Francis Ford Coppola bought the run down Palazzo Margherita in Bernalda, one of Basilicata’s neglected hill towns, where his grandfather was born and turned it into a swank boutique hotel, the kind of place he wanted his children to return to again and again long after he was gone.
He is not yet gone but he was right. Sofia got married there and even better for a family of cinephiles he created a great movie room in the piano nobile’s reception hall, with black-out curtains, retractable chandeliers, and drop down screen. Coppola personally selected 200 films for screening, mostly classic Italian neorealist and post-neorealist, some on their way to being forgotten, some never released in the USA in their Italian versions. To see any one of them, all you have to do is ask. So I did.
I like Rossellini and De Sica, Visconti and Pasolini, and wanted to see Monicelli for the first time. So I saw two old favorites first, Francesco giullare di Dio and Il Decameron, I wanted to see La ciociara, from 1961, which we call Two Women and was Sophia Loren’s Oscar break through- she was the first to win Best Actress in a foreign language film- but Coppola only had an un-subtitled version.
So I saw it when I got home and was shocked by the last scenes of expressionist violence and sadness- so unexpected and raw in a work of gentle neorealism- and I read about the marocchinate, “the deeds of the Moroccans”, the mass rape and killing of civilian women and men in the Ciociaria countryside following the fall of Monte Cassino. The Italian government estimated 2,000-3,000 female victims aged 11 to 86 years old had been raped in a few days of mayhem by Goumiers (from the Arabic word “qawm”, meaning “people or tribe”), irregular troops from North Africa under loose and out-of-control French command.
Instead I saw the 1962 anthology film Boccaccio ‘70 with the short La riffa, like La ciociara, starring Loren, directed by De Sica, produced by Carlo Ponti, and with a milquetoast supporting actor playing against Loren’s busty broad- Jean-Paul Belmondo (a year after Breathless !) in Two Women and Alfio Vita in La riffa.
The Italian release had the Monicelli short- Renzo e Luciana, co-written by Italo Calvino- that the US version did not which I liked too, with modern office-as-rat’s maze scenes like what Jacques Tati played for laughs in Parade ten years later but that Monicelli played for poignancy- with the Italian gioia di vivere completely snuffed out of a young secretary newly married to a janitor in the same company, which they must keep secret because for a woman to marry in that company is a firing offense.
But to compare Two Women to La riffa is to compare cantaloupe to honeydew- Sophia Loren fills out her shirt so well that it seems impossible she can find any extra room to stuff and unstuff fat wads of lire in there, which she does in both films with gusto. Her weak counterfoils are not quite equals- Belmondo is an intellectual with his head in the clouds, Vita is a Mama’s Boy- but neither can stand up to her high-heeled sashaying self.
I must have spent ten hours in that screening room over two days, not a minute of them wasted, and the lights came up with a renewed taste for neorealism, for untrained actors and extras picked off the mean streets like Pasolini did, or picked out of the monasteries like Rossellini did, or picked up from random town carnivals where De Sica found his.
I like the story that Rossellini once shot a scene with Ingrid Bergman talking to a group of fishermen in Stromboli, using real fishermen, but he couldn’t get them to mouth nonsense words at the right times where the dialogue would later be dubbed in, so he tied strings to their toes and told them to say something whenever they felt a tug, and his assistant director pulled on the strings one by one, and it worked, sometimes with the fishermen swearing, but Rossellini got his shot.
Stromboli wasn’t on Coppola’s list but Viaggio in Italia was, which I also saw. Its scenes from Naples and Pompeii are great, made just ten years before I was there the first time when I saw the famous plaster dog. Was he awkwardly scratching fleas or writhing in pain from Vesuvio’s suffocating gas? And the car George Sanders and Miss Bergman drove? In the Colette story it was a Jag, in the film it was a Rolls. This time ours was a Fiat Panda. Theirs was a comfortable convertible. Ours, under-powered but good on curves.
