The Big Screen (34 page)

How can he or the police make any progress in a city of bicycles? And here something quite profound emerges in the film, a sense of the city, sustained by endless gray perspectives, the rustle of bicycle bells, and the implication of some infinite life going on without regard for this one story.

As the man searches for his bicycle, he takes his young son with him; and so it is that the son has to observe the demoralization of the father, even to the point where the man tries to steal a bicycle himself. He is captured and rebuked, but he is let off and cast loose with a child who has seen and heard. No relief comes in the film. It ends on the question of what will happen to the man and his family.

This film about hopeless poverty opened in New York and played to full houses and laudatory reviews—how far that revenue could be translated into more bicycles in Rome is not clear. The New York Film Critics voted it Best Foreign Film. The Academy nominated Zavattini for Best Screenplay. But in the furor of the moment, the film was significantly interfered with. For some reason, in the United States it was called
The Bicycle Thief
—perhaps this was an attempt to build the father as a character and to distract from the child's helpless complicity or the larger social implications. Perhaps it was just an American idea that the man in a film has to be its hero—when David Selznick saw the picture he straightaway longed to remake it, but with Cary Grant as the man. People laugh at that story, but don't miss how it reveals innocence in 1948. Americans were moved by the film. They wanted to help. Yet in the retitling, an essential part of Zavattini's scheme was overlooked: the way in which theft is the ultimate behavior shared by all the poor in a shattered society. And so the country horrified at the thought of Communist influence suppressed the gentle Marxist interpretation of the title.

Otherwise sane minds were carried away. André Bazin called it “one of the first examples of pure cinema. No more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema.”

Be careful of the word
pure
! Yes, the man who played the father, Lamberto Maggiorani, was not a professional actor. He was a factory worker. But he was handsome, with a grave, eloquent face, and he did make more films afterward. For a moment, Bazin was so excited that he started enthusing over the way all Italians seemed to be natural actors. The truth was that Maggiorani was asked to act, to register feelings and emotion; he was charged by De Sica to
play
the man, and who would be astonished if sometimes De Sica acted the part out for him in the way so many directors had done with novices before? Acting is pretending. It is learning a script and working out what it means. And then it is striving to get a shot “right.” But what is right in a world allegedly comprised of amateur actors and the trust that nothing will happen except what happens?

Bazin, and many others, gasped at the prospect of infinite reality poured out on our screens. He rejoiced at the lack of design:

Zavattini actually called for an end to the culture of people being moved by “unreal things”: one day, he hoped, the cinema would be nothing but our chance to reflect on the real thing. You can see the temptation. But who is to say when or how the real thing has been delivered? For example, in the course of their mounting misery in
Bicycle Thieves
, the man and his son are caught in a rainstorm. Rain cannot help but be providential, visible, significant information—call it what you will. I don't know whether the rain was in the script, or it just happened so that De Sica jumped to take advantage of it. It doesn't matter, because the rain is so degrading and spectacular at the same time—it is cinema, just like the light. It cannot help but contribute toward an atmosphere. Yet no raindrops fall on the lens—which means that great care has been taken to get it “right.” Or is that wrong?

I don't mean to make fun of
Bicycle Thieves.
When
Sight & Sound
polled critics in 1952 in their first attempt to identify the greatest film ever made,
Bicycle Thieves
came top. It was in sixth position in 1962. Today the film still plays; it works. And any film student should see it. But I don't think many people feel as strongly about it now. Is it that we realize Italy has grown out of its postwar poverty, or have we become more accustomed to a cinema that concentrates on inward states of being? Have we become blasé about images of poverty and reports of suffering? In the last thirty years or so, our screens have brought us hideous scenes from Sarajevo and Srebenica, Darfur and Rwanda, Haiti and the last great natural disaster, so regularly, so loyally, that we have had to acquire the hardening process that says we are looking at a screen rather than reality. We can endure only so much. We wait to be put in the dire position of having to survive ourselves.

