Italy's silent cinema had been famous for its historical epics and had updated virtually every story from the classical past - it went the full gamut from Spartacus to Neiro and from the Fall of Troy to Julius Caesar, from Oedipus Rex to Atilla the Hun. The cinema of the Fascist era could not in its wildest of dreams manage an output of epics compatible to that of the great age of Italian cinema. although Carmine Gallone's Scipione L'Africano (1937) was a lavish re-telling of the Roman general's victorious campaigns in North Africa and aimed to justify Mussolini's African campaigns.
Other directors would turn to the epic in order to deviate from contemporary reality and avoid entanglement with the scandalous present. many films such as the 1937 version of The Last Days of Pompeii were remakes of tried and true silent successes. They would indeed reflect nothing but the frozen values of a society in paralysis. In fact it was mused that even the Fascists were bored by them.
.png) |
| In 1860 they took a little trip... |
Underlying the blandness of most of the films of this period was the realist style that has been recurrent throughout the history of Italian cinema. The work of Alessandro Blasetti (1900-1987) is typical here. In his first film 1929's Sole (Sun) he tackled the government's land reclamation policies with a realism that recalled 'verismo' (truth and likeness) style of Italian films that presaged the first World War. The heroes and anti-heroes alike are peasant workers in the Northwestern border's Pontine marshes, captured and framed on film as if it were a van Deale painting.
Blasetti is better remembered however for his 1933 epic -the proto-realist 1860 which deals episodically with Giuseppi Garibaldi's campaign for the liberation of Sicily - quite an inappropriate subject for a fascist regime to endorse. In his 1934 propagandist entry Vecchia Guardia (The Old Guard) Blasetti paid the obligatory lip service to the Fascists who in the year 1922, had marched on Rome. His subsequent films were less overtly propagandist and his historical fantasy La Corona di Ferro (The Iron Crown 1941) looks in retrospect to be a worthy predecessor to the Italian costume epics of the early 1960s.