MARIO SOLDATI AND FRIENDS.

Our knowledge of Italian sound film tends to start when American movie critics like Arthur Knight were stationed there after the war. Perilous little Italian film from pre 1945 circulates abroad so I was pleased to find that You Tube, which is a bottomless well of untranslated Italian movies, had a run of the films of Mario Soldati with good English sub-titles.

Soldati (left) had a literary background and had spent some time teaching in the US before becoming one of that band of Italian movie directors whose careers begin in the thirties, go through the war and peter out in the wide screen era. The neo realists have already had their share of attention and some more, though the extent of Luigi Zampa’s continued output is a surprise. By and large I’m more interested in the later comers, people like Pietro Germi, Dario Argento, Sergio Corbucci, Damio Damiano and Gianni Amelio - if we reduce the country’s output to the work to a few directors.

Accordingly I’d never taken any real notice of Mario Soldati though a few titles had driffted my way. He worked on scripts for a couple of nice 1932 comedies, Mario Camerini’s Gli uomini, che mascalzoni... / What Scounrels Men Are and Alessandro Blasetti’s La tavola dei poveri / Poor People’s Table and continues through what we are assured is the White Telephone era to begin directing in 1938. In the fifties he managed a couple of British films, Her Favourite Husband and The Stranger’s Hand, ushered Sophia Loren, Gina Lllobrigida and Fernandel through unmemorable A features and fades away in the sixties.

I managed to score a VHS of his 1939 Dora Nelson a romantic comedy that is neither particularly romantic or particularly funny and we are assured, an example of the then celebrated caligraphist movement.

Like the contemporary Ohuls La Signora di tutti and rather better, it has a film making background. In the opening, star Dora Nelson (then celebrated Assia Noris) brings shooting on her historical movie to a stop because she considers her leading man not sufficiently aristocratic. She marches off the set, leaving the director in despair until crew members draw his attention to Pierina (Miss Norris again), the modiste who does a convincing Dora impression. The girl is whipped away from boxing hats and driven to the studio delighting all with the resemblance and her willingness, as she shoots in front of the process screen.

 Meanwhile the real Dora is expressing her allegiance to a Prince, announced by his flunky putting on a record of the National Anthem. He plans launching a coup from Cannes and Dora agrees to accompany his court in exile. Her absence casts a shadow on the daughter’s impending marriage and husband Carlo Ninchi begs Pierina to continue the impersonation through the ceremony. Her optician fiancé is bluffed by seeing the two Dora’s.

Ninchi is rapt and rides her round the markers in his sail boat. However in Cannes, the prince informs Dora that the revolution will fail because he can’t pay for the guns and she stomps up a 30,000 lire cheque. Scandal ensues.

The film is mounted on a large scale, with huge, modern sets, hoards of dress extras, sharp images, smooth editing. Noris differentiates the two characters expertly backed by ingenious cuts as to a double continuing her walk into the distance as the camera passes behind pillars, as well as good split screen. However the men are totally unimpressive, with the exception of chiseled featured Massimo Girotti as the fiancé, whose part could be given any juvenile.

What we got is polished, ordinary entertainment distinguished from routine Hollywood A features of the day by the occasional continental vista - the tree lined road with the comic’s car or the lights of Cannes. It’s nowhere near as winning as Signor Max an earlier De Sica starring doppelganger piece Soldati wrote for Camerini. It never seems to have been subtitled.

Our man and possibly his industry have matured by the time we get to Quartieri alti / In High Places, an A feature begun in 1943 and finished in 1944 after the fall of Rome and one of the subtitled You Tube features.

This one turns out to be accomplished, with strong leads and polished and quite imaginative production. Massimo Serato, (below right) the youngest I’ve seen him, is the con man gigolo who supports family and friends by his affair with a cheese heiress but aspires to romance with unspoiled student Adriana Benetti. He sets up an elaborate false identity to appeal to her but things aren’t going to plan on the night of their scheduled meeting.

The film is derived from the Jean Anouilh play "Le Rendez-Vous de Senlis" produced in the theatre by Andre Barsaq in 1941. This is both a strength and a weakness. The plot has considerable ingenuity and works up some tension over whether Serato’s schemes will come unravelled but the development, dialogue and relationships distractingly ring of the stage - the place put out at the rich peoples’ diners for an uninvited pauper, Alfredo Del Pelo’s chitarrista song at the Ulpia taverna. Soldati has attempted to deal with this by showing what we see as being observed by an audience - characters hidden in cupboards or outside windows and accounting for the theatricality of some of the older player performances by having the characters being former actors hired to boost the deception.

