Hollywood on the Tiber
(See Cover)
Seldom since the pagan days of old had so many pilgrims come trudging to the shrine of the Goddess of Fortune where it sits in pleasant ruins not far from Rome. But Fortuna was out of luck last week.
The pilgrims hustled past her premises and up the nearest mountain to the little (pop. 643) village of Castel San Pietro Romano. For there the rumor had it, a goddess enchantingly more substantial had suddenly come to earth among the amorous groves. Gina Lollobrigida (pronounced low-low-bridge-id-ah) was in town to make a movie.
And who is Gina? Hardly anywhere in the world today except in the U.S., could such a question be asked. In Europe she is the most famous seven syllables since "Come up and see me some time." She is the girl who, according to. Humphrey Bogart, "makes Marilyn Monroe look like Shirley Temple." She is the modern Italian (excluding politicians of course) who, according to Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito, has made the greatest impression on him. "She is the hottest thing in Europe today," says Moviemaker Rene Clair. In recent months she has become one of the world's most highly paid actresses (about $100,000 a picture). Last month she won the Silver Ribbon, the Italian equivalent of Hollywood's Oscar, as the "Best Actress of 1954" for her performance in Bread, Love and Dreams.
According to the famous photographer of women, Philippe Halsman, "she has the finest figure of any actress I have known." In Paris a new phrase (les lollos) is being used in brassiere advertisements. In Lon don Sir Jacob Epstein, the famed sculptor, has done a bust of Gina, and in Manhattan, Gossipist Walter Winchell has been gushing about the new "Lollopalooza."
In the U.S. a small but enthusiastic minority has seen Gina body out her bodice in the French-made Fanfan la Tulipe, show some charmingly unexpected dimples in the bath scene from Beauties of the Night (seen in full by the Queen of Britain, but sharply censored for U.S. moviegoers), and play her cheesecake for comedy--with a side dish of macaronic English--in John Huston's Beat the Devil.
Early next month, Gina, in the flesh, will appear at the Manhattan premiere of Bread, Love and Dreams. Some of Hollywood's shrewdest peddlers will be on hand for the great inspection. But to Hollywood, Gina Lollobrigida suggests trouble: she is the latest of a lot of disquieting portents borne on the trade winds from Italy.
New Hollywood. In recent months, the travelers' tales from Italy have unsettled many an expensive lunch at Chasen's and Romanoff's with visions that might have been flashbacks to the balmy days when Hollywood was in its sinfancy. Movie pro ducers, they said, were as common as cats in the Forum, and just about as noisy. Stars were demanding--and getting--as much as $6,400 a day. As many as three pictures were being shot at once with the same cast. Directors were arrogantly demanding 800 horses for a single scene. Drinking orgies, studio spies and gorgeous villas with swimming pools were the rule of the day. The purple sports shirt had replaced the purple toga, and through the narrow vias where Nero's chariot had clanked, the Jaguars were prowling.
Could it really all be true? The reports of deepening inroads made by Italian pictures in Hollywood's foreign market strongly indicated that it was. On the banks of the Tiber, incredible as a castle in the air but vividly more real, has arisen a new and powerful Hollywood to challenge the old. "It's impossible," said one U.S. moviemaker. "It's as if there were two Orson Welleses. But there it is."
Tempting Gewgaws. In 1948, the Italian moviemakers produced only 54 feature films. Last year they made 145, almost half as many as the major Hollywood studios released, and a third of them were in color. While in the U.S. close to 5,000 movie houses had closed, the total in Italy jumped from 6.500 to 9,778, and the Italian cut of the Italian box-office pie (though Hollywood's thumb still pulls out the biggest plums) swelled from $8,800,000 to $48 million.
In 1952 not one Italian company produced more than four films; in 1953 there were five that turned out between ten and a dozen. By last week the Italians had six pictures "in the can" that cost between $800,000 and $3,000,000 each. Among them are such epics as Ulysses and Attila --fancy gewgaws frankly designed to tempt the mass market away from Hollywood's brand of cinematic costume jewelry. Temptation is sweetened by many a big box-office name from the U.S. Among the Hollywood stars who have worked for the Italians: Kirk Douglas, Claudette Colbert, Linda Darnell, Hedy Lamarr, George Sanders, Shelley Winters.
