5
Genre, Politics, and the Fascist Subject in the Cinema of Italy (1922–1945)1

Marcia Landy

In the late 1970s, ”the skeleton in the closet”—that is, films produced during the Fascist regime—were made available to film historians and critics, who undertook an examination of films that had been neglected for over a quarter of a century. In the spirit of this ongoing critical enterprise, my chapter asks: amid what conditions were films produced under Fascism, and who were the individuals and groups involved in creating a popular cinema that could produce pleasure, profit, and perhaps political consent? What role did the cinema, along with other cultural forms, play in the project of capturing the hearts and minds of a “Fascist subject?”

To answer these questions, I examine the various strategies deployed by private industry and the state to recover after debilitating economic and ideological change from the mid‐1920s to the early 1930s. I identify the individuals and institutions involved in this process of recovery and their concerted attempts to create a popular cinema aligned to mediate the conflicting directives of the regime, commercial interests, and the emergence of filmmakers who would play a critical role in “modernizing” the cinema. I focus on the renovation of genres (comedy, melodrama, and historical films), and the creation of stars to combat the appeal of Hollywood and offer contemporary portraits of Italy. These films directly or indirectly address Fascist practices and institutions.

Industrial and Political Efforts to Create a Popular Film Industry

Italian Fascism was allied to the corporate state. Through populism and syndicalism (trade unionism), workers and employers were organized into industrial and professional corporations toward the end of creating a “harmonious” social and political order along the lines advocated by Mussolini. Each corporation was to negotiate working conditions and contracts that were then to be submitted to a ministry of corporations that would have final authority. In theory or appearance, this form of administration was designed to grant a voice to various businesses and unions, workers and employers; in reality, it became a means of suppressing political dissent and controlling workers. Ultimately, corporatism served the interests of nationalism and the consolidation of state power, yet it also served to produce conflicts among the different corporate structures. This state of affairs pertains directly to conditions affecting film production.

Rather than a state‐run activity, the cinema from the late 1920s into the early 1930s was a corporate entity that involved the state and business in economic, political, and cultural activities. An attempt at “cooperation” between state and local organizations emerged in the creation of the OND (Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro), or Dopolavoro, designed to shape public and private life in relation to work and to after‐work activities (small “d” dopolavoro). The OND sponsored forms of entertainment, including films, in conjunction with the fused Ministry of Press and Propaganda and the Ministry of Popular Culture in the mid‐1930s (De Grazia 2002, 1–59, 187–224). The creation of LUCE (L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa), a propaganda arm of the regime and ENIC (Ente Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche), signaled greater state involvement in film production funding, exhibition, and distribution of films. While the newsreels produced and distributed by LUCE were more generally propagandistic (termed “educational”), the commercial feature films more often seemed to avoid representing the regime. However, they “nonetheless addressed the contradictions characteristic of social life under fascism” (Ricci 2008, 76). In any case, the role of the state in relation to cinema production and moviegoing underwent significant transformations from the silent era to the talkies, revealing the complex ideological and transnational aspirations that the Italian commercial cinema negotiated over the 20 years of Fascism.

In the 1930s, the Italian film industry had to restructure in conformity with the new sound technology and through accommodations with the regime. The golden age of silent cinema, with its spectacular historical films and melodramatic narratives of divismo featuring powerful female protagonists, was over. In the face of box‐office disasters of the mid‐teens and early twenties, the film industry was in search of audiences through creation of popular cinematic forms that could cut across different gendered, regional, generational, and rural and urban audiences. The Cines Studio, founded in Rome during the silent era and headed by exhibitor‐turned‐producer Stefano Pittaluga, moved to the forefront of this attempt to modernize the film industry, boasting a group of experienced directors such as Alessandro Blasetti, Mario Camerini, and Goffredo Alessandrini, and skilled technicians such as Massimo Terzano, Gastone Medin, and Ivo Perilli.

The commercial film industry improved over the decade through state and private investment and technological developments in visual and sound images resulting in the introduction of new cinematic and narrative techniques in the production of musicals, comedies, melodramas, historical films, biopics, and fables. Though the general output of films was not large, Cines experimented with genres and sound technology, exemplified by Camerini’s Rotaie (Rails, 1931), Blasetti’s silent Sole (1929) and Resurrectio (1931), Baldassarre Negroni’s Due cuori felice (Two Happy Hearts, 1932), Alessandrini’s La segretaria privata (1932), and Camerini’s Gli uomini che mascalzoni … (What Scoundrels Men Are!, 1932). The theme song of the last, written by Neapolitan composer Cesare Bixio, became a hit, and helped to create connections between the cinema and music industries.

Hollywood films played a crucial, though not exclusive, role in the formation of audiences (Sorlin 1996, 59–61). The films produced in Italy displayed an anxiety of influence evident in genre production (historical films, comedies) and the increased presence of star images. Most significantly, despite the regime’s ostensible opposition to Hollywood, the cinema of genres contributed to an emphasis on fashion, consumerism, and stardom. Mario Camerini’s films tempered Hollywood influences by injecting them with Italian versions of cinematic modernity. Like those of Frank Capra, they were “dunked in realism, populism, and an ingenious sentimentalism or, better with optimism” (Casadio, Laura, and Cristiano 1991, 17) to align them with the present.