He has added cinematic flourishes - the opening title background of the Ecelsior Hotel revolving door runs till one of the character goes through and we follow him to the desk, the introductory glimpse of Serato hiding behind a door as the scene continues while a woman takes a bath in the next room, a cut to a spinning car wheel to account for a journey and showing both sides of the frequent ‘phone calls. However bits of undigested business are a give away.

The film remains quite modern in playing, pacing and setting but the theatrical feel does distract and the simple ending is particularly unsatisfactory after such a complex build up. Among the cast Jucci Kellerman, who did not have a great career, is particularly effective. (left -unhappy cheese heiress)

Two years later Eugenia Grandet is an ambitious costume movie, the last of (Alida) Valli’s Italian language movies before her launch into Hollywood and off-shore Hollywood. (below left) 

 

One of more than a dozen adaptations of the Balzac novel this one kicks off with the coach, carrying Paris based Giorgio De Lullo, delayed while he is attended by the Tours hairdresser. When they do set out (shot with the camera at road level among the wheels and hooves) they pass through the lands and properties which the driver identifies as belonging to De Lullo’s uncle and it is to his house in provincial Saumur where they carry the newcomer’s bags.

 

 There uncle Gualtiero Tumiati’s guests are in a Tombola card game which is abruptly terminated when the uncle takes their only candle to examine the letter the boy brings from his father. Tumiati’s sheltered daughter Eugenia, played rather passively by Valli at the peak of her European stardom, tries to make the new comer at home despite her father’s objection to the cost of a bed warmer and wax candles to replace his normal, smelly tallow ones. Middle aged peasant maid Pina Gallini is her accomplice, proving able to snap the firewood on her knee when the young man fails.

The film’s best scene proves to be Tumiati’s birthday present to Valli of a rare gold coin to add to her dowry. He radiates a contagious enthusiasm as he explains the history and purity of pieces in her little collection.

A newspaper from the capital tells them that the boy’s bankrupt father has suicided. Through the dining room window we see de Lullo on the garden bench struck down by the news. Tumiati only has sympathy for his brother’s defrauded creditors. At the same time he makes a killing from the Visiting Dutch wine merchant getting his order leaving the other local suppliers with nothing to do but sell Tumiati their stock at a favorable price. This he uses to make up his short fall on the Dutch order.

Drawn to the young man, Valli gives him her treasure to start his career in the Indies. He leaves with her a box with the portrait of his mother and the pair swear that, though they will be in different countries they will think of each other as they see the same evening star that they now watch from the bench in her garden - in the best Seventh Heaven Tradition.

We get a couple of brief glimpses of his life in the colonies as attention focuses on Saumur and Tumiati’s fury as he discovers his daughter has given the gold to the unworthy nephew. He locks Valli in her room permanently. However the health of his wife (Giuditta Rissone one time Mrs. Vittorio de Sica) fails and it becomes obvious that with her death he will have to pay levies and taxes in passing her share of the estate to his daughter. He brings Valli out and has her sign a document which will disadvantage her to avoid these. She complies.

Tumiati’s health fails too and he succumbs eyeing voraciously the precious metal of the crucifix held in front of him. Meanwhile De Lullo sets out from the Indies. On his way he encounters a Marchioness who puts forward a plan where he will marry her ugly daughter and be bought a title so he can be a functionary at court.

In Saumur, Valli looks longingly at the bench where she made her promise to her cousin only to have her dreams fulfilled as he appears there. He expresses his gratitude, pays back the money given him with market interest and asks for the return of the chest, uneasy at the prospect of her asserting his obligation to her. She lets him leave.

However De Lullo’s potential father in law puts an end to the scheme saying the son of a bankrupt could never be given a title. News of De Lullo’s fate reaches Valli and she buys up his father’s debts anonymously enabling the marriage to go ahead. Now she only has sixteen million instead of twenty one the Notary explains.

The film ends with Valli/ Eugenia at maid Gallini’s wedding in the church where De Lullo’s embroidered robe, which he had given her, now adorns the Virgin Statue. The novel’s coverage of her later years is notably missing.

