Now Playing: APRIL 25, 1933

Gabriel Over the White House seemed to prove that there was an audience for a movie about a President who acted like a dictator. Would they come out for a movie about a real dictator?

Mussolini Speaks is a relic of a time when fascism, before Hitler had made any real impression, still had a good name in many circles for making the trains run on time and so forth. Notice how Columbia can't lay off the movie ballyhoo even for a documentary -- they can't even call it that. It's a "DRAMA" and Il Duce is not only powerful but "romantic" and "mysterious." Nothing about the love life of fascist women, however. I don't see how they missed that angle.

Speaking of romantic and mysterious...

Secrets was Mary Pickford's swan song, a very troubled production that hides its identity as a pioneer epic in the advertising. Notice that they're promoting it by association with director Frank Borzage's last picture, not Pickford's. The co-founder of United Artists would live for another 46 years without making another picture.

I'm at a loss for all the remaining pictures this week, so let's just have a look at them all.

 

Finally, Mussolini gets replaced by more typical Pre-Code fare:

I AM THE LAW (Il prefetto di ferro, 1977)

In the 1970s, it seemed to be a commonplace of movie criticism that any movie, whether American or Italian, that advocated tougher police methods against crime was "fascist." The charge probably carried more of a charge in Italy, where fascism was born and living people knew what it looked like. As if to make a point, director Pasquale Squaltieri made Il prefetto di ferro about a cop getting tough on crime during the actual Fascist era. It's hard to be sure what the exact point was meant to be in the original pop-political context of Italy's turbulent Seventies, but from a distance the point seems at least partly to do with dissociating crimefighting with fascism, to show that real fascists weren't necessarily the most enthusiastic or relentless crimefighters. The ironic effect is to give us a real-life hero who, by the standards of Seventies critics, was more "fascist" than the fascists themselves.

Cesare Mori was not a fascist himself, and a point made in his favor during the film is that, in his years as a prosecutor he had been willing to go after fascist lawbreakers. Despite his perceived opposition, Mussolini sent Mori to Sicily to recreate some success the incorruptible official had had years before the fascist takeover. As prefect of Sicily, Mori (Giuliano Gemma) had carte blanche to root out the Mafia and all bandit gangs who plagued the island. In the film, Mori's task is complicated by how deeply embedded organized crime has become at every level of society, and how dependent so many poor people are on bandits and mafiosi. Mussolini's mandate goes against the interests of local businessmen, landowners and clergy, who rely on gangsters to keep the peasants and rabble in line. The local bishop asks mafiosi to help put protesting farmers back to work, complaining that Mori's efforts may make common people unafraid of traditional intimidation. But nothing stops the "iron prefect" until after he's routed the low-level gangsters, having cleaned one hilltop town out house by house and tunnel by tunnel, and begins to go after the upper echelons of society, picking up a trail that leads to Fascist officials. Fidelity to facts prevents the typical Seventies finish, as Mori is merely kicked upstairs into a powerless Senate, while the very official he was pursuing is appointed to his place in Sicily.

From the confrontations of horseback bandits and farmers (above) to the posing of dead bandits for publicity photos (below), I Am the Law often resembles a spaghetti western actually set in Italy.

Given Sicily's backwardness, only the occasional shots of automobiles and fascists remind us that I Am the Law takes place in the twentieth and not the nineteenth century. That makes for a picturesque period piece with much more action on horseback than I expected, given a modern thrust and urgency by Ennio Morricone's score. An aged-up Gemma is impressive as the unflinching Mori, who is not above calling out and blowing away a mafioso all by himself. He gives the part the right blend of stiffness and stubbornness for the rest of the cast to play off of -- particularly Claudia Cardinale as a bitter mother who sees more harm than good done for the poor by the prefect even while decrying mafia rule. The overall impression is that, in Fascist Sicily, the Mafia is just one among many contending and occasionally collaborating predators. Destroying one doesn't liberate the people, and it may be impossible to destroy them all by police methods alone.

From the perspective of Italian cop and crime movies, Il prefetto has it both ways. It gives audiences a hard-ass, no-compromise lawman to cheer for, while assuring skeptics that any war on crime is just a clash between styles of authoritarianism. By taking the leftist equation of crimefighting with fascism to its historical reductio ad absurdam, Squaltieri arguably refutes it.

On the Big Screen: VINCERE (2009)

The title of Marco Bellocchio's new film translates as "win" onscreen, but it seems like it should be "WIN!" There's an imperative quality to the term that we see incarnated in the movie's two main characters: ambitious socialist agitator Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Ida Dalser. Benito will accept nothing short of winning total power; politics is his only alternative to what he knows would be a life of mediocrity in the arts or any other profession. Ida will accept nothing short of Benito's total commitment to her, his reciprocation of her total dedication to him. But it's not going to happen. Despite her sacrifices to support him when he breaks with the Workers' Party and loses his editorial job over his support for Italy's entry into World War I -- she sells most of her possessions to provide him capital for starting his own newspaper -- he starts to cut her off as his rise to power requires him to maintain a respectable image with his jealous wife. But Ida refuses to compromise, even when it would make the difference between freedom and imprisonment in an insane asylum. If anything, she maximizes her demands: she insists on being recognized as Il Duce's wife and the mother of his first-born son. Like her erstwhile lover, she demands all or nothing -- but gets nothing. Bellocchio's suggestion at the end, however, is that all who gamble as big as they did -- all who tempt fate -- lose in the end.

Marco Bellocchio has been directing features in Italy for 45 years now, rising from a wunderkind to one of the Italian film industry's elder statesmen. I haven't seen many of his films, but 2003's Good Morning, Night, his account of the Aldo Moro kidnapping, is one of my favorite movies of the late decade. Vincere takes a drastically different approach to history, though the two films have in common the perspective of a relatively peripheral female character. The new film has the feel of an old-fashioned biopic, enhanced for modern sensibilities by nudity and sex scenes featuring the young, studly mustachioed Mussolini (Fillippo Timi) and the attractive Ida (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). It aspires only occasionally to epic style, albeit on a small scale. There's one well done scene that shows an air raid (?) on Milan; as smoke fills an arcade, you see handfuls of people hurrying and stumbling through in panic as Ida placidly pushes her stroller along. There's a more satiric sequence in which a fight breaks out between anti-war socialists and Mussolini's patriots in a movie theater. Bellocchio shows us the silhouette of a brawl in front of newsreel footage of the war as the theater pianist doggedly plays a martial tune.

This is as good a time as any to mention the role of music and movies in this film. Benito and Ida are operatic in their passion, and the socialists and fascists as a whole seem operatic in their political passion. We hear snippets of opera on the soundtrack and characters sing what I presume to be either opera arias or patriotic songs of the period. Music suffuses most of the movie, but I'm not literate enough in Italian music to tell how much comes from credited composer Carlo Crivelli and how much is classical sampling. It's very florid and feverish to fit the spirit of the time, and Vincere itself is operatic in its subject matter of a spurned lover and her son cast into madhouses. As time marches on, this operatic atmosphere yields to the more modest accompaniment you usually got for silent films, pianos or accordions. The moving image looms large in the film, from newsreels to a Passion Play to Chaplin's The Kid (for which a pianist miraculously approximates the score Chaplin himself would record nearly fifty years later). Most important, eventually, are newsreel images of the real Benito Mussolini, from silent shots of the leader rassling with a lion cub to sound footage of a typical Thirties oration. I'm not sure about this, but my gut feeling is that Bellocchio means to show the extent of Mussolini's totalitarian domination, so that his voice and his image crowd out all the opera and imagery of the past. It may also just illustrate the totality of Ida's obsession with the man.

The use of Mussolini as both fictional and historical character is a challenging aspect of the movie. At a certain point, Fillippo Timi withdraws from the film, and from that point the only Mussolini we see is the real one in newsreel form. It's probably the most drastic way to illustrate the complete break between Benito and Ida, and it forces us to focus on her for the rest of the film as someone cut off from what she thinks is her proper place in history. Bellochio sees no need to have Timi shave his head or put on weight because Mussolini has refused to remain a character in Ida's story. The actor returns in the third act, however, as Ida's college-age son, Benitino. The boy has been raised alone in an orphanage for most of his life but hasn't been broken of his mom's conviction that he's the son of Il Duce. When we see him grown, however, it looks like this claim has become little more than a joke. Benitino's classmates goad him into doing a Mussolini impersonation in public that gets him thrown into a madhouse. He's the most tragic illustration of Mussolini's pervasive imposition of his own will over Italy, as we last see him raving in an imitation of the leader speaking German.

Vincere is the sort of film that I don't feel certain of after one viewing. Bellocchio seems to be aiming for a complex effect, and I'm not really sure if the payoff justifies the effort. I'd say it's worth seeing for the acting by Timi and Mezzogiorno, and for often-eloquent images crafted by the director and cinematographer Daniele Cipri. But if you're looking for the Benito Mussolini story or some explication of Italian fascism, this is the wrong film for you. It's mainly the story of two people caught up in the passions of a cultural moment and the comeuppance that comes eventually to both of them. At the end, Bellocchio returns to the scene that opened the film: Benito is taking part in a public debate on the existence of God. He uses a cheap trick to refute God, challenging the deity to strike him down within five minutes and claiming victory when time runs out as Ida looks on admiringly. I don't think the director is saying that they suffered later for their sacrilege then, but coming back to this implies at least a "don't tempt fate" moral that Bellocchio can't mean -- can he? Maybe he's just trying to be ironic. I invite global film fans to watch and judge for themselves.

But watch the IFC Films trailer first, as uploaded to YouTube by CinemaItaly: