Beauty and the Beast: Italianness in British Cinema

Girelli

Beauty Beast and the

and the

Italianness in British Cinema

Recent years have seen an increased interest in issues of national identity and representation, and cinema is a major medium where strands and layers of representational systems come together in cross-cultural dialogues.

About the author Elisabetta Girelli is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews.

ISBN 978-1-84150-244-1

Italianness in British Cinema

Italianness in British Cinema

Beauty and the Beast provides an account of the specific development of depictions of Italy and the Italians in British cinema. Girelli draws upon cultural and social history to assess the ongoing function of ‘Italianness’ in British film, and its crucial role in defining and challenging British national identity. Drawing on British literary and filmic tradition to analyze the rise of specific images of the Italian Other, this book makes original use of archival material such as WWII footage – and a selected corpus of significant British films.

Beauty and the Beast

Elisabetta Girelli

Beauty Beast

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9 781841 502441

intellect | www.intellectbooks.com

Elisabetta Girelli

Beauty and the Beast Italianness in British Cinema

To the memory of my grandfather, Angelo Macchia: with love and gratitude.

Beauty and the Beast Italianness in British Cinema

Elisabetta Girelli

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First published in the UK in 2009 by Intellect Books, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2009 by Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2009 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover photograph: Phyllis Calvert in The Madonna of The Seven Moons (Arthur Crabtree, 1944). Courtesy of BFI Stills Collection and ITV Global Entertainment. Cover designer: Holly Rose Copy-editor: Davina Thackara Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire ISBN 978-1-84150-244-1 EISBN 978-1-84150-303-5 Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.

Contents

Abstract Acknowledgements Introduction

7 8 9

Chapter 1 History and Representation of Italian Immigrants in Britain

29

Chapter 2 Italianness in 1940s British Cinema

51

Chapter 3 Italianness and Masculinity in 1950s British Cinema

93

Chapter 4 The New Italian Glamour: Italian Film Stars in British Cinema from the Early 1950s to the Mid-1960s

119

Chapter 5 Italianness, British Cinema, and Thatcherism

147

Conclusion Filmography Works Cited

173 177 179

Abstract

This work argues that British culture has developed a consistent and stereotyped representation of Italy and the Italians, and that British cinema, in particular, has made a specific use of this representation. Throughout the changes affecting British society, film has been as a site for the negotiation of national self-definition, and for the necessarily related construction of Otherness: screen Italianness has been instrumental in this process, helping to define and challenge notions of Britishness. The book is divided into six parts. The Introduction situates the subject in a theoretical framework, with special reference to postcolonial criticism; it follows by tracing the popular and literary roots of contemporary Italian stereotypes in British culture. Chapter One looks at the history of Italian immigration to Britain, paying particular attention to the reception of Italians in British society, to further investigate the rise of a specific image of the Italian Other. Chapter Two is devoted to British cinema of the 1940s, assessing the presence of Italianness on the screen in the light of wartime events, and of the immediate post-war. Chapter Three moves on to the 1950s, looking at the relation between the crisis of British masculinity and the portrayal of Italian men in British cinema. Chapter Four concentrates on emerging cultural trends in Britain and Italy during the post-war boom, discussing the use of Italian stars in British films from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. Finally, Chapter Five looks at Britain in the Thatcherite era, focusing on its reassessment and negotiation of national identity, and discussing the function of Italianness in some key British films of the 1980s and early 1990s.

Acknowledgements

This book has developed from a PhD thesis which I completed at Queen Mary, University of London, in 2004. I am deeply grateful to Peter Evans, my PhD supervisor, for his intellectual guidance and moral support. I also want to thank Mark Glancy, Stuart Jones, and Pauline Small, who throughout my time at Queen Mary provided invaluable help. Many of the films discussed in this book were only available as VHS copies in private collections: I am therefore greatly indebted to the kindness of Steve Chibnall, Sue Harper, and Robert Murphy, who lent me their precious copies. I want to thank my colleagues at the University of St Andrews for their encouragement, and especially Dina Iordanova, whose suggestions and support have been crucial in the final stages of my work on this book. Finally, my very special thanks to Brian Gomes da Costa, who first opened my eyes to academia, and to Tony Brown and my mother, Marialuisa Macchia, whose love and patience made it possible for me to complete this work. Earlier versions of some of the material covered in this book have appeared in the following publications: National Identities, Studies in European Cinema, Cinema Journal, and Stellar Encounters (John Libbey Publishing).

Introduction

Part One: Italianness as a System of Representation Post-structuralist theories of representation have persistently ignored national stereotyping in western culture. Notions of self-definition and Otherness have been the focus of much critical work in recent years, as part of the wider post-structuralist debate on reality, and its challenge to perceptions of the ‘real’ as a solid and monolithic fact. The reconsideration of identity as a construct has led to the questioning of accepted epistemological categories, and to their analysis in the light of cultural, historical, and political determinants. In the attempt to rewrite traditional narratives of social categories and biological imperatives, this critical undertaking has often focused, unsurprisingly, on groups caught in obvious power structures: postcolonial, gay, and gender theory have all addressed identity as the superimposed product of hegemonic discourses. At the same time, cultural criticism, like history, sociology, and geopolitics, has also been concerned with the formation of national identity and imagined communities. Issues of ethnicity and nationality have been of course at the forefront of postcolonial criticism, which in confronting the colonist/colonized opposition has attacked one of the major axes establishing global cultural divisions. One ought to ask, however, if national groups who have not been as blatantly oppressed, or whose collective history has not played such a decisive role in shaping the modern world, appear less distorted and limited by their proscribed selves only because these are more taken for granted. This book is concerned with British representations of Italianness, understood as a collection of accepted notions about Italy and the Italians; specifically, this analysis focuses on British cinema, considering its construction of Italianness at specific historical periods, and approaching it as both a reflection and a determinant of national culture. The book aims to demonstrate a series of contentions: firstly, that beyond the First World/Third World opposition, or the one between white and non-white, there exist other established divides of geoethnic separation, generating and legitimizing stereotyping and/or discrimination. British representations of Italy and the Italians are seen as a prime example of this, and constitute the book’s specific subject. A second

10   | beauty and the beast

aim is to demonstrate that typecast, specific notions of Italianness have deep roots in British society, and are related to equally fixed ideas of Britishness, helping to shape self-definition through negative derivation. Thirdly, it is argued that traditional Italianness, as articulated in British culture, is often structured on similar lines to those assisting the construction of Otherness in the Orientalist context. Finally, the special concern of this work is the representation and function of Italianness in cinematic narratives: the aim here is to show that film, among other media, systematically expresses and reinforces British notions of Italy and the Italians. The presence of Italianness in British cinema has remained, to the best of my knowledge, a completely unexplored topic; indeed, images of Europeans in general have been scarcely examined in British film criticism.1 This project therefore seeks to fill an obvious gap in Film Studies, while contributing to the growing field of research on identity and Otherness. Screen representations, by their very nature, are highly constructed: their analysis lays bare the process of interpretation and codification behind every social identity. Cultural theory, when specifically concerned with the formation of Self and Other, offers an apt methodological tool for the analysis of Italianness in British cinema; in particular, the work of Edward Said has been crucial in the development of a theoretical framework for this book. Archival research has also proved essential, providing unique documentation on the creation and reception of Italianness through the history of British cinema. A major assumption of this work is that cultural production must be seen in context: that is to say, that every cinematic rendition of Italianness is related, to some degree, to the historical, political, and social conditions surrounding its construction. This has meant, first of all, looking closely at the antecedents of twentieth-century notions of Italianness: the presupposition is that stereotypes do not arise in a vacuum, but are instead built and developed from available, pre-existent ideas. Consequently, this introductory chapter not only sets up a theoretical structure, but also traces the history of Italian stereotypes in British literature. Chapter One follows with a brief account of Italian immigration to Britain, paying special attention to the reception and perceptions of the immigrants by their host country: the assumption here is that fictional and real-life experiences of Italianness are interrelated, and that the presence of Italians in Britain has been instrumental in consolidating their image. Sources for this chapter are necessarily limited, as very little research has been published on the subject. The next four chapters, which examine the representation of Italianness in British cinema, frame their film analysis with an assessment of the sociocultural contexts in which cinema was produced. The focus is on three separate periods: the 1940s, the years from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s, and the 1980s. The selection of specific moments in British cinema history, at the expense of some others, has been a technical necessity, aiming at keeping the scope and length of this book within reasonable limits; at the same time, it is true that some periods offer an especially rich production of Italian-themed films, or that they coincide with remarkable developments in British cinema and society, likely to affect perceptions of national identity and of Italianness. These considerations have therefore shaped the organization of the book. To call the 1940s an extraordinary decade is to state the obvious; what may be less apparent, however, is its unparalleled output of cinematic Italianness. While they gradually shifted from war enemies to war victims, Italians were never absent from British screens, where newsreels documented their peculiar position: as Fascists, soldiers, prisoners, civilians, grateful allies, they were vividly

