2. The Forties: The Season Of Neo-Realism part three

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

Roberto Rossellini's other classical film on the Resistance is PAISA (1947). Here echoes from the cinema of the past fuse with certain important premises for the development of the cinema of the future. The film is divided into episodes, that is a kind of film rarely exploited in Italy (only two titles come to mind: QUARTA PAGINA [FOURTH PAGE] by Nicola Manzari in 1943 and CIRCO EQUESTRE ZA-BUM [ZA-BUM CIRCUS] by Mario Mattoli in 1944) and ventured with some success only by Hollywood (IF I HAD A MILLION, 1932) and the French (CARNET DU BAL, DERRIERE LA FACADE, PARADE EN SEPT NUITS). Episode films were frequently nothing more than a random collection of short stories. Rossellini, instead, linked each episode to the others: the film as a whole, paints the historical picture of the Allied advance in Italy from the landing in Sicily in June, 1943, to the liberation of the North in 1945. The first and last of the short episodes are starkly tragic, fraught with death. In between, however, the director and his associates alternate humor and drama. See, for example, the two completely comic episodes about Naples (the friendship between a black American soldier and a Neapolitan "sciuscia" of bootblack) and the Romagna (the quandry of a convent of Catholic friars forced to take in two American chaplains of a different religion). Also in PAISA, written mostly, like ROMA, CITTA APERTA [ROME, OPEN CITY], by Sergio Amidei, the humorous touch of Fellini can be detected.

2. The Forties: The Season Of Neo-Realism part two

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE
by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

Even so, as has now been made perfectly clear, Italian cinema cannot historically be divided into two neat division: Fascist-period films on the one side, neo-realism on the other. Many elements of the way films were made before were carried over into the post-war period, even in important works, if for no other reason that the artistic and technical personnel had remained pretty much the same. So it is easy to understand how, in an essentially dramatic and, indeed, tragic genre like neo-realism, the ingredients of comedy were not altogether lacking.

Take ROMA, CITTA APERTA [ROME, OPEN CITY], directed in 1945 by Roberto Rossellini (1906-1977). The great director manages to create a manifold image of a luminous city suddenly plunged into gloom by the Nazi occupation and the deplorable phenomenon of collaborationism. Rossellini shoots on the street, recreating, where it actually took place, a tragedy experienced barely yesterday, the scars of which are still painfully fresh in people's minds. He takes as a point of reference a parish priest, Don Morosini (the story is true), and the mother of a family who sees her man arrested and then tortured to death. Two characters meant to be the exact opposite of the "heros" of the traditional epic cinema and who could never be played by two "cute and glamorous" matinee idols, according to the rules of the star system. So Rossellini chose Aldo Fabrizi and Anna Magnani, the couple of CAMPO DE' FIORI and L'ULTIMA CARROZZELLA [THE LAST CARRIAGE], and carried their usual roles as popular comedy figures up and up, without a hitch, to the heights of tragedy. ROMA, CITTA APERTA [ROME, OPEN CITY] could not have existed without the triptych of comedies which Fabrizi and Magnani had previously appeared in. It was those films that got audiences used to leading actors who were neither glamorous, nor very young, to films shot outside, in the open, with real people, to the use of Roman dialect instead of the polished Italian of the professional actors. To be sure, ROMA, CITTA APERTA [ROME, OPEN CITY] is a masterpiece and the three films that preceded it were, instead, made for sheer entertainment, but the connecting thread between them is clear. Not only, but the presence among the script-writers of the same Federico Fellini of those films made it certain that the material of ROMA, CITTA APERTA [ROME, OPEN CITY] would be "alleviated" from time to time by a few light, but essential humorous touches.

