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On a sunny afternoon half of white-collar Rome strolls down the Via Veneto to see the movie stars at play. There they sit at the dime-size sidewalk tables at Doney's and Rosati's and the Strega, or slouch along the bar at the Excelsior Hotel. There, like swarms of gnats, come the hundreds of little middlemen, promoters, rumor touts and inside-kiters who do the dizzy business of making Italian movies. And in the oleander evenings, while the Roman sky turns blue and gold, the "wasps" (motor scooters) snarl through the Via Veneto, and oldtimers sip their Camparis and indolently speculate on the future.
The Diggers. But "it's fairly hard to worry about the future," as one U.S. moviemaker in Italy explains, "when spaghetti is only a quarter a plate." Besides, there lies beneath the fiscal quicksands some solid ground for the Italians to hope that their movie industry has a commercial if not an artistic future. The sound stages and their equipment are excellent, and Italian technicians are getting better with every picture. Labor is still much cheaper than Hollywood's, and production-distribution deals with France and West Germany have opened new markets to the Italian product; thus far, the Italian government's block on Hollywood dollars in Italy has restrained the U.S. industry from open reprisal against its rising rival in Rome.
This year and next, when the returns from the Italians' big gamble with multimillion-dollar productions come rolling in, will tell the tale. But no matter what the climax, it is sure, in a vital respect, to be an anticlimax. The finest hour of the Italian cinema was rung in with Open City (1946) and tolled out with Umberto D (1952), and every man of talent in the Italian movie industry knows it. Few are willing to give up the prospect of prosperity, but most are sad and just a little ashamed to see their pictures become more and more Hollywooden.
"There is an old Italian proverb," said one moviemaker last week: "He who digs a grave is the first to fall into it." But as long as the Italians keep finding gold, they are likely to keep digging. When the gold runs out, they may begin to listen to such critics as Neo-Realist Cesare Zavattini, who says: "It is a crime to use this gift of God . . . the film ... if we don't use our moral conscience and also make films of the real life we see before us. It is like using soap only to make bubbles and never to wash yourself with."