Introduction |   11

recorded on film. At the same time, fictional Italians filled propaganda features in the early stages of the war, and saturated melodrama from the mid-1940s onwards. Unsurprisingly, Chapter Two, which covers the 1940s, deals with the largest number of films. Chapter Three focuses on the 1950s, years in which Italian emigration to Britain reached massive proportions; as British society struggled to adapt to post-war changes, and to an unprecedented influx of foreigners, national identity and gender roles went under scrutiny. Cinema reflected this situation, notably from a male, disorientated point of view; as women’s presence diminished in films and audiences, images of Italian men proliferated on the screen, serving a specific function in the articulation of masculine crisis. Chapter Four also begins by examining the 1950s, but continues its analysis until the mid-1960s: the focus is on the new glamour projected by Italy, through its status as fashion, cinema, and tourist Mecca. In the light of Italy’s changing image, and of Britain’s conflictual relationship with the emerging European alliance, this chapter looks at the role of Italian film stars in British films. Finally, Chapter Five deals with the 1980s, a turbulent period in British history, when national identity was reassessed and challenged; as Thatcherism penalized British film-makers, it also galvanized them into action, unwittingly assisting a remarkable creative output. In a cinema variously engaged in negotiating notions of Britishness, Italianness was once again used as a signifier of Otherness and alternative. Needless to say, this work does not in any way aim to provide an exhaustive survey of British films dealing with Italy and the Italians: it offers instead an analysis of particularly significant productions, chosen to exemplify the issues under discussion. As stated above, one of the premises of this book is that identity is to a vast degree an artefact, shaped by cultural and social factors; once open to this idea, many assumptions by which one reads the world are liable to be reassessed. In this process of revision and analysis one may look for common structures behind the construction of Self and Other, considering different groups who nevertheless share an approach to self-definition hinged on notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Critics working on issues of identity do indeed often recognize this link, by placing Otherness-construction at the core of practices of self-definition; at the same time, they refer to wider contexts where the same system recognizably operates, notably the First World/ Third World divide, or the East/West one. To give a few examples, Robin Cohen (1994), in his discussion of the formation of British identity, includes a panoramic view of notions of Otherness spanning from anti-Semitism to the colonial recreation of Asia and Africa. Gertjan Dijkink (1996) introduces his study of geopolitically motivated identity by referring to the East/West opposition, as much as to traditional German attitudes towards Russia and Poland. Another work on the making of British identity, edited by Raphael Samuel (1989), devotes a whole volume to the British treatment of ‘minorities and outsiders’, setting the context by pulling together Tudor legislation against vagabonds, seventeenth-century anti-Catholicism, and 1920s representations of the Chinese as ‘the yellow peril’. A critical frame often referred to by these texts is the postcolonial one, by virtue of its identification of a colonial discourse dependent, for its very existence, on the codification of perceived racial, ethnic, and national differences; while postcolonial theory has thus led the way in exploring

12   | beauty and the beast

representations of Otherness, it has remained by definition anchored to specific historical moments and geopolitical locations. The issue at stake, however, is whether the structures recognized within the colonial system, and their derived critical model, may be applicable to a range of stereotyped images found outside and beyond colonialism; at the same time, one could ask whether national groups with an imperial past, whose collective identity has been formed on notions of superiority and even of world hegemony, may not internalize and replicate colonial attitudes when defining themselves against the Other. Before attempting to answer these questions, it is necessary to define which structures, as identified by postcolonial theory, may be relevantly used; a good place to start is Edward Said’s Orientalism (1995), a text which arguably defined the whole postcolonial venture, and which is constantly referred to in works on identity and Otherness. Although specifically concerned with European attitudes towards the Middle East and Islam, Orientalism has laid the basis for the discussion of the construction of Otherness based on geographic, ethnic, and racial distinctions. Said’s argument is that the Orient of western tradition has no correspondence in the tangible East, but is instead a self-sustaining concept justifying, maintaining, and feeding off political and cultural western hegemony; crucially, the Oriental is also the archetypal Other against which western identity is defined. From this perspective, Orientalism is then exposed as a representational system, producing and reproducing an image of the Orient whose ‘reality’ is only found in western motivations. In White Mythologies (1990, 139), Robert Young adds that as the Orient does not really represent the East, it must signify instead the West’s dissociation from itself: what is being represented is not a factual Orientalness, but the projection onto the East of the West’s own and disavowed split. This concept is already implicit in Orientalism (1995, 3), which maintains that ‘European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self’. This assessment of Orientalism as the ideological accessory to political expansionism, but also as the systematic codification of socially and psychically motivated needs, brings us back to our original question: while the creation of a colonized Other is self-evidently the product of colonialism, how essential is the colonial structure in the instigation of an identity based on the opposition with a national and/or ethnic Other? The reference to the place of Said in studies of national self-perception points to the fact that, while making a specific case for European attitudes towards the East, Orientalism has also touched on cardinal structures underlying the process of identity-formation; as Dijkink asks (1996, 8), ‘is it not the case that much of the discourse identified by Said as “Orientalist” belongs to the type of knowledge (or rather “gossip”) which is generated in every place where people encounter an external world considered inferior?’. This argument is supported by Marco Cinnirella (1997, 37) who, using a socio-psychological approach to the construction of Otherness, sees stereotyping as ‘belief systems’ whose structures are common to all cultures; rather than historically specific, the creation of stereotypes amounts to an essential cognitive strategy, aimed at making sense of the ungraspable reality represented by millions of individuals who are ‘Other’. National stereotypes thus provide an easy way to ‘know’ people, and predict what they will do (1997, 38); this ‘knowledge’ often remains dormant but ready to be reactivated, as notions from the past are resumed to understand the present (1997, 39).

Introduction |   13

Importantly, Cinnirella names differentiation as a prime function of stereotypes (1997, 46), again supporting the idea of identity as negatively derived. Social psychology, indeed, provides a vast and important body of literature on the subject of stereotypes, which complements and confirms postcolonial theoretical models. Past and present work in the field focuses on the role played by the construction of Otherness in the formation of identity, generating a consensus on the crucial nature of this role. Michael Pickering, in his authoritative book on stereotyping, states that ‘the Other is always constructed as an object for the benefit of the subject who stands in need of an objectified Other in order to achieve a masterly self-definition’ (2001, 71). Pickering devotes a whole chapter to ‘The Concept of the Other’, approaching the construction of Otherness as ‘a denial of history’ (48), as well as discussing the role of objectified difference in the subject’s elaboration of fantasies and desires; he equally stresses that stereotyped representations owe their formidable suggestive power to their deep roots in a nation’s cultural practices, becoming ‘powerful social myths’ (49) and thus aiding the experience of belonging on which collective (national) identity rests (80). Stangor and Schaller use the term ‘ego-relevant’ to describe the function of the Other in the formation of identity, pointing out that ‘stereotyping and prejudice have traditionally been considered in terms of their relations with the need to maintain self-esteem or self-valuation’ (2000, 75). Fein and Spencer argue that ‘self-image maintenance processes play an important role in stereotyping and prejudice’, concluding that ‘prejudice […] can be self-affirming’ (2000, 172). While social psychology focuses on behavioural and cognitive patterns which all human beings may share, cultural analyses are instead anchored to specific social and historical conditions, and to discourses which are historically or culturally specific. In the case of stereotyped Italianness, for example, Pasquale Verdicchio (1997, 191) argues for the application of postcolonial discourse to the analysis of the experience of Italian Americans, believing that ‘First and Third World are not always separable in geographic space’, and that ‘Italian immigrant writing, as it has emerged in Canada and the United States, is an expression of that postcolonial condition’ (1997, 204). It may be useful here to consider how the link between Orientalism and colonialism, as discussed by Said, can appear ambiguous on various accounts. Covering as it does almost the whole breadth of European civilization, Said’s analysis posits a virtually monolithic, unchangeable form of ‘western thought’: this position implicitly entails the elision of difference within colonial discourse, and, by tracing an unbroken Orientalist European consciousness since pre-Christian times, effectively collapses discursive and practical Orientalism into one. The latter argument is supported by Aijaz Ahmad (1992, 181), whose questioning of Said’s ‘Orientalist discourse’ focuses on its description as both the prerequisite for European imperialism and a defining element of European thought, therefore being contemporaneously the producer and product of colonial enterprise, and an essential function of ‘Europeanness’. This inherent contradiction in Orientalism’s thesis, argues Ahmad, ‘raises the question of the relationship between Orientalism and colonialism’. But while undoubtedly adopting an ambivalent approach to the genesis of Orientalism, Said may nevertheless be weakening