2. The Forties: The Season Of Neo-Realism part one

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

In 1944, Italy was split in two by the war. Liberated from Rome to Sicily, with the first democratic government in twenty-three years, occupied by the Nazis and still governed by Mussolini in the North. The film industry was also split in two. Before abandoning Rome, Mussolini's Republic moved the Cinecitta equipment to Venice and with second-rate actors and directors tried to make films. Since the outcome of the war was obvious, few people felt like jeopardizing themselves, and the films that came out of the makeshift Venetian studios were bland little comedies that were so uncompromised by Fascism that they circulated without any trouble after the war was over. In Rome, Cinecitta, stripped of its equipment and confiscated by the Allies, was of no use. But in that same year of 1944, the Italian cinema somehow or other came back to life, utilizing the few remaining studios and even private homes. For the records, the first film to be put into production in liberated Rome was precisely a comedy, L'INNOCENTE CASIMIRO [CASIMIRO, THE INNOCENT], directed by Carlo Campogalliani, with Macario, but it was an insignificant little film that seemed to belong to some remote past.

It was only natural that the immense ordeal of pain and suffering endured by the Italians with a war that started as a mistake and ended in defeat, should have led to the firm determination to build a new Italy. So there was a desire to meditate upon what had happened, to sing of the tragedy and the struggle for freedom, and also to come to terms with the enormous problems of the post-war period, with the country physically in ruins and racked by hunger and unemployment.

This state of mind - which was at once anger at the mistakes of the past, compassionate remembrance of the dead, solidarity for the survivors, trust and determination for the future - gave rise to the rejection, on the part of many film-makers, old and young, of movies as duplicity, deceit, escape, and the search, also through films, for a closer contact with the human and social reality of the country. It is this that explains the neo-realistic phenomenon. It was not - like French surrealism, German expressionism, Russian realism - an artistic trend, a "school": De Sica, Visconti, Rossellini, the three masters of neo-realism, were in fact extremely different in their style, in their approach to film-making, in their subject matter. What united them was, above all, the above-mentioned state of mind, which led to a specific moral choice.

1. The Thirties: The Age of the "White Telephones" part nine

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE
by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

Among the various regional and dialectal theatrical traditions, little space was occupied by the Roman dialect theater, despite the presence of an extraordinary actor like Ettore Petrolini. Roman dialect flourished, not so much in the "respectable" theaters, as on the shoddy stages of secondrate vaudeville houses, which were mostly located in the poorer parts of town with a decidedly working-class audience. One of the lesser celebrities of those theaters was Aldo Fabrizi (born in 1906), comedian, poet, entertainer of enormous appeal with his round face, his plump body and a deliberately unconventional way of speaking, that is with the words almost "eaten" to give the impression of words being made up on the spot rather than memorized beforehand. A former silent movie star who had taken up directing with some success, Mario Bonnard (1889-1965) put Fabrizi, then unknown in movies, into the leading role of AVANTI C'E POSTO... [COME ON, THERE'S ROME...: 1942]. On stage, the actor had created, with a fine sense of parody, a number of typical Roman characters, including a streetcar conductor. It was this figure which was placed at the center of a story that recaptures the humorous, sentimental flavor of Camerini's comedies in telling of the bashful courtship a middle-aged streetcar conductor pays to a pretty young house maid who is out of a job, until he realizes that the girl is in love with a young colleague of his. The story, written by Zavattini, Fabrizi and Piero Tellini, is weak, but it is the way it is told that matters. Between romantic scenes and scintillating gags, a quite accurate picture of wartime Rome emerges and the film ends sadly with the young husband-to-be leaving for the front of an already lost war. Federico Fellini also lent a hand to the script and certain gags are typically his. Immediately after, Mario Bonnard, director; Fellini, Fabrizi, Tellini, scriptwriters; Marino Girolami, scenarist, came up with CAMPO DE' FIORI (1943), where Aldo Fabrizi plays the part of a fishmonger who has a stormy love affair with a woman who sells fruit and vegetables in the popular open-air market of Campo de' Fiori, one of the most picturesque squares in Rome. The woman was Anna Magnani, till then known as a variety show star with Toto and in films in the type-cast role of a coarse woman of dubious reputation. CAMPO DE' FIORI completely overhauled the image of Anna Magnani, turning her into a positive figure: a simple woman of the people, all heart and instinct, brusque and aggressive in manner. A love affair between two actors no longer very young (Fabrizi was thirty-seven, Magnani thirty-five) in lower-class roles was something new and the film took great delight in the lively imagery of the true-to-life streets and squares of Rome. The third and last film of the series was, again in 1943, L'ULTIMA CARROZZELLA [THE LAST CARRIAGE], directed by Mario Mattoli and written by Fabrizi and Fellini, the story of a Roman carriage driver, galled by the competition of taxis, who forbids his daughter to marry a taxi driver. This then completes the triptych which brought to the screen a bittersweet image of "popular" Rome, of simple people who live modestly off their earnings in a city caught in the transition between an old world that would be swept away by the war, and a new world that could yet barely be glimpsed. Meanwhile, as the historic tragedy of Italy ran its course, comedy pointed in the direction of human solidarity and understanding with a certain hope for the future.

