Senso (Luchino Visconti, 1954)

 

Senso (Luchino Visconti, 1954)

Cast: Farley Granger, Alida Valli, Massimo Girotti, Heinz Moog, Rina Morelli, Christian Marquand, Sergio Fantoni, Marcella Mariani. Screenplay: Luchino Visconti, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Carlo Alienello, Giorgio Bassani, Giorgio Prosperi, based on a novel by Camilo Boito. Cinematography: G.R. Aldo, Robert Krasker. Production design: Ottavio Scotti. Film editing: Mario Serandrei. Costume design: Marcel Escoffier, Piero Tosi.

Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)

Lamberto Maggiorani and Enzo Staiola in Bicycle Thieves

Antonio: Lamberto Maggiorani 
Bruno: Enzo Staiola 
Maria: Lionella Carell 
The Charitable Lady: Elena Altieri
Baiocco: Gino Saltamarenda 
The Beggar: Giulio Chiari
The Thief: Vittorio Antonucci

Director: Vittorio De Sica 
Screenplay: Oreste Biancolli, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Vittorio De Sica, Adolfo Franci, Gheraldo Gherardi, Gerardo Guerrieri, Cesare Zavattini
Based on a novel by Luigi Bartolini
Cinematography: Carlo Montuori
Production design: Antonio Traverso
Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma 
Music: Alessandro Cicognini

One of the many things I love about Bicycle Thieves* is the omnipresence of bicycles. At the beginning of the film, we spot them whizzing by the bike-deprived Antonio, as incidental and elusive as birds in the sky. But by the climactic scene, when Antonio and Bruno are sitting despondently on the curb, they are everywhere: There are hundreds of them parked outside the nearby sports arena; a bike race whizzes by only inches from the father and son; and of course there's that fateful bike outside a doorway just around the corner. Bikes become as tempting to Antonio as bottles and glasses would be to a recovering alcoholic in a bar. I wonder how much of the greatness of Bicycle Thieves depends on that list of no less than seven screenwriters: Did Vittorio De Sica really need six other people to tell what is essentially one of the simplest of stories? I think perhaps he did, for the film is crowded with incidentals, with scenes and details that give it such a wonderful texture, from the relationship between Antonio and Maria to the crowd of job-seekers outside the employment office to the bustling bike market scene, and so on. Details such as Antonio's ignoring the fact that Maria is carrying two heavy buckets of water when he finds her to tell her of his job add immeasurably to our sense of his flawed, self-obsessed character. Did the scene in which Antonio watches a man climb up and up and up stacks of shelved, pawned sheets arise from observation on location, or was it suggested by a writer as a way of signaling the depth of poverty in postwar Rome? There are small, non-essential but telling moments in every scene, such as the man at the bicycle market who is clearly a pedophile trying to lure Bruno astray. De Sica and his writers have loaded every rift of Bicycle Thieves with ore. But only De Sica could have been responsible for drawing such miraculous performances from unknown actors like Lamberto Maggiorani, who has the haunted look of a young Robert Duvall, and Enzo Stailolo, whose Bruno verges on cute -- especially when his face lights up at the thought of food -- but never becomes cloying, and at the end exhibits a wonderful mixture of disappointment and love for his father.

*This seems to have become the official English-language title of the film, sanctioned by IMDb among others, after many years of being known as The Bicycle Thief. It is, of course, the literal translation of the Italian title, Ladri di Biciclette. But it's not only preferable because of fidelity to the original but also because, as David Thomson puts it in his entry on the film in Have You Seen...?, "in the world it shows, there are thousands of bicycle thieves because of the terrible economy."

