Foreign News: Cinema

L’Onorevole Mussolini, ofttimes quick to wrath and action, acted both hastily and wrathfully last week, dismissed at fell blow his entire Italian Board of Cinema Censorship.

The Board, either stupid or non-vigilant, had passed a U. S. film which showed a Hollywood Naples, murky and depraved. Mussolini’s Italy, Mussolini’s Naples had been grossly, falsely represented, insulted! Away with the Board!

To the première of the film, Street Angel, were invited Rome’s most scintillant critics, most potent cinema tycoons. When an unsalubrious and perhaps unrecognizable Naples flickered before their eyes, they whistled and hissed in protest. One critic shouted “Only the fact that we are guests prevents this theatre from being inundated under a Niagara of violent indignation.” The theatre therefore was saved but the Board of Censors was doomed a few hours hence.

Wrote the next day famed Editor & Cinema Critic Mario Carli in Rome’s Impero: “Perhaps past conditions approached those shown . . . but in Mussolini’s Italy certainly nothing of that nature exists. Gypsies, underworld characters, prostitution, cheating, misery, vice, overdressed peasants, gamin life, people in rags, filthiness, superstition, thuggery, human landscapes immersed in endless fog—even the classic sun of Italy was obliterated by the Fox directors. Can you imagine an Italian seascape perpetually steeped in fog?”

Fox representatives in Italy, noting the fate of the Board of Censors, trembled for the future of their cinema, wished earnestly that it had not committed the grievous error of showing Italian “human landscapes immersed in endless fogs.”

Had Mussolini decided immediately to ban the offending cinema, he would have done exactly what Great Britain’s Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association did in 1925 to Director Carl Laemmle’s Phantom of the Opera.* Shrewd, Director Laemmle let it be rumored that his film would encourage recruiting in His Majesty’s armies. Accordingly, when the film arrived in Southampton from Manhattan it was greeted by an escort of territorial troops and a jubilant band which accompanied it to London. Decidedly, Director Laemmle had scored a signal advertising coup.

Of course when the film finally flickered in London it contained no stimulus for bashful but possible recruits. British retribution, speedy, came a few days after the premiere. The cinema was banned.

Since then Director Laemmle has freely acknowledged his error, has appealed through the Exhibitors’ Association to British justice not to “contemplate unending punishment.” Last week, Director Laemmle was able to derive some comfort from the statement by the Association that it would reconsider the case.

* From the famed story by M. Gaston Leroux. The film, titillating, showed sepulchral subterranean passages under the Paris Opera House, a bal masque done in color, a great chandelier swinging, crashing.