De Sica and Zavattini went on. After
Miracle in Milan
(in which sharp satirical comedy is employed to point up continuing hardship), their next film was
Umberto D.
(1952), which seems to me formally the most interesting of their works. It is a study of an old-age pensioner, a singularly charmless man, and his dog. He has nowhere to live, and the dog is an impediment to his chance of getting a place. Should he kill the dog? Should he kill himself? The bleakness is emphatic and it has always kept down the audience for
Umberto D
.

But there are great virtues: the carefully controlled restriction of sympathy for the man, even with the dog in evidence; the determination to observe ordinary human incidents at the risk of losing dramatic appeal. Indeed, we are very close here to a documentary that might simply record human loss and tragedy. Bazin stressed the way De Sica showed a maid getting up in the morning. “Have I already said that it is Zavattini's dream to make a whole film out of ninety minutes in the life of a man to whom nothing happens? Two or three sequences in
Umberto D
give us more than a glimpse of what such a film might be like.”

There were many others caught up in the wave of neorealism. Giuseppe de Santis made
Bitter Rice
in 1948, which is ostensibly a portrait of the very hard life led by rice pickers in the Po Valley, but which also made a great star of the statuesque Silvana Mangano, whose dance sequences led us straight back to the allure of
Gilda
. In 1949, Mangano would marry Dino de Laurentiis, the rising business star of Italian film. In 1954 she would play Penelope (and Circe) in Mario Camerini's
Ulysses
(with Kirk Douglas as the hero). By then, Italy and Cinecittà were into the age of the Italian international coproduction.

Michelangelo Antonioni (born in Ferrara in 1912) was on the edge of the neorealist group. In 1943, as Visconti shot
Ossessione
, Antonioni made a documentary nearby,
Gente del Po
. He had helped write the screenplay for Rossellini's
Un Pilota Ritorna
, and he had a similar job on De Santis's first film,
Caccia Tragica
(1947). He made another documentary, about street cleaners in the city. And by 1950 he would direct his first feature film,
Cronaca di un Amore
, with Lucia Bosé and Massimo Girotti. This was a tragic love story about beautiful people—it seemed like a throwback to old-fashioned melodrama or the salons of Paramount. You might even see a white telephone in it, and Bette Davis clutching it. But it also demonstrated an eye for the city that surpassed the poetry in De Sica and a sense of camera movement that could seem impersonal and undesigned but that became a keynote to the most novelistic Italian director. We shall meet him again.

Perhaps neorealism was always a diversion. There is another Italian cinema, stylish and stylistic, literary and operatic, rich in gesture and architecture. “Grand cinéma” is what Visconti gravitated toward with
The Leopard
(1963) and
Death in Venice
(1971). From
La Strada
(1954) to
Amarcord
(1973), Fellini loved the grandeur of the picaresque. Sergio Leone made infatuated rhapsodies to the Western—above all,
Once Upon a Time in the West
(1968)—with mock symphonic scores (by Ennio Morricone) and pastiche violence. Pier Paolo Pasolini went from the austerity of
The Gospel According to St. Matthew
(1964) to lavish art albums:
The Decameron
(1971),
The Canterbury Tales
(1972),
Arabian Nights
(1974). Décor and moral decay make the tension in Bertolucci's
The Conformist
(1970). And in Marco Bellocchio's
Vincere
(2009) there is a sense of the political-cultural passion of cinema. It's the story of Mussolini's abandoned first wife, Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), but it draws upon newsreel and the thunderous example of Mussolini himself as an actor or national presence. He longs to have life become a movie, and you know he would have appreciated
The Godfather
or
Raging Bull
. Mussolini and Joe Pesci is one of the meetings that demand computer-generated enactment. If it resulted in madness, that was predicted in the two great earlier works by Bellocchio:
Fists in the Pocket
(1965) and
The Eyes, the Mouth
(1982), both driven by the alarming Lou Castel.