14   | beauty and the beast

the exposition of his argument rather than its substance. By placing colonialism at the peak of western Orientalist tradition, and by insisting that there is no cultural Orientalism without its eventual political counterpart, Said is indeed blurring the boundaries between cause and effect, which may be a problem if one requires cause and effect to be rigidly separated. Viewed from a different angle, however, Said’s project is to shed light on two constituents of Orientalism which are alternatively parallel and intertwined, but which remain nevertheless two distinct manifestations (or phases) of the Orientalist system of thought: one as a cultural representation of the Orient, serving an essential function in the western process of selfdefinition, the other as a political (or colonial) implementation of this representation. The relationship between Orientalism and colonialism appears in this way more flexible, and more useful as a critical model: if the representational system crystallizing the Oriental into a certain image is a full-blown example of Orientalism, regardless or prior to actual territorial colonization, it follows that this ‘type’ of Orientalism can recognizably operate as a discourse in its own right, and as such it may be defined and used as a model. By the same token, if the Orient is nothing else than a western projection, ‘the West’s own dislocation from itself’ (Young 1990, 139), and if this dislocation is conceived as the basic structure of a negatively derived identity, then a parallel structure may well operate outside the East/West axis: to deny this would be to imply that, outside the colonial context, identity is unidirectionally derived, which seems a frankly undefendable proposition. In his study of the formation of British national identity, Robin Cohen (1994, 205) makes use of the concept of ‘situational identity’, the idea that ‘an individual constructs and presents any one of a number of possible social identities, depending on the situation’. In national and ethnic terms, then, the choice between First and Third World, like the one between white and nonwhite, is necessarily just one among many which are constantly being made: indeed, some of us may never make that particular choice at all. It may be possible, then, to hypothesize a correspondence between the construction of Otherness in the colonial context, and the process of identity-formation as articulated in ethnic and national terms outside that context; more specifically, if one considers a nation like Britain, whose imperial past is arguably still entrenched in its collective consciousness, one may suppose a common drive behind British self-definition in relation to others. Cohen is again useful here: having agreed with the concept of negatively derived identity, he introduces the notion of ‘fuzziness’ to indicate a flexible or permeable barrier between one’s own identity (British in this case) and that of others. Of particular interest is Cohen’s view of European identity as a fuzzy frontier (1994, 18–19): it suggests that the Otherness of a given European people (the Italians, for example) may be permeable and flexible, as long as ‘Italian’ blurs into ‘European’. In any case, it would depend on what attitude towards Europe is chosen. To see the barrier between British and Italian as fuzzy to some degree (a degree which would vary depending on the circumstances), is to reinforce Young’s description of Otherness as a dislocation from oneself: dislocation implies an original continuity, and fuzziness entails a gradual dissolving of one identity into another, rather than a sharp separation. The concept of frontier is also useful in another sense: it highlights how identity is built equally on what is kept in and on what is left

Introduction |   15

out. On this assumption, the cultural position of Britain towards another country can be assessed through asking ‘how is difference perceived and systematized?’ Skin colour remains a powerfully perceived factor of ‘difference’: it fosters the construction of boundaries between human groups, it lies at the foundation of racism, and has, of course, played a crucial role in the colonial creation of the Other. Obvious as this observation may appear, its application to British notions of Italianness may seem less so: after all, Italians are undisputed members of the ‘white race’. Or are they? On closer inspection, the matter does not look so simple; the word ‘swarthy’ has been used in Britain for centuries, and the suspicion it arises today speaks of its uncomfortable implications. The word has no direct equivalent in the Italian language, which does not provide nuances between black and white skins: swarthy as they may be, Italians do not doubt that they are white, simplifying their linguistic racial boundaries (racist Italians, incidentally, discriminate against any shade of brown which is darker than their own). The idea that all white people are white, but some are whiter than others, has been convincingly argued by Richard Dyer (1997, 12–13), who uses the notion of ‘hegemonic whiteness’ to describe the northern European sway over the fair-skinned sphere. This whiteness ‘has none the less been assumed to include southern and eastern European peoples (albeit sometimes grudgingly within Europe and less assuredly without it, for instance, in the Latin diasporas of the Americas)’. Indeed, the hierarchy of gradations within whiteness are laid bare by immigration dynamics, so that Italian Americans, for example, have started to claim their right to ‘come out as olive’ (Verdicchio 1997, 206). A crucial point made by Dyer in his study, however, is that colour, in its factuality, has little to do with whiteness, which is rather related to canons of ‘normality’: hence the Irish, in the nineteenth century, were caught in an English narrative which described them as a hybrid, half-African people, and even today ‘Latins, the Irish and Jews, for instance, are rather less securely white than Anglos, Teutons and Nordics’ (1997, 12–13). The relative weight of actual skin colour, as well as the dubious whiteness ascribed to the Italians, is evident in an English text from 1642, James Howell’s Instructions for Forreine Travell, which describes the Genovese as ‘White Moores’ (quoted in Vander Motten 1997, 118). The construction of the ethnic or racial Other, then, soon departs from factual lines of physical differentiation: it relies on belief systems, and is thus essentially arbitrary. The arbitrariness of Otherness is, ultimately, the underlying principle of Said’s Orientalism, and it is what makes its argument so useful: its analysis of the process by which Otherness is constructed provides a valuable theoretical structure, by which the dynamics of Self and Other, in a variety of contexts, can be investigated. Specifically, Said’s theory is underpinned by five major points, which constitute an ideal frame for the purpose of this work: the discussion of Italianness in British culture. To begin with, as already mentioned, Orientalism’s major assumption is that geographical and national distinctions are largely arbitrary: this applies first of all to geopolitical practices, in the sense that national boundaries are man-made, and that notions of North, South, East and West are purely conventional. The enduring British confusion as to what ‘Europe’ actually includes is in itself proof of this. Secondly, derived national attributes, the constituents of a ‘national character’,

16   | beauty and the beast

are equally subjective. All this is not to deny that there is a country called Italy inhabited by people called Italians, but that geopolitical boundaries are seen as circumscribing certain moral and behavioural traits: the millions of individuals born south of the Alps are expected to share precise characteristics, being effectively framed into a ‘system of representations’. Having established that national and ethnic identities are cultural creations, Said maintains that any culture is limited, and partly determined, by the historical, social, and political conditions in which it is produced; in other words, any environment will in some way restrict what it is possible, at a given moment, to think. This leads us to Orientalism’s third point, the concept of ‘textual attitude’: the tendency to rely on previously read texts, or acquired notions, to understand something new. According to Said, one is more likely to adopt a textual attitude in two situations: when confronted with the new and threatening, and when one believes oneself to have found a correspondence between text and reality: when the text ‘works’. For the purpose of this book, this means that the representation of Italianness in British cinema will depend, to a large extent, on both the historical moment and the strength of tradition. To take one example, the depiction of Italians in 1940s British films is the result of ideas about Italy brought on by World War II, of wartime notions of Britishness and Otherness, and of a mass of pre-existent, readily-available representations of Italianness, from classical Rome to the Renaissance, from Gothic novels to immigrant organ-grinders, and so on. By the same token, the evocation of all these different facets of Italianness would have been approached by the British public with a textual attitude, through recourse to other films, novels, travel literature, previous experience of Italy or the Italians, and personal feelings about Italy’s role in the war; not to mention the course of the war itself, and whether the film in question was being watched in, say, 1941 or 1944. The basic assumption here is that cinema audiences need to decode what they see on the screen, and they can only do so on the basis of what they already ‘know’. The image, narrative role, and even accent allocated to an Italian character in a film will call forth a whole field of associations: everything read, heard, or experienced about Italianness. To paraphrase Said again, ‘Italy’ will summon up ‘the field surrounding the word’ (1995, 203). The fourth point considered in Orientalism, in its analysis of representations of the Orient, is that conventional western attitudes towards the East are imbued with a sense of condescension, often with a feeling of duty to rescue the East’s past glory; paradoxically, the Orient’s loss of splendour is seen as the result of an innate Oriental inferiority, laziness, corruption, and so on. Disassociated from their own history, Orientals are thus placed into ‘a framework constructed out of biological determinism and moral-political admonishment’ (1995, 207). As will be discussed later on, this contention of Said’s fits beautifully with traditional British views of Italianness, based on a distinction between Italy, the country of art, beauty, and past grandeur, and the Italians, a charming but inept, farcical, and morally suspect people. It is not by accident that the Victorians saw themselves, rather than the Italians, as the rightful heirs of Roman emperors. This split representation survives intact today, modernized by encompassing a desirable, consumable Italianness made up of fashion, design, cuisine, and sex (endlessly exploited in advertizing), together with an Italianness of inefficiency, corruption, and organized crime, of moral and political instability. Pejorative words such as ‘machiavellian’, ‘prima donna’, ‘mafia’, or ‘paparazzi’, now