Since 1948 Italy has doubled her income from movie exports, has spread them from 38 to 86 countries, now ranks ahead of Britain and France, and second only to Hollywood, as a provider of the world's film fare. Some Italian pictures have even broken out of confinement in U.S. art houses and ridden the big circuits to impressive grosses (Bitter Rice, with Silvana Mangano, made almost $8,000,000 in the U.S. alone).
Gorgeous Flowers. "This boom," said one onlooker, "is really a series of busts." Gone is the strenuous postwar "neorealism" that struck the screen with such hammer blows for humanity as Roberto Rossellini's Open City and Paisan, Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine and Bicycle Thief, Luigi Zampa's To Live in Peace. Neorealism has died at the box office, and the Italian government has written its epitaph with the charge that it performed "a very bad service to [the] country." In place of facts the Italians are offering figures--the kind that ripen so exquisitely in the Italian sun. And they are offering a kind of beauty new to the U.S. eye--an earth-heavy Italian beauty as rich as roses in an olive dusk.
Movieman Emanuele Cassuto says of his country's film beauties: "They are beautiful because they stay dumb . . . We pick our gorgeous flowers where we find them ... in offices, shops, factories, farms, even by the wayside . . . We keep our film actresses in their places, which means we keep them feminine. They have simple tastes. And they have romantic natures."
Few of the new Italian actresses had any notion of acting when they went to work; indeed, the finest actress in Italy, 46-year-old Anna (Open City) Magnani, has been so thoroughly overlooked in the girly-burly that she has not made a picture in two years. Six of the new top ten were picked by their directors out of beauty contests. In their films, as a rule, they do not even have to speak; the Italian system of dubbing sound track into a film after the camerawork is done makes it possible, as one director explains, "to put the acting in later"--in somebody else's voice. Says one wag: "An actress in Italy needs only two expressions--horizontal and vertical."
Among the dubbed Buses, these are currently the favorites: CJ Silvana Mangano (bust 36 in., waist 25 in., hips 35 in.), known as "the Italian Rita Hayworth." really looks more like Ingrid Bergman. The 24-year-old daughter of an Englishwoman and a Sicilian railroad conductor, she stands about 5 ft. 6 in., weighs about 128 Ibs., has brown eyes and chestnut hair. Picked as Miss Rome of 1946, she went on to a bit part in a film and a job modeling clothes, was finally offered the role of the girl who gets attacked by the sadist in Bitter Rice. The salary: $800. "The day after the picture was released," says an Italian moviemaker, "she was worth $8,000,000." She promptly married her producer, had a baby, bulged to a maternal 192 Ibs. Reluctantly reduced, she played a nun in Anna and both Circe and Penelope in Ulysses. She owns a Hudson in which one of the seats can be converted into a canasta table.
P: Silvana Pampanini (37, 24, 36") plays the sort of part Yvonne de Carlo does for Hollywood. The 25-year-old daughter of a Roman typesetter, she stands 5 ft. 8^ in., weighs close to 140, has black hair and green eyes and runs heavily to chest. In 1946 she came in second in the Miss Italy contest. She gets the heaviest fan mail of any Italian actress. Her main complaint: producers always want her to do scenes in the near-nude, "as if I were some kind of prize pig." P: Eleonora Rossi-Drago (35, 24, 33), one of the few Italian actresses to whom it has occurred that sex might not be enough, tries sophistication too. She has red hair and green eyes, stands 5 ft. 7 in. and is 28 years old. Because her beauty was marred by a mildly misshapen nose. Eleonora won no beauty contests, had to come up the hard way. She won the La Victoire Prize, the French equivalent of Hollywood's Oscar, in 1954, and about the same time had her nose fixed up by Paris surgeons. "I would give up everything for my career," she says, "and I mean everything." She has a speaking voice that would send her back to Genoa if her fans ever got to hear it. P: Rossana Podesta (35, 21, 33) stands 5 ft. 4 in., has dark hair and eyes, and is about the nearest thing the Italians have to Terry Moore. Born in Tripoli, North Africa, she wanted to be a doctor until she was discovered by a movieman in a swimming pool four years ago. Since then she has made 16 pictures. She was signed for the title role in Helen of Troy, but her acting did not measure up to her looks. After she blew her lines in 36 takes of a singfe scene, the picture was changed from a love story to a spectacle, in order (the word went around) to get more excitement and less Rossana.