Ingrid Bergman was born in Stockholm in 1915. By the age of twelve she had lost both her parents, but she was strong—all her life people would marvel at her inner strength—and she was determined to go on the stage. She grew up tall and beautiful, with a dramatic energy such as few had encountered before. She began to make films in Sweden as an ingenue and she was under consideration for a contract in Germany with Ufa. (Her mother was German.) But in the New York building where David Selznick had offices, there was a Swedish elevator operator who had heard from home how glorious this Ingrid Bergman was. He passed on this opinion (elevator talk) to Kay Brown, who was one of the people who dug up things for Selznick. She had found
Gone With the Wind
,
Rebecca
, and later on she would notice the girl who became Jennifer Jones, but now she said, “There is this Swedish girl…”

To cut a long story short, Kay Brown went to Sweden to meet Ingrid. She found a young married woman with a new baby. Would you really give this up to come to America on a chance? asked Kay Brown. Oh yes, said Ingrid, wide-eyed. It is a modern legend that people will do anything for the movies.

She came. She came all the way across America. She went up to the Selznick house on Summit Drive in Beverly Hills on a Sunday, but David was at the studio—this was 1939 and he was working on
Gone With the Wind
. So his wife, Irene Selznick, looked after Ingrid (they would be friends) and took her out to dinner and a party. Still no Selznick. So Ingrid dozed, and then Selznick appeared. He looked at her and said, Oh my God, you're tall, and your teeth, and you need makeup, and that name is too German. Whereupon Ingrid drew herself up to the full five feet ten and said, look, this is what I am; this is what you get. Selznick smiled and said, Okay, we'll sell you as the natural woman.

She became America's darling in a matter of years. Selznick made
Intermezzo
(1939) and then loaned her out all over town:
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1941),
Casablanca
(1942),
For Whom the Bell Tolls
(1943),
Gaslight
(1944),
The Bells of St. Mary's
(1945),
Saratoga Trunk
(1945). He even put her in a couple of his own films,
Spellbound
(1945) and
Notorious
(1946, one of her most moving portraits of victimhood).
Saratoga Trunk
is probably the only one you don't know; the rest are classics, stepping stones in stardom whereby the world believed that Ingrid was not just natural, lovely, and saintly, but good, good, Good. So what does “good-looking” mean? the public still asks. In fact, despite husband and daughter (in America by now), Ingrid was a compulsive man-izer. When men liked her and said so, she was touched and generous and she slept with them. It's a matter of reassurance: if strangers feel they must love a star, she may reward whomever she meets.

But Ingrid Bergman was not quite happy. She had an Oscar for
Gaslight
(and she is very sympathetic in that film), but she had made a lot of silly films, none sillier than
Spellbound
(a cockamamie story of psychiatry, with Hitchcock and Salvador Dalí and Gregory Peck), and she felt awkward playing a nun in
The Bells of St. Mary's
. She was European still, and one of her lovers, the still photographer Robert Capa, had shown her the bomb sites of Europe. She knew how sheltered and unaware Hollywood was, and she was growing weary of stupid escapism, even if it had brought her liberty. She had seen
Rome, Open City
already in 1946 and been impressed, but now she went into a theater to watch
Paisà
and she came out having seen the light.

She asked her friend Irene Selznick what to do and they agreed that Ingrid should write to this man Roberto Rossellini who had made the two films: “If you need a Swedish actress who in Italian knows only ‘ti amo' I am ready to come and make a film with you.” If you feed people enough scripts, sooner or later they are going to start sounding and thinking like them. More than that, amid all the dedication to salary and entertainment, there are people who go into the movies for the sex.