Introduction |   17

part of the English language, retain their Italian connotations even when used out of their original context. The tired, because so often repeated, observation that post-war Italy has had a record number of governments, is ideally matched by the notion of Italians as lacking self-control: it evokes a people unable to govern themselves. Most British people ignore outstanding democratic Italians and the institutions they represent, for example the judges, politicians, and policemen who risk and lose their lives fighting the Mafia, but still remember the 1980s porno-diva-turned-politician Ilona Staller, a harmless, utterly insignificant figure in the history of Italian politics: this selective knowledge speaks volumes about British attitudes towards Italy (as well as about the British press and the priorities of its readers). To comprehend just what is the dominant British view of Italy, one need go no further than Tobias Jones’ widely acclaimed book The Dark Heart of Italy (2003), which promises on its sleeve to prove that Italy is a country ‘based on aesthetics rather than ethics’. A catchy phrase, perhaps, but of appalling implications. One wonders whether the publishers would dare print the same statement in reference to, say, India, or Palestine: and one suspects they would not. Orientalism, to however small a degree, has had to learn to keep its mouth shut; Italianism, unrecognized and unopposed, thrives. Just as the Oriental becomes the inferior Other in a western, Eurocentric version of history, so the Italian can be conveniently disposed of, relegated to the lesser provinces of the West. According to John Agnew (1997, 28), Italy is fundamentally excluded from a master European narrative based on Europe’s ‘modernity’; its specific history and problems are explained in terms of what Italy is not compared to ‘idealised English or French national histories’, so that Italianness is equated with the idea of lack (for instance, the lack of a bourgeois revolution). Thus the language of modernity and backwardness ‘organises and directs thinking about the “nature” of Italy’ (1997, 29), resulting in a representation deeply rooted in Italy itself as much as abroad: that of Italy as an anomaly in the midst of a historical European push towards liberal democracy (1997, 25). Geography plays its part in this grand European narrative, through Italy’s ambiguous position on the map: at the continent’s edge, and so very close to Africa, its identity can be placed in the ‘Mediterranean’ sphere, separate and remote from the heart of Europe. Maps, after all, can be held at any angle without compromising territorial accuracy; scholars are increasingly suggesting that Europe may never have been the only, or ‘natural’, place in which to situate Italian identity (Allen and Russo 1997, 9–11). Italy’s fragmented history and relatively recent unification (1870), its massive export of emigrants, together with twenty years of Fascism, have done nothing to modify its Otherness in relation to dominant versions of western progress; the more recent past, however, has equally problematized Italy’s place in the West. As Richard Bosworth (1996, 54–55) has pointed out, Italy’s post-war politics, both in the foreign and domestic spheres, placed it somewhat apart from its western allies: despite joining NATO in 1949, and endorsing the Common Market, ratified in Rome in 1957, Italy remained a country of powerful, anti-American opposition parties, who for years enjoyed a limited flirting with the Soviet Union. The Italian Communist Party (PCI) did not start to reject Stalinism until 1956; Italy was ‘the border state of the capitalist world, in a sense the Yugoslavia of the West’. The fifth relevant point in Orientalism is its description of the relation between East and West as one of ‘varying degrees of a complex hegemony’ (1995, 5). Here Said is obviously

18   | beauty and the beast

referring to political, military, and economic colonialism, and in this literal sense the statement is inapplicable to Britain and Italy; in terms of Self and Other, however, the issue is highly relevant, as Italians in Britain have a long history as a social minority. As will be discussed in the next chapters, almost two centuries of economic migration to England (and to a lesser extent to Scotland and Wales) equated the Italians with cultural inferiors, placing them in a precarious social position; poor, darker-skinned, with a funny accent, nominally Catholic, Italian immigrants were an obvious target for racism (as were, of course, many other immigrants). World War II largely destroyed the slow advances made by the Italian British community, as its members were interned, abused, or ostracized, to the extent that many gave up any claim to Italian citizenship. The post-war years saw unprecedented, massive immigration from Italy to the United Kingdom, which continued well into the 1960s; a visible group among immigrants, Italians continued to occupy a subordinate position in relation to the hegemonic Britons. As a result, an image of the Italian Other as the archetypal ice-cream seller is rooted in British consciousness: together with the knife-branding bandit or Mafioso, it is forever part of Italian iconography, coexisting with football millionaires and glamour icons. Moreover, the history of Italians in Britain, and its cultural representations, are complemented by parallel developments on the other side of the Atlantic: Italians emigrated to the United States and Canada in their millions, and their North American reputation is still anchored to pizza and Al Capone (despite notable efforts by contemporary, pillar-of-the-Establishment figures such as ex-New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani). Needless to say, the immense popularity of The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) and its sequels has done little to normalize the image of Italian immigrants, resting on countless prior representations which mix the very violent with the very grotesque: from Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1930) to Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959), Italians appear as unassimilated, antisocial figures to eliminate, even though (or because) they sing opera, cook pasta, and sport comical surnames like Mozzarella. At the other end of the spectrum, unthreatening and unempowered, we have figures like Rocky Balboa (Rocky, John G. Avildsen, 1976), an inherently pathetic, foreign loser at heart, despite multiple sequels and boxing victories. Lastly, the weight of Hollywood on global notions of Italianness is responsible for another stereotype, that of the Italian as southern Italian. Historically significant and iconographically rich, the southern Italian diaspora has tinted perceptions of Italianness everywhere; just as Italy is depicted as a perpetually sunny and hot country, so its inhabitants are invested with the traditions, experience, and physical appearance of the South, itself usually compressed into a single entity, Sicily or Naples. Hence the common screen appearance of Venetian gondoliers singing Neapolitan songs. But while Hollywood has greatly assisted the spread of the mythology surrounding Italy and the Italians, in Britain this mythology has been but a recent addition to a discourse about Italianness which is many centuries old. In order to understand the interaction of new factors with wellestablished stereotypes, and to study how this discourse has been appropriated, developed, or subverted by British cinema, it is necessary to examine the roots of Britain’s relationship with all things Italian: to see how the ‘field surrounding the word’ came into being.

Introduction |   19

Part Two: Beauty and the Beast – Italianness in British Culture Italianness as a British construct rests on a complex interplay of high-brow concerns, popular culture, and national attitudes towards immigrant minorities. As discussed earlier, and as Lucio Sponza has argued (1988), a neat division between Italy and its inhabitants has traditionally defined British views of the country: Italy, the land of beauty and art, has been contrasted to the Italians, a corrupt and treacherous people, unworthy of their glorious past. As already mentioned, this dual image, with varying degrees of subtlety, persists today. In this respect, British attitudes reflect a heritage of centuries of Grand Tour travel and literature, and the internalization of an image of Italy which, through its development from Classical to Gothic, and from Romantic to Victorian, remained based on notions of past glory and present decay. The tone was set in the early eighteenth century with Joseph Addison’s widely-read Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705), which defined the country solely in terms of its former Roman grandeur, lamenting its current decadence and identifying England as its modern inheritor. This reconstruction of Italy to suit national aspirations did not only characterize Grand Tourists of the time, but survived in some form the shift to Romanticism and to the nineteenth century: John Ruskin, for instance, an apostle of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, begins The Stones of Venice (1852) by declaring that Italy’s former greatness has been reclaimed by England. For most of the eighteenth century, however, the Roman empire supplied the only representation of the Italian past, one which inevitably evoked its own decadence, constructing a theme of rise and fall which would continue to summarize Italy for a vast part of its visitors: two generations of Romantics approached their first Italian tour with expectations shaped, more or less directly, by Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), the definitive historical account of ancient Italy for years to come. Gibbon’s six-volume work, selfevidently concerned with decadence rather than eminence, established a link between political and moral degradation from its first page, informing the reader of his intention to trace ‘the memorable series of revolutions, which, in the course of about thirteen centuries, gradually undermined, and at length destroyed, the solid fabric of human greatness’ (1820, vol. 1, xxxviv). Obviously, if Italy’s claim to ‘human greatness’ ended with the Roman empire, modern Italians could not boast any moral or intellectual achievements: this was precisely Gibbon’s opinion, and as he lamented ‘the wretched state of this fine country’ and ‘the misery of its idle and oppressed inhabitants’, he found that his visit to Italy had made him better value England, with its ‘plain honesty and blunt freedom’ (Norton 1956, 191, 197). In a sense Gibbon was hardly being original, as the already mentioned Howell, almost two hundred years before him, had recommended foreign travel to his English readers, as a means to appreciate England’s moral, religious, political, economic, and geographic superiority to any other country; and even Howell himself, according to Vander Motten (1997, 121), was simply articulating ‘the old Protestant myth of England as the Promised land and the English as a chosen people’. Using Italy as an ideal contrast to England, however, Gibbon was setting parameters to look beyond a generic ‘abroad’, and to elect a particular nation as example of what England was not. Not everyone following in Gibbon’s footsteps would share this view, but the representation of Italy as an architectural and political ruin was maintained by the Romantics, whose concern with