1. The Thirties: The Age of the "White Telephones" part eight

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

On June 11, 1940, Mussolini, carried away by what English historian F.W. Deakin called the "brutal friendship" with Hitler, declared war on France and England. In a couple of years, the Axis, initially victorious, retreated on all fronts. With the loss already in 1940 of Ethiopia, which had been Mussolini's "imperial dream", the loss of Libya in 1942, the invasion of Russia ending in a ghastly retreat littered with corpses, Italy at the beginning of 1943 was already defeated and preparing to fight on its own soil, as was to be the case in June with the Allied landing in Sicily.

Fascism by now was in a serious crisis, Mussolini's popularity had completely faded. Many young people, who had grown up under Fascism, started to open their eyes and look for new directions.

Between 1941 and 1943, that is in the period when the war took a disastrous turn and the regime was in shambles, the Italian cinema also started looking for new directions. Neo-realism, which was to "explode" in 1945 after the Liberation, got its start in those dark tormented years. On the one hand, there were directors, old and young, who sought refuge in films of literary inspiration, elaborate and refined, exclusively devoted to bringing to the screen, with lavish sets adn costumes: the sources were Alessandro Manzoni, Aleksander Pushkin, Thomas Hardy, Antonio Fogazzaro, Stendhal. On the other hand, beginning directors like Francesco De Robertis and his pupil, Roberto Rossellini, made war films, but devoid of propaganda, interested primarily in showing the pain and suffering caused by the war.

There was one director, however, who with participation and intelligence, made use of comedy to bring audiences into contact with lower-class reality. In 1942, Alessandro Blasetti directed QUATTRO PASSI FRA LE NUVOLE [FOUR STEPS AMONG THE CLOUDS] on a story by Cesare Zavattini. The script by Zavattini, Blasetti himself, Amato the producer and Aldo De Benedetti, whose name could not appear on the credit titles: he was Jewish and the racial laws prohibited him from working. A traveling salesman leaves the big city to follow an unwed mother who has gone to her parents' farm in the country and who lacks the courage to confess her condition. So the man, with all the predictable misunderstandings, passes himself off as her husband, gradually helping the woman to be accepted by her father and mother. Delicate and sentimental, but also full of life, the film gives audiences an insight into the Italian peasant world, till then somewhat neglected by a primarily urban and bourgeois cinema.

