This 35mm presentation is part of the Luchino Visconti season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Aptly titled—a lush, melodramatic portrait of seduction and betrayal,
decadence and deceit in the midst of Italy's resistance to Austrian
occupation in the mid-19th century, revealing Luchino Visconti at his
most baroque and the Italian cinema at its most spectacular (1954). A
fine tragic performance by Alida Valli and surprisingly good work by
Farley Granger (imported for American box-office appeal) help overcome
some of the obvious narrative gaps created by the Italian censors.
Visconti's sinuous Marxism here begins to creep to the fore. Dave Kehr
Time Out review: Luchino Visconti’s epic melodrama of social migration and
moral decay was first released in 1960, when it was met with great
scandal (a prosecutor threatened to charge the director with
“disseminating an obscene object”) and even greater success. Today,
distanced from ridiculous controversy and dislocated from the provincial
politics that drive its story, this immaculately restored classic of
post-WWII Italian cinema often feels like a new experience altogether. Set in the early ’60s, when Italy’s moneyed Northern
classes were regularly exploiting the people of the South for cheap
labor, Visconti’s shaggy tale begins with the hardscrabble Parondi
family moving from rural Lucania up to industrial Milan, where recently
widowed Rosaria (Katina Paxinou) and her four sons hope to find a better
life. “My family arrived like an earthquake,” sighs Vincenzo, the
eldest son who’s already in Milan, to his fiancée (a young Claudia
Cardinale) after his mother and siblings crash their engagement party
and interrupt the first strains of the flowing Nino Rota score that
would earn the composer a gig on The Godfather. From there, Visconti paves the way for rollicking family sagas like 2003’s The Best of Youth,
unspooling his tale across three brisk hours and five overlapping
chapters, one for each of the Parondi boys. Over time, idealistic Rocco
(Delon, magnetic even when dubbed by an actor who pronounces his
character’s name as though it were spelled with eight rs),
closeted older brother Simone (Salvatori) and local prostitute Nadia
(Girardot, sensational) emerge as the true focal points. Stubbornly attached to the clannish virtues of his
father’s generation, Rocco can’t help but forgive Simone even his most
violent transgressions—including Nadia’s brutal semipublic rape—as his
moral absolutism rots into something perverse as he tries to hold the
family together. Watching the film so far removed from the time of its
making underlines the tragedy of Rocco’s anachronistic nature and
compensates for the increasing clumsiness of Visconti’s more topical
subplots. “The world’s a one-way street,” Girardot’s character blithely
declares, but Rocco still can’t see that he’s speeding toward a dead
end. David Ehrlich
BFI introdcution: Poitier’s first collaboration with director Stanley Kramer is an
action-packed thriller that transformed the actor into the first bona
fide Black movie star. He plays Noah Cullen, an escaped convict in the
Deep South who is handcuffed to Tony Curtis’ embittered racist. To stay
alive and out of reach of the authorities, they forge an embittered
friendship. As a man seething with rage from a life of indignity,
Poitier is superb. It earned him a landmark first Oscar nomination for
Best Actor.
This Lost Reels presentation is from an original 35mm print, and will be followed by an in-person Q&A with writer/director Whit Stillman.
Time Out review: Manhattan, the early '80s. Recent graduates from an upper crust college,
Alice (Chloe Sevigny) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) - flatmates and friends of a
sort - pass their days working as trainee publishing editors, and most
of their nights discussing social niceties at a fashionable disco where
assistant manager Des (Eigeman) courts the boss's disfavour by admitting
the wrong kind of clientele. The girls hang out at the disco with a
preppy bunch of Harvard admen and lawyers; rumour, rivalry and
falling-out is rife and relationships are frequently at risk. The third
comedy of manners in Whit Stillman's loose trilogy about the 'doomed
bourgeois in love' again highlights the writer/director's expertise with
naturalistically articulate dialogue whose idioms, ironies and
absurdities provide vivid insights into the delusions, desires and often
ludicrous tribal rituals of the young, privileged and, mostly, pretty
ineffectual. Like Metropolitan and Barcelona, it's a
brittle, sporadically brilliant film, very funny but rooted in social,
political, historical and emotional realities. Beckinsale, especially,
is a revelation, making Charlotte smug, spiteful, sexy and, underneath,
rather sad, all with a spot-on accent. Geoff Andrew Here (and above) is the trailer.
Time Out review: Luchino Vsconti's second feature (five years after Ossessione
in 1942) was an improvised drama produced by the Communist Party,
filmed with and among Sicilian fishermen in the village of Aci-Trezza.
An overwhelmingly stark chronicle of a family which strives but fails to
break out of the poverty trap - they try to cut out the middlemen by
embarking in what one might call 'free enterprise', with disastrous
results - La Terra Trema‚ stands as a masterpiece of neo-realism,
a social conscience cinema of proletarian ways and means. Yet, despite
this, it's no less 'operatic' than the director's later decadent
melodramas: it surges with great tides of emotion. The film is
distinguished by its vivid camerawork, at once poetic and 'documentary'.
(Francesco Rosi and Franco Zeffirelli, it may be noted, served as
assistant directors.) Visconti only finished the film by selling some of
his mother's jewellery and an apartment in Rome. Yet, true to his
breeding, he brought home one of the boys from the film and installed
him as his butler. Tom Charity
Vulture review: The Way We Wereis
told in a series of flashbacks and montages, primed for maximum
nostalgia and some truly gorgeous period costuming. The entire film is
Hollywood confection from start to finish, opening with the lush,
familiar croon of Barbara Streisand’s famous titular song, allowing
Robert Redford to wear his navy whites for so long that he begins to
look as though he’s emerged from a perfume ad. There are some scenes cut
from the conclusion that make the timeline a little confusing, butThe Way We Weredoes
not endure because of its plot. It endures because of a fearsome,
desirous performance from Streisand, and Redford’s cold beauty, and all
the ways that it captures a one-sided desire many of us have felt. Christina Newland
This 35mm screening is part of the Big Screen Classics strand (the 'Singers on Screen' season) at BFI Southbank. Details here.
Time Out review: Touted as a ground-breaking addition to the crime-on-the-streets genre,
Mario Van Peebles' thriller is far more modest: a high-tech update on that old
warhorse, a mobster's rise and fall. Ruthless Nino Brown (Wesley Snipes) lords
it over a New York neighbourhood with an empire built on crack and
violence. It's only when two disenchanted streetwise officers come
together - African-American Scott Appleton (Ice T) and Nick Peretti
(Judd Nelson) - that his domain is effectively threatened. The movie pays lip
service to social analysis while delighting in the paraphernalia of
violence. As such, it's a superior example of what used to be called
blaxploitation, with Van Peebles piling on corruption and carnage for
all he's worth. Geoff Andrew
Chicago Reader review: Perhaps the most unjustly neglected of Luchino Visconti’s early films is
this hilarious 1951 comedy, tailored to the talents of Anna Magnani,
about a working-class woman who is determined to get her plain
seven-year-old daughter into movies. A wonderful send-up of the Italian
film industry and the illusions that it fosters, delineated in near-epic
proportions with style and brio. With Walter Chiari and Alessandro
Blasetti. Jonathan Rosenbaum
