Bucket List Movie

That slight movement of the earth you just felt may be accounted for by the fact that this is SPROCKETED SOURCES 100TH ENTRY - Well actually 105 but I've knocked out some that were no longer relevant.  - B.P.

I'm getting on for having exhausted my inventory of  important works of cinema left to see but then again I must be on the way to exhausting the time I have to get through them - and of course there are all the ones I have yet to hear about, to start with a vast range of Hispanic and Arab films which are never considered in English language writing. 

One title which has always eluded me, though I made a serious effort to track it down on visits to Italy, was Mario Camerini’s 1929 Rotaie / Rails celebrated as the major Italian film of  the last years of their silents. Well, there it is on You Tube at the press of a button. Another one off the bucket list.

Rotaie opens with a most Germanic sequence, the camera tracking down the dark street following shabby couple Käthe von Nagy and Maurizio D’Ancora obviously experiencing hard times. They take a room in the cheap hotel planning a suicide pact - close up of an effervescent tablet in a glass - but buoyed up by their mutual affection they leave and face the glittering light’s of the night time city. The pair find themselves in front of the rail station (montage of travel posters). In the buffet a man, rushing to catch the train that's leaving, drops his wallet. He is seen,  pulling away, as they pick it up and look for him. The wallet is full of bank notes.

On impulse (“Dove andiamo”) D'Ancora buys them tickets on the train at the platform, it's giant locomotive bellowing steam, and they find themselves in a a compartment headed for Monte Carlo. In the breakfast car, diner Daniele Crespi changes his seat so they can be together. He has a thin mustache so is obviously a hand kissing foreigner of loose morals of the kind normally played by Warwick Ward at the time.

 Rotaie - Von Nagy & D'Ancora

They arrive as the speed boats are racing on the bay, like the scene in the l933 Gloria Swanson - Laurence Olivier Perfect Understanding. Crespi is following the action from the hotel terrace and, seeing Nagy struggling with her new purchases, he sends the uniformed page to help her. Taking the young couple in hand, Crespi introduces the husband to the gaming room where he soon is captivated by roulette, winning big only to see (best sequence) his new found wealth raked back away from him by the croupier. In desperation he tries to steal chips from the next gambler but is spotted by the floor manager and only saved from calamity by the intervention of  Crespi  who gives him another handful of notes which he is sure to lose.

Planning to collect on his investment, Crespi sends Nagy flowers and an invitation and, outraged by her husband’s irresponsibility, she accepts only to find herself in a situation she can’t control. After a dramatic confrontation, the leads flee the luxury hotel and buy a third class rail ticket home, sharing the compartment with the breast feeding mother, her son who gives them an apple and the father who accepts a cigarette. A couple more montages - one of those familiar geometric shots of tracks filmed from the moving train and one of giant factory machinery pumping away and D’Ancora is finishing his shift with Nagy bringing his meal in a basket, now happily part of the industrial working class.

Finally Rotaie emerges is a scaled down Sunrise, (simple couple lost in the big city) trading actual settings for the exuberant theatricality of the American film. The plotting in Rotaie is too familiar and too simple minded to impress, like its "stay with your own kind" message, which seems to have been in step with the Italian populism of the day. The craftsmanship is not sufficiently stylish to redeem it. 

However Rotaie is an interesting enough item coming from a place and time whose films we don’t know.  The film’s odd mix of twenties gloomy expressionist streets and Soviet editing with society drama from the thirties and forties' location shooting, does make it a revealing book mark in movie history.

Von Nagy.

Appealing Fraulein von Nagy’s performance out classes the others. She would have a strong career in the thirties, playing leads for most of the major German directors of the decade in  films that it appears nobody bothered to sub-title. She does get second billing in Gustav Ucicky’s splendid Fluchtlige but that one is all Hans Albers’ film. D’Ancora, only seventeen when he made this film, continued headlining till after WW2. Crespi does double duty here also working as designer. Cameraman Ubaldo Arata went on to film Open City. Director Mario Camerini, whose agreeable comedy films (including Darò un milione) would shortly launch the star career of Vittorio De Sica, can be glimpsed at the gaming tables.

The copy on You Tube is the 1931 "sonorised" re-issue running marginally too fast with a so so added music and effects track. It was lifted off Italia Tre and the quality is just passable. The sparse intertitles are not translated but it doesn’t take fluent Italian to follow what’s going on.

Barrie Pattison 2021