A scene from Fellini's '8 1/2', part of Scorsese's look into Italian filmmaking
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Along with the wonderful Ealing comedies from Britain and the Fernandel farces from France, our local art house showed the occasional Italian comedy: "The Miller's Beautiful Wife," "Bread, Love and Dreams," later "Big Deal on Madonna Street." These were robust pieces of bustling business, full of...
...fabulous babes! As Italy was creating world-class cinema, it was also discovering world-class beauties to ornament its screens. They came in droves, often out of beauty pageants.
Consider the 1947 Miss Italy contest. Among the also-rans: Silvana Mangano, a sensation with her hiked-up skirt and dirty dancing in "Bitter Rice," and Eleonora Rossi Drago, the keen-featured seductress of Antonioni's 1955 "Le Amiche." The pageant winner was the luminous 16-year-old Lucia Bos, who would star in Antonioni's first two features, "Cronaca di un amore" and "The Lady Without Camelias." Second place went to Gianna Maria Canale, who was "Theodora Slave Empress" before co-starring in "Hercules." And in third place: Gina Lollobrigida, one of an imposing group of Italian actresses to star in Hollywood as well as Italian movies. The list is long and enticing: Valentina Cortese, who made the 40s "Thieves Highway"; delicate Pier Angeli and her twin sister Marisa Pavan; Magnani, who won an Oscar for her first Hollywood movie, "The Rose Tattoo"; and the ever-intoxicating Valli (Hitchcock's "The Paradine Case").
By the 50s, Hollywood had cast a worldwide net, globetrotting for new locations to fill the CinemaScope screen (thus proving its superiority, in size as well as quality, to TV) and for fetching females of all nationalities. Italians filled the bill. Exotic yet earthy, they couldn't be reduced to the American stereotypes: teen queens or cartoons of lust. The Italians were grown-ups, women with a capital Wow. Some of them were so buxom that an irreverent friend from my youth called their home country "Titaly."
Which brings me to Sophia Loren. We would call her statuesque, but that barely does the young Loren justice; so iconic is her voluptuousness, it would be fairer to call statues Sophiaesque. She was married to producer Carlo Ponti, but she didn't need a patron to get good roles. She was "The Miller's Beautiful Wife," a Mario Camerini comedy co-starring de Sica and a calflike Mastroianni. She appeared in de Sica's "Gold of Naples" with Mangano and the clown Toto.
Eventually Hollywood paged her. For her debut, as a pearl-diver in "Boy on a Dolphin," she emerged from the sea in a clinging outfit that, when I was about 12, instantly induced puberty. But Loren had the whole package: swan neck, laughing voice, a poise and perfect posture rare among tall women and, not least, the gift to inhabit any role, serious or silly, as if she'd been born there. For me, Loren was Italian cinema incarnate — until Claudia Cardinale came along, and then Stefania Sandrelli. The Italian-actress assembly line just kept producing masterpieces.
PROFUMO DI DONNA
Loren has a cameo in "My Voyage to Italy": an excerpt from "Gold of Naples." For four vertiginous hours, women glamorize this compilation film, as they do Italian (and every other) cinema. "Voyage" begins with Magnani's death in "Open City" and ends with Cardinale's seraphic smile in "8-1/2." Bergman is at the center of the Rossellini segment, as Vitti is of the Antonioni. The emotional peak of the whole opus is an 18-min. prcis of "Senso," whose ravishments are incarnated by Valli's gift for reckless passion glowing through a steely sheath. The most poignant moment in "Voyage" is the last scene from "La Dolce Vita": a girl (14-year-old Valeria Ciangottini), her face innocent and knowing, beckons to Mastroianni, and in his wry stupor he waves her entreaties away.
Yet these actresses seem not to interest Scorsese for their contribution to the cinematic life force — only as incidental expressions of the films' matter and manner. Loren, for instance: he zips past her to concentrate on the delectable comic turn by Paolo Stoppa. Scorsese is more taken by the light playing on Valli's face than the face itself; on the textures of Monica Vitti's hair, in the crystalline monochrome of "L'Avventura," than on the subtlety with which Vitti reveals a wounded soul through huge, blank eyes. In all Scorsese's reveries of a boyhood falling in love with movies, there's no talk of a boy's love-fear-awe-thrill at the women who animated those movies. His wafting memories hardly carry the scent of a woman.
We know Scorsese appreciates the connection of directors and actresses. He had a liaison with Lisa Minnelli, the daughter of Judy Garland and Italian-American auteur Vincente Minnelli; and he was married for a time to Isabella Rossellini, the loveliest co-production of Rossellini and Bergman. But we also know that he had a shy boyhood, and long considered studying for the priesthood. Then too, we know Scorsese's films. He makes serious, explosive ones about men loving and betraying each other. Women are usually on the periphery. This doesn't make him unique among directors. Indeed, it is in his concentration on guy dynamics that this unique film artist most resembles his less gifted American colleagues — and separates him from most of the Italian directors he admires.
In the "8-1/2" section of "Voyage," Scorsese says this about women in the world of Fellini and his alter-ego hero, the movie director Guido: "He can love them, he can use them, he can ignore or worship them. But he can't control them." This is a sharp observation, but not quite so passionately expressed as his remarks about Guido's difficulty in getting his next film started — the subject of "8-1/2": "In order to make the movie you want to make, you need time. But that's the hardest thing to find when you're a filmmaker." Scorsese was putting "Voyage" together in 1998-99, when he was finally ramping up his long-deferred "Gangs of New York." In light of the tortured, tortuous process of that film's production, his comment sounds like a cry de profundis.
THE BRITS ARE COMING?
I saw Scorsese last month at the Cannes Film Festival, where he showed 20 mins. of "Gangs" (which, by the way, appears to have a meaty role for its female co-star Cameron Diaz). I asked if he planned to tackle or embrace another national cinema, and I guessed that, if so, it would be France — surely the oldest and richest, the most varied and distinct movie tradition outside the U.S. He said yes, he might, and no, not France. He was thinking of Britain. Why? Because he saw lots of English movies when he was a kid, and that child, apparently, is a stern father to the man. Don't expect that one to be panoramic either. Scorsese isn't interested in the Ealing comedies; he's likely to concentrate on the early Hitchcock melodramas, on "The Blue Lagoon" and other British films aired on 50s network TV and on the flourishing, festering genius of Michael ("Peeping Tom") Powell.
I hope he goes on his British tour, and that the result will be like "My Voyage to Italy." For this is a love letter — to a form of cinema, to its creators, to the nation that inspired it, to the generations of Marty's cinematic children who may learn to appreciate it. But should Marty undertake this third grand project of ardor and remembrance, I have a few other British artists for him to consider. Vivien Leigh ... Jean Simmons ... Joan Greenwood ... Margaret Lockwood ... Celia Johnson ... Claire Bloom ... Jessie Matthews ... Kay Kendall ... Dorothy Tutin ... Barbara Steele ... Julie Christie ... And who was that elusive beauty whose gravity anchors Carol Reed's "The Third Man"? Ah! Alida Valli.