Hollywood motion pictures that immediately preceded WWII were basically decorative and a kind of falsifying cosmetic that bore little resemblance to the post war trauma and destruction that had occurred. One had to look elsewhere….
By far the most impressive foreign pictures of the 1945-1950 period of post-war delapidation and regenesis were those made by the Italian neo-realists who, refusing to dodge the issues by intoxicating themselves with pretty pipe dreams and resonant extravaganzas, looked unflinchingly at the way things really were: chaotic, ignoble,decayed,and ragged at the edges.
Through their films, mobs of unchildlike children roved in clothes too big for them: a precociously crafty and rapacious band of waifs worked with black-market hoodlums in Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine; in Roberto Rossellini’s memorable Open City, boys from a parochial school watched through a barbed wire fence as their priest, a partisan, was shot by a German firing squad; the resignation of their dry eyes teestifying to other monstrous things they had seen.
De Sica’s camera and Rossellini’s, and those of Fredrico Fellini, Luigi Zampa, and Renato Castellani, picked up the empty Roman plazas, the murky courtyards, and the haunting fountains, the dazed faces of ordinary people on trolley cars, rangy cats walking cleverly over skylights, tides coming in, religious processions through country towns,dispirited prostitutes, and drunk GIs. Sick babies howled in wretched tenements where the blistered wlls sweated; women pawned their sheets; pld men sold their treasured books; hungry crowds looted bakeries; hope, when it was painfully born, was short lived; and although the national persuasion to sing was irrepressible, arias from Puccini and Verdi were heard in counterpoint to the military music of the Fascisti. Nothing was certain and fear was quotidian.
These surgical and uncompromising probings of a society’s ulcerated wounds were not accepted gratefully by Italian audiences, who wanted to wake from the nightmare of how life was into a dream of how it might be in a nver-never land of sweetness and light and fun and games; they wanted cheesecake, not bitter rice.
But despite the apathy of their countrymen, these radical directors continued to hold up to the public its flawed, twisted and often heroic image. The products of their devotion included, besides Shoeshine and Open City, ROssellini’s Paisan, a group of unrelated and unfinished episodes during the last years of the war as the Allies moved north from Sicily to the Po Valley; Di Sica’s profoundly disturbing Bicycle Thief, the tragedy of a laborer who, bereft of his bicycle, is bereft also of his job and who, in the hopeless search for the stolemn machine, turns on his small son in a fury of frustration, introducing the boy to the pain of unkindness that is not deserved.
Umberto D., also the work of De Sica, is the portrait of a broke and friendless and homeless old man, marred by sentimentality but having nonetheless a great many dr
ic details and photographic virtues. There were somewhat later, Fellini’s I Vitelloni, Cabiria, and his most famous, La Strada, a pathetic and Grand Guignol story of a free-lance strong man, played by Anthony Quinn, and a simple and simple minded girl, played by Giulietta Masina, and their rural peregrinations from circuses to fairs to country weddings.