Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/07/18

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, November 7, 2018

The Children Are Watching Us (Vittorio De Sica, 1944)

Luciano De Ambrosis and Emilio Cigoli in The Children Are Watching Us

Andrea: Emilio Cigoli
Pricò: Luciano De Ambrosis
Nina: Isa Pola
Roberto: Adriano Rimoldi
Agnese: Giovanna Cigoli
Grandmother: Jone Frigerio
Aunt Berelli: Dina Perbellini

Director: Vittorio De Sica
Screenplay: Cesare Giulio Viola, Margherita Maglione, Cesare Zavattini, Adolfo Franci, Gherardo Gherardi, Vittorio De Sica
Based on a novel by Cesare Giulio Viola
Cinematography: Giuseppe Caracciolo, Romolo Garroni
Production design: Amleto Bonetti
Film editing: Mario Bonotti
Music: Renzo Rossellini

The title, The Children Are Watching Us, carries a warning that threatens to turn Vittorio De Sica's film into a moral fable. Which would probably have been okay with the Fascist and Catholic censors watching over De Sica's shoulder, since it ostensibly serves the cause of God and family, meting out punishment to the careless parents who let young Pricò suffer from the failure of their marriage. The mother here bears the chief burden of scorn for letting her carnal desires lead her away from the path of duty, though the father also gets blamed for letting his workaholic tendencies distract him from his role as husband and father. But of course a director as sophisticated as De Sica can't allow himself to be so morally didactic, especially since he's working here with, among a raft of writers, Cesare Zavattini, who became his greatest collaborator on the classics to come: Shoeshine (1946), Bicycle Thieves (1948), and Umberto D. (1952). The Children Are Watching Us is an unabashed tearjerker, with an often heartbreaking performance by young Luciano De Ambrosis, but there is a substance to the film, a clear-eyed look at the characters and the milieu in which they exist, that transcends its implicit sermonizing and anticipates the neorealistic postwar works.