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Hollywood Glamour in Postwar Italy
regimes. It was the first big commercial films which provided the wealth, spectacle,
and sexuality that communicated something new and which matched and
expanded the horizon of aspirations that was the consequence of hardship. It is
probably misleading to refer to a single film in this context, but King Vidor’s 1946
movie Gilda was undoubtedly important for the extremely potent image it offered
of Rita Hayworth. Hayworth’s star image had been forged by Harry Cohn’s
Columbia Pictures and it presented an unusual mixture of hyperbolic, manufactured
beauty, perfect fashioning, healthy physicality, vampish behavior, and
innocence of spirit. As an image to be consumed, Rita-Gilda offered Italians a
powerful taste of the capacity for manufacture of the US film industry. She filled
the demand in postwar Italy for a dream of abundance and freedom. With her
perfect figure, luxuriant auburn tresses, and the costumes of Jean Louis, she
entranced a generation. Posters of the film are being affixed around Rome by the
protagonist of Ladri di biciclette and Pier Paolo Pasolini produced a memorable
account of the film’s impact which then appeared in reworked form in his novella
Amado mio. Gilda’s easy sexuality, he wrote, “was like a shout of joy, a sweet cataclysm
that brought down Caorle’s cinema.” 10 “Gilda speaks a universal language
that crosses all frontiers and enters into direct communication with the spectator
by means of that special pass that is called sex appeal,” observed Gion Guida in
Cinemoda. 11
Rita Hayworth represented the highest point of glamour manufacture achieved
up until that moment in Hollywood. Born Marguerita Cansino and of Mexican
origin, she had undergone extensive remodeling to turn her into such a potent
symbol of Americanism that her image was affixed by enthusiastic airmen to the
first hydrogen bomb to be dropped on Japan. The reaction to the film in Italy and
the influence it has had on the collective memory shows that Italians were ready
to respond to it, even if the visual codes it employed were unfamiliar to most and
it represented a precursor of social and economic developments rather than an
integrated part of the development of a new industrialized imagination. Although
Rita Hayworth’s appeal was enormous and probably unique at the time, it should
be seen in relation to the more general effects of the enormous quantity of
Hollywood films which poured into Italy in the postwar years.
Hollywood films had been popular with the restricted audiences of the 1930s
and before the war a small number of stars had visited Rome to see the newly
opened Cinecittà studios. From the late 1940s their visits became more regular and
systematic as runaway American film production in Italy became routine following
the introduction of protective legislation in 1947 and 1949. Although the impact
of the films was very significant and indeed crucial to the overall glamorous
impression of the United States as the land of prosperity, sex appeal, and excitement,
it was ultimately the arrival in Italy of the star lifestyle which had the greater
impact on the imagination, customs, and perceptions of glamour. Clearly, the star
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