Camerini and Blasetti were responsible for the changing character of Italian cinema during the Fascist era. Their films share common cultural, if not political, images with European cinema, illuminating for the ways they adapted “foreign” models to Italian popular culture. Critical of the state of Italian cinema, both directors set about inventing new forms in a range of genres and styles. Their influence was due in large part to an awareness that the cinema was in desperate need of renovation. Recognizing that cinema was both an art and an industry, Blasetti attempted in his writings and in the multitude of films he directed to steer an intellectual, cultural, and stylistic course that took account of the changing technological and industrial imperatives of the cinematic apparatus. In his genre films, Camerini aspired to a modern cosmopolitan look.

The physical appearance of actors, costuming, lighting, uses of mise‐en‐scène, modes of narration, and styles of acting were altered in the changeover to sound technology in the late 1920s and with the gradual encouragement of the regime. There was an emphasis on the rural landscape and/or on metropolitan spaces and a greater emphasis on everyday life, yet there was often ambivalence toward the signs of modernization. The common folk figured prominently, among them peasants and workers, in contrast to the largely upper‐class cinema of divismo during the teens. While aristocrats and the rich had not disappeared from the narratives, they were often presented in critical fashion. Blasetti’s films highlighted industrious, loyal, and procreative peasant women in contrast to decadent city women. Terra madre (1931) was an important film for its innovative uses of rural landscape, its acting, and its celebration of rustic life.

Through the Dopolavoro, the cinema played a crucial, if contradictory, role in the evolution of popular culture. Films produced were tied to both escapism and ideology in ways similar to Hollywood genres, but they translated the Hollywood idiom into an Italian milieu by emphasizing Italian types and narrative problems through casting, uses of landscape, and dubbing. Treno popolare (Raffalelo Matarazzo, 1933) intertwines domestic melodrama and comedy, portraying a day’s train outing sponsored by the Dopolavoro. The episodic narrative intertwines the various activities of the travelers. Similar to Terra madre and 1860 (Blasetti, 1934), the film also anticipates neorealist techniques, involving location shooting, loose narrative construction, and nonprofessional actors in the context of everyday activities.

Refashioning Genres: Directors and the Comedy

Comedies with sound featured young women in search of employment, who end, of course, by getting married: for example, the successful protagonist of La segretaria privata. This film, a musical of sorts, moderates the striving for upward mobility by focusing on images of work, seeking and finding employment, pleasurable after‐work entertainment, the taming of a womanizing boss, and resolution in the promise of marriage. The film does not appear propagandistic. Its effectiveness lies in using the cinematic medium embodied in attractive actors, whose images and actions are visually identified with proper courtship, sexual restraint before marriage, and cooperative relations between workers and employees. The film validates the tightrope that characterized popular comedy: it could negotiate with Hollywood appeal as well as with the regime’s modernizing efforts (and with Catholic strictures) by dramatizing not only the lure of freedom but also its dangers.

Camerini’s comedies, influenced by Hollywood and such filmmakers as the Italian‐American Frank Capra and the European René Clair, were geared toward the conflicts of ordinary people caught between traditional and changing patterns of modern life, conflicts not unfamiliar to the architects of Fascism, with a nod toward certain tendencies of modernism. Camerini’s first notable achievement as director was the silent 1929 melodrama Rotaie, reissued as a sound film in 1931. The film is notable for its experimentation with camera work, acting, and editing, heralding new directions in an Italian cinema struggling to regain its former commercial and international prestige. Rotaie follows the vicissitudes of a young petit‐bourgeois couple, led astray by the promises of wealth, who contemplate suicide but ultimately are converted to acceptance of a working‐class milieu, a narrative common to many of Camerini’s subsequent films. The film exploits the image of train wheels linked to that of a roulette wheel. The reiterative circular images of the wheels, the rhythmic editing, and the chiaroscuro lighting develop a tension between the couples’ entrapment in a self‐destructive life and their struggle to extricate themselves. Romance is coupled to the landscape of modernity—the automobile, industry, commerce—and the fast pace of life inherent in it. Camerini was responsible for launching major Italian stars of the 1930s and 1940s, such as Assia Noris and Vittorio De Sica.

Gli uomini che mascalzoni … is characteristic of Camerini’s popular cinema in its selection and absorption of various elements from past and present, popular and elite, cultural forms. Popular cinema has multiple and often divergent meanings, relying on an ability to acknowledge different generational, gendered, and social‐class viewers. This romantic comedy focuses on Bruno, a chauffeur who pursues Mariuccia, a saleswoman, who lives with her taxi‐driver father, Tadini. It embodies the economic and social aspirations and pretensions of Bruno and Mariuccia. Through masquerade and impersonation Gli uomini che mascalzoni … self‐consciously highlights how the cinematic medium generated new modes of perception appealing to contemporary audiences.

The film, like other Camerini populist comedies, dramatizes antagonisms between the lower‐middle‐class prosaic world and the lure of upper‐class glamour with its nomadic aristocrats, snobbishness, extravagance, and cynicism, involving workers in conflict with family and class loyalties but later reconciled to their destiny. Camerini comedies, including Batticuore (Heartbeat, 1939) and I grandi magazzini (Department Store, 1939), were rarely overtly political, despite Fascism’s authoritarian, theatrical, and often propagandistic tendencies, though Camerini became embroiled in censorship as a consequence of Mussolini’s ire at the portrait of the dissolute governor in Il cappello a tre punti (The Three Cornered Hat, 1935). This film, unlike other Camerini films, was denied approval for several months, and then cut. The witty dialogue and exaggerated characterization (thanks to the famous Neapolitan comic actors of theater and film, Edoardo and Peppino De Filippo), the vivid character of the pastoral setting, and the uses of song are symptomatic of Camerini’s employment of generic forms and literary adaptations to emphasize a visual over didactic treatment. His only film that conforms to Fascist ideology is Il grande appello (The Last Roll‐Call, 1939) a colonial film.

Comedy and Stardom

The comedies that followed Gli uomini che mascalzoni …—Il signor Max (Mr. Max, 1937); Darò un milione (I’ll Give a Million, 1935, remade in Hollywood in 1938); Batticuore, remade in Hollywood in 1946); and I grandi magazzini—reinforced Vittorio De Sica’s and boosted Assia Noris’s stardom. A motif common to Camerini’s films, the hazards of impersonation as an inauthentic expression of identity formation, speaks to an attempt to appeal to a different generation of Italian filmgoers in the late 1930s—an audience that was more attuned to the theatricality of Mussolini via newsreels, as well as to the self‐conscious attention to role‐playing in the commercial narrative cinema, via Camerini’s comedies.

Photo of a scene from the film I’ll Give a Million by Mario Camerini displaying Assia Noris and Vittorio De Sica facing each other with an old man standing behind them. — **Figure 5.1** Assia Noris and Vittorio De Sica in *Darò un milione* (*I’ll Give a Million*, Mario Camerini, 1935).
*Source:* Author’s personal collection.

Noris, with her light blonde hair, was “the very image of a cinema of filmic artifices” (Aprà and Pistagnesi 1979, 82). In Il signor Max, her character contrasts with Rubi Dalma’s sophisticated upper‐class figure. As Lauretta, a maid to Dalma’s imperious society matron, she becomes instrumental in enabling Gianni (De Sica) to find a more satisfying identity through shared values with the world of the Fascist dopolavoro. Her costuming and makeup are modest, and she is filmed in middle distance and close‐ups to accentuate a vision of appealing feminine ordinariness. Not only do her appearance and behavior contrast to the theatricality of upper‐class society, but also her character is instrumental in assisting Gianni in abandoning the delusive promises of a nomadic, unnatural, and inordinately costly life. In Darò un milione, she is a circus performer who becomes romantically involved with a bored and cynical millionaire (De Sica), who attempts suicide, and she again becomes instrumental in his redemption.

Compared to Carole Lombard and billed as a Lombard type, she could do screwball comedy, as evident in her role in Batticuore, where she impersonates to humorous effect a thief and an aristocrat. Her masquerade as thief is exposed from the film’s outset, as she reveals her incompetence in that role. Clever in concealing her identity, the film creates suspense about the threat of its disclosure. Through the rubric of illusion and theatricality, Noris’s persona serves to unite social classes as is confirmed at the film’s closure in her wedding to a count, attended by her fellow pickpockets and the upper classes.

In Noris’s transformation from common thief to baroness, and in De Sica’s from aristocrat to beggar, the films’ emphasis on impersonation introduces reflections on the cinematic image and on the iconography of the star as unstable visual currency, but as currency that works at the box office. In Darò un milione, the circus becomes the site of spectacle, altered identities, and entertainment and romance, where De Sica’s familiar role changes become central to the romance and the film’s reflexivity. His protean identities are a hallmark of his stardom. He performs in “both his mythical persona as an Everyman” but also in a “privileged role” (Hay 1987, 47).

The Forms of Melodrama

Melodrama was popular in the 1930s and early 1940s in adaptations from literary classics (Antonio Fogazzaro’s Malombra and Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi), as were family dramas, historical reconstructions, and various explorations of masculinity and femininity. T’amerò sempre (Camerini, 1933), is a “fallen‐woman” melodrama, highlighting the fate of a young woman abandoned by her aristocratic lover. Pregnant and alone in the city, she seeks to rebuild her life. The film’s opening introduces images from LUCE documentaries on maternity and childbirth, but the film veers in a darker direction in its portrait of a female protagonist whose early blighted life is presented through flashbacks of her mother’s death, life in an orphanage, and her meeting with a count, situations common in melodrama’s folklore. Through vignettes, the film presents a contrast between the leisurely and extravagant life of the aristocracy and the unpretentious life of workers, ending not in the protagonist’s reconciliation with the count but in her engagement to a modest accountant. Thus, the film portrays a sense of community attributable to the lower middle‐class family with its unpretentious life style and its difference from the alienated and decadent upper classes.

Camerini’s Come le foglie (Like the Leaves, 1934), another family melodrama, portrays a wealthy family almost destroyed by the social pretensions of the maternal figure, by her playboy son, and by the ineptness of the father. Through an attempt at suicide by the daughter, which is circumvented by her middle‐class lover, who presents an alternative to the decadent life of the upper classes, she is saved, and family continuity is assured through a fiscally and emotionally responsible male figure. Once again, Camerini’s portrait of femininity in relation to Italian modernity is critical of the frivolousness and irresponsibility of upper‐class luxuriousness and spectacle. The familiar Catholic and Fascist emphasis on family, maternity, and work are dramatized in the daughter’s sense of the sacrality of work and family responsibility, and juxtaposed to the mother’s sexual and economic profligacy and to the father’s weakness. Only after a brush with disaster is a semblance of temperate social life restored through the daughter and her future husband, but the portraits of the unsettled domestic milieu despite its “restoration” constitutes an ambiguous portrait of familial values.

Camerini’s oeuvre also includes adaptations of Italian literary and dramatic classics to cinema. His version of Pirandello’s Ma non è una cosa seria (But It’s Not Serious, 1936) is set in a boarding house run by an aging and unappreciated woman whose life is altered when a handsome rake proposes marriage to her in jest. In Camerini‘s adaptation of I promessi sposi (The Spirit and the Flesh, 1941), though he had to scale down characters and episodes, he offers a portrait of the novel’s historical milieu and conveys his populist predilection for dramatizing the disruption of familial and class solidarity through the abuses of power by the upper classes, while eulogizing the virtues of religious piety and modest aspiration.

Amleto Palermi also undertook domestic melodrama with a focus on women in Le due madri (The Two Mothers, 1938) and La peccatrice (The Sinner, 1940). The latter featured the ordeals of an unwed mother in Anna, who is deprived of the security of family and mistreated by the men she encounters in a threatening urban milieu involving crime and prostitution. This noir‐like film is a portrait of beleaguered femininity that is not resolved through the happy ending of marriage characteristic of Camerini’s comedies and melodramas but through the female protagonist’s rejection of urban life through her return to the maternal home. The film offers an unsettling portrait of femininity and of romance. It is not the erring protagonist but the world that is threatening, and the return of Anna to the maternal home is expressive of an ambiguous regression to the past, a safe haven in a dark world—a timely motif given the regime’s (and the Catholic Church’s) ambivalence toward female sexual freedom (De Grazia 1992, 59–61).

History, Politics, and Myth: Luis Trenker and Alessandro Blasetti

The war in Ethiopia and then World War II saw the rise of historical films that were in the service of spectacle and propaganda (Brunetta 2001b, 91–92). Scipione l’Africano (Carmine Gallone, 1937) reprised the silent Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914), set during the Second Punic Wars, celebrating the victory of the Romans over the Carthaginians. If the silent film experimented with the visual image, dramatic episodes, romance, and adventure in the interest of history as spectacle, the later sound film centers on the aesthetics of leadership, military combats, choreography of the masses, rather obvious allusions to Mussolini, and the war in Africa (Ricci 2008, 90). However, the interests of propaganda were better served through these features than through the numerous documentaries and newsreels produced by LUCE, since they were deemed to more effectively combine myth, ritual, romance, and adventure with parallels to militant and militaristic Fascism.

Condottieri (Luis Trenker, 1937) focuses on the heroic exploits of the mercenary warrior, Giovanni de’ Medici, played by the director, a German filmmaker who was identified with the genre of the German mystical mountain films in the 1930s and with the film western. Condottieri was filmed in both German and Italian versions. The film might be classified as a biopic, in its focus on the career of de’ Medici who, after enforced exile, returns to home to claim his rightful role as leader. However, Condottieri uses myth and allegory in its spiritualized treatment of the hero’s life and death. What has been considered worthy of commentary about the film is its ostensible partisan, propagandistic appropriation of Italian history and, as many critics have commented, its evocation of the figure of Mussolini through the Renaissance figure of Giovanni delle Bande Nere (Brunetta 2001b, 134). A reviewer in Variety commented that “the men who rally around the leader look a great deal like Fascist blackshirts and talk a good deal like Fascist blackshirts” (Reimer 2000, 49). Upon seeing the film, both Goebbels and Hitler objected to the scene where “the SS men dressed as Italian knights kneel before the Pope [Hadrian IV].” And to the film’s “mystical Catholic hocus pocus” (Reimer 2000, 49).