20   | beauty and the beast

individual feelings and transient enjoyments turned Italy into an allegory of the human condition: while indulging the senses with its sun, women, and wine, the country’s dilapidated appearance and alleged social degradation were a tangible reminder of the frailty of life. In opposition to puritanical and cold Britain, Romantic Italy was held as a signifier of intense pleasure and acute sorrow, providing a total experience and a mirror for existential anguish: Rome was for Shelley ‘at once the Paradise/The grave, the city, and the wilderness’ (1956, 268), for Byron his elected homeland by virtue of its decrepitude, a ‘lone mother of dead empires’ (Phelps 1971, 145). Byron’s identification with Italy, which led him to take an active part in its politics, joining the clandestine movement of the Carbonari against foreign domination, remained exceptional among his contemporaries; not until the mid-nineteenth century would British travellers take such an interest in Italian events, and then mostly in an indirect way. For all his genuine sympathy towards Italy, however, Byron’s conception of it was linked to previous notions of the country, and while judging it differently he nevertheless contributed to their reinforcement: the sunny but derelict land, the sensual and passionate people, were caught in an intertextual framework held in place not only by Gibbon’s Enlightenment-born meditation on the collapse of corrupted civilizations, but also by the sensationalist narratives of Gothic fiction. Kenneth Churchill (1980, 9) points this out by noting how Byron’s work ‘abounds in references to Gibbon’, and by recalling the poet’s own mention of Mrs Radcliffe, the archetypal ‘Italian Gothic’ author, as ‘one of the writers who had formed his image of Venice’ (1980, 17). Indeed, Italy presented much the same spectacle to eighteenth and nineteenth century travellers, who differed in their individual responses rather than in their assessment of it. For the Romantics, the mountains, volcanoes and lakes of the Italian landscape brought closer contact with the ‘sublime’ (Brand 1957, 170), while the Italians themselves fell short of this ideal, providing a picture of earthly, sensual indulgence which would endure throughout the centuries, lending itself to a variety of interpretations. Setting the trend for an appreciation of the Italians based on their supposedly superior capacity to enjoy life, John Moore (1781, vol. 2, 372–73) described them in 1781 as ‘the greatest loungers in the world’, a somewhat ambiguous tribute, finding an equally ambiguous echo in Byron’s confession: ‘With all its sinful doings, I must say/That Italy’s a pleasant place to me’ (Doherty 1969, 141). Shelley, on the other hand, did not hesitate in defining Italian men as ‘a tribe of stupid and shrivelled slaves’ (Jones 1964, 9), obviously incompatible with Italy itself, the beautiful inspirer of his lofty thoughts and poetry.2 A similar approach characterized Ruskin, who, despite devoting years to the study of Italian art, never learnt the language or socialized with Italians in any way, considering them ignorant and lazy (Churchill 1980, 87–88). The theme of decline and fall was indeed not lost on the Victorians: with the nineteenth-century belief in progress and order, and in the inevitable link between poverty and sin, many British travellers extended to the Italians their charity, normally reserved for the downtrodden working class at home. Charles Dickens, whose work is dominated by a lifelong preoccupation with social injustice, pitied ‘the years of neglect, oppression, and misrule’ which had caused the moral downfall of the once-noble Italians: his picturesque description of Naples includes ‘begging and stealing everywhere and at all hours’, and urges fellow-tourists not to dismiss ‘the miserable depravity, degradation, and wretchedness, with which this gay Neapolitan life is inseparably associated’ (1973, 219, 242). A similar view was expressed by

Introduction |   21

another eminent Victorian, the historian and politician Thomas B. Macaulay, who considered the Italians ‘a race corrupted by a bad government and a bad religion, long renowned for skill in the arts of voluptuousness and tolerant of all the caprices of sensuality’ (quoted in Sponza 1988, 127). Given the endurance and pervasiveness of this negative representation, it would have taken most British people a notable effort to appreciate unreservedly the Italians, as this would have implied the rejection of received ideas, and the abandonment of a subjective position defined in terms of national superiority. This was, however, accomplished by a number of British residents in Italy: apart from Byron, for instance, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her husband Robert interacted with Italians on equal terms, celebrating contemporary Italian life in their work, and, especially through Elizabeth’s poetry, supporting advocates of national unification like Giuseppe Mazzini. John Addington Symonds, who spent thirty years working on the Italian Renaissance, and whose seven-volume Renaissance in Italy (1875–86) became a popular read for late-Victorian art lovers, revelled in the classical beauty of the local population, ‘in whose eyes and clustering curls/The youth of Greece still lingers’ (quoted in Churchill 1980, 121). However, while certainly preferable to the contemptuous attitude of other British tourists, Symonds’ vision of Italy as a pagan heaven, inhabited by handsome boys, effectively reconstructed the country around his desires: Italy became the paradise of the senses, the antithesis of homophobic Britain. Symonds’ focus on the island of Capri, a place associated with sexual adventures well into the twentieth century, can be seen as part of a specific aesthetic and moral discourse, which incorporates Italianness as a signifier of transgression and un-Britishness. In fact, according to Giorgio Triani (1996, 138), the eighteenth and nineteenth-century association of seaside Italy with illicit pleasures is all but dead, having its parallel in the ‘sun and sex’ package holidays of today: ‘the South, as the latitude of pleasure and sentimental adventures, found its full expression in the coastal resorts’ (my translation). Ian Halliday (1997, 364) makes the specific example of Sicily, as recently represented by a popular travel guide, Insight Guide: Sicily: apart from a general abundance of negative stereotypes, the book rants hysterically about the resort of Taormina, which has a thriving gay scene, describing it as a ‘flower of pederasty’, in a chapter entitled ‘Foreign Vices’. But while this latter vision of Italy can be dismissed as the paranoid produce of a homophobic culture, any sex-centred vision of the country, however positive, ought to be viewed with suspicion. Constructed as the answer to puritanism, and objectified as the focus of desire, the Italian Other may still emerge as the positive embodiment of life-affirming hedonism; however, the step from paganism to savagery is brief, and any representation of the Italian as uninhibited, free-living and free-loving, risks becoming a eulogy of the Good Savage. A prime example of this two-sided praise can be found in the writing of D.H. Lawrence: the author’s revulsion at what he saw as a dehumanizing existence in grey, industrialized Britain, brought him to idealize under-developed Italy as a primitive land, full of ignorant but vital peasants. Pitted against the highly civilized but innerly dead Britons, the Italians were brutal, backward, and sex-obsessed, tuned in to the primordial life-force sought by Lawrence through his belief in ‘the blood’: ‘they haven’t many ideas, but they look well, and have strong blood’, or ‘they are a spunky lot, and no soul or intellect. It’s an awful relief to live among them’ (Boulton