Le Amiche (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1955)

Yvonne Furneaux, Eleanora Rossi Drago, Anna Maria Pancani, and Valentina Cortese in Le Amiche

Clelia: Eleanora Rossi Drago
Lorenzo: Gabriele Ferzetti
Cesare Pedoni: Franco Fabrizi
Nene: Valentina Cortese
Momina: Yvonne Furneaux
Rosetta: Madeleine Fischer
Mariella: Anna Maria Pancani
Tony: Luciano Volpato
Clelia's Employer: Maria Gambarelli
Carlo: Ettore Mani

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Screenplay: Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alba De Cespedes
Based on a novel by Cesare Pavese
Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo
Production design: Gianni Polidori
Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma
Music: Giovanni Fusco

The usual rap on Michelangelo Antonioni's films by those who dislike them is that nothing happens, when in fact all sorts of things happen, from mysterious disappearances to murder. What sets Antonioni's films apart is that things happen almost randomly, without the usual dramatic buildup, and that the way his characters react to the things they witness or that happen to them is not usually the way we would react to them. So Le Amiche starts with an attempted suicide to which the sophisticated women who form the circle of "girlfriends" of the film's title react with a kind of detachment and indifference, even though the woman who tried (perhaps not very hard) to kill herself was one of them. Even Clelia, the outsider who will soon become part of the little circle and who discovers the unconscious Rosetta, seems to take the occurrence in her stride. The next on the scene is the brittle, cynical Momina, who knows Rosetta and accepts her suicide attempt as something like a part of the routine. And so we, along with Clelia, are thrust into a group of people in whom something essential seems to have atrophied, producing several fractured marriages and dead-end affairs. Clelia has come to Turin, the city where she grew up, to supervise the opening of a dress shop, part of a chain headed by the designer for whom she works. So it's the world of fashion superimposed on a place Clelia knew in the immediate postwar years as a grimy working-class city, and her point of view on the lives of the girlfriends is a special one. Partly in reaction against these wealthy women and their ineffectual men, Clelia takes up with Carlo, a supervisor on the construction of the shop, who shares her lower-class roots in the city. But you can't, as they say, go home again. The film is full of Antonioniesque touches that anticipate his major works of the 1960s. There's a visit to the beach where the behavior of the girlfriends and their men evokes some of the behavior that precedes the disappearance of Anna in L'Avventura (1960), and there's a breathtaking cut from the suicidal Rosetta walking away into the darkness to a high-angle shot of her white-shrouded body on the pier after she succeeds in killing herself. Antonioni antagonists will find nothing in Le Amiche to counter their charges of "arty ennui," but those of us who appreciate his work, even if we have to struggle sometimes, think this earlier film is almost the equal of his later work.

White Nights (Luchino Visconti, 1957)

Mario: Marcello Mastroianni
Natalia: Maria Schell
The Tenant: Jean Marais
Mario's Landlady: Marcella Rovena
The Maid: Maria Zanoli
The Prostitute: Clara Calamai
The Dancer: Dirk Sanders

Director: Luchino Visconti
Screenplay: Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Luchino Visconti
Based on a story by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno
Production design: Mario Chiari
Music: Nino Rota

With White Nights, Luchino Visconti made a move from neorealism to neoromanticism that would be the major direction of his career -- a shift toward characters with operatic, overstated emotions, treading on the edges of sanity. It's a tribute to the skill of Marcello Mastroianni that he manages to keep White Nights grounded as Maria Schell's performance tests the limits. Mastroianni's Mario is a man whose good sense tells him that Schell's Natalia is a fragile woman on the bounds of self-destruction but his loneliness and infatuation with her beauty -- did anyone ever have a more dazzling smile than Maria Schell? -- keep him tied to her. He tries to break away, but an encounter with a prostitute restores his longing for the innocence he cherishes in Natalia. White Nights teeters on sentimentality, as do almost all of Visconti's films, but it's rescued by the skill of the performers and by the rightness of its mise en scène, especially the carefully crafted heightened realism of the studio sets. It also helps that there's a brilliant break in tone in the scene in which Mario learns how to dance to the music of Bill Haley and His Comets -- another demonstration of Mastroianni's boundless talent.

Turner Classic Movies 

Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti, 1960)

Renato Salvatori and Alain Delon in Rocco and His Brothers

Rocco Parondi: Alain Delon
Simone Parondi: Renato Salvatori
Nadia: Annie Girardot
Rosaria Parondi: Katina Paxinou
Vincenzo Parondi: Spiros Focás
Ginetta: Claudia Cardinale
Ciro Parondi: Max Cartier
Luca Parondi: Rocco Vidolazzi
Morini: Roger Hanin

Director: Luchino Visconti
Story and screenplay: Luchino Visconti, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Vasco Pratolini, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Massimo Franciosa, Enrico Medioli
Based on a novel by Giovanni Testori
Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno
Production design: Mario Garbuglia
Music: Nino Rota

When Rocco cries out, "Sangue! Sangue!" on finding Nadia's blood on his brother Simone's jacket, I almost expect to hear Puccini on the soundtrack instead of Nino Rota. It's one of those moments that cause Rocco and His Brothers (along with other films by Luchino Visconti) to be called "operatic." It's "realistic" but in a heightened way -- the word for it comes from the realm of opera: verismo. The moment is in the same key as the actual murder of Nadia, along with her earlier rape by Simone, and the numerous highly volatile scenes of the family life of the Parondis. It's what makes Rocco and His Brothers feel in many ways more contemporary than Michelangelo Antonioni's more cerebral L'Avventura, which was released in the same year. Movies have gone further in the direction of Rocco -- think of the films of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola -- than they have in the direction of Antonioni's oeuvre. I have room in my canon for both the raw, melodramatic, and perhaps somewhat overacted Rocco and the enigmatically artful work of Antonioni, however.

Watched on Filmstruck

I Vinti (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1953)

Fay Compton and Peter Reynolds in I Vinti

Why did they burn Joan of Arc? a character asks in Michelangelo Antonioni's I Vinti. Because she got involved in politics, another replies. It's a response befitting the disengaged youth that are the focus of the three episodes in Antonioni's film, the title of which is often translated as The Vanquished. They are the postwar generation in Europe, deprived of the political fervor that drove their parents' generation into war. But Antonioni has another reason for sniping at politics: It interfered with his efforts to make and distribute the film, which was banned in France until 1963 and never received theatrical distribution in the United Kingdom, even though two of the episodes were filmed in those countries. One of the reasons for the bans was legal: The episodes were based on actual incidents and could have led to prosecution on various grounds. But Antonioni was also forced to change his original plan for the Italian episode, which was to have been about a violent act of political protest, and instead make his protagonist a kind of rebel without a cause: a young man who turns to cigarette smuggling as a reaction against his wealthy parents. The film as released also is weighed down by a didactic prologue explaining that these are stories about the plague of what was then called "juvenile delinquency" -- a heavy-handedness uncharacteristic of Antonioni as artist. The first of the three episodes takes place in France: A group of high school students play hooky, telling their parents that they're going on a class field trip, and instead go to the countryside where, in the ruins of a chateau, a boy who has boasted of how much money he has -- he ostentatiously lights his pipe with a five-dollar bill -- is shot and robbed, only to reveal that the money is fake. The Italian episode features Franco Interlenghi as Claudio, whose venture into cigarette smuggling is busted by the police. On the run, he shoots and kills a guard, but he also takes a fall from which he apparently suffers internal injuries. Rescued by his girlfriend (Anna Maria Ferrero), he returns home, but dies before the police can arrest him. In the English episode, a police reporter (Patrick Barr) for a London newspaper receives a call from a man (Peter Reynolds) who claims to have discovered a body in a park and wants to be paid for his story. Relishing the celebrity his story brings him, he eventually admits to having murdered the woman (Fay Compton), a prostitute, and is sentenced to death. Slight as the three episodes are, they are vivified by sharp writing -- the screenplay is by Antonioni, Giorgio Bassani, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Diego Fabbri, Roger Nimier, and Turi Vasile -- and by the director's increasing virtuosity in placing his camera. The cinematography is by Enzo Serafin. Granted, what we often watch the early films of great directors for are signs of their future brilliance, and especially in the English section there are some striking foreshadowings of Blow-Up (1966). But making allowances for some of the restrictions under which Antonioni was working, I Vinti is impressive on its own. I was struck by the Hitchcockian humor in the English episode, when the reporter tangles with his unseen but hilariously incompetent switchboard operator. Unfortunately, the version I watched on FilmStruck retains the original dubbing of the French and English sections into Italian, but apparently there are undubbed DVD versions.