ROME LETTER
ITALIAN MOVIES
The friendliest gathering in Rome these days was the first
showing of
Ladri di Biciclette
(Bicycle Thieves), the latest picture by
Vittorio De Sica, the author of
Shoe-Shine,
at the Barberini Theater.
There, every Sunday morning, through the fall and winter, the
Circolo
Romano del Cinema
offers its members a preview of the best Italian
movies, or the exclusive showing of some carefully selected foreign
film. A rite that puts the Barberini Theater half-way between Holly–
wood's Chinese Theater and New York's Museum of Modern Art. Pro–
ducers, directors, stars, mix with cinema aesthetes, literary people, as–
sorted highbrows, and representatives of the
quartieri alti,
that is,
Rome's Park Avenue. The gathering is u sually quiet and formal. The
movie is introduced with a speech by one of the most prominent Italian
filmologhi
(a term that indicates, in highbrow Italian movie language,
anybody who deals with the cinema in a scholarly way, keeping at a
convenient distance from the promiscuous world of actual movie-mak–
ing). During the projection, filmologists and aesthetes greet with a
peremptory clapping of the hands those passages, sequences, close-ups,
and single scenes which seem to them to deserve well of the Muse. After
the showing, outside the theater (which u shers and charwomen in the
meantime rush to make ready for the Sunday crowds), the audience
breaks up into small groups of analysts who evoke the hallowed names
of Eisenstein, Dreyer, Flaherty, Ford, and appraise the latest achieve–
ment in the light of the great examples of the past: a regular academy.
After which ceremony, the maiden movie may begin its career among the
profane masses. It may be a complete flop or a great popular success.
For the membership of the
Circolo Romano del Cinema
the only verdict
that counts is their own. What the ordinary moviegoer will consider a
solid block of boredom may live forever in their memory on account of
a single shot in which all the gestures of the heroine are kept rigorously
inscribed within a triangle. On the other hand, even though they do not