The film revels in aestheticism, visualizing the epoch it represents through its sculpture and monuments, suggesting how art as myth replaces the vulgarity and corruption of material existence. Condottieri also invokes a mystical relation of the hero to the landscape through a dramatic background of clouds. The mountains are the setting for the first stage of Giovanni’s initiation into manhood that presages glory and immortality but also martyrdom. We then move forward in time to his adulthood as he sits in statuesque fashion astride his horse. The heroic man on horseback is a major coda. A lengthy montage sequence associates the rider with the symbolism of an eagle, the heavens, and craggy mountains that foreshadow his future greatness. A distinction is made between the feudal ruler Malatesta, portrayed as an adventurer for worldly gain, and Giovanni, the historic savior of the people.

In an operatic scene, the Florentine men join Giovanni, singing and swearing allegiance to him “to the last drop of their [blood].” The Florentine council, threatened by Giovanni’s growing power, warns him to abjure his revolutionary objectives. Undeterred, he is arrested and tortured but liberated by his men. He once again returns to the mountains where he is reunited with blonde Maria, the film’s principal female figure—daughter of a lord in his mother’s castle, destined for Giovanni, and associated with rustic purity. The film concludes with the marriage of Giovanni and Maria in Rome where he and his followers are blessed by the pope, and where he again confronts Malatesta in combat and is mortally wounded. Giovanni’s death is portrayed through a dissolve of his image into the statue of Giovanni de’ Medici, thus fusing the fictional with the real, highlighting how the “movie fiction becomes an authentic legend” (Hay 1987, 164).

What is striking about the Trenker film is how its reliance on organic images of nature are overridden by its monumental character, its highlighting of the past by means of its fusing of the characters with statuary. Giovanni’s image also dissolves into sculptures identified with heroic and mythic warriors (e.g., Perseus with the head of Andromeda and also the sculpture of Giovanni on his tomb). The allegory aligns this past with the present Fascist revolution, and the German–Italian alliance.

Photo displaying the heroic man on horseback: Condottieri. — **Figure 5.2** The heroic man on horseback: *Condottieri* (Luis Trenker, 1937).
*Source:* British Film Institute.

The film’s allegorical treatment provides a lesson in the uses of the past that include the reworking of multiple texts and of chivalry, combat, spiritual trials, courtly love, and religion. Despite its heterogeneous stylistic choices, the film conveys a sense of history that “specifies the future as nothing less than the fascist revolution” (Ricci 2008, 93). The film’s popularity raises the issue of whether its appeal resided in its spectacular style, its propagandistic designs, or in a fusion of both.

In contrast to both Gallone and Trenker, Alessandro Blasetti’s historical aspirations to create a national cinema involved experiments with style, types of actors, and a variety of narrative forms, from his first sole‐directed silent film Sole (1929) to such early sound films as Terra madre, La tavola dei poveri (1932), and Vecchia guardia (Old Guard, 1934). A Fascist panegyric, 1860 was homage to the Risorgimento and considered by some critics to anticipate neorealism with its uses of location shooting and nonprofessional actors. Blasetti was also drawn to stylized and spectacular costume biopics such as Ettore Fieramosca (1938) and Un’avventura di Salvator Rosa (An Adventure of Salvator Rosa, 1939), La corona di ferro (The Iron Crown, 1941), and La cena delle beffe (The Jester’s Supper, 1942), often in the form of mythic narratives. His Quattro passi fra le nuvole (Four Steps in the Clouds, 1942) is a departure from these historical works in its reliance on realistic motifs and style, invoking both rural and urban life and commonplace Italian types and landscapes, qualities that have led film critics to identify this film, like 1860, with postwar neorealism.

His use of professional and nonprofessional actors testified to Blasetti’s careful selection of figures who could embody the physical properties of the historical figures they played. The overriding motifs of his films involved tensions between tradition and modernity and rural and urban life, as well as a penchant largely for a realist style or thematics that evoked contemporary issues. It was in the mid‐1930s that, disenchanted with Fascism, he turned toward Italian historical subjects often in the form of biopics and mythic narratives. Not particularly a devotee of the star system (though he used popular stars) and concerned to experiment with narration and mise‐en‐scène, Blasetti employed a hybrid style that included Hollywood and European influences, and even Soviet montage (as in 1860), suited to his various narrative choices.

1860 was a historical reconstruction of the Risorgimento narrated from the perspective of Sicilian peasants, shot on Sicilian locations, and using nonprofessional actors (hence the perceived links to neorealism). This film becomes a celebration of the foundation of the Italian nation from a vantage point of unifying different regions and social classes, bearing directly on controversies of the time concerning uses of the past in relation to the Fascist present (Fogu 2003, 199–200). The film, however, was not appreciated by the regime, with its new directives that emphasized the “celebrative and monumental qualities” of Fascism in relation to portrayals of history (Brunetta 2009, 91). By the late 1930s, Blasetti’s commitment to Fascism had clearly waned, as can be seen in his La corona di ferro.

Blasetti’s film appeared in 1941, a critical year for Italy. The coming of war and its attendant privations contributed to a loss of confidence in Mussolini and the Fascist regime (Ben‐Ghiat 2015). The film is set in a mythical Middle Ages, and its allegory has been interpreted as alluding to Fascism’s abuses of power through dramatizing, in Blasetti’s words, an “aversion to violence, conquest, and sterile power” (Brunetta 2001b, 287). La corona di ferro adopts the form of a fairy tale to create an allegory of the illegitimate uses of authority. This fable features the ill‐fated king, Sedemondo, a paternal figure whose tyrannical obsession with prestige and control leads to his defeat. In his flawed judgment that ultimately leads to his madness, he is one of a long line of Blasetti male characters who belong in fairy tales and Hollywood swashbucklers.

Elsa, his daughter, resembling the fairy‐tale princess of Sleeping Beauty, has been imprisoned in a splendid court whose palatial architecture is redolent of Oriental exoticism. She is barely visible through the numerous veils that surround her chamber as she languidly reclines on a luxurious bed. The other prominent female figure in the narrative is the Amazonian warrior Tundra, sworn enemy of Sedemondo and Elsa. The other major figure in this fable, Arminio, reenacts the myth of the changeling of royal birth who is raised in natural surroundings and then, after a series of trials, restored to his rightful status as heir to the kingdom. Arminio’s name is possibly an allusion to Tacitus’ heroic rebel chieftain Arminius, who defeated the Romans and brought peace to the land. Arminio is an amalgam of several heroic figures: Rinaldo, Orlando, Robin Hood, and Tarzan.

The film’s use of architecture, costuming, landscape, and stylization of characters to create a mythic Middle Ages does not aim for realism in style. In its eclecticism and use of spectacle, “the entire material of the film constitutes folkloric bric‐a‐brac simulating a return to the cultural origins of Europe and imprinting on the text a secularization of themes inherited from the medieval and post‐medieval period” (de la Bretèque 2004, 3; also see Savio 1975, 3, on spectacle). The film presents a spectacle of a remote and magical mise‐en‐scène that evokes parallels between the mythical and the contemporary, with critical valences. The costumes by Gino Sensani—Arminio’s Tarzan‐like outfit, the king’s rich furs and jewels, Elsa’s light colors and gossamer fabrics, and Tundra’s male clothes—enhance the dreamlike and mythic characters of the narrative. Not unlike Hollywood epics, La corona di ferro exemplifies the spectacular dimensions of popular cinema, using literary allusion, allegory, and cinematic techniques to provoke associations among an invented past, a problematic present, and a reconciled vision of the future in an unsettled and threatening social and political world.

Despite his reservations about a star system, Blasetti both created and used certain stars in his historical films and in comedies as well as melodramas: for example, Elisa Cegani in Ettore Fieramosca and Luisa Ferida in Un’avventura di Salvator Rosa—the two often cast with the extremely popular and versatile Gino Cervi. In La corona di ferro, Cervi’s acting is generally stylized, cartoon‐like, giving rise to the judgment that in Blasetti, the hero finally “can exist only as a joke” (Aprà and Pistagnesi 1979, 77). Cervi’s girth, booming voice, and histrionics do indeed border on the comic. Playing a mad king, he was able to communicate the character’s vulnerable, satiric, and excessive dimensions. On the other hand, his role as a beleaguered salesman in the realist Quattro passi fra le nuvole reveals another dimension of his persona marked by commonplace appearance and understated acting style.

Melodrama and Stardom

Max Ophuls’ La signora di tutti (Everybody’s Woman, 1934) is a film that addresses a female protagonist’s attempts “to recover or to piece together her identity in a modern society” (Hay 1978, 127). Isa Miranda is also the film’s pretext for exploring the commercial cinema and the world of the female star. Ophuls, a German director, was invited to Italy by Angelo Rizzoli to direct the film, concomitant with pressures to modernize filmmaking and with the drive to create new stars. The heroine appears to be a throwback to the cinema of divismo in the teens and early 1920s, with its emphasis on a transgressive feminine figure, a femme fatale (Brunetta 2001a, 78), but Ophuls’ film offers a different feminine portrait: one that clashes both with divismo and with the star prototypes in Camerini’s comedies. La signora di tutti is framed by images of the movie industry—the role of agents, producers, and publicity associated with the business of filmmaking—but the star of the film reveals another self‐conscious dimension to the narrative. Unlike the imperious and powerful diva of the silent era, the star is no longer purely spiritual, ethereal, or remote; she is both ordinary and extraordinary, familiar yet exceptional in her appearance and morality (Dyer, 1998) and in her quest for realization in maternity.

While Isa Miranda had appeared in several films directed by Italians—Il caso Haller (Blasetti, 1933), Creature della notte (Creature of the Night, Palermi, 1933), and Tenebre (Darkness, Guido Brignone, 1934)—it was Ophuls who was instrumental in helping her to gain the lead role that propelled her into stardom. The film was part of an attempt to create a cinema that not only appealed to Italians but also to the international public (de Berti 2003, 34). The press office of Novella‐Film made sure to create advance publicity favorable to the production and particularly to its star. Stories, photographs, and comparisons to American stars such as Greta Garbo, Katherine Hepburn, and Marlene Dietrich appeared. Her appearance was described in terms of her photogenic quality, stressing her face, and particularly her eyes that illuminated her face and conveyed a secret interior torment (35).

La signora di tutti’s narrative emerges as a flashback through the protagonist’s narcosis, a dream state, providing a chronology of her life that positions her as an unwilling, if not passive, object of the viewer’s curiosity. Miranda’s performance was to establish her as a star who carried multiple contradictions involving her futile escape from paternal figures (her father and, later, a destructive marriage). Despite her success as a performer, Miranda was unable to realize the desire for a proper home and children characteristic of her film persona.

In Miranda’s publicity photos and in her films, lighting becomes the essential ingredient in conveying the mysterious and ambiguous character of her roles. Her face shines forth from the darkness, and while she is praised for her employment of gesture, the dominant impression she conveys is one of statuesque passivity. Her figure is clearly delineated, while the landscape is often hazy. Her stance and dreamy gaze suggest her being posed in a position to be seen and admired, qualities also characteristic of her appearance in Passaporto rosso (Brignone, 1935), Scipione l’Africano, L'homme de nulle part (Feu Mathias Pascal, Pierre Chenal, 1937), Malombra (Mario Soldati, 1942), and Zazá (Renato Castellani, 1942).

If, as was the intent of her producers, Miranda was to offer a new image of Italian stardom, this image was different from that of the divas of the silent era, particularly in the emphasis on maternity. In Zazá, as a performer and a seeker for realization in love, she is, as in La signora di tutti, a divided figure who resembles “everybody’s woman.” In Zazá and strongly implied in La signora di tutti, Miranda’s character is identified with the regime’s critique of the femme fatale (De Grazia 1992). She is the embodiment of a division between body and soul, a woman of two worlds, doomed to be a vision for others to devour visually but unable herself to do more than gaze on a world to which she is denied entrance. She remains, at the film’s end, a spectator, as her lover disappears from sight (Figure 5.3).

Photo displaying Isa Miranda as a woman of two worlds with a young girl seated beside her in the film Zazà by Renato Castellani. — **Figure 5.3** Isa Miranda as a woman of two worlds in *Zazà* (Renato Castellani, 1942).
*Source:* Author’s personal collection.

Dynamic movement and gestures identify her role as entertainer, whereas her role as voyeur to family tableaus is consistently static. In her star persona as a trapped theatrical figure controlled by others, particularly by her intra‐ and extra‐diegetic audience, Miranda projects a certain melancholy. Her roles are identified with family melodrama, but in ways that are not overtly linked to Fascist politics but rather to a more ambiguous and oblique reflection on the cinematic medium as transmitter of cultural lore.

Calligraphism: Melodrama, Formalism, and War

By the late 1930s and into the 1940s, certain films began to assume a more critical posture toward dominant film forms, if not toward Fascist culture itself. Directed by filmmakers such as Castellani, Ferdinando Maria Poggioli, Luigi Chiarini, and Soldati, these films were dubbed “calligraphic” by critics identified with the journal Cinema, and the term was often meant to designate an elegant, ornate, and formalist style that one could associate with highly stylized calligraphy. The films relied on literary texts, particularly nineteenth‐century novels, such as Fogazzaro’s Malombra and Piccolo mondo antico and Luigi Capuana’s Gelosia, to portray a hermetic world where landscape is as much a character in the film as are the actors (Landy 2004). The films’ literariness, formalism, and antiquarian attitudes toward history created a sinister and somber world inhabited by obsessed, somnambulistic, and violent characters.

Soldati’s film credits during the Fascist era include Dora Nelson (1940), Tutto per la donna (1940), Tragica notte (Tragic Night, 1942), Piccolo mondo antico (Old Fashioned World, 1941), and Malombra. His films starred such actresses as Juni Astor, Doris Duranti, and Alida Valli, “representative of a new school opposed to the sophisticated extravagance of the dive” (Leprohon 1972, 242). In contrast to the divas, the actresses in many of his films were youthful, slim, and fashionable; they were meant to look ordinary, not exceptional, and the costuming, the make‐up, and the camera work enhanced their perfected ordinariness. In many instances, the films employed reflexive devices (allusions to novels, films, and theater) to call attention within the films to their artifice, and to femininity as performance.

