Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/03/19

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

Tuesday, December 3, 2019

Nobody's Children (Raffaello Matarazzo, 1951)

Nobody's Children (Raffaello Matarazzo, 1951)

Cast: Yvonne Sanson, Amedeo Nazzari, Françoise Rosay, Folco Lulli, Enrico Olivieri, Enrica Dyrell, Teresa Franchini, Gualtiero Tumiati, Alberto Farnese, Aristide Baghetti. Screenplay: Aldo De Benedetti, based on a novel by Ruggero Rindi. Cinematography: Rodolfo Lombardi. Production design: Ottavio Scotti. Film editing: Mario Serandrei. Music: Salvatore Allegra.

If you think of postwar Italian cinema in terms of the neorealism of Rossellini and De Sica, the satiric grotesquerie of Fellini, or the existential angst of Antonioni, you owe it to yourself to go to the Criterion Channel and check out the popular film of the era as represented by Raffaello Matarazzo. To judge from the one movie there that I watched, Nobody's Children, and a couple of shorts about Matarazzo's works, he crafted a bunch of melodramas that combine the delights of soap opera, Hollywood weepies, and Italian opera libretti. Nobody's Children features the handsome Count Guido Cavalli, who is in love with the lovely Luisa, whose elderly father is the security guard at the marble quarry in Carrara, owned by the Cavalli family. But the relationship of the count and Luisa is stymied by his imperious mother, the countess, who connives with the scheming quarry foreman, Anselmo, to separate the lovers. Eventually, the count gives up Luisa to wed his mother's choice, the unwed Luisa gives birth to their child, Anselmo abducts it and makes it look like the baby died in a fire, Luisa enters a convent, the child grows up and goes in search of his parents, and ... oh, much, much more. It's all so well done that I couldn't hate myself for enjoying it as much as I did.