ITALIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2022.

 

The 2022 Italian Film Festival offers films by Gabriele Salvatores, Pif, Eduardo Leo, Silvio Soldini, Gianni Amelio & Giuseppe Tornatore. With Daniele Luchetti busy on the L'amica geniale TV Series, they’ve pretty much rounded up the top cinema heavy weight contenders. Pity our luck didn’t hold with the retrospective. Facing Pasolini again reminds me how sorry I am I watched his films the first time. That one goes with the notion that Italian films start with Bicycle Thieves.  No one  seems to understand that the forgotten Genina-Blassetti-Camerini era or the gloriously trashy Solima-Corbucci-Anthony Ascott days could use our attention.

Hopes centered on Gianni Amelio’s new Il signore delle formiche / Lord of the Ants. It turns out that this is on the edge of being a masterpiece. 

The real life basis dealt with failed author (again) Aldo Braibanti, played by a now mature Luigi Lo Cascio (La meglio gioventù / The Best of Youth), found heading up
The Tower, a 1960s artist’s commune in Piacenza, guiding young people in theater, art and literature. Brothers Davide Vecchi and younger Leonardo Maltese are drawn into his circle, biking to the rural Tower work space. We see one of his words-as-blows rehearsal and the young people dancing in the open there.

The film opens with Vecchia and mother Anna Caterina Antonacci  bursting in on Lo Cascio and Maltese asleep to have them arrested, in the city rooms they have taken. Their landlady pockets the pay off.  

This comes backgrounded by  scenes where the pair encountered the urban gay community which play disturbingly close to Veit Harlan’s 1957 homophobic Anders als du und ich. Maltese’s institutionalisation introduces a dim White Sister, the only representative of the Catholicism the film hints at. The cops are treated more kindly. A so-friendly doctor sets up scary electro therapy for the boy, while Lo Cascio is thrown in the slammer for “plagio” an offense put on the statute books when Mussolini didn’t want to admit there were homosexuals in Italy but figured he could nail them for coercion. Braibanti’s was the only prosecution ever launched under that act.

I’ve pretty much filled my quota on films where gay characters are persecuted by right wing authorities lately and Amelio knows he has to deliver the double load of drama and argument to hold a current audience.

At this point, involvement grows as hat wearing reporter co-star Elio Germano, emerges changing the film’s dynamic, when he provides an audience identification figure his certainties untroubled by the doubts and needs of the other characters.  With his twenty first century sympathies, Germano provides both the strength and weakness in the film. He’s like Claudette Colbert in Paramount’s Maid of Salem thirties witch trials movie or the Gene Kelly character in Inherit the Wind, someone we endorse while aware he’s an anachronism. From the moment we see him at his desk in the office of the Italian Communist Party daily L’Unità, we know he’s going to end standing his  typewriter on its end like the other reporters at the finish of their shifts.

Germano, who is excellent, gets to dramatise the maker’s point of view, scrapping with the editor who tells him he doesn’t want his paper to be a vehicle for perverts and shocking the visiting Russians who feel they should throw their support behind oppressed comrades till they find out what they pair are on trial for. Amelio is sharp enough to create a tension with Lo Casio who resents the way Germano is involving Lo Casio’s mother, become more victim than him, a character whose brief screen time provides a large slice of the film’s most telling moments.

Germano’s plot is elaborated with his cousin Sara Serraiocco, (a festival visitor also appealing in Il ritorno di Casanova) who organises demonstrations outside the court of which Lo Cascio is dismissive but for which his mother is profoundly grateful. Throw in Serraiocco’s regional lover who barracks her demo saying they should be protesting Vietnam.

The actual trial reaches an intensity rare on film with the two single take testimonies - the prosecution witness who we only see the one time while in the background the defense lawyer can be heard chuckling at his evidence and Maltese, watched from behind entering shattered and showing the raw scars of his shock treatment, getting to realise that the courage he is showing is making the situation worse

Amelio at work.

Throw in some hard charging symbolism in Lo Cascio’s study of ants and their devotion to their community. One of the nicest touches  is his revelation that prisoners and staff are collecting specimens for his jail herborium.

Anyway you assess it Lord of the Ants is a major film. It’s unlikely I’ll see anything as good this year. Film craft and performances are outstanding. The finale with actors lipsynching Tebaldi’s “Aida” for an open field performance is an effectively distanced exit point to take the film into its what happened next captions, as seventies pop numbers play.

I'm always amazed that Amelio attracts so little attention and, incidentally, I can’t help noticing that, since his break out with the exceptional 1990 Porte Aperte, the only one of his features which I’ve been unable to see is his coming-out documentary Felice chi è diverso, make of that what you will.

Italian comedy teams seem to fall outside both the popular and the fesitival nets, think Franco Franchi and Cicchio Ingrassia or Aldo, Giacomo and Giovani, which means they hardly ever qualify for sub-titles. It was not till I’d been watching them for years that I saw Franco & Cicchio translated and discovered that they actually were funny - at least in their B&W years. These are a different animal to the celebrated anti-authoritarian Commedia all’Itaniana or the vehicles for Aldo Verdone or Lino Banfi even with some overlap.

Well, now the  Pio D'Antini & Amerdeo Grieco duo have coined it with Gennaro Nunziante’s  Belli Ciao., this time drawing on a TV background and fronting an engaging enough comedy which keeps recalling other, often better efforts.

The boys grow up in the picturesque (very) hill community where the streets are too narrow for cars and all the young people are fleeing North to Milan. Their lifelong friendship only lasts till business minded Pio takes the train to the big city where he achieves financial center power, leaving his wannabe doctor pal Amedeo to become manager of the local surgical aids business.

They are re-united when it’s Amedeo sent back to assess the district civic betterment scheme. One of the town council points out they can get better than his 15 % interest offer from the Camora and suggests ‘phoning them.

Amadeo resolves to sort this out by visiting his one time friend's home in the city, meeting his media influencer associates and picking up an unhappy sales girl in the swank shop, whose mean manager he uses the store P.A. system to send scampering up and down the stairs. When he tries to borrow ingredients for the evening meal from  Pio’s urban neighbors, they they tell the cops he’s a burglar.

The financial police take an interest in Pio’s business dealings, seizing his trendy furnishings, and he ends up under house arrest back with the olds he had put in a retirement home.

Gags like making city guests breathe exhaust fumes to adjust to the country air and a
framing story set in a therapy group.

I’m not sure how well this one travels. It’s amusing enough, with a nicely cynical line and lots of attractive scenics. However the shadow of Benvenuti al sud never quite leaves it.

Mario Martone’s Nostalgia proves to be two movies in one. Leading man of the moment Pierfrancesco Favino quits an established life as a businessman in Egypt to go back to his childhood home in Naples’ picturesque Rione Sanità district, finding his aged mother Aurora Quattrocchi moved into the slum ground floor flat of the building where he grew up and his old friend Tommaso Ragno, now “the bad man”, nowhere to be found. In parallel, we get a crime melo with fighting priest, balding Francesco Di Leva, first seen conducting a service on the steps of his church in defiance of the authorities. He’s battling the Camora and police regulation to save the city’s imperiled youth.

Nostalgia - Favino.

Lots of atmospheric scenes of Favino in the narrow streets where he used to ride his bicycle (flashbacks) and his visit to the catacombs in the company of Father Di Leva’s star pupil, a girl who has graduated as an art historian. There’s the extra- ordinary sequence of Favino bathing Quattrocchi naked in a new home he is attempting to set up for her and which the unseen heavies graffiti after burning his vintage motor cycle.

Di Leva fears for Pierfrancesco’s safety and spends a day introducing him around to the drug dealer families of the children in his youth club. Finally a sinister secret is revealed as Favino makes a blind fold visit to Rangno’s base in the the guarded streets, to face the reproach that, unlike his old associate, he has home, religion, wife and business. Genuine tension has been set up.

Effective low light location shooting makes the Neapolitan setting dominate but the schizoid structure finally does in more promising elements. This one has the High Noon fault. All the characters are telling the lead to get out of town. Not to do so out of nostalgia seems to make no sense.