1. The Thirties: The Age of the "White Telephones" part seven

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE
by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

At the end of the '30s, World War II broke out. In a still neutral Italy (it would enter the war in 1940), the comedy of the absurd was a way of unconsciously rejecting the seriousness of what was happening in Europe. In 1939, ANIMALI PAZZI [CRAZY ANIMALS] appeared, directed by Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia (born in 1894) on a story by Achille Campanile, in which a Neapolitan music-hall comedian, Toto, scored a hit with his puppet-like, wholly unrealistic acting, in the part of an aristocrat forced to get married in order to come into an inheritance. Another film, IMPUTATO, ALZATEVI! [DEFENDANT, STAND UP!], by Mario Mattoli, also appeared, with a script written by the director himself together with one of the most popular contributors to the comic weeklies, Vittorio Metz. The star of the film was another comedian of regional and dialectal origin, Turin-born Erminio Marcario (1920-1980), with a round, innocent, Harry Langdon-like face. At that time he was the most popular star of the music-hall, which he carried to the heights of Parisian elegance, with lavish choreography, a chorus-line of beautiful girls (known on the bills as "Macario's Little Women"), spectacular scenery. Macario was, like Langdon, the innocent who wasn't even capable of realizing the enormous predicaments he kept getting into, the catastrophes he brought about; into the character he introduced a highly personal note of romantic delicacy. IMPUTATO ALZATEVI! [DEFENDANT, STAND UP!] was a take-off on thrillers and trial films, with an attack on the judicial system that was so pungent that, aside from setting the film in France, the producers decided to take precautions and insert this hypocritical statement at the end of the credit titles: "Everything that happens in this film is purely imaginary and seeks to be nothing but the caricature of events and institutions fortunately far removed from our climes".

1. The Thirties: The Age of the "White Telephones" part six

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

This surreal and "absurd" humor - actually deeply concerned with human values - gave rise to another genre, another variation on the Italian film comedies of the '30s. The credit for discovering this new way of making people laugh again goes to Mario Camerini, who met Cesare Zavanttini at the beginning of his career as a script writer. The film was DARO UN MILIONE [I'LL GIVE A MILLION] and won a prize at the Venice Film Festival of 1935. Vittorio De Sica played the part of a millionaire weary of his wealth, who pretends to be poor and falls in love with a girl from the circus, while Luigi Almirante (the great dramatic actor who starred in the world premiere of Pirandello's "Six Characters In Search Of An Author") is a penniless man in tails who wanders around the world of the rich, making fun of everybody. Fast-moving and exhilirating, the film (set in France for reasons of censorship: poor people couldn't exist in Mussolini's Italy) is a veritable barrage of gags. It was also very successful abroad. Hollywood bought the rights for a remake, I'LL GIVE A MILLION (1938), director: Walter Lang, with Warner Baxter is the De Sica role.

1. The Thirties: The Age of the "White Telephones" part five

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE
by Ernesto G. Laura - Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

At this point, in order to understand the evolution of Italian film comedy, mention must be made of a journalistic phenomenon peculiar to Italy between the two wars: the enormous popularity of comic weeklies.

From the end of the 19th century on, comic weeklies had occupied more and more space on the newsstands, but never reached the enormous circulation they enjoyed under Fascism. There is a reason for this. Though freedom of the press was a dead letter and the regime gave orders even as to how much space was to be devoted to a given piece of news, the comic weeklies represented a tolerated corner where some irony and a little social criticism could be indulged in. The best-known ones were "Il Travaso delle Idee" (color tabloid), "Marc' Aurelio" (large format, a paper repeatedly confiscated in 1932 for political reasons until the publisher was finally forced to fire the editor) and "Bertoldo" (it too large format).

These weeklies were entirely made up of cartoons (often moderately sexy), jokes and short stories. Their editors and contributors were the same people who, in the same period, gave birth, in the field of books, to a brief flowering of the humorous novel and who moreover gave their support to the ferocious nonconformist satire of Achille Campanile, which succeeded in slipping by the censors because it was expressed in surrealistic terms, anticipating by some thirty years Ionesco's humor of the absurd. Among the contributors to these weeklies are to be found the names of many post-war Italian film makers: Federico Fellini, Marcello Marchesi, Steno, Age (Agenore Incrocci), Furio Scarpelli, Cesare Zavattini, Vittorio Metz, Giovanni Guareschi.