The lead duo fail to involve and attention moves to the Grandet household grotesques. Tumiati’s pleasure in his trading is overwhelming while Gallini’s sympathetic peasant provides a balance. Opportunities for complexity are avoided beyond giving the unworthy cousin a rudimentary sense of obligation. There is no real comparison between the high price delights of Paris and provincial Saumur or comment on the legal and ecclesiastic structures. Despite Soldati’s flawlessly tasteful presentation there’s nothing as memorable as the walls of Miser Grandet’s counting room closing in on him in the Rex Ingram The Conquering Power.

Even lacking the florid decadence of Luchino Visconti’s best work or the flamboyance of the films of Vittorio Cottafavi, this one still remains very much a product of the European forties costume melo cycle, films like Christian Jacque’s Carmen or Cavalcanti’s Nicholas Nickleby, never approaching the standard of The Heiress or La Chartreuse de Parme.

Cesare Olivieri who plays President Cruchet here will become a long running Soldati associate directing second unit for his films in the fifties. Future directors Renato Castellani and Mario Girolami were also frequent collaborators.

 Two years later again in 1948 at the height of the realist cycle, we get Soldati’s Carlo Ponti production Fuga in Francia / Flight to France offering an unfamiliar view of post WW2 Italy. It centres on fugitive ex Mussolini government official Folco Lulli’s attempt to escape retribution. The structure, the flight of war criminals, recalls The 49th Parallel and may have been influenced by Michael Powell’s film.

When we first see Lulli, he’s wearing a priest’s cassock and entering a boarding school where head teacher, Cesare Olivieri again, reluctantly kits him out in civilian clothes, reminded of Lulli’s financial contributions to the institution. Lulli’s pre-teen son Enrico Olivieri is among the pupils and despite Lulli’s plan to leave him behind, he climbs into the seat next to him in the bus. Accompanied by itinerant migrants, ex-soldier Pietro Germi conspicuous among them, they travel to a border town stopping at the inn there.

Lulli’s one time maid Rosi Mirafiore, playing a character called Pierina (like Dora Nelson’s alter ego), is working there and recognises her former Ecelensia. Both fear the other. He begs her not to denounce him and promises a hefty payment. He has also pocketed his son’s clasp knife.  (Left Fuga in Francia Lulli and Cesare Olivieri)

Fearful she invites one of the traveler group to come to her room and they spend the night together. 

 When he goes, he leaves his striped scarf which she carefully folds and puts away but Lulli appears and murders her, placing the scarf to incriminate the itinerant.

Lulli then guides their group, taking them over the pass in the snow into France - the trip the migrants in Germi’s Il Camino della speranza will make. Avoiding the police ski patrol, they are overtaken by a snow storm and in the film’s best scene they shelter in a mountain hut where the troop’s accordionist recognises Lulli as the fugitive war criminal from his picture in a news paper on the floor and Lulli joins in his song desperately trying to recover the paper from under the musician’s feet.

He produces a pistol but Germi, the most embittered of the group, a soldier who had experienced reprisals against his town and been forced to join firing squads during the war, takes control intending to hold him for the police. Lulli wins over one of his captors but young Olivieri is injured in the the cold and pursuit is closing in.

This is one of the second wave of Post WW2 Realist Italian cinema, using real locations but now foregrounding them with professional actors. The school with it’s bullying, the maid’s sparse room, the unattended dam all suggest the country’s run down condition. The final scene’s ambulance is a made over baker’s van.

Folco Lulli had several leads in this period but is best known as the Italian driver in Le salaire de la peur / Wages of Fear. An effective enough character actor he doesn’t carry a starring role, particularly here one which lacks any sympathetic shading. Germi on the other hand emerges from the ensemble giving one of his best performances and the film is of a piece with his own serious dramas of post war anguish.

Best forties B&W production values don’t create the authenticity intended. An early Nino Rota score disappoints also.

It’s a bit much to expect a few films by a single director to stand in for a decade of Italian film making but these are a good match for the pattern of unsurprising craft skill that the few accessible films of this period reveal, more so than the description we get from contemporary English language critics - white telephones succeeded by unremitting veracity.

It seems unlikely that there is a masterpiece hidden away among the unknown Soldati work (Eugenia Grandet is his most often cited film) - or a carelessly made one. You could do worse than explore these easily available titles to get a handle on the Italian film of their day. I found it rewarding.

Barrie Pattison 2020.