22   | beauty and the beast

1979, 462, 508). The routine of the typical Italian was thus described: ‘in the sunshine he basks asleep, gathering up a vintage into his veins which in the night-time he will distil into ecstatic sensual delight’ (1956, 35). While the recorded British experience of Italy seems to have produced creative energy, and sometimes a genuine interest in a foreign culture, it has also evidently implied a distorted, patronizing, and highly subjective construction of what that culture was all about; in the latter case, one can paraphrase Said’s comment on Flaubert’s and Nerval’s approach to the Orient (1995, 180), and say that British travellers and intellectuals brought to Italy ‘a personal mythology whose concerns and even structure required [Italianness]’. Worse still, when the British infatuation with Italy is articulated along the oppositional configuration of Italy versus the Italians, it belies a cultural pillage of the country and a dissociation from its people. As an approach to a different place characterized by the loot of its riches (whether materially or intellectually) and the patronization of its natives, it strongly resembles standard colonial attitudes towards the colonized, motivated by the belief that political and cultural superiority rests with the colonist (or with the artist or tourist); Orientalism provides a fitting analogy by stating that ‘what the European took from the classical Oriental past was a vision (and thousands of facts and artefacts) which only he could employ to the best advantage’ (1995, 79). If one adds to these considerations the fact that Britain, in the last few centuries, has been the site of a substantial scholarly effort to study, classify, and explain Italian culture and history, from the Roman empire to fascism and beyond, that hundreds of fictional Italians populate the pages of British literature,3 and that, as will be discussed later on, Italian locations and characters operate as fixed signifiers in the negotiation of national identity taking place in British cinema, then one can see Italianness as the specific, highly functional product of a cultural discourse not unlike the Orientalist one. Like Orientalism, the British construction of Italianness frames the Italian Other in a ‘system of representations’, limiting and shaping the experience of Italy to a set of pre-received ideas, and to the fulfilment of certain expectations; and just like the Oriental, the Italian is dissociated from the past glory of his or her country. On the basis of these factors, one could regard British views of the Italians as the replica of a general stance towards people of an older civilization and darker skin; this position, however, implies a fragmentation from the start, as the colonial Other is the focus of different fears and desires, constantly producing Otherness in excess of the primary opposition in which he or she is situated. Likewise, Italianness must be understood as a multi-faceted compound, always slipping out of the original ambivalence it is formed upon: the beautiful country and the beastly people give rise to a popular image which, if it straddles the two, also creates a dynamic representation which exceeds its own limits. This is evident in the power traditionally ascribed to Italianness by its literary creators: the history of British literature is dense with Italian settings and characters, serving narratives as signifiers of tensions and longings, often quite out of proportion to the actual signified. Again, the power of this fictional Italianness is not confined to its narrative function, spilling instead into the reservoir of cultural stereotypes; a ‘textual attitude’ is fostered in readers and travellers alike, creating in the process the hybrid epistemic category of the not known but familiar. On the assumption that texts do not exist in a vacuum,

Introduction |   23

but inevitably refer to other texts, most Britons’ reading of literary Italianness must be seen, to some extent, as inseparable from previously internalized representations of it: canonical literary works, visual art, popular fiction, travel literature, newspaper articles, advertizing, television, and finally cinema. Looking back to the literary roots of these cultural stereotypes, one finds not only the steady formation of a specific image of Italianness, but also a reliance on the strength of this image, a highly charged use of language by which the first mention of Italy evokes a whole field of associations. The Renaissance was a key period in the formation of Italian stereotypes. According to Halliday (1997, 353), all constructions of Italianness in British culture can be traced back to 1532, the year in which Machiavelli’s The Prince was published: the book was understood as being a blueprint of Italian morals, based on scheming, corruption, and murder. The Prince was probably also the right text at the right time; as A.J. Hoenselaars observes (1997, 85–86), English Renaissance literature placed a special stress on national representations, reflecting an age which was seeing the emergence of European nation states, and thus the formation and consolidation of their associated stereotypes. The notion of Italy as a land of intrigue and vengeance was certainly appreciated by Shakespeare, whose genius settled on Venice, Verona and Rome to evoke instantly a powerful atmosphere; Ben Jonson also chose Venice as a setting, to intensify moral corruption in Volpone (1607). But if Italy provided the English stage with its required dramatic ingredients, Italian theatre itself was seen as a hotbed of vice: the fact that female roles were given to actresses, rather than to men dressed as women, as in England, seemed indisputable proof of the Italians’ lax moral code. Italian actresses could only be considered prostitutes (Parolin 2000, 107, 115). Sixteenth-century Italian theatre was thus vilified and feminized: it embedded female deviousness, cunning, and malevolent charm, all traits destined to enter popular British notions of Italy as a country. Indeed, in the already mentioned Instructions for Forreine Travell (1642), Howell described Italy as a mistress ‘able to turn a Saint into a Devill’ (quoted in Vander Motten 1997, 118). The Italians’ character was also seen as the reason for their predilection for comedy, a much-needed light relief in a life full of passion and revenge; unlike the English, the Italian public could not be expected to amuse itself with tragedy ‘which the Italian nature too much affects to imitate and surpass’ (quoted in Parolin, 117). Italy had certainly become a byword for tragedy. John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1602), Philip Massinger’s The Duke of Milan (1623), and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1623) were all titles which, to readers of the time, would have hinted at the content: passion, jealousy, murder, and in the case of Webster, incest. The possibilities of villainous Italianness, however, were not exhausted by the Elizabethans and Jacobeans: according to Marshall (1934, 231), between 1754 and 1818 pre-Romantic playwrights seized a familiar theme with their ‘tragedies of Italian jealousy’, which, with titles such as Italian Husband (1754), Fatal Falsehood (1779), and The Sicilian Lover (1796), were really about ‘celebrating a traditional literary figure’. But it is perhaps in eighteenth and nineteenth-century popular fiction that Italianness as a self-explaining sign was most exploited. Two-dimensional but loaded with meaning, Italian backgrounds stood for a heady mixture of ruins, convents, and opulence, while Italian

24   | beauty and the beast

characters were handsome and dangerously alluring (bandits, scheming nobles, or sadistic monks). Specifically, the proliferation of the ‘Italian Gothic’ novel began in 1764, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, defining a genre now best known for Ann Radcliffe’s works: A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and, poignantly, The Italian (1797, subtitled The Confessional of the Black Penitents). A glance at some popular titles from the beginning and end of the nineteenth century shows the endurance of this image of Italy: The Venetian Outlaw (1805), Legends of a Nunnery (1807), Manfrone; Or, The One-Handed Monk (1809), Barozzi; or, the Venetian Sorceress (1815), Vendetta! (1866), Castle St Angelo and the Evil Eye (1877), Il Mal Occhio or the Evil Eye (1894). Sophisticated readers and writers of the time may well have derided the cheap thrills of fictional Italy, and indeed Jane Austen constructed her most naïve and gullible heroine, Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey (1817), around her spell-bound admiration for The Mysteries of Udolpho: ‘I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the black veil. […] I am sure it is Laurentina’s skeleton. Oh! I am delighted with the book!’ (1993, 21). By repeatedly directing her irony at Udolpho, Austen shows her acknowledgement of its privileged position in the popular imagination; at the same time, her inclusion of Radcliffe’s work in a wider group of novels admired by Catherine, such as Horrid Mysteries and Mysterious Warnings, points to a critique of the whole genre rather than of its national characterizations. This may be due to the unquestionability of Italy as the appropriate setting for Gothic horror, to its entrenchment as such in British culture since the sixteenth century; as Churchill observes (1980, 17), Mrs Radcliffe looked mainly at Shakespeare for her construction of the Italian character, and it was Shakespeare’s influence that Walpole acknowledged in The Castle of Otranto, thus highlighting the Gothic novel’s debt to the English revenge tragedy (1980, 6). The strength of this villainous, murderous image of Italianness finds evidence even in the work of William Godwin: this liberal, unconventional, and supremely rational author writes in The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) that there is ‘scarcely any Italian that would upon some occasions scruple assassination’ (quoted in Marshall 1934, 243). While eighteenth and nineteenth-century Italianness was associated with danger, however, this remained confined to isolated individuals rather than to Italy as a collective entity: the country may have been populated by crooks and cut-throats, Catholicism may have been an evil cult headed by the Antichrist, yet Italy as a whole suggested treachery and mystery rather than menacing power. Even today, a classic Italian stereotype like the Mafia is not perceived as a direct threat to society at large, nor is it taken for a symbol of a general Italian offensive: it remains an underworld, a by-product of moral laxity more than an example of collective aggressiveness, simply the violent offspring of a nation incapable of self-regulation. There are historical reasons behind the dismissal of Italy as a corporate threat: first of all, Italy as a nation state did not exist until 1870, making Italianness the attribute of a collection of cities and geophysical sites. Secondly, before and after unification, it never posed a military or economic threat to Britain, therefore never rising to the status of national enemy variously enjoyed by France, Spain and Germany; this situation was of course changed by World War II, but only partly and temporarily, as will be discussed later on. Most importantly, Italy was never synonymous with Catholicism the way Spain or Ireland were (and arguably still are): it is

