Fifty years of Italian cinema (1955)

34 Films of more than routine interest that followed included Indiana by George Sand, directed by Umberto Fracchia, the writer, and La bella e la bestia (Beauty and the Beast), also by Fracchia. Another was La casa di veiro (The Glass House) by Righelli and — ■ before we forget it — one of the most noteworthy films made in Italy in the twenties, Casanova, directed by the expatriate Russian Alexander Wolkoff, starring the Russian Ivan Mosjoukine, and filmed, for its greater part, in Venice. Who can forget Rina de Liguoro's enchanting seductivenes in it — which, if I will be forgiven, is an apt thing to remember in a film about Ca anova. The film had real merit, too, but Casanova dates from 1927 and we are momentarily ahead of ourselves. Before 1921 was over a crisis had set in. The Italian cinema was exhausted. Each new film was hopefully expected to revitalize the moribund film industry but the demode film language was too much for it. Italian movie audiences had seen the new foreign films and the Italian films were no longer any competition to them. Unemployment among film stars and technicians was rife. Stars were beginning to sell their jewels. The active Ghione, who had worked so hard, fell into debt. By 1922, almost all the Italian studios were shut down, serving only for early morning duels between politicians and journalists, with Fausto Salvatori busily employed as a much-demanded second. There was yet another brave attempt of the Italian cinema to lift itself by its boot-straps, as the expression goes ; a few more romances, a few more spectacles even, a film on Dante, another on Messalina and then a second Quo Vadis ? This Quo Vadis ?, destined to become one of the authentic classics of the screen, along with the first Italian Quo Vadis ? and Cabiria, was an Italo-German production, with a mixed Italian and German cast, co-directed by D'Annunzio and the German George Jacoby. Emil Jannings played Nero and among the actresses were the seductive Liguoro and Elena Sangro. To what extent this was a German film and to what extent it was an Italian film we will leave to historians to determine. Suffice it to say that its realism and power were not to be matched in any subsequent versions made elsewhere in the world. Women were now swooning over an adventurous actor of little talent but of extraordinary handsomeness — Rudolph Valentino — who left many palpitating feminine hearts behind when he went to America to seek his fortune. The La Fert Studios of Turin, then controlled by Stefano Pittaluga, became very productive. To compete with the perilous, if not hallucinatory, and exultant acrobatics of Douglas Fairbanks and the derring-do of Tom Mix, both of whom had become dear to the hearts of Italian moviegoers, La Fert brought out the muscles and leaps of Luciano Albertini, Bartolomeo Pagano (the Maciste of Cabiria), Boccolinindi, Gambino, etc. in such films as Julot D' Apache (Julot the Apache), Ritorno di Ulysses (Return of Ulysses), Pugno di Ferro (The Iron Fist), Scala della morte (Staircase of Death — still the preoccupation with death !), Maciste Imperatore (The Emperor Maciste), Maciste all' Inferno (Maciste in Hell), Maciste and His Nephew from America (sic !), etc. They gallantly refused to surrender to the all too ominous portent and practically exhausted themselves trying to give the public the action for which it clamored. Even Za la Mort was launched once more in La via del peccato (The Street of Sin), with fourteen stars of the first rank, but it was no use.