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A MILAN LETTER
ITALIAN REVIVAL
By II Tl WO EMMEIt and IMUro OKAS
Paisa remains the sensation of the screen in Italy. Critics seem rather puzzled by this unusual film and try to discover in it some complicated or even occult factors while the answer to their speculations apparently lies in the plain true-to-life nature of the picture. It is a news film that lasts for two hours and features the progress of the American troops in Italy. The film is divided in six parts, each of which takes place in one of the key spots of the Allied military occupations; the landings in Sicily, the capture of Naples, Rome, Florence and Bologna; and ultimately the crossing of the Po River. Every part is acted by characters of its own and has its own tragic, human and poetical meaning.
Yet the value of this film is not determined so much by the literary factor of its various sketches as by the manner in which they are narrated. The director Rosselini's language is not of the high-brow, carefully-weighed type nor is his poetical world intellectual and abstract. He is more inclined to follow the spontaneous impulse of his instinct and sensitiveness that speak with the strong and convincing voice of genuine poetry. Such bold liberty of movement does at times draw Rosselini somewhat beyond the mark, but these inevitable errors are due to an excess of generous zeal and can therefore easily be accepted and forgiven. By calling things their real names he dismantles them from the conventional meanings they have acquired through generations of literature.
Rosselini, who also direced Open City, recently visited Berlin where he studied the approaches to his Germany In The Year Zero, a film that he expects to realize without professional actors but with people drawn from actual life. He also plans to produce in France a short out of Cocteau's famous one act play, La Voix Humane, with Anna Magnani who played the leading role in Open City.
Another able director is Alberto Lattuada whose BanJit has been a great success. He is now preparing The Romantic Isthmus after D'Annunzio's Gioiinni Episcopo, and is said to have plans for producing a film on the adventures of Negro AWOL's in Italy to be called Goodbye Othello.
Yittorio De Sica's Sciuscia (Shoe-Shine) is still a favorite with Italian audiences and he is working now in the wooded mountains of Calabria, the extreme tip of the
t
Measure for Measure, one of William Shakespeare's less publicised plays, will reach the screen in this Italian version (Dente per Dente). It is heralded as that country's most pretentious and lavish film since Quo Vaclis came to America in 1913. According to reports, the film version retains Shakespeare's incisive social comment as well as his broad sweep.
JULY 1947
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