Introduction |   25

Spain, not Italy, that is associated with the Inquisition, and whose religion coloured a concerted national and colonial threat to Britain. While Spain waved the Catholic flag as an expression of aggressive power, forming a Catholic empire and attempting to dethrone Elizabeth I, the Italian Renaissance provided a picture of humanism and secular concerns. Similarly, Ireland’s prolonged struggle against British domination contributed to a representation of Irishness centred on religious difference, while Catholicism became a key to self-affirmation for the Irish themselves; the Italians, on the other hand, had no reason to define themselves against the British, and as a result Italian immigrants in Britain did not brandish their faith as a weapon of cultural self-preservation. In fact, as Sponza points out (1988, 133–40), Italians in nineteenthcentury Britain managed to shock both English Protestants and Irish Catholics by ignoring rules of Sunday worship and rest, and by counting among them a significant number of vociferous anti-papists, notably Mazzini and the supporters of Garibaldi. Italy, then, evokes a peculiar kind of menace, a hidden threat carried out subtly: its essence may be danger, but its mode of expression is often charm. The step between trickery and seduction is very brief, and the peril inherent in Italianness is compatible, indeed connected, with its other traditional attributes, for example artistry and musicality. Just as the foundation of Italianness is intrinsically dualistic, resting on a split between country and inhabitants, so the constructed Italian incorporates clashing qualities, blending craftiness with softness, immorality with attractiveness: his or her allure conceals a trap, as the beauty of art and landscape belies decay. It is perhaps this duality which marks most significantly the alienness of the Italian Other, the idea of danger masked by enchantment: it is villainy operating on a different system. In E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), Philip remarks that the Italian Gino is ‘a bounder, but he’s not an English bounder. He’s mysterious and terrible. He’s got a country behind him that’s upset people from the beginning of the world’ (1987, 88). The long-established figure of the insanely passionate Italian murderer, ready to kill at the slightest provocation, also hinges on the notion of an alien value-system, frequently based on cowardice as much as on violence; the polar opposite, in fact, of the idea of British ‘fair play’. For instance, as Halliday points out (1997, 351–52), in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles voices the opinion that it is natural for Sicilians to ‘empty a shotgun into an enemy’s back’ (1977, 86). This quote also highlights the appeal of the southern Italians, especially Sicilians, as representatives of stereotypes which are applied to their country as a whole; since there can be no doubt as to the British use of ‘Italy’ and ‘Italian’ as catch-all terms, which blur regional differences. To a large extent, of course, the same is true of the British usage of words like ‘Latin’, ‘Mediterranean’, ‘Continental’, and ‘European’, all vague, flexible, and interchangeable concepts. So while various parts of Italy have been endowed with different associations, their inhabitants are ultimately levelled by their shared nationality. Tuscany is a case in point. Famous, fashionable, and a favourite of the British middle classes, the region enjoys a special status among visitors to Italy; indeed, Verdicchio (1997, 195) draws a link between Dante’s representation of Florence as the site of Italian greatness (‘a new Rome’), and contemporary perceptions of

26   | beauty and the beast

the city as the epitome of Italian culture. Undoubtedly, urban and rural Tuscany is portrayed as a desirable, because tame, foreign destination, offering picturesque rest to the British elite, from Sarah Ferguson to Tony Blair; by contrast, the Italian South is often viewed as a semi-wild place, geographically as much as socially. This distinction, however, needs to be qualified. Perceptions of Tuscany are largely based on its identification with Renaissance art, and with a natural landscape characterized by gentle hills and well-ordered trees; the latter image benefits from notions of greenness and pleasantness, generally dear to Britons, making Tuscany (in the British mind) the most Anglo-Saxon of Italian regions. As for the Renaissance connection, it must be placed in the context of the immemorial division between Italian art and Italian character: the Mona Lisa, certainly, but also Lucrezia Borgia. Even the place itself, for all its pretty sunsets and designer olive oil, retains an intrinsic, exotic Otherness: if it didn’t, a British film like A Room With A View (James Ivory, 1985), which portrayed Tuscany as profoundly unsettling, would not have been as immensely successful as it was. Of course, A Room With A View (1908) is itself firmly established in British literary history; its author, E.M. Forster, has been invested with the authority of tradition and ‘Englishness’, with the result that his views on foreigners are easily accepted as received wisdom. Chapter 5 will address the issues arising from the adaptations of Forster’s work; here it suffices to say that, despite his merciless criticism of British tourists, Forster depicted Italy as a highly alien place. So alien, in fact, that in ‘Story of a Panic’ (1947) the English characters visiting the Tuscan countryside encounter no-one less than the Devil; death and social disgrace ensue. In view of what has been said so far, it should be clear that traditional British attitudes towards Italy have been complex and ambivalent, equally divided between desire and distance. To discuss representations of Italianness in British cinema is, first of all, to focus on a cultural medium whose very structure necessitates, as well as creates, both desire and distance. While the construction of spectatorship is a hotly debated topic in Film Studies, Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay remains an essential reference point: its outline of the dynamics of film-watching provides a useful model, and an appropriate starting point for this analysis. Mulvey’s argument centres on classic narrative cinema, and it is primarily concerned with the problematic position of women spectators in the economy of the film’s system: they find themselves objects of the cinematic gaze (which is assumed to be male), while at the same time members of the audience (therefore aligned with the gaze). Mulvey consequently identifies ‘two contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures of looking’: the first, scopophilia, ‘implies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen’. The second ‘demands identification of the ego with the object on the screen through the spectator’s fascination with and recognition of his [sic] like’ (1990, 32); Mulvey’s conclusion, that the only position available to female spectators is a masochistic one, sparked a variety of responses, notably the objection that alternative viewing strategies are possible, and that prescribed meanings can be resisted.4 While this feminist debate is obviously crucial, its relevance to this thesis is secondary to the fundamental structure defined by Mulvey: as an approach to the spectator’s construction of meaning, her theory can shed light not just on sexual identifications, but on the production of subjectivity in itself. Specifically, it can help define the terms in which a British audience, watching

Introduction |   27

Italianness depicted on the screen through a British point of view, will assemble notions of Self and Other; these notions, in turn, will direct the audience’s response to the film. The structure of looking, says Mulvey, rests on an initial division between subject and object, without which spectatorship cannot be established; while she conceives the act of looking as an erotic activity, it ought to be acknowledged that the functions of subjectivity cannot be restricted to a single purpose, but should be understood as a range of identifications, serving different ends in the constitution of the Self. While eroticism is an essential factor in scopophilia, various modes of pleasurable looking are available to the audience. Through separation from the Other on the screen, a subject will be formed, defined by the negation of (or separation from) the defining attributes of the Other in question. Rather than just an erotic identity, this negatively derived subjectivity will comprise a series of potential locations for the Self: one of these, of course, may be a national or ethnic configuration. The recognition of the Italian (un-British) Other will be mutually dependent on the election of British self-definition. Mulvey’s second point is the ego’s identification with the object on the screen, achieved through fascination and self-recognition: the ‘contradictory’, or ambivalent, prerequisite of spectatorship. For the purpose of this analysis, Mulvey’s description defines the process by which the Italian Other assumes the function of a surrogate Self: identification permits the temporary appropriation of Italianness (un-Britishness), thus allowing spectators to experience a different state of ‘being’. Mulvey’s gender-centred approach, however, remains highly relevant even in this context: the objectivization of Italian characters, whose point of view has rarely been privileged in British cinema, effectively feminizes Italianness as an attribute. Regardless of their gender, Italians in British films usually occupy a conventional female position in the structure of looking, being objects of the (British) gaze; this is especially significant in relation to Italian men, whose masculinity, as will be discussed in the next chapters, has been traditionally represented in extremely ambiguous terms. Furthermore, the cinematic feminization of the Other has a significant correspondence in the colonial representational structure: the colonist/colonized axis, which recreates gender dynamics, effectively feminizes its object through imagery (the colonized as effeminate) and practice (the colonized as disempowered). The fact that British cinema has consistently equated Italianness with Otherness, and that British culture has traditionally feminized both Italy and the Italians, only reinforces the application of postcolonial theory to British representations of Italianness.

Notes 1. One of the few notable exceptions is provided by Christine Geraghty (2000, 93–111). 2. Interestingly, in this age when classic authors are re-examined in terms of their racial attitudes, Shelley’s declarations have not tainted his reputation, which remains pristine; meantime, Jane Austen is on trial for having made someone’s uncle trade in the Caribbean (see Said’s analysis of Mansfield Park, 1993, and John Sutherland’s defence of Austen, 1998). It is more evidence of the fact that ‘Italianism’, in whichever form, is deemed acceptable and unimportant. 3. Perhaps thousands: in the Elizabethan age only, Britain produced five hundred plays dealing with Italy (Scott, M.A. 1916, quoted in Marshall 1934, 7). 4. See for example Ruby Rich (1978), who opposes real-life female spectators to Mulvey’s theoretical ones, pointing out their active participation in the creation of filmic meaning. Rich believes women

28   | beauty and the beast

viewers are capable of resisting preferred readings, or of reading against the grain. Janet Bergstrom (1988) objects to the idea that spectators must identify with screen characters of their own gender; Gaylyn Studlar (1984) sees masochism as an integral part of the viewing experience for both male and female audiences. Miriam Hansen (1986), in an article on Rudolph Valentino, argues that male stars can be objects of erotic desire for women spectators; Paul McDonald (1988) speaks of the ‘difficulties with the empirical evidence, theoretical foundations and universalising claims of Mulvey’s argument’.

1 History and Representation of Italian Immigrants in Britain

In contrast with modern economic migration, early Italian emigration to Britain was sporadic and markedly elitist. The Middle Ages, particularly the late 1200s and early 1300s, saw the formation of small commercial colonies in London and Southampton, through the arrival of traders from the wealthy mercantile cities of Venice and Genoa; at the same time, Italian banking firms were able to fill a niche left vacant by the Jews, expelled by Edward I in 1290. These latter Italian immigrants brought with them a new financial system based on money (Colpi 1991, 25–26), whose legacy is visible today in the £ symbol, and in the abbreviation ‘comp.a’ for compagnia (company) on five pound notes; Lombard Street in the City bears witness to their most frequent origin, Lombardy in northern Italy. The association of Italian immigrants with the financial elite, however, was never to be repeated, and while the movement of Italians to Britain maintained an exclusive character in the Renaissance, it became dominated by churchmen, scholars, and artists, who settled in centres of culture such as abbeys and universities; many Italian musicians were attached to the English and Scottish courts, as singing teachers to kings and queens, setting the tone for what was going to be an art-orientated immigration until the 1800s. While music continued to be a characteristic occupation of Italians in Britain, with over a hundred performers and composers arriving during the eighteenth century, painters and architects were also prominent, benefiting from the growing popularity of Italian style and Palladio’s architecture. In fact, the few Italians who moved to Britain in the 1700s often achieved a high cultural status, even contributing to the establishment of national institutions: the Italian Cipriani was a founding member of the Royal Academy, while the Royal Academy of Music was co-founded by Handel and two Italians, Bononcini and Ariosti (Colpi 1991, 27). The eighteenth century may indeed be a crucial stage in the development of an enduring Italian stereotype, that of the music lover and performer, whose appreciation in the upper spheres of society coexisted with his perceived ridiculousness, and Otherness, at popular level; a 1735 satirical print, concerned with foreign threats to British values, chose the famous castrato

30   | beauty and the beast

Farinelli as its example, contrasting the Italian’s grotesque decadence with Shakespeare’s solid, home-grown virtue (Duffy 1986, 132–33). As the 1700s drew to a close, however, the image of the Italian musician acquired a far less sensational or prestigious character, as high-profile immigration was confined to history by the increasing arrivals of unskilled Italian peasants, typified in the British imagination by their most visible representative: the organ-grinder. The itinerants from northern Italy who sought their fortune in nineteenth_century Britain were, to all effects, real modern emigrants, the product of economic and political forces in their country of origin. Many Italian agrarian economies had been destroyed by the Napoleonic wars, as small farmers had seen their land confiscated and distributed among loyal gentry and nobility, while armies seized their crops and cattle; demographic increment, the devaluation of agricultural produce, and the importation of cheap industrial goods, had all contributed to Italy’s economic crisis, and to a situation of virtual starvation in the countryside. The partial Italian unification of 1861 provided an added blow to many rural communities, as the removal of frontiers across the Apennines meant the disappearance of smuggling, a time-honoured source of income. In this context, emigration abroad developed out of a tradition of seasonal vagrancy, especially in the Alps and northern Apennines, where summer transhumance had been a way of life since time immemorial; the particularly backward mountain economy, dependent on a scarcely productive land divided into small plots, would have also been a strong motive behind emigration (Sponza 1988, 23–24, 45). But while a few Italian itinerants, turned street musicians and acrobats, had found their way to Britain since at least the early eighteenth century, in the 1800s their number would increase steadily, reaching massive proportions by the late Victorian years. British censuses show the escalation of Italian-born immigration, although their available data does not cover the first sixty years of the century:

Italians in Great Britain, 1861–1911:

1861

1871

1881

1891

1901

1911

Males Females M+F

3,903 705 4,608

n.a. n.a. 5,331

5,625 1,207 6,832

7,874 2,784 10,658

18,151 6,232 24,383

17,570 7,413 24,983

The 1911 slump is probably due to a variety of factors: the 1905 Aliens Act, which limited itinerant commercial activity, socio-economic changes in Italy, and a shift towards temporary and seasonal migration in the catering trade, which made many Italians fall through the net of the censuses. New occupational patterns were also responsible for the increasing number of women (Sponza 1988, 12–13). As far as regional origin is concerned, nineteenth-century immigration from Italy came mostly from Lombardy, Piedmont, Liguria, Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, and Campania: the latter region,

History and Representation of Italian Immigrants in Britain |   31

covering the area around Naples, was the only considerable exception in a prevalently northern pattern, with Emilia, especially the Upper Valtaro in the Parma province, far outstripping the other regions. These proportions remained virtually unchanged until the early 1900s, when growing numbers of southern Italians began to change the composition of the colony: indeed, by 1915, out of a total of 69,483 immigrants arrived in Britain since 1876, 15,486 were from Emilia-Romagna, 13,639 from Campania, and 12,747 from Tuscany, while Lombardy had only 4,916 entries (Sponza 1988, 25). London was the major receiver of Italian immigrants, although a few of them only stopped there en route towards other parts of Britain; the London community remained always the largest, numbering 2,041 in 1861, out of a total of 4,608 Italians in Britain, and 11,668 in 1911, out of a total of 24,983 (Sponza 1988, 13). Until 1881, Holborn was the heart of Italian London, where the community grew around Hatton Garden and Saffron Hill; in later years, immigrants increasingly settled in Finsbury, King’s Cross, and Soho, so that in 1901 the district of Westminster had 2,282 Italians compared to 2,029 in Holborn (Sponza 1988, 19). But while useful in determining the trend of Italian immigration, these figures alone do not give us any indication of the impact of the Italian community on British society: in an age of unprecedented economic migration, when newly industrialized cities attracted work-seeking multitudes, how prominent were the Italians compared to other ethnic groups? They were certainly not conspicuous for their number. In 1861, for example, England and Wales had 84,000 foreign immigrants, of which 4,489 were Italians; in practical terms, this placed the Italians in the fourth place, after the Germans and Prussians (34.1 per cent of the total amount), the French (15.4 per cent), and the Dutch (6.6 per cent). The Italians accounted for 5.3 per cent of all foreigners, followed by the Poles (4.3 per cent) and the Swiss (2.8 per cent) (Sponza 1988, 273). In a Scottish census of the same year, only 119 Italians are registered, and figures remained extremely low until the turn of the twentieth century. German immigrants predominated in England and Wales until the 1890s, when they were overtaken by the Russian Poles, mainly Jews, the real target of the 1905 Aliens Act; by 1911 the Germans were outnumbered also by the Italians, now occupying second place after the Russian Poles (Holmes 1988, 23). It must be remembered, of course, that none of these statistics included the Irish, considered British subjects since the 1800 Act of Union, and by far Britain’s largest immigrant group: in 1861, there were 601,634 of them only in England and Wales, against the 84,000 registered foreigners of the same year. Even when their numbers fell, as in 1911 when they counted 375,325, the Irish made up 1 per cent of the total population of England and Wales, and 3.7 per cent of that of Scotland at 174,715, overtaking all other ethnic minorities (Holmes 1988, 20). The Italians were thus, until the 1910s, easily eclipsed by other immigrant groups; they also played a negligible part in the competitive job market, as they mostly relied on their own idiosyncratic occupations or skills, as will be discussed later. This relative disengagement from British society protected them, to some degree, from the overt hostility encountered by other immigrants, while Italy’s comparative insignificance in political, military and economic terms made them a secondary target for xenophobia: as Sponza puts it, ‘Italy was never a threat to Britain and so it fell to other nations to be regarded as the most obnoxious people living on

32   | