THE GOLD OF NAPLES (Vittorio De Sica, 1954)

In six episodes, Vittorio De Sica’s L’oro di Napoli finds “gold” in its Neapolitan characters of diverse age and status. The splendid script by Giuseppe Marotta, Cesare Zavattini, and De Sica launches an uncommonly rich work, one that brilliantly entertains and offers a host of terrific performances that encompass hilarious comedy, profound sadness, even ironical, embittered tragedy. De Sica’s filmmaking, coupled with Carlo Montuori’s gray black-and-white cinematography, achieves a subtle though pervasive sense of lingering clouds from the Second World War. The city has been so deeply lived in it has been worn down to the souls of inhabitants past and present. De Sica, who grew up in Naples, plays gambler Count Prospero B. in “I giocatori,” who gets frustrated that a young boy, the posh apartment building doorkeeper’s son (Pierino Bilancioni, giving the funniest child performance I’ve seen), keeps beating him—leaving him behind, as it were. This Prospero will not willingly surrender his “wand”; but he must make way for the future. Director De Sica has rewarded actor De Sica here with one of his greatest roles.

The other segments are just as sharp: “Il guappo,” in which Totò’s Saverio Petrillo does an hysterically funny jig when, emboldened by the support of his wife and kids, he tosses out the gangster, “the man who came to dinner,” that has bullyingly settled into their apartment; “Pizze a credito,” where Sophia Loren, in the first of many collaborations with De Sica, plays (with the confidence that Queen Latifah would later exhibit) a pizza baker’s wife who leaves the emerald ring that her husband sacrificed to give her at her lover’s place, and whose fibbing cover-up sends the couple on a frantic search for it in every pizza they sold that day in the neighborhood; “Funeralino,” showing the funeral procession for a child, attended mostly by children (schoolmates? fellow orphans?), and attracting more and more children from the tossing of sugared almonds into the street; Silvana Mangano (best actress, Italy’s film journalists), giving the performance of a lifetime in “Teresa,” about a former prostitute who must choose between her pimp and her rich spouse after discovering on her separate bedrooms-wedding night that her marriage is a grotesque sham; and “Il professore,” whose “seller of wisdom” demonstrates the interconnectedness of the people of Naples, and by so doing diverts the course of a young tough who was intent on slashing his girlfriend’s face.

Throughout, Alessandro Cicognini contributes a memorable score.

Like Umberto D. (1951), this stupendous film was exceptionally close to De Sica’s heart.

It is nearly as close to mine.

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SUNFLOWER (Vittorio De Sica, 1970)

War, love and life are all a damn pain: this is the message of Vittorio De Sica’s I girasoli, an opulent and very dreary melodrama that misapplies sweeping camera gestures, and lush color, to what ought to have been an intimate story about ordinary people. From Italy, the U.S.S.R. and France, the film also seems interminable, although only 100 minutes long.
     Sophia Loren plays Giovanna, who during the Second World War marries Antonio (Marcello Mastroianni), an electrician, who despite attempting to act insane is shipped off to the Russian front. After the war, when he doesn’t return home, Giovanna, refusing to believe he is dead, goes to Russia armed with a photograph in hopes of finding someone who recognizes him and knows where to find him. Her success is dumbfounding. (Conclusion: Russia must be a much smaller place than we thought.) But Giovanna finds more than she bargained for: Antonio now has a Russian wife and a young daughter. Feeling betrayed, she rips up her photograph, returns home, couples with a nondescript factory worker and bears his son, whom she names Antonio. If instead she had named the kid Marcello, the film could be credited with a lone spark of postmodernist wit.
     Antonio, however, visits Giovanna in Milan, where a tortured though morally proper Giovanna sends him on his way—with such tears at the train station! Along the way, Antonio, following the script, forgets all about his elderly mother, whom he also abandoned when he shut the door on his Italian life and started anew in the U.S.S.R., the nation of new beginnings.
     Loren, despite being named best actress by the Italian film industry, is horrendous: manicured, posturing, flamboyantly emoting, distastefully bourgeois. Mastroianni at least bothers to act.
     Henry Mancini’s music is dispiriting, lugubrious.

