ROME LETTER
629
the first screen version of
The Postman Always Rings Twice,
conceived
and directed by Luchino Visconti, a talented young member of the illus–
trious and wealthy Milanese family. Visconti, who had already won
applause as a modern-minded stage director, decided to risk challeng–
ing fascist censorship with a picture which showed nothing but poverty,
gloom, and blunt passion.
Obsession
was a slow and clumsy picture, but
it was done with obvious enthusiasm and faith. When the Government
clamped down on it, it became a symbol, and the banner of "neo–
realism." Filmologists still speak of it with reverence. Visconti has now
just put out his second movie,
La Terra Trema
(The Earth Shakes),
which has proven to be a case in point for those who maintain that
"neo-realism" threatens to become a rhetorical attitude.
La Terra Trema
should have been the last word in realism, since it is a picture about a
Sicilian fishing village, spoken in Sicilian, and acted by the local people.
Actually, in spite of some excellent photography, it is a phoney. It is
a surprisingly naive attempt to force the story of the nineteenth century
novel by Verga,
The Malavoglia,
into a modern setting. Verga had
described a family of fishermen whose attempt to have a business of
their own is ruined by a storm. Visconti tried to charge Verga's plot
with social significance by having a gang of villainous wholesale dealers
the real cause of the downfall of the Malavoglia. The trouble is that
there is no such thing as a wholesaler in Acitrezza, the village where the
picture actually takes place. Fishermen there have eliminated interme–
diaries by working on a cooperative basis, and are relatively well off.
But one should add that even without this basic violation of the tenets
of realism, the picture would still have all the faults of a propaganda
movie.
Realism however is a useful orientation for Italian movie-makers. To
start with, there is the fact that, as a whole, Italy is a country whose
people and ways of life are less known than many think. From Stendhal
to Norman Douglas, and D. H. Lawrence, foreigners traveling in Italy
have again and again discovered people and places which Italian writers
themselves ignored or took for granted. Those were precisely the aspects
of Italy that fascism tried to suppress in favor of a historical-bureaucratic
fiction, with the result that intelligent Italians were made hungry for
the
other
Italy, that is for everything that contradicted, or didn't fit in
with, the official image. Which, among other things, explains the tre–
mendous success of Carlo Levi's
Christ Stopped at Eboli.
Under Mussolini, young directors had tried to escape from censor–
ship by making documentary films. It was a way of uncovering "re–
stricted" realities without making any comments. But it wasn't always