What kind of man did these comic weeklies portray? It was without question an Italian who had never heard of Fascism, never heard of its "passwords", its myths. It was instead the man of the street, the one to be found in the films of Mario Camerini (whose brother, Augusto, was the well-thought-of satirical cartoonist). Among the contributors to these papers, one name is particularly important: Cesare Zavattini (born in 1902), who as early as 1931, in his book, "Parliamo tanto di me", expressed his love for the poor, the misfit, the underdog, creating bizarre and slightly mad situations in which the poor became the symbol of opposition to society and its laws.

1. The Thirties: The Age of the "White Telephones" part four

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. LauraCompiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, ItalyEdited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

One Italian city in particular had long occupied a conspicuous place in the theater, with a repertoire, actors and authors all its own. That city was Naples, a place of unrivaled magnificence and age-old culture and history, but also the emblem of a timeless poverty, capable of enclosing within itself the entire social and human drama of Southern Italy. From the escapades of Punchinello to the modern plays of Eduardo De Filippo runs an unbroken chain of characters, full of wit and "flavor", amusingly portrayed, in which high drama and personal tragedy are covered with gibes, mockery and derision. Ever since the days of silent films, in the 1910s and '20, Naples had carried its theatrical tradition to the screen, almost never, however, reducing it to mere "photographed theater". So that during the '30s, along with the "white telephones" and the popular, rose-colored comedies of Camerini, the Neapolitan comedy made its appearance.

In 1932, the same year of GLI UOMINI CHE MASCALZONI... (MEN, WHAT SCOUNDRELS...), a young Italian director, Alessandro Blasetti (born in 1900 in Rome), bought to the screen one of the most amusing and humane plays by the actor-playwright Raffaele Viviani: LA TAVOLA DEI POVERI (THE TABLE OF THE POOR). It's the story of an aristocrat, interpreted with an aloof
detachment tinged with irony by Viviani himself, whom, reduced to poverty, tells no one and acts as if he were still rich, even succeeding in collecting donations for a spectacular banquet for the poor people of the city. At this point, while not abandoning the light comical touch that distinguishes it, the play sinks its teeth into the social fabric with an earnestness unknown to films of the period. In films of this kind it is best to speak of "regional" comedy, linked to particular customs and traditions and stemming from dramatic works that use dialects instead of the Italian language. Among the Neapolitans, the De Flippos make their first appearances in films: Eduardo (born in 1900 also a director), Peppino (1905-1979) and Titina (1898-1963). Their films of the '30s are, however, generally unimportant, over-conditioned as they are their theatrical origins. From Sicily an important actor, Angelo Musco, reaches the screen with his repretoire of plays already tested on stage. And in the '40s the most distinguished Genoese dialectal actor, Gilberto Govi, would appear in films. But "regional" comedy was not encouraged by Fascism, which tended to root out the use of dialects and the local cultures identified with
them.

1. The Thirties: The Age of the "White Telephones" part three

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Compiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, ItalyEdited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

Mario Camerini carried forward this brand of popular, gently realistic comedy over the following years, proving that GLI UOMINI, CHE MASCALOZONI... [MEN, WHAT SCOUNDRELS...] was not an isolated, and unique case but could give rise to a genre, to a kind of light comedy highly successful with audiences. Vittorio De Sica starred again in IL SIGNOR MAX [MR. MAX], which in 1937 won a prize at the Venice Festival, and was the pungent portrait of a snobbish Roman newsdealer who with his polished manners and smattering of foreign languages tries to make his way into "high society", that which today would be known as the jet set. In 1939, De Sica would again play the part of a driver who falls in love with a salesgirl in GRANDI MAGAZZINI [DEPARTMENT STORE].

