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Stephen Gundle
and success; they had absorbed the “me too” message of Hollywood, which
encouraged the belief that anyone could make it. Unable to imitate the wealth or
even afford even modest consumer items invested with star aura, they took on
board the message of sex appeal and responded to the invitations of entrepreneurs
and impressarios to display their bodies.
Italian cinema could not compete with the sophistication, expense, and skills of
the American industry. But it could offer plenty of feminine beauty combined with
attractive images of Italian landscapes and lifestyles. For the foreign market, Italy
in the 1950s provided a novel and highly attractive input into the international pinup
culture that prospered so widely. The films, from the rice-field melodrama Riso
amaro (Bitter Rice) to the working-class potboiler La donna del fiume (Woman
of the River), appealed to art-house spectators in English-speaking countries who
found in the wild, dark women of Italian film confirmation of a longstanding
northern view of Italy as a primitive land of passion and waywardness. Since the
early nineteenth century, writers including De Lamartine, Stendhal, and D.H.
Lawrence had cultivated this impression. It found a further extension in the post-
World War II writings of authors such as John Horne Burns and Joseph Heller.
The cult of Mediterranean beauty that prospered in Italian films in the 1950s
owed something to the global success of neo-realism, with its downbeat yet strong
heroines and rejection of the glamorous. But it owed more to the determination
of producers and directors to apply some of the lessons of Hollywood as they
perceived them. These were successful enough for Hollywood very quickly to
seek to insert Italy’s female beauties into its own runaway productions. Gina
Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren, and others had the advantage of being less stylized
than American actresses, they were physical rather than artificial. However, to
American eyes, the Italians looked not like stars but starlets since in the United
States only the latter exposed their flesh. Actor and director Vittorio de Sica
confirmed this view when he declared, in poor English and causing much
controversy, that “Italian beauties are all curves . . . Their artistic capabilities really
cannot compete with their physical qualities. It is very sad to say it, but the Italian
film industry today tends mainly to highlight legs and showy, opulent bosoms.” 21
As they emerged and became successful, winning Hollywood contracts, starlets
like Lollobrigida and Loren underwent a process of refashioning. In effect they
became absorbed into the styles and codes of Hollywood glamour. They adopted
the low-cut gowns, the perfect coiffures, the statuesque qualities, the poses and
manners, and the affluent lifestyles of the Hollywood stars with whom they entered
into rivalry. For a brief period, Lollobrigida and Loren were seen as direct
competitors of Marilyn Monroe; by some they were seen as much sexier, in a less
innocent and more adult way. In many American films of this period, Italian
actresses played parts which called for them to be prostitutes or ex-prostitutes or
to be sexually knowing. For some Italians, however, the addition of sexual allure
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