SHOW BUSINESS: Rome’s New Empire

One day in 1945 Rod Geiger, an American G.I., came back from Italy with an odd trophy in his barracks bag : a print of Roberto Rossellini’s Open City, one of the first movies made in liberated Italy. Geiger had bought the exclusive U.S. rights for $13,000. In seven years the film, which startled U.S. audiences with its documentary realism, grossed more than $3,000,000.

Open City’s success not only made money. It stirred Italy’s moviemakers into a frenzy of activity which has put Italy second only to Hollywood as the major supplier of films to the U.S. and the world. On the 14 sound stages of Rome’s Cine-città., Europe’s biggest studio, and in smaller studios scattered from Turin to Palermo, Italy’s 180 producers are shoot ing an alltime record of 120 films, ten more than last year. And for the first time they are ready to exploit the U.S. beach head opened by Open City into a big invasion of Hollywood’s home market.

Hollywood Pays. Italy’s films have been shown mainly at small, arty theaters, attracting audiences who did not mind subtitles. But this spring, Tomorrow Is Too Late, the first Italian film to begin its run in a big Broadway theater (Loew’s State), proved that it could pay. In four weeks it grossed $110,000. Encouraged by that success, the Italians launched an ambitious project to “dub” English dialogue into twelve major pictures a year. Last Week Bitter Rice, which has already grossed more than $3,400,000 in the U.S. in a subtitle version, was playing with English dialogue in Manhattan. Some critics thought the English words were hard to reconcile with the Italian actors. But Italian producers think that Americans will become used to dubbed-in English, just as Italian audiences have become accustomed to dubbed-in Italian in U.S. films. Ironically, Hollywood is paying for the dubbing. Last year, in return for releasing half of Hollywood’s frozen lire, Italy persuaded U.S. film makers to kick back 25% of the thawed money to finance a new agency, Italian Films Export (I.F.E.), which has received $1,200,000, is using it to finance the U.S. invasion.

Liberated Genie. In a way, Mussolini set the stage for Italy’s movie renaissance by building Cinecitta and granting state subsidies. But he also dictated the propaganda trash which was the industry’s main prewar product. After liberation, Italy’s democratic government resumed the subsidies. But Italy’s able young film boss, Under Secretary of State Giulio Andreotti, 33, onetime journalist and underground fighter, wisely kept hands off the product. Result: such imaginative directors as Rossellini and Vittorio (The Bicycle Thief) De Sica had free play.

Skinny budgets and antiquated equipment forced them to use natural lighting and to press amateurs into service as actors. These techniques, born of economic necessity, gave their films a fresh, simple quality that made Hollywood’s chrome-edged product seem brassier than ever. They took their themes from the world around them: war, occupation, poverty, misery and human courage. Sex was merely incidental to such plots, but since it was handled in the casual manner in which Italians regard sex, it startled U.S. audiences, accustomed to the sniggering censorship of the Breen office.

The selling power of sex was brought home to the Italian industry by Bitter Rice, a second-rate movie with arty pretensions and a nodding gesture to social problems (the exploitation of women workers in Italy’s rice fields). Bitter Rice turned out to be a brilliant showcase for the tightly clad, womanly figure of Silvana Mangano, who helped make the picture the biggest-grossing foreign-language film ever shown in the U.S. Now the Italians have made a picture entitled Sensuality, starring Newcomer Eleonora Rossi-Drago, with which they expect to clean up in the U.S.—if it gets by the censors.

Upgraded Genius. With dollar success, the moviemakers lost some of the advantages of their pinchpenny early days. Silvana Mangano, who got $800 for her scenic rice-picking, now commands $32,000 a picture, while Italy’s top star, Anna Magnani (Open City, The Miracle), commands $96,000. But Italian producers are still able to turn out a film for as little as $112,000, less than a tenth of Hollywood’s average budget. In Italy’s castle-crowded, ruin-laden countryside, they need build few sets. In a nation which talks with its eyes and hands, they find new stars among amateurs. Says Rossellini:”All Italians are actors. Our people are our real resources.”

Sunny Side. In its bid for the U.S. market, the maturing Italian industry is now trying to prove that it can develop something more than sex and social realism. With its U.S. dollars, Italian Films Export is staging a Hollywood-like “Italian Film Festival” in Manhattan in October, which will offer a different production every night for seven nights. They include Gogol’s satiric The Overcoat; De Sica’s tragic Umberto D.; the comic Little World of Don Camilla, a story of rivalry between a priest and a Communist leader; and a love story, Two Cents Worth of Hope, which shared first prize at the Cannes Film Festival and stars 15-year-old Maria Fiore in her first picture. The bill may be topped by the most ambitious ($1,000,000) and first Technicolor movie Italy has yet made: The Golden Coach, directed by France’s Jean (The River) Renoir, and starring Anna Magnani.

As Italy’s film industry grows, so do its troubles. In recent months the state, which holds the purse strings, has begun to pressure the industry to shade down its realism in favor of more “constructive” pictures which show the sunnier side of Italian life. It also faces a bigger danger in that the more it succeeds by being different from Hollywood, the more it may try to imitate Hollywood. So far, the Italians have steered clear of both perils, and their lusty young movie industry shows plenty of signs of further growth.