It is clear that the "Camerini-style" comedy foreshadows what today is known as "Italian-style" comedy. It is the opposite of those escapist films of a Central European flavor in that it seeks to express topical Italian characters and situations. Smiles could be tinged with tears and heartbreak, though the generally optimistic tone of Camerini's film stories inevitably led to the "happy ending". This mixture of the serious and the comic also foreshadows the characteristics of the future Italian-style comedy. Camerini views his characters with true affection and sets the simple and fundamental values of their way of life against the artificiality and emptiness of the upper classes. So there is a constant theme that runs through his comedies, though it is never carried to extremes; it is tempered rather by a good-natured smile and a lucid irony. Along with Camerini, some of his favorite script writers should be mentioned: the writer (and future director) Mario Soldati, the critic Mario Pannunzio, the playwright Aldo De Benedetti. In any case, Camerini was not simply a director, but took an active part in the script, which was often based on a story of his own.
In the wake of these successes, other directors were able to come to the fore. In 1933, for example, Raffaello Matarazzo (1909-1966) directed TRENO POPOLARE [THIRD-CLASS TRAIN], a story about a group of youngsters on a river excursion, with no stars, no dramatic events, nothing but a keen, perceptive observance of reality, held together by a sharp and high-spirited pace. The same charm and spontaneity marked MUSICA IN PIAZZA [MUSIC IN THE SQUARE: 1935] directed by Mario Mattoli (1898-1980), the first film shot live in a hill-town near Rome and starring an internationally famous Italian music-hall singer, Milly.

1. The Thirties: The Age of the "White Telephones" - part two

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. LauraCompiled by A.N.I.C.A. (National Association of Motion Pictures and Affiliated Industries) Rome, Italy - Edited by CIES Soc. Coop. r.1 (Institute for the Promotion of Italian Motion Pictures Abroad) Rome, Italy - under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment

At that time there was Fascism, a dictatorship that glorified the myth of the he-man, the warrior. But on the screen, and on the stage as well, a rather different kind of man was all the rage, a man without particularly lofty ideals, concerned exclusively with his sexual conquests and his success in business. In other words, the spirit of that Parisian version of light comedy known as "boulevardier", also triumphed in Rome and Milan, in Palermo and Genoa. If anything, it may be pointed out that in films the French model was soon replaced by the Central European model as it had evolved between Vienna and Budapest at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By no accident, Hungarian plays were taken as the starting point for Italian films, writers moved from Budapest to Rome to prepare scripts, actors were at home in studios of both capitals.

This brand of comedy was given a nick-name: "white telephone" films. In fact, phones of that color did not exist at the time and could only be seen in the elegant homes of the millionaires in those films, where men wore tails and women glittered with jewels. It was a fuatous world, hardly representative of Italy in those years, and whose sole purpose was escapism. It would not be fair, however, to reduce all Italian cinema of the '30s to "white telephone" films.

In 1932, Rome-born director Mario Camerini (born in 1895) made a considerable splash with GLI UOMINI, CHE MASCALZONI... [MEN, WHAT SCOUNDRELS...], presented that same summer at the first Venice Film Festival.

Here the characters and setting were altogether different from those of the "white telephone" comedy. The leading character was a Milanese driver, Bruno, who lost his job in order to woo Mariuccia, a salesgirl in one of the stands at the Samples Fair and the daughter of a cab driver. An ordinary love story about ordinary people, far removed from the "heroes" proposed by the Fascist regime, but even further removed from the luxury of the upper middle-class world fondled by the "white telephones." So Camerini invents a light comedy which is popular in flavor and setting, "discovers", cinematographically speaking, Milan, the industrial capital of Italy, and at a time when everything had to be built in the studio, carries his troupe from Rome to Milan and does the actual shooting among the stands of the Samples Fair. The film brought a breath of fresh air to the Italian screen and launched an actor, Vittorio De Sica, who hadn't succeeded in breaking into films before because the biggest producer of the day, Stefano Pitaluga, felt he wasn't photogenic. The success of GLI UOMINI, CHE MASCALZONI... also led to the success of the sentimental song De Sica sang in it: "Parlami d'amore, Mariu", by C.A. Bixio.