/The Living Corpse (1929), based on the play by Leo Tolstoy.

These productions were shot all over Europe, and Jacobini even filmed in Africa for Die Frauengasse von Algier/The Street of Women of Algiers (Wolfgang Hoffmann-Harnisch, 1927) with Camilla Horn.


Italian postcard, no. 430. Photo: Maria Jacobini and Lido Manetti in the silent film Addio giovinezza/Goodbye Youth (Augusto Genina, 1918), an adaptation of the play by Sandro Camasio and Nino Oxilia.


Italian postcard, no. 431. Photo: Maria Jacobini and Lido Manetti in the silent film Addio giovinezza/Good-Bye Youth (Augusto Genina, 1918).

Italian postcard by G.B. Falci, Milano. Photo: Maria Jacobini and Amleto Novelli in La preda/The Prey (Guglielmo Zorzi, 1921).


Italian postcard by Ed. Vettori, Bologna. Photo: probably publicity still for L'articolo IV (Gennaro Righelli, 1918) in which Jacobini and Tullio Carminati were the leading actors. The film is about Duchess Jenny who offers her hand to the only man who didn't court her, the Count d'Hauteville. She has a condition, though: for a long time the two must first live together as mere friends and if they don't get along they will divorce. Will both keep this promise? The card suggests otherwise...


Italian postcard by G.B. Falci, Milano, no. 13. Photo: Maria Jacobini and Amleto Novelli in La casa di vetro/The Glass House (Gennaro Righelli, 1920).


Italian postcard by G.B. Falci, Milano. Photo: publicity still for La casa di vetro/The Glass House (Gennaro Righelli, 1920) with Jacobini and Amleto Novelli.


Italian postcard by G.B. Falci, Milano, no. 92. Photo: publicity still for Il richiamo/The Call (Gennaro Righelli, 1921).


Italian postcard by G.B. Falci, Milano, no. 67. Publicity still of Maria Jacobini and Lido Manetti in Il richiamo/The Call (Gennaro Righelli, 1921). A print of this film is in the Komiya Collection at the National Film Center in Tokyo. A restored version was shown at the festival Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna in 2012.


Italian postcard. The film title on this card is a mystery. Maria Jacobini did not play in La via del peccato (Amleto Palermi, 1925), but her sister Diomira Jacobini did. Maria acted in a film called L'onestà del peccato (Augusto Genina, 1918). But this is probably a card for La bocca chiusa/The Closed Mouth (Guglielmo Zorzi, 1925), for the moment when the aged Maria, now a domestic to a lord, sees a childhood photo and realizes her employer is her son.


Italian postcard by G.B. Falci, Milano. Photo: Maria Jacobini in La bocca chiusa/The Closed Mouth (Guglielmo Zorzi, 1925) with Lido Manetti.


Italian postcard by Ed. G.B. Falci, Milano, no. 106. Photo: S.A. Stefano Pittaluga. Maria Jacobini and Malcolm Tod in the late silent film Il carnevale di Venezia/The Carnival of Venice (Mario Almirante, 1928).

Marginal roles

In the second half of the 1920s, Maria Jacobini performed also in a few Italian films such as La bocca chiusa/The Closed Mouth (Guglielmo Zorzi, 1925) opposite Lido Manetti a.k.a. Arnold Kent and Carmen Boni, Beatrice Cenci (Baldassarre Negroni, 1926), and Il carnevale di Venezia/The Carnival of Venice (Mario Almirante, 1928).

In France, she did Maman Colibri/Mother Hummingbird (Julien Duvivier, 1929) with Franz Lederer. It was her final silent film.

With the coming of the sound cinema, Jacobini's roles became marginal, though she continued to play in films until her death.

In 1937 she became a teacher in acting at the new Roman film academy Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, where she gave lessons to new stars and actresses such as Alida Valli and Clara Calamai.

Her final film was La donna della montagna/The Mountain Woman (Renato Castellani, 1943) with Marina Berti. Maria Jacobini died a year later, in 1944 in Rome. She was 52.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 569/1, 1930-1931. Photo: Atelier Riess, Berlin.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 569/2, 1919-1924. Photo: Atelier Riess, Berlin.


Austrian postcard by Iris Verlag, no. 717. Photo: Sascha Film.


Austrian postcard by Iris Verlag, no. 5476. Photo: Derussa-Film / Allianz-Film.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 3635/1, 1928-1929. Photo: Atelier Bieber, Berlin.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 3635/2, 1928-1929. Photo: Atelier Bieber, Berlin.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 3955/2, 1928-1929. Photo: Terra-Film.

Sources: Vittorio Martinelli (Le dive del silenzio), Caterina Cerra (Treccani.it - Italian), Wikipedia (English and Italian) and IMDb.