Quotes of the Day

"The Eternal City" ... "in CinemaScope" ... "Directed and Produced by Martin Scorsese."

This isn't another lost Scorsese film, like the long-deferred "Gangs of New York." It's a dream project that the boy Marty storyboarded back in the early 50s, when, at 10 or 11, he first tumbled under the swooning spell of Italian historical epics like Alessandro Blasetti's "The Iron Crown" and "Fabiola." He saw these and many other Italian pictures on his family's TV at 253 Elizabeth Street in Manhattan's Little Italy. He says that, watching these films, "I found a secret door that led to the heart of the ancient world... I had the feeling I was watching a newsreel of ancient Rome."

Scorsese speaks to us, from his youth and his wisdom, in the documentary "Il Mio Viaggio in Italia" / "My Voyage to Italy," a four-hour inundation in Italian movies from the early 40s ("The Iron Crown" and Luchino Visconti's "Ossessione") to the early 60s (Michelangelo Antonioni's "Eclipse" and Federico Fellini's "8-1/2"). Less a synoptic view of this fertile terrain than a visit to some favorite landmarks, the film premiered in 1999 at the Venice Film Festival and is showing this month on Turner Classic Movies (next time: Sunday the 23rd) along with 20 features that give the viewer a crash course in masterpieces from the Peninsula. Every Friday night TCM is airing 10 to 12 hours of prime cinematic real estate: four films each by Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti, three by Fellini and Vittorio de Sica, two by Michelangelo Antonioni, two pioneering silent films ("Cabiria" and "The Last Days of Pompeii") and, just for Marty, "The Iron Crown."

If these names and titles mean nothing to you, perhaps Scorsese's do — for his brilliantly crafted studies of violent ecstasy ("Mean Streets, "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull," "Goodfellas") and many equally adroit documentaries ("Italianamerican," "American Boy," "The Last Waltz," "Made in Milan"). In 1995 he assembled "A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies," the engrossing prequel to this latest compilation. Both films offer a rich banquet of images, memories, analyses, aphorisms. But they do more: they chart the gestation of the sophisticated movie fancies bubbling within our most distinctive and accomplished cinemagician.

Every director came from somewhere, Scorsese, who will be 60 this November, came not just from Little Italy, familiar to us from "Mean Streets," but old Italy — ancient Rome, the Eternal City that spawned Caesar and Mussolini, and Rossellini and Fellini as well. To have seen a Martin Scorsese Picture is to be acquainted, second-hand, with the American and Italian films that nurtured him. Why not take this chance to see the real things? "I know that if I'd never seen the films I'm going to be talking about here," he says at the beginning of his Italian voyage, "I'd be a very different person and, of course, a very different filmmaker."

A few influences are easy to spot. Fellini's "I Vitelloni," the story of five young men who bicker, fool around and make trouble on their way to nowhere in particular, spawned "Mean Streets." Rossellini's "The Flowers of St. Francis" was an important inspiration to "The Last Temptation of Christ" and the baby-Buddha bio "Kundun." I wouldn't be surprised if the bitter domestic sparring between Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders in Rossellini's "Il Viaggio in Italia" / "Voyage to Italy" (from which the title for this film comes) emboldened Scorsese to draw out the arguments in his movies to their shrill, enervating extreme — what we may call the Joe Pesci factor. The layering of rapid dialogue in Italian movies, with every minor character determined to put his two lira in, is mirrored not just in Scorsese's films but in his own famously fast and urgent patter.

Some of the most fascinating footage in "Voyage" is not from any Italian film. It's a home movie, shot by Scorsese's uncle, of the old neighborhood: Marty's home, the street where his mother and grandparents shopped, a celebration with a dozen family members crushed together as if on the 2nd Avenue "el" at rush hour, Marty's father Charles smiling broadly. In 1948 Charles, a presser in the Garment District, bought a 14" TV set (that's big, and early); Marty was six then. Italian-Americans being one of the largest ethnic groups in the city, a local station often showed Italian movies. They were dubbed, cut for the time slot, interrupted by commercials, shown in muddy prints — and they were, to this bright, asthmatic child, a lightning revelation. "My world," he says, "consisted of our apartment, the church, the school a block away, the candy store around the corner. All of a sudden, it became much bigger."

