General Della Rovere

Roberto Rossellini’s General Della Rovere (1959), which was recently revived as a part of Vittorio De Sica retrospective, currently playing at Film Forum, is a chance to see the great Italian director (Bicycle Thieves, 1948, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, 1970), act. The role would be a plum for any thespian due it’s marvelous conceit. De Sica plays the part of Vittorio Emanuele Bardone, a fraudster who exploits the misery of occupied Italy and in particular those whose relatives have been imprisoned by the Nazis. Bardone gets caught up short by his fascist counterpart, a savvy S.S. colonel named Muller (Hannes Messemer) who outdoes him at his own game. The mixture of rivalry and admiration that forms the basis of the relationship between Muller and Bardone is reminiscent of that between von Rauffenstein (Eric von Stroheim) and de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) in Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion (l937). General Della Rovere is based on a novel that apparently had some basis in fact, but there’s a disconnect. The  contrived theatrical quality which sets the stage for De Sica’s tour de force is almost at odds with Rossellini’s stark neo-realism. It’s as if  the intrinsic melodrama of the narrative were being mollified by the director’s signature style. An unforgettable scene where resistance fighters hover in a snowy piazza recalls the gritty Rossellini masterpiece Rome, Open City (1948). But then there are also the shots of the prison with its futuristic lines of black cell doors complemented by a soaring interior whose Beaux Arts style is as duplicitously high-minded as the film’s final con--where Bardone impersonates the title character. Has Bardone finally undergone a conversion and become a hero? You might admire  De Sica’s acting, but it’s hard to believe the figure Rossellini creates has finally seen the light.

Big Deal on Madonna Street

Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958), which was recently revived as part of the Mario Monicelli series at Film Forum is literally Roman comedy. On its most basic level it’s a comic heist movie that takes place in Rome; it turns the poverty and beauty of post-war Rome into a sequence of comic ideas. In one of these an imprisoned criminal Cosimo (Memmo Carotenuto) attempts to pay a down on his heels boxer, Peppe (Vittorio Gassman) to serve out his sentence. But Roman comedy also refers to the kind of slapstick you find in Plautus and Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. For instance, Claudia Cardinale is Carmelina, the fetching potential bride who’s kept locked up by another one of the crooks, her overly protective brother, Michele (Tiberio Murgia). Monicelli works the farcical elements for all their worth, interspersing scenes with the kind of balloons, “the big day,” “in the meanwhile,” that are to be found in comedies of the silent film era. The renowned Toto plays the part of Dante, a professional safecracker who's called in as a technical advisor. The motley crew of thieves who besides Vittorio Gassman also includes Marcello Mastroianni steal a camera with which they hope to film the crime scene. When the resulting movie is screened, it turns out that the shots have been obscured by a clothes line from which women’s panties are hanging. Mastroianni, who is about to participate in the robbery with his arm in a splint, has also used the camera to make home movies of his infant son. When asked about movie, Dante responds, “as a film it’s bad.” The same might be said of Big Deal which whose particular brand of humor, the comic caper, may have more effectively lived on the work of directors like Blake Edwards of The Pink Panther fame. Still Big Deal on Madonna Street is the comic version of the Rome presented by neo-realists like De Sica in such classics as Bicycle Thieves. At the very end as Gassman’s character Peppe gives up his dreams of riches to join a brigade of laborers, there’s a trenchant sadness to a final exchange when one of his criminal cohorts cries out “Peppe, they will make you work.”

Little Fugitive

One of the most interesting things about Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin and Ray Ashley’s production of Little Fugitive, currently being revived at Film Forum, is that it came four years after Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (l948). Engel actually shot the movie in a cinema verite style with a hand held 35mm camera, not a common piece of photographic equipment at that or in any time in the history of American film. If Bicycle Thieves is an iconic piece of Italian neorealism then Little Fugitive might be sui generis example of American hyperrealism. The scene where Lenny (Richard Brewster) tries to locate his kid brother Joey (Richie Andrusco) on a crowded Coney Island beach is uncannily reminiscent of the doomed attempt to retrieve the stolen bicycle, the needle in a haystack, amongst the mountains of bicycles that fill the streets of De Sica’s post-war Rome. What makes Little Fugitive singular in American cinematic history is that it’s about objects rather than a story. Americans genuinely like their bread and butter, which is to say plot, but while Little Fugitive literally had plenty of bread and butter—in the form of cotton candy, watermelon, hot dogs and soda pop—it didn’t provide the kind of bread and butter most filmgoers generally seek. The story is rather simple, young Joey runs away when he is tricked into believing he’s murdered his older brother. Joey has his seven year old version of a Walgurgisnacht and Last Supper in one, riding on the El to Coney Island, passing signs reading “Smile It’s Worth a Million Dollars and Only Costs a Dime” and hearing shills in front of an arcade crying out “everyone knocks them down, you will too,” seeing the ferris wheel and the steeple chase and caressing the head of a merry-go- round horse. The brilliance of the film is to see guilt from the point of view of a seven-year-old and from that character’s height too. Joey survives by collecting the deposits on bottles he finds next to impervious lovers under a boardwalk or nestled into a jetty. “Why did you run away?” Lenny asks his younger brother at the end. “It was just a joke.” “Why didn’t you tell me,” Joey says and that’s a wrap. In the meanwhile Little Fugitive, awash in the imagery of the great photographer Ruth Orkin, creates its own iconography. The motto is, don’t ever underestimate the intelligence of the movie going public. Just because Hollywood plays to the lowest common denominator doesn’t mean that audiences aren’t capable of a helluva lot more (Little Fugitive opened in 5000 theaters in l953) and still can draw substantial audiences today. Little Fugitive is a great American movie that proves the point.