Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

the most popular actor in fascist Italy, playing roles similar
to those performed in Hollywood by both Cary Grant
and James Stewart. Camerini’s most important comedy,
Il Signor Max (Mr. Max, 1937), starring De Sica, established
a level of craftsmanship and witty sophistication
that rivals the best products of the Hollywood studios
during the same period. Blasetti’s career represents an
entirely different approach to cinema. Frequently abandoning
the sound studios at Cinecittà so crucial to
Camerini’s work, Blasetti created his masterpiece 1860
(Gesuzza the Garibaldian Wife, 1934), a patriotic film
about Garibaldi. In its original uncut edition, he linked
Garibaldi’s Redshirts to Mussolini’s Blackshirts, first
made use of nonprofessional actors and on-location
shooting, and pursued film realism—all supposedly original
features of the immediate postwar period. Blasetti’s
Vecchia guardia (The Old Guard, 1935) employs a similar
documentary style in portraying Mussolini’s rise to power.
Yet, Blasetti also made one of the most beautiful and
imaginative of all films during this era, La Corona di ferro
(The Iron Crown, 1941), in which ornately stylized studio
sets testify to the technical prowess reached at Cinecittà.
Its call for universal peace at a time when the entire world
(including Italy) was at war demonstrates how fascist
censorship was quite loosely applied to the commercial
cinema. Moreover, Blasetti’s Quattro passi fra le nuvole
(A Stroll in the Clouds, 1942) prefigured the poetic style of
De Sica’s postwar neorealism in its simple plot and a
Zavattini script.
Italian films made during the fascist period were
usually not ‘‘fascist’’ in tone, although they were often
nationalistic and patriotic, much like their Hollywood
counterparts. The search for realism in the Italian cinema
thus began not with the postwar period and the neorealists
but, rather, with directors working in the 1930s
and the 1940s before the end of World War II. In an
important manifesto published in 1933 (‘‘The Glass
Eye’’), pro-Mussolini journalist Leo Longanesi called
for Italian directors to take their cameras into the streets
and to produce a non-Hollywood version of Italian
everyday life, a film realism that was authentically
Italian in content. This interest in realism was specifically
the goal of the left-wing Italian fascist intellectuals associated
with Vittorio Mussolini’s journal Cinema, and
after the war and the fall of his father’s regime, these
same individuals continued their interest in film realism
but pursued this goal with a Marxist, not a fascist, twist.
Not only talented auteurs such as Blasetti, but other
directors took up Longanesi’s call, and the advent of
the war added urgency to a realistic view of Italian life
on celluloid. A marriage of fact and fiction, documentary
and fantasy, soon became the formula for successful films
about the war. Francesco De Robertis (1902–1959), his
protégé Rossellini, and Augusto Genina (1892–1957), all
Italy
contributed to this search for realism while making war
films. Genina’s Squadrone bianco (The White Squadron,
1936), a film about Italian colonialism in Libya, was shot
on stupendous desert locations; his L’Assedio dell’Alcazar
(The Siege of the Alcazar, 1940), a celebration of the
Falangist defense of the Alcazar fortress by Franco’s
troops during the Spanish Civil War, also employed real
locations and documentary footage.
The realistic war films of Genina, De Robertis, and
Rossellini adopted the formula of the documentario romanzato
(fictional documentary), combining a fictionalemotional-romantic
theme (usually the love affair between
a soldier and his lady friend) with the documentaryhistorical-realistic
theme (the war film genre, real locations,
documentary photography, some nonprofessional
actors). De Robertis’s Men on the Bottom (1941), made
for the Italian navy, employs an editing style indebted to
Eisenstein’s montage (the Russian’s theories had been
discussed and partially translated by the film journal
Cinema) and used nonprofessional actors, the men on
board an Italian submarine, to great effect. Rossellini
actually produced a trilogy of pro-regime films that we
label today his ‘‘fascist trilogy,’’ which may be contrasted
and compared to the more celebrated ‘‘war trilogy’’ he
made in the immediate postwar neorealist period. The
first of these three works, La Nave bianca (The White
Ship, 1941), the dramatic tale of life on a hospital ship
saving brave Italian soldiers, was shot in collaboration
with De Robertis; Vittorio Mussolini collaborated on
the script. It was followed in short order by two other
films supporting the war effort (the soldiers, sailors, and
airmen doing the fighting and the dying, not necessarily
the fascist regime): Un Pilota ritorna (A Pilot Returns,
1942) and L’Uomo dalla croce (The Man With a Cross,
1943). These three nationalistic films shot to support the
troops represent important precursors of Italian neorealism,
and another appeared in 1943, the year that witnessed
the downfall of Mussolini’s regime: Ossessione
(Obsession) by Luchino Visconti (his first feature). Based
on a pirated version of James Cain’s novel, The Postman
Always Rings Twice (1934), Visconti created a truly
unusual antiheroic protagonist who can easily be seen as
a homosexual. This character was indebted to American
hard-boiled novels and was diametrically opposed to the
kind of ‘‘manly’’ protagonists fascist censors might have
preferred. Visconti’s long takes and languorous rhythms
reappeared in his postwar work and represented a style
that was set apart from the more rapid editing techniques
in Rossellini’s neorealist classics.
POSTWAR NEOREALISM: A BRIEF DECADE
With the fall of Mussolini and the end of the war,
international audiences were suddenly introduced to
SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM 43