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THE FILM SINCE THEN
homeless boys by stupid and corrupt officials, but its spirit was romantic and reformist in a now-discredited manner. Luigi Zampa's To Live In Peace is equivocal indeed. It describes and idealises that peasant inertia in the face of tyrannical force against which Silone struggled and which Carlo Levi records with some complacency in Christ Stopped at Eboli. The indifference to causes which it represents is precisely that ' force of habit of millions and tens of millions ' which Lenin describes as a ' most terrible force \ And it is, also precisely, the deepest disease of Italian culture. Here it is rendered with affection.
Zampa's second film, Angelina, written and played by Anna Magnani, the brilliant and dynamic actress of Open City, starts in quite a different key, the key of Rossellini. Angelina and her sister proletarians act effectively against the corruption with which they are surrounded. As intelligently as the partisans they seize food from the black market and occupy decent homes built by their owners for more profitable purposes. Angelina's gift of leadership whirlpools her into the arena of national politics, and we seem about to witness the education of a working-class woman in the realities of the functioning of the State. The form of that education is curious to say the least. Flattered and duped by the profiteers, she is discredited with her supporters and jailed until she is powerless. What is the lesson she has learned? That the place of a wife and mother is at the side of her husband and children, not in politics. Anyhow, everything turns out all right. So moved is the capitalist by her plight that he turns over his housing project to the proletariat, and gives his son in marriage to Angelina's daughter — along with, presumably, half his industrial kingdom ! Such a resolution of economic struggle has not been presented seriously on the screen since Metropolis.
Is this compromise a crude reflection of what has actually happened in Italy during the past year? Or does it represent the exhaustion of the revolutionary impetus which was the sole source of the emotional power, and the filmic force,
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