Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 07/29/19

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

Monday, July 29, 2019

Divorce Italian Style (Pietro Germi, 1961)

Marcello Mastroianni in Divorce Italian Style

Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Daniela Rocca, Stefania Sandrelli, Leopoldo Trieste, Odoardo Spadaro, Margherita Girelli, Angela Cardile, Lando Buzzanca, Pietro Tordi, Ugo Torrente, Antonio Acqua, Bianca Castagnetta, Giovanni Fassiolo. Screenplay: Alfredo Giannetti, Ennio De Concini, Pietro Germi. Cinematography: Leonida Barboni, Carlo Di Palma. Production design: Carlo Egidi. Film editing: Roberto Cinquini. Music: Carlo Rustichelli.

American movies were still trying to shrug off the morality enforced by the Production Code when Italy sent us the brilliant comedy about adultery and murder called Divorce Italian Style. And how ready Hollywood was to jettison that morality can be gauged by the fact that the film's screenplay won an Oscar, and that its director and star, Pietro Germi and Marcello Mastroianni, were nominated as well. The irony here is that Divorce Italian Style is about the consequences of a hidebound moral code, one in which murder could be condoned but divorce was forbidden. Germi and his co-screenwriters make the most of this irony, providing ingenious twists as Mastroianni's Ferdinando encounters multiple obstacles to his plans to rid himself of his wife, Rosalia (Daniela Rocca), and marry the lovely Angela (Stefania Sandrelli). It's one of Mastroianni's greatest performances, made even more striking by the inclusion of a screening of La Dolce Vita, the 1960 Federico Fellini film that made Mastroianni into an international star, in the Sicilian town that is the setting of Germi's film.