P: Sofia Loren (38, 24, 37), 19, is the youngest of Italy's screen queens. Insiders give some of the credit for her rapid rise to her harddriving, redheaded Neapolitan mother, who hovers incessantly in the background, pushing her daughter to the front. Honey-blonde Sofia got her start as Miss Rome, went on to dramatic school and a modeling job. She has a thick Neapolitan accent, and in the sultry Roman evenings, loves to turn on the record player, throw off her clothes and dance.
The Cinematic Animal. Gina Lollobrigida (36, 22, 35; 5 ft. 5 in.) does not quite belong in the bouquet. It is true that she was plucked as casually as any of the other gorgeous flowers (a director spotted her on the street), and that she probably has no more talent than it takes for a black-eyed Susan to allure a bee. Beauty she has to a thrilling degree--the helpless beauty of a dark little nymph who seems to wake the satyr in men. But the secret of Gina's success is not beauty, not brains, not even luck. Hers is the first appearance in sunny Italy of a stormy Hollywood phenomenon: the Star Type.
"Gina," says a producer who knows her well, "is the cinematic animal, as specialized as a hunting dog. She is governed by a perfect, sure instinct for what she does. She gets up in the morning and thinks of the movies. She works at them, and at lunch she talks about them. She knows nothing whatever about ordinary little details of life . . . how much a ticket from Rome to Paris costs, or what time the train leaves. She would think nothing of it if you told her you had paid $500 for a Cadillac. But she knows how much a good scriptwriter should get, or what the going rate is for a technician, or what any given cameraman's strong points are."
Gina has the iron will of the true star personality. She is up at 5 every morning, works hard until 6 in the evening, studies her part or reads scripts for an hour before bed at 10. She neither smokes nor drinks, never takes a real vacation (studio technicians for Beat the Devil called her "Lollofrigida"). On the set, says Director Vittorio De Sica, "Gina is really brava." She memorizes the whole script in advance, not just a scene at a time, as the shooting schedule calls for it. She is always on time, always "reacts immediately to advice," says Director Rene Clair.
Gina is, furthermore, a reluctant girl with a lira. She lives plainly in a small apartment in an unfashionable district with her business-manager husband, a 34-year-old Yugoslav physician named Mirko Skofic (rhymes with so rich), who is now so busy with Gina's career that he has had to give up his medical practice.
Scrapbooks & Broken Families. Gina has a star's compulsive vanity. She has 300 dresses and 70 pairs of shoes, keeps 15 handsome, leather-bound scrapbooks filled with newspaper clippings about Gina; one scrapbook is devoted entirely to observations about her bosom. She will tell anybody who will listen how in 1953 she adorried the covers of 46 magazines --"eight in one week"--and her favorite anecdotes concern the way "I'm always breaking up families." Once, during an elopement scene in Fanfan, the actor who was carrying Gina was careless enough to bang her beautiful face into a low-hanging beam. Gina started to scream, stopped almost immediately to ask for a mirror, sat calmly until it arrived, inspected her bloody face and swollen lips, and only then permitted herself to faint.
Gina's most extravagant outbursts of vanity are connected with her hobby: suing people. She has been involved in as many as ten lawsuits at once. Her most famous day in court came when she asked damages from an Italian movie critic who wrote a derogatory review about her "udder." He and his editor were fined $176 and costs.
The Crazy Streak. All this temperament is not unusual in a Latin country, but the driving determination is. Where did Gina get it? Her family says it's just "the Lollobrigida crazy streak," which seems to come out in every generation. One of her uncles, for instance, thought he was a great poet. A doctor, he wrote all his prescriptions in rhyme, and after office hours rewrote the Divine Comedy into a monumental work that he said was better than Dante's. Gina's father once conducted an antiprofanity campaign, had posters printed, and stomped angrily around Rome, pasting them up at major centers of cursing.