The Child Scorsese loved these movies, in part, because they gave him a time-capsule glimpse into the land his parents had left (and brought with them): Sicily. A country with a millennial history of outside conquest and furtive survival, Sicily was depicted in films like Blasetti's "1860" as a place where, Scorsese says, "You think twice before you trust anyone outside your family." A place, in order words, like Elizabeth Street in the 1940s, or like nearly any Martin Scorsese film thereafter.

OPEN CINEMA

"My Voyage to Italy" is not the only available movie overview of Italian cinema. For a more scholarly documentary approach, consult the three hour-long chapters that Carlo Lizzani contributed in 1992 to the "Antologia del Cinema Italiano" series; they cover neorealism from 1942 to 1954, and are available in some video stores. Lizzani, a screenwriter on Rossellini's "Germany Year Zero" and Giuseppe de Santis' sexy-socialist "Bitter Rice," provides clips from a much wider range of films than Scorsese does; you'll see snippets of obscure, potent films like Aldo Vergano's "Il Sole Sorge Ancora" and Luigi Zampa's "To Live in Peace" with the great Anna Magnani, star of "Open City." Lizzani also wrestles valiantly with the question, "Did neorealism really exist?" He finally comes to a broad definition of the form as "a brave and clever mix of different film styles — a daring attempt to harmonize around a central theme of new inspiration and moral tension."

Lizzani is the professor; Scorsese is the brilliant student whose homework is his passion. At the heart of his "Voyage" are 16 synopses, six to 18 mins. each, of the Italian films that have meant the most to Scorsese. Most of these can be categorized as "neorealism," a form that told slim, grim stories of the Italian working (or wish-they-were-working) class trying to rise above a victim status imposed on them by the occupying Nazis during World War II and a crippling poverty after it. The setting was usually outdoors, the camera style functional and unobtrusive, the cast often composed of nonprofessional actors.

Scorsese believes these were more than good films: "If you ever have any doubt about the power of movies to effect change in the world, to interact with life and fortify the soul, then study the example of neorealism." He says that the form's directors "needed to dissolve the barrier between documentary and fiction, and in the process they changed the rules of moviemaking... Illusion took a back seat to reality." Though he has an acute eye for frame composition and narrative impact, Scorsese isn't speaking as a scholar. This time it's personal: "For me, [neorealism] is the most precious moment in film history."

He quotes Lindsay Anderson, the English critic and filmmaker, as finding neorealistic films defined by "first, their tremendous actuality; second, their honesty; and third, their passionate pleading for what we have come to call 'human values'." Skeptics would translate that as (first) street movies that (second) critics can agree with because they are (third) Marxist — the triumph of leftist sentimentality.

I agree, that's too strong, and not just because I happen to be a sentimental leftist. There's no doubt that the landmarks of neorealism — Rossellini's "Open City" and "Paisan," de Sica's "The Bicycle Thief" and "Umberto D.," Visconti's "La Terra Trema" — spoke starkly of human despair and determination. In the immediate postwar era, "Open City," with its Partisans daring to defy the Nazi occupiers, became, as Scorsese says, "the New Italy's ambassador to the world." But the film also ingratiated because it portrayed Italians as holy victims and heroic Partisans. Wasn't every Italian in the Resistance?

Victims they had been, and some had been heroes, for the two years of the Nazi occupation. But for 20 years before that, the Old Italy — under the popularly elected dictator Benito Mussolini, whose Fascists had won 60% of the vote in the last free elections in 1924 — was a bully. It oppressed its own and other peoples, launching invasions of Abyssinia, North Africa and Yugoslavia (and, in the last two campaigns, needing military bailouts from Hitler's Germany). When Il Duce fell from power in 1943, Italy allowed the Nazis to march in and take over. Germany was defeated, not by the Italians but by the Allies. Films like "Paisan" have so many roles for American soldiers because the Americans were there; they fought their way up the Boot and liberated it.