There's no need to be too blunt about it, or too censorious, but we are talking about a way of life in which the not inconsiderably ugly Louis B. Mayer (Irene Selznick's father) may have been getting midafternoon blow jobs from studio talent (beauty and the beast), and about the kind of screening room séance where we might all imagine being in the arms of Lana Turner or Robert Taylor (or both). Then there are actors and actresses who have to kiss rapturously for thirty-seven takes at a time and are inclined to get a little horny, though the actress may know that later that evening the director, too, wants to go over a few lines to get the mood right. Sexual possibility, the teeming virtual promiscuity behind a straight face, and actual sleeping around, are all in the air. So it's not that Ingrid was so uncommon. But hers was the kind of letter people write if they are in a movie, and not just in the movies.

There was a further paradox waiting to embrace Ingrid and Roberto. She was an international star who longed to find artistic integrity with a director who was not interested in money but who aspired to truth and art. He was an impoverished Italian director, compelled to work on wretched budgets with restricted crews, who dreamed of getting himself an honest movie star and some of that American money. There are earnest volumes in the film library that attest to the artist in Roberto Rossellini. Some of them are so hero-worshiping they may lose sight of the man who was a chronic gambler (and realists do not make good gamblers), a devotee of sports cars, a collector of spectacular women, and an habitué of expensive hotels. That Rossellini exists in the memory of his friends and in press accounts. The two seem at odds, but there is a synthesis: the same man can be a great artist and a fun-loving scoundrel bent on self-destruction.

The Bergman-Rossellini story played out as scandal and tragedy, but with the benefit of time we must see it as farce, too, and the comedy begins in the tangle of opposed desires, with Anna Magnani as an indignant onlooker once she realized she was Rossellini's former mistress.

Ingrid and Roberto met at last and they agreed that they must make a picture together, a work of insight and beauty. Roberto would develop a story and a script. But gossips in the press noticed how the two of them conspired together—we are on the verge of the new age of trash journalism, paparazzi, and the breakdown in the defense of stars by studio publicity departments. In America, Ingrid had had the Selznick organization looking after her. In Europe, Rossellini had no such defense. If stars are going to be free, they may find themselves alone.

Roberto's idea was a love story, though a very unhappy love story, in which a refugee woman from Lithuania (to be played by Ingrid) is taken up by and married to a fisherman who lives on the island of Stromboli, a small, volcanic upheaval to the north of Sicily. Of course, the film would be shot on the island itself. For a moment, at least, before seeing the grim place, Ingrid thought this was sublime and exactly what she wanted. Anna Magnani caused scenes and decided that she would go off and make her own volcano picture. Ingrid and Roberto drew very close.

With money from RKO,
Stromboli
(1950) proved an amazing mish-mash of a film—very clumsy in parts, heedlessly operatic in others. It does not seem remotely real. It feels like Ingrid Bergman struggling to make a testament or stake a claim to righteousness. The shooting was said to be appallingly difficult and ridiculous, yet there are phenomenal passages in the film where Rossellini's camera style and Ingrid's innate histrionic ability soar together. And Ingrid got pregnant, because there was not a lot to do on Stromboli.

By this stage the press was in a frenzy. Ingrid had deserted husband and daughter. Roberto had forsaken his wife and children. There was an outcry, with people saying that Ingrid had betrayed the public who believed she was a nun and a saint and Ilse from
Casablanca
. She was denounced on the floor of the House by John Rankin, a loudmouth from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and from pulpits all over the world. In February 1950, Ingrid had a son by Rossellini. She got a divorce in Mexico; Roberto got a divorce. They managed to marry. In America, Bergman's husband, Petter Lindstrom, won custody of their child, Pia. Ingrid next had twins. (Isabella Rossellini is one of them.) And the lovers were trapped.

Roberto may have hoped they would all end up in Hollywood, where he would direct Ingrid Bergman pictures and drive a sports car on Mulholland Drive at sunset. But Magnani got there sooner, and won an Oscar for
The Rose Tattoo
(1955). Ingrid was effectively blacklisted in Hollywood, not because of actual political inclinations, but because of the scandal and the disbelief among America's stanchions of decency.
Stromboli
was a bust at the box office. Ingrid suddenly found herself with three young children, and she was edging up on forty, which can be daunting for those known for a natural look. They had only each other to make films with. They became increasingly unhappy because Roberto continued to play around with other women and because Ingrid realized her crushing mistake. But this is a moment for close and fair attention when, amid mounting hostility and regret, they made a few important films that still wait to be discovered by the smart filmgoer.