Soldati’s remake of Fogazzaro’s Gothic novel Malombra—originally filmed in 1917 by Carmine Gallone, with Lyda Borelli—stars Isa Miranda as a tormented woman haunted by a past, isolated in a palazzo, removed from contact with others, and caught in a life‐and‐death struggle with her aristocratic and domineering guardian uncle. Borelli’s Marina belonged to the world of divismo, which “partook more of ritual than fashion: the diva was at once goddess and priestess” (Leprohon 1972, 39). In the lexicon of silent cinema, the absence of synchronous and ambient sound allowed for the diva’s image to concentrate on an interior world of female subjectivity that destabilized the other characters over which she wielded power. This later Malombra, done during the era of both Fascism and sound, highlights the protagonist’s descent into madness and violence as she fancies herself a reincarnation of her guardian’s dead wife, goaded to revenge.

The remake followed the trajectory and language of the novel, echoing specific images and incidents from the Gallone film, but it was strikingly different in style and psychological emphasis from the silent version. Through the photography of Miranda and of the landscape, the film becomes a disturbing melodrama controlled by its formal elements in the uses of lighting and camera work, as well as of sound (music and speech). In the vein of calligraphism, Soldati’s remake creates a threatening and fatalistic world that focuses on the social dimensions of class, patriarchy, property, and power. The formalist techniques, the identifying feature of cinematic calligraphy, situate the characters and its star in an oppressive vision of the world that may appear removed from direct allusions to Fascist life and culture, but that evokes its psychic and social effects—as does Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1942).

The films made by Ferdinando Maria Poggioli during the war—Gelosia (Jealousy, 1942), La morte civile (1942), Il cappello del prete (1944), Sissignora (Yes, Madam, 1941), and Sorelle Materassi (1943)—are often adaptations of literary or dramatic texts based on misrecognitions, obsession, and violence, involving domestic tyranny, male opportunists, and sexual fantasies in a style that renders commonplace situations surreal. Sissignora and Sorelle Materassi star the Grammatica sisters, Irma and Emma, in narratives that feature problematic portraits of femininity. In Sissignora, the two women obstruct a relationship between a young sailor and their maid that ends disastrously for the young woman. In Sorelle Materassi, the two elderly sisters participate in a bizarre drama of abjection with an unscrupulous masculine figure. Through their masochistic relationship with Remo the film alludes to Fascism, if not war, in a style that implicates a longer history of Italian cultural politics, involving a tenuous world of repressed, vulnerable, lonely women seeking gratification.

World War II produced a series of films that portrayed aspects of Italian life at home and in combat on land and sea by such filmmakers as Francesco de Robertis, Roberto Rossellini, Aldo Vergano, and Augusto Genina. Uomini sul fondo (S.O.S. Submarine, de Robertis, 1941) involves a submarine disaster and its effects on the crewmen. Similarly, Rossellini’s La nave bianca (The White Ship, 1941) takes place on a ship and also features professional and nonprofessional actors and focuses on the medical and humanitarian support of the sailors. Un pilota ritorna (A Pilot Returns, Rossellini, 1942) stars Amedeo Nazzari as a pilot shot down in enemy territory who experiences life from the side of those attacked rather than that of the Italians. Bengasi (Genina, 1942), starring the popular Fosco Giachetti and Amedeo Nazzari, takes place in the African theater and combines combat footage with melodramatic scenes involving familial complications attributable to war. Quelli della montagna (Vergano, 1943) is set in the Alpine region. To a large degree, these films were propaganda in the service of war, but the militant aspects of Fascist rhetoric took a back seat to the exigencies of survival, if not national honor. It is possible to see in these films tendencies and styles of the neorealist films of the postwar era.

Afterthoughts

Critical writings on the cinema of the Fascist years continue to elaborate on the cinematic and political climate of Italian Fascism, though the reception of the films themselves is still unclear aside from reviews and box office receipts. Especially hard to pin down is the degree to which these films might or might not reveal their spectators’ enthrallment to Fascism. Critical writings identify multiple contradictions that arise from tensions between the regime’s aspirations and those of producers, filmmakers, and screenwriters straddling technical and aesthetic considerations that veer between profit and politics (Ricci 2008). More recently, critics have moved from the spectacular dimensions of Fascist politics (“fascinating Fascism”) to concentrate on the more immediate technical and microhistorical dimensions of Fascist culture as expressed through cinema to address portraits of masculine and feminine bodies, sports, constructions of space fashion, stars, and advertising (Pinkus 1995), in relation to the metropolitan landscape and to regionalism, the integral connections between visual media and industrial technologies, and modes of historicizing (Ricci 2008; Fogu 2003).

While early analyses of the cinema under Fascism tended to totalize reception or focus on the aesthetic and technical quality of the films (Ricci 2008), these later studies offer a more material and less monolithic version of Fascist subjects that might better account for viewership. They emphasize connections between the onscreen and offscreen world of the viewer, and strategies that bring imaginary worlds and the real into a contiguous relationship to establish a firmer basis for identifying the fragile and fractured nature of consensus, if not of dissent. Hence, the ongoing studies of films of the Fascist era are not mere archival reflections of the past, they are pertinent beyond the time frame of Fascism for rethinking the ongoing problems raised by the role of media in modernity set in motion during that time but pointing to the present and perhaps future.

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