Political passions ebb; political fashions change. For neorealism to work today, it must transcend socialist ideology (which anyway is a sticky issue for someone like Rossellini, who in the early 40s directed five feature films for the Fascists, and whose production company was owned by Mussolini's son Vittorio). The films have to live as drama and cinema. And many of them do. We may come to them with a built-in sympathy because we're aware of the awful conditions under which they were made: defeat and chaos for the population, a dearth of materials for the filmmakers, since the Germans had destroyed much of the film stock and equipment on their way out. But "Open City," "Shoeshine," "La Terra Trema" do surprise, horrify, engross — all the right things...

...for all the right reasons. The films' craft meets their fervor. Their righteousness still allows for unexpected blasts of dark wit and the occasional moral shading. And though many of the actors may have been amateurs, the screenwriters weren't. The names of men like Fellini, Sergio Amidei, Cesare Zavattini — and a woman like Suso Cecchi d'Amico (who, at 85, got a co-script credit on Scorsese's "Voyage") — appear again and again on the crucial films of the 40s and beyond.

Eventually the country rebounded from economic despair. Directors got richer and artistically restless. Moviegoers grew tired of watching misery on their movie screens. So neorealism went the way of other isms; it became an isn't. But it traveled, in the 60s, to Czechoslovakia and Brazil, energizing those nascent cinemas. And it emerged, a decade or so ago, in the humanist-naturalist gems of filmmakers in the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is truly a world of wonders.

I MAESTRI DI MARTY

At the beginning of any artistic "movement," the most prominent perps sit for a class portrait. Dressed in their new uniforms, they reveal to us only their resemblances, similarities, common goals. But as the classmates grow up and older, they inevitably grow apart. We see that the movement was a series of perhaps coordinated, perhaps coincidental baby steps that, for each participant, leads in a different direction.

Thus it was with the main men of neorealism. They gradually revealed their true selves, their obstinate individualities. Visconti went to the opera, Fellini to the carnival. Rossellini achieved a kind of "scientific" austerity. De Sica returned to his old, brawny comedy style. For all of them, neorealism had become so... 40s. They wanted to tell stories about themselves and their divinely decadent friends. And in doing, they equaled or surpassed their neorealist efforts.

Rossellini was the first to break away, and some would suggest he did it for love. For his 1948 "Stromboli," the renowned Italian art-film director was to have as his leading lady Ingrid Bergman, from Sweden via American stardom. Both married, they had an affair and a child. The scandal trashed Bergman's Hollywood career; and Howard Hughes' RKO, which had financed "Stromboli," shaved 20 mins. off it. They stayed together and made six films, all ignored or reviled. Scorsese considers some of them — "Stromboli," "Europa 51," "Voyage to Italy" — among the most sublime and troubling works of their time. "What mystery! What beauty!" exclaims Bergman when she reaches the Stromboli peak; Scorsese feels that way about these astringent, volcanic films.

As for Fellini, he found apt subjects for big canvases, pulling off the cool tandem of "La Dolce Vita" (gossip journalism raised to invigorating art) and "8-1/2" (the director's film about his inability to make a film). The first was the most financially successful foreign movie ever released in the U.S., the second surely the most entertaining art film of all time. They also canonized Marcello Mastroianni as the dominant European star of the 20th century's second, pooped half. Handsome, effortlessly macho yet spiritually impotent, he elevated emotional passivity to a metaphysic and a fashion statement.

Visconti, reputedly the heir of a noble family that traced its lineage back to Charlemagne's right-hand man, had won his neorealist props with "La Terra Trema," about poor fishermen whose pay is so poor they cannot afford to buy their own boat. In 1992, Lizzani asked: "Was Visconti's point of view the same as that of his heroes, or was it that of a great Renaissance nobleman bending down to watch humble people with the attention but also the detachment of an entomologist?" For many, the first "genuine" Visconti masterwork is the 1954 "Senso," a romantic tragedy set in the 19th century and reaching the level of operatic delirium that Visconti would pursue for the rest of his long career. This sumptuous color film finds its turbulent focus, and so much of its visual rapture, in the lead performance by the neck-swivelingly beautiful Alida Valli, who similarly illuminated films by Antonioni, Hitchcock, Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento.