TERMINAL STATION (Vittorio De Sica, 1953)

Of the two versions, Vittorio De Sica’s cut and David O. Selznick’s version re-edited for U.S. consumption, the director’s version is superior—as is always the case. Apparently Seznick was spooked by bad reviews that Stazione Termini drew; but the principal fault lay with the central love story, not the material around the edges, the ordinary humanity that is glimpsed at Rome’s train station, and it is this that Selznick butchered, the better to keep wife Jennifer Jones in the camera’s eye. (Even new closeups of Jones were shot and inserted!) Jones plays an “American housewife in Philadelphia,” who dresses in Christian Dior, and has been having an affair with a younger man (played by Montgomery Clift) while visiting her sister in Rome. Now she is trying to leave to return to spouse and daughter, but her lover shows up at the train, wobbling her resolve and delaying her departure. The pair are arrested for smooching in an abandoned train car.
     Jones is in her element in her neurotic role, and De Sica does wonders controlling her tics and twitches. She has never been better in a dramatic role—although this is damning with faint praise. It helps that Jones isn’t the star of De Sica’s version; the train station is, along with the variety of people who pass through it. Each version bears the title that best suits it. Selznick’s Indiscretion of an American Wife treats the station like an artificial Hollywood set!
     Something else assists Jones’s rare okay performance: her own Catholic guilt. Two years earlier, Robert Walker committed suicide. Walker had been her husband when both were under contract to Selznick and she was Selznick’s lover. Playing Paul, her adoring young nephew, like a jealous lover, Richard Beymer resembles Robert Walker.

ROMA CITTÀ LIBERA (Marcello Pagliero, 1946)

Writer-director Marcello Pagliero’s Roma città libera presents a grim portrait of postwar Rome. It is 1945, and the city, having been liberated by the Americans, is “free”; but life isn’t easy. Three impoverished individuals exemplify this fact: a career burglar; his potential mark, a man whose suicide attempt the burglar, since he happens to be there, thwarts; the woman in an adjacent apartment, who, about to be evicted because she cannot pay rent on time (despite ad hoc work as a typist), decides to have a go at her roommate’s work, street prostitution. The burglar and the would-be suicide give her cover against police arrest later that night, and she—none of the characters are given names, to stress the widespread difficulty of anonymous lives in Italy at the time—falls into romance with the would-be suicide, who, unbeknownst to her, is her own much complaining neighbor.
     Therefore, grim is only one adjective that may be used to describe the film’s portrait of postwar Rome. Serendipitous and hopeful are two others. This long, methodical, moderately enjoyable film suggests a work of French poetic realism, but one leavened by humor and given an optimistic ending. One must make note of another character, though: the “distinguished gentleman” whose amnesia, following a fall, has separated him from posh friends and at least temporarily erased his memory. Possibly a political minister, this character encapsulates Italy’s desire to forget Mussolini, Fascism, the German occupation.
     Ennio Flaiano, who would routinely write for Fellini, invented the story and contributed to the script; other contributors included Cesare Zavattini, who wrote for Vittorio De Sica, and Suso Cecchi d’Amico, who wrote for Luchino Visconti. De Sica himself plays the amnesiac.
     But the best performance comes from Valentina Cortese, who sensitively plays the typist.

THE ROOF (Vittorio De Sica, 1956)

Despite four years of meticulous care, the superficial result of Vittorio De Sica’s Il tetto, scripted by Cesare Zavattini, helped end the movement of neorealismo in Italian cinema. (Through today, it still exists as a style of filmmaking.) Indeed, this merely sealed a demise that had been in the making for quite some time, with Italy’s growing economic recovery and its reluctance to share with others evidence of any lingering social problems. Neorealismo focused above all on Italy’s postwar problems.
     The film opens with the camera’s pan from the lofty flight of the national flag to the booming construction under way in Rome: apartments for the increasing numbers of those who can afford them. The cut to a poor young couple coming out of church right after their wedding, which the bride’s parents did not even attend in protest of its precipitousness, may be a tad convenient; the fault is compounded by the fact that the boy, Natale, is an apprentice bricklayer. Get it? Natale is part of the brigade of laborers at work on those high-rise apartment buildings who nonetheless are too poor to move into the buildings themselves. Natale and Luisa instead move in with the boy’s folks; there are now nine persons living in a crowded space, “with another on the way.” But a provision in the law will allow the couple to keep a home on state property once at least a door and a roof are constructed without police intervention.
     De Sica alternates between claustrophobic interiors—early on, side-by-side with the groom, Louisa takes off her bridal gown over her head in the back seat of a cab—and spacious exteriors; but there isn’t much of visual interest to be found.
     Italy’s critics adjudged Zavattini’s script the year’s best.