Simultaneously realistic and operatic, new comer Francesco Costabile’s Una Femmina - The Code of Silence is an indictment of the Calabian 'Ndrangheta crime syndicate, with grim subject matter and convincing, unfamiliar handling. A few observers have compared it to Gomorrah but the nearest I can get is the Ugo Tognazzi Sardinian family feud piece Questione d’onore, with the jokes stripped out.

This one starts in the currently fashionable dim images. Lead Lina Siciliano’s granny lures the girl’s mum back into the black hands of  the mob with a face half frame close up ‘phone call. The child is made ghostly in dark mirror reflection. Severe featured Siciliano, her first role, then grows up in the remote farm home during a lull in the local blood feud, with her chubby, animal noise making cousin taking an unhealthy interest in her

Siciliano sees the local singing grave digger as a better mate, with his eye for the world beyond the mountain horizon. They discover the derelict grave of her mother
(“They didn’t even write the name”)  and by way of revenge, Siciliano sets about “mischief”, stirring the dormant vendetta claiming strangers are responsible for burning the goat barn and dope stash. Local capo Vincenzo Di Rosa won’t have any of that. “Blood and money don’t go together.”  It’s menacing headlights in the dark time time and soon the local women are grooming Siciliano for her wedding (“Women need to be tamed”)  followed by the striking march of singing, black veiled women for an enigmatic ending.

Its Calabrian setting stands this one apart. There’s even a reference to leaving the tree stump as a marriage proposal the way Mino Reitano does in Tara Poki. 

Fabrizio Ferracane, who plays the authoritative uncle, has been around for twenty years and the producer’s wife Pina Turco was in Gomorrah. Otherwise its an unfamiliar cast adding authenticity. The unfamiliar location film making, using minimal lighting and severe, straight faced playing, give the material conviction but I can’t say I’d like to see this one again - or more like it.


Leading man Eduardo Leo  pulled away from the herd with his sharp anti-religion satire Io c'è. I’d like to double feature that one with Aamir Kahn’s equally subversive PK.

So Leo's new high concept romcom Lasciarsi un giorno a Roma / Breaking Up in Rome is a disappointment. In this one, Leo is (who’d have guessed?) a failed novelist who has fallen back on ghosting an agony aunt column under the name of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. There’s trouble at home and yoga work out enthusiast, elegant Marta Nieto gets on the IPhone without knowing her companion’s the columnist, listing out his failings. He attempts to correct  shortcomings - sloppy dressing, indecisiveness etc..

Parallel with this, their chubby friend is married to Claudia Gerini the mayor of Rome and the stresses in their relationship have her prepared to quit the job. Everyone is insufferably charming. This is not going to work out.

Best elements are the scenics - the nice coffee house over the river, street scenes and ideal homes. The film is irredeemably soft centered. Doris Day and Rock Hudson
would fit right in. I got bored half an hour before the end.    

Gabriele Salvatores’s new  Il ritorno di Casanova / Casanova’s Return is getting one of if it’s first outings here. I’ve always admired Salvatores’ work and the texture of this one is remarkable - the  the story of movie director Toni Servillo as he edits his version of  Arthur Schnitzler’s "Casanova's Heimkehr."

The Scnitzler original deals with the aging Casanova and has already been filmed several times, once by Pasquale Festa Campanile in 1978  again & by Edouard Niermans in 1998 with Alain Delon. It covers the same ground as Don Juan movies (or at least TV episodes) with Doug Fairbanks and Errol Flynn. Casanova is shown reaching his sixties as he faces a younger competitor, just like Servillo, whose film will compete with one from a younger admirer for the Venice Golden Lion. Servillo’s Casanova, star Fabrizio Bentivoglio (it's already a quarter century since he made the Australian The Missing) envies his involvement with the the gorgeous twenty something farm girl, found at one stage birthing a calf.  We get a wet and raunchy scene of her and Servillo making out. The film within the film runs to elaborate costume drama in the best Barry Lyndon manner and even a naked sword fight which must have been close to the temperament of Festa Campinale.

A comparison between on screen director and his star edging towards becoming lookalikes, is pushed further. Like his subject, Servillo is shown willfully ungrateful for the support of his long time  patron and friend, here the producer who has borrowed against his home to make the film, the devotion of his editor and the admiration of his younger competitor. Character and creator, make parallel returns to Venice at Carnival time.

The scenes with Servillo are in black and white while his work is shown in colour. They get their money’s worth out of this, with the editing suite where the colour images, we have already seen, appear in monochrome on the monitors while some of the full spectrum filming is so dim that the range of tones is only revealed when a light is introduced into the near black image. Once, their dissolve into the colour stock only shows when a reflection shimmers on the black water on screen. The change of format they use to differentiate time periods in Nostalgia is out classed. This is all mirrors facing mirrors, complete with the evocation of Fellini, not only in the Casanova subject but the movie making of 8&1/2.

Il ritorno di Casanova - Servillo

I’d already been through a lot of of this this with Salvatores’ Quo Vadis Baby and I’ve always admired what he did. I sat there hoping that all the razzle dazzle would dissolve out to reveal an idea as substantial as it’s presentation but the cell 'phone on the Venice Beach ending doesn’t sell me. I ended up wanting the Salvatores of Mediterraneo back again.

 

One of the problems of seeing material so early in its career is that it's hard to document these. Another week to go. Hope springs eternal.

 

Barrie Pattison. 2022


 

Fox and His Friends.

The films that had been made by the William Fox Company all but vanished after it was merged with Daryl Zanuck’s 20th Century Company. Fox stars, people like Warner Baxter, Tom Mix,  Janet Gaynor and the once enormously popular Will Rogers, were the ones about whom I knew the least for most of the years I spent on this. Fox Studios' history reel used the Zanuck - Wellman Call of the Wild which had no connection with Fox but got Clark Gable in.

DVD turned this around with the new owners realising that they had a store of all but untapped major Hollywood product. The new owners did a handsome Fox-Murnau-Borzage Box along with Charlie Chan and Will Rogers sets and now, out of this new activity, we are getting glimpses of hard worker studio directors who filled their A feature schedule - include Doug Fairbanks graduates Allan Dwan and Raoul Walsh.

Dwan’s 1927 East Side, West Side makes the cut more as a record of the enormous New York construction effort of it’s day. There’s a then-and-now short showing its locations shooting.  The title is a the name of a popular street song and was used for an Irving Cummings movie in 1923, a super boring one by Merven Le Roy in 1949 and a 1963 TV series with George C. Scott, none of which are connected to this film but all have in common foregrounding the contrast of a milling working class and the penthouse people.

 

This one opens with George O’Brien, admiring the East River sky line of high rise construction his back to camera, and pondering how a brick from the load that his adoptive parents’ barge carries, can turn into sky scrapers. It’s not long before the barge sinks (disturbing this - the cargo of bricks taking it straight down) and George clambers out onto an East Side pier where, still sopping wet and in shock, he has to punch out the toughs from Dan Wolheim’s gang.  Virginia Valli, stereotypical Jewish tailor Dore Davidson’s daughter, jokes about her dad reluctant to kit George out from the store’s sales stock. Romance blooms.

East Side - West Side - O'Brien on the shore

The street toughs now cheer O’Brien when he takes on comers at the local boxing ring and promoter and Fox regular J. Farrel Mc Donald spots his potential and starts training our hero. In the gym, George meets socialite Holmes Herbert, who is actually his dead beat dad having lost contact with the boy when his snooty family had his marriage annulled. If Holmes revealed this, he would lose the respect and friendship of the boy.

Of course, O’Brien is drawn to uptown girl  June Collier (opposite Gary Cooper in The Man from Wyoming) and accepts architecture training set up by Herbert. Virginia, not wanting to stand in his way, claims to be engaged to a local club manager. This doesn’t work out too well with drugs being slipped into match books in the joint while she works there, and the dastard determined to have his will of Virginia.

Meanwhile Collier has taken passage on a Titanic-modeled doomed liner, waving good bye to Herbert from the life boat where her low life society lover has hidden himself, while the crew shoot men trying to take places reserved for woman and children only. This incident turns up again in Negulesco’s 1952 Fox Titanic movie. A punch out re-aligns the lovers according to the preference of a working class audience.

The thing which elevates this from Hollywood production line features around it is the presentation of New York as a dynamic, vital environment always in the process of improvement. The scenes of subway building are particularly vivid, with a work elevator large enough to drive a car onto, lowering the camera into actual construction. The cave-in (is 1949’s Le point du jour the only mining film without a cave in?) is a particularly impressive mechanical effect and the same crew seem to have staged the one shot of chairs sliding down the tilting deck, standing out in the otherwise mediocre studio tank model sinkings.

Cast are more than equal to their task. George O’Brien’s career was peaking at this point with the Murnau Sunrise and Michael Curtiz’ much abused Noah’s Ark. Like Philip Reed shortly later, body-builder-actor O'Brien anticipated the Stallone-Steve Reeves era.  They get him into his shorts whenever possible and we see a lot of Valli’s stockinged legs, giving the piece an effective physicality in all the studio artifice. In sound, O’Brien would become a B movie cowboy hero and regular John Ford featured player.

Dwan gave an interview where he claimed the way to survive in Hollywood was to never stick your head above the crowd. He mentioned the forties Dennis O’Keefe versions of once scandalous comedies Up In Mabel’s Room and Getting Gertie’s Garter as his favorite work. Like East Side West Side, these do stand out from an often mediocre output.  

 Eight years later Fox’s take on New York is much the same in Raoul Walsh’s Under Pressure, with a script that passed though hands including Borden Chase, Billy Wilder & Lester Cole. Irving Cummings again did some uncredited revisions on this one.

Uneven & crude but fascinating for a movie freak, this mid thirties Victor McLaglen - Edmund Lowe-Raoul Walsh piece works at setting up crews constructing a subway tunnel between New York and Brooklyn, “Sand Hogs - a short life at high speed” Boss McLaglen talks about the river “a thousand feet over your head - do you want it in your lap?” A shaky optical shows a cross section with McLaglen’s team tunneling from Brooklyn towards rival Charles Bickford working from the other side, with the crews betting their hefty wages on who will reach the center first. The newcomer is offered a cigarette to see it blaze up in his face from air pressure and a worker collapses in the street in front of Florence Rice, who finds the emergency disk he carries, rushing to put him in Dr. Sig Ruman’s decompression chamber to treat the bends.

This one has the director’s personality stamped all over it -  a cartoonish notion of masculinity that places it between What Price Glory and  Marines Let’s Go. There’s a saloon like the one in The Bowery, though here it’s Marjorie Rambeau who punches out the drunk rather than Wally Beery flooring a floozie. Rambeau even has a there are two kinds of women speech admitting appealing Rice to her blokes only establishment .

Rice looks good and has the character of a fashion illustrator who walks out on her editor to do her Sandhog story but, as in her MGM movies that include the Marx brothers At the Circus, she comes across as incidental. The relationship between McLaglen and side kick Lowe is more clearly important than those with the women.  

We’ve really got two films. There's the lumpen surface drama with dodgy process backgrounds of the wrong New York sky line and compressed air bubbling up from below the river’s surface in a poor matte shot. Among the tunnelers’ women watching it, Rambeau gets a monologue about seeing a thirty foot spurt from a leak bringing up mud, timbers - and men.
    

Under Pressure - Bickford, Lowe. McLaglen and (?) Thorpe.

The piece however comes to life in the imposing scenes underground in hellish conditions, where the men, sweat-covered half naked, race to complete the work. One of the first surprises is to see the grubby crews emerge at street level in smart suits.The outstanding feature is the studio built tunnel, a great piece of  construction by art director Jack Otterson in his second year on the job, soon to move into Charles Hall’s spot as prestige designer at Universal - the John Wayne The Spoilers notably.

There are  a couple of comic darkies again but we don’t see much of them. Jim Thorpe is a "mucker" and Ruman, Lynn Barri and Ward Bond, doing another bit part, figure early in their careers.

This is a very much the thick ear entertainment that earned abuse for Hollywood but European industries couldn’t match for energy. G.W. Pabst’s 1931 more documentary mining film Kameradschaft makes an interesting comparison.

The two films are represented by reasonable copies on You Tube and add to the newly unfolding picture of  the William Fox Company, one of the most rewarding and curiously neglected areas of Old Movie World. That pair are available to us, even without having any serious Cinematheque activity in this country.

Barrie Pattison 2022