In
Europa '51
(1952), Bergman plays Irene, a society woman whose young son dies unexpectedly—seemingly from emotional neglect. Irene begins a kind of breakdown, and she spends time with a Communist magazine editor who educates her in how the poor are living. Irene grows closer to several poor people, with the result that her husband (played by Alexander Knox) has her confined to a mental hospital. The film has traces of awkwardness (especially with the sound and the quality of the acting), but here at last is genuine social realism and the simple plot embodies the moral crisis of a rich woman in Italy.

In
Viaggio in Italia
(1954), Bergman and George Sanders play a married couple on the edge of divorce. They come back to Italy to arrange the sale of a property that represents their happiness. In the process, they visit Pompeii and come a little closer to the need for reconciliation. Once more there is a feeing of strain—Sanders by every account was miserable during the filming and very uneasy over Rossellini's attempts to improvise. Ingrid may have been more flexible, but in her diary she makes it clear that she found Rossellini's spontaneity disarming and unhelpful. Yet the film is complex, challenging, and often very beautiful. It is a step toward a kind of novelistic filmmaking, with the inner life made manifest in gesture and movement. It is a prelude to Antonioni.

In
Fear
, or
La Paura
, Ingrid and her husband (they speak German) run a chemical factory working on new painkilling drugs, using rats as experimental victims. The wife (named Irene again) is having an affair with a musician. Then a young woman approaches the wife and says she, too, is in love with the musician. She starts to blackmail the wife. The wife cracks under this strain and comes close to suicide, before realizing that the husband is behind the blackmail. It is the least of the three films, yet once again the situation is fascinating (and the cross-reference to
Gaslight
seems deliberate).

These films did no commercial business, and on their first release they received very little critical attention. Ingrid was increasingly unhappy, and beginning to see if she could get back to Hollywood. At last the marriage broke down. Roberto would move off toward documentary and work on historical subjects made for television. Ingrid came back into the mainstream in a film called
Anastasia
(1956), a piece of ahistorical hokum in which she plays a lost woman who agrees to masquerade as the last of the Romanovs, the tsar's daughter Anastasia. But is she the real Anastasia, too? Have your cake, and eat it: she was back in Hollywood. And she won her second Oscar for a performance in a film that comes close to betraying the substance of
Gaslight
.

After which Ingrid and Roberto went their separate ways and the middle-aged Bergman became a conventional fixture again on-screen and -stage:
Indiscreet
(1958),
The Inn of the Sixth Happiness
(1958),
The Yellow Rolls-Royce
(1964), and
Murder on the Orient Express
(1974). Her radicalism was gone as quickly as it had appeared. Her habit of making films that were scarcely concealed comments on her own life and career resumed in Ingmar Bergman's
Autumn Sonata
(1978), in which she plays a concert pianist who has neglected her own daughter (Liv Ullmann) and has to face recriminations. I do not want to subscribe to the notion that
Europa '51
,
Viaggio in Italia
, and
Fear
are great films, but they are palpable imprints of a passion going cold (an unusual subject in movies in the 1950s) and studies in marital unease. They are pictures that nowadays have rather more to offer than the supposed classics of neorealism, and
Europa '51
suggests with pitiless clarity that the middle class cannot cleanse its conscience simply by enjoying
Bicycle Thieves
. One way or another these films testify to the fact that the pursuit of cinema still depends on story, acting, and faith in the inner life and not on doctrinaire claims for realism. But the way in which Bergman and Rossellini hoped to change the trajectory of their careers is a reminder of how muddled the quest for glory becomes when it bestrides money and art.