But the signal auteur of the Italian 60s was Antonioni, the grand, glum mystifier. He was a late starter: 47 when "L'Avventura" won a second prize at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival (the Palme d'Or that year went to "La Dolce Vita"). This "adventure," in which the woman who seems to be the lead character disappears and is never found, was just the thing at a time when movies had morphed into films; folks on the worldwide intellectual cocktail-party circuit loved to argue over a puzzle that had no resolution. "L'Avventura" was the first in Antonioni's trilogy of existential blahs, followed by "La Notte" and "Eclipse." Not all the critics cottoned to the languid voluptuousness of his film style; Andrew Sarris labeled it "Antoniennui," and Pauline Kael spanked it as "Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Party." But it was as influential on European filmmakers as neorealism had been. And any moviegoer with patience had to admit: the films were beautiful.

In Antonioni's new, blue Italy, the moneyed class is mired in depression (the poor can't afford it, or don't have time for it). In his later films, this indulgence turned into an addiction. Antonioni's creatures seemed doomed not to hope, but they were gorgeous people — Mastroianni, Alain Delon, Jeanne Moreau, Lea Massari and the director's blond Muse, Monica Vitti — wandering in a wasteland caught in some of the most elegant, pristine images ever recorded. Sometimes, the landscape became the movie. In "Eclipse," which, Scorsese says, "felt less like a story and more like a poem," Delon and Vitti agree to meet, but neither one shows up at the appointed spot. So, for the film's final seven minutes, the camera lingers on apartment houses, street corners, all the places the lovers could have been but weren't. There are no people, only buildings. "Eclipse" is a cinematic neutron bomb, and a wondrous experiment that enthralls as it enervates.

If you didn't care for Antoniennui (I did), no matter. It was just one dish in an endlessly nourishing smorgasbord of movie attitudes and styles available then — from Italy, but also France, Sweden, Japan, India, Britain. the U.S. The whole joint was jumpin'. Scorsese, just entering his 20s, was a prime gourmand of this banquet. Now he is one of the few directors from whom one still expects a feast. And the graybeards among us have to declare that the 60s was the last great decade for grown-up movies.

At the end of "Voyage," he offers this cinematic prayer: "I wish that every young person with an interest in film could have had the same experience that I had back in those days: to be young, open to everything, and to walk into a theater and have your expectations not just met but surpassed, time and time again." I wish so too. Actually, I hope against hope. This could be cranky middle age talking, but I wonder if today's kids will be able to look back, 50 years from now, and say what Scorsese and I can say: that the films we saw in our youth were terrific — mind- and medium-expanding works of great seriousness and power, whose profound artistry and progressive eloquence not only influenced filmmakers and filmgoers, but made them better.

IL VIAGGIO PICCOLO DI RICARDO

Martin Scorsese has a couple years on me, so his movie age of reason would naturally precede mine. Also, there was no foreign-movie TV show in Philadelphia, where I grew up. And I can't pretend that as a boy I had his prodigious familiarity with Italian cinema. (Well, I can pretend, but then what's the point of this column?) Anyway, what the Child Corliss remembers of Italian cinema was three things: broad comedy, wan spectacle and beautiful women.

In the 50s, Italian films were often disguised as Hollywood films. They were in English (as released here) and usually boasted an American male star surrounded by a busty bambina and a cast of local scenery-chewers. Anthony Quinn must have had dual citizenship back then: he played in "Attila" with Sophia Loren, "Ulysses" with Kirk Douglas and Silvana Mangano, and Fellini's Oscar-winning "La Strada" with Giulietta Masina. I didn't see the "Hercules" movies and other sword-and-sand epics, but they were probably the biggest-grossing Italian pictures of the decade.

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 Bosé, 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. prècis 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.

• Richard Corliss
• Richard Corliss on Martin Scorsese's TCM Festival of Italian Cinema