At other times Father Lollobrigida was a sensible fellow who owned a small fur niture factory, employing 15 workmen, in the little town of Subiaco, about 50 miles east of Rome. There in the Sabine mountains 26 years ago Gina Lollobrigida was born, the second of four daughters. At seven, while playing a glowworm in a school pageant, Gina had her first romance --with an elf, aged nine. Her next flirt, as the Italians say, came when she met "a young businessman from Bologna." But Mother Lollobrigida chased him away because she was determined that Gina should marry a doctor ("It's always handy to have a doctor around the house"). Three of her daughters are now either married or engaged to medical men.
Art & Army Blankets. During the war Gina sang for the Italian troops stationed in Subiaco. But in 1944, after some Allied air attacks, the family moved to Rome. There the Lollobrigidas made a precarious living in black-market cigarettes, C rations and U.S. Army blankets. Part of the time they ate at the local charity kitchen.
Gina worked up a routine of strolling through U.S. Army messes and offering to do portrait sketches of G.I.s, soon had enough money to pay for singing lessons. She also got a scholarship to art school. Alas, she says, one of her instructors fell so violently in love with her classical proportions that the school had to transfer him. Meanwhile, for similar reasons, she was forced to change her singing teacher six times in six months.
She was therefore understandably suspicious when, one day in 1947, a middle-aged man rushed up to her in the street and said (in Gina's English translation): "Do you want to do the cinema?" "Go to the devil," replied Gina. When the fellow protested that he was really Mario Costa, the famous regista, she made him show his identity card to prove it. Gina went to work as an extra at about $3.30 a day, soon rose to be a stand-in for a well-known actress, but was fired, she says, because the star was jealous of Gina's looks. In 1947, Gina entered a beauty contest, was chosen Miss Rome, ran second in the Miss Italy competition. Two years after that, she married Dr. Skofic, got a showy role in a picture about beauty contests called Miss Italia, and an urgent invitation from Hollywood to come quick and take a screen test, all expenses paid. The sender: RKO Boss Howard Hughes, who had just seen a picture of Gina in a Bikini.
Into the Dawn. What happened next (according to Gina--Hughes is not talking) was all a terrible mistake. Gina's story: Hughes sent a T.W.A. plane to Italy, flew her to Hollywood. At the airport she was met by Hughes agents, who shooed reporters away, bundled her into a limousine, hurried her off to "a hotel distant from the center of the city . . . I discovered I was practically locked in the hotel, unable to get in touch with anyone." All day she endured English lessons, '"orrible RKO peectures," rehearsals for her screen test, and the importuning of lawyers, who wanted her to sign a contract written in legal English.
At 2 a.m. Producer Hughes would drop by, order the hotel orchestra to keep right on playing after closing hours, and just the two of them in the darkened ballroom would dance romantically into the dawn. After six weeks of this, Gina broke down, signed "a preliminary piece of paper," flew back to Italy. Hughes has the option still, but Gina insists she will go to Hollywood "only if I get the right sort of contract."
After the Hollywood experience, it was one good part after another in a series of better-than-average Italian films. But the higher, she goes, the harder Gina has to work. She and Mirko have formed three corporations to handle her career and investments, and they have permitted themselves only two extravagances: a glaring red Lancia Aurelia and a pink stucco villa on Via Appia Antica, right next door to the place where the Empress Poppaea used to take her daily bath in the milk of 300 asses. They have planted 300 trees on the grounds, laid out broad English lawns, strewn the area with ancient paving stones and 3rd century sarcophagi. As she surveys these domestic comforts (which she can en joy. only on weekends), Gina sighs, not quite convincingly: "I hope that the producers next year will give me time to do a baby."
Tutelage & Torn Pants. Italian moviemakers may give her time for more than that if they are not very careful. The awful truth: the Italian movie industry is just about the craziest thing constructed in Italy since the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and it may fall down and go broke at any moment.
The main trouble: hardly any Italian film makes enough money at the box office to defray production costs. Last year the total deficit was $15.8 million--nearly a third of the total annual investment in Italian movies. The industry has survived thus far merely because the government awards each picture a subsidy that ranges from 10% to 18% of its box-office gross. . In effect, the industry exists on government sufferance and is subject to all the hazards of politics and bureaucracy, as well as to the normal risks of business.
The "crisis" of last spring showed everybody what was what. The government happened to mention that it was considering withdrawal of the film subsidy. Next day almost all production in Italy stopped. Frantic conferences went on for a couple of days. The government announced that it would continue the subsidy. Thereupon, everybody went back to full production. But the government had seen its power and began to use it more vigorously.
Economic and artistic tutelage are only the worst of it. While the general cost of living has multiplied 52 times since 1945? the cost of making movies has gone up about 95 times. Italian producers now have to compete with prices paid by Hollywood producers, who since 1946 have shot (in whole or in part) a couple of dozen films in Italy. And the stars demand enormous salaries (De Sica really has made $6,400 a day), because the companies are not sure enough of their financial existence to sign long-term contracts.
Another big trouble is inexperience. The business has expanded so fast that half the people. hardly know their jobs yet. When Ulysses was supposedly finished and the company disbanded, the cutting room suddenly discovered 23 gaps in the continuity of the film. Extra scenes had to be spliced in at considerable extra cost. Again, when a company was shooting in Sicily, Hollywood's Anthony Quinn tore the pants he had been wearing in all the scenes. It took three days to get another pair from Rome. Meanwhile, the company sat around and did nothing, with the result that the $3.95 pants cost $22,000.
Villas & Cadillacs. But while the boom lasts, the Italian movie colony, borrowing from Hollywood in every field, is eating high on the bel paese. "California," in Italian, is an adjective meaning luxurious, and californially they live today in Rome. The producers sit behind desks as big as pingpong tables, and send their Cadillacs fishtailing through the crooked little Roman streets. The Rossellinis have had as many as nine cars in their garage, and Actor Raf Vallone owns twin Lancias ($24,000 apiece)--one blue, one grey. Each morning he can pick a car to match his tie.
On the ruins of the tombs built by the
Roman patricians of antiquity, the new movie rich are raising some of the world's most expensive homes. Actress Yvonne Sanson can be seen out on the New Appian Way in a "ranch-style villa" with a 600-sq.-ft. living room, walled in glass, in which four huge Gobelin tapestries look like so many postage stamps. Amedeo Nazzari, the Italian Errol Flynn, has a 2O-room duplex in Rome furnished with 18th century antiques, and a villa on the Tyrrhenian Sea with a ballroom, rifle range, tennis courts, and a regulation-size soccer field.
On a sunny afternoon half of white-collar Rome strolls down the Via Veneto to see the movie stars at play. There they sit at the dime-size sidewalk tables at Doney's and Rosati's and the Strega, or slouch along the bar at the Excelsior Hotel. There, like swarms of gnats, come the hundreds of little middlemen, promoters, rumor touts and inside-kiters who do the dizzy business of making Italian movies. And in the oleander evenings, while the Roman sky turns blue and gold, the "wasps" (motor scooters) snarl through the Via Veneto, and oldtimers sip their Camparis and indolently speculate on the future.
The Diggers. But "it's fairly hard to worry about the future," as one U.S. moviemaker in Italy explains, "when spaghetti is only a quarter a plate." Besides, there lies beneath the fiscal quicksands some solid ground for the Italians to hope that their movie industry has a commercial if not an artistic future. The sound stages and their equipment are excellent, and Italian technicians are getting better with every picture. Labor is still much cheaper than Hollywood's, and production-distribution deals with France and West Germany have opened new markets to the Italian product; thus far, the Italian government's block on Hollywood dollars in Italy has restrained the U.S. industry from open reprisal against its rising rival in Rome.
This year and next, when the returns from the Italians' big gamble with multimillion-dollar productions come rolling in, will tell the tale. But no matter what the climax, it is sure, in a vital respect, to be an anticlimax. The finest hour of the Italian cinema was rung in with Open City (1946) and tolled out with Umberto D (1952), and every man of talent in the Italian movie industry knows it. Few are willing to give up the prospect of prosperity, but most are sad and just a little ashamed to see their pictures become more and more Hollywooden.
"There is an old Italian proverb," said one moviemaker last week: "He who digs a grave is the first to fall into it." But as long as the Italians keep finding gold, they are likely to keep digging. When the gold runs out, they may begin to listen to such critics as Neo-Realist Cesare Zavattini, who says: "It is a crime to use this gift of God . . . the film ... if we don't use our moral conscience and also make films of the real life we see before us. It is like using soap only to make bubbles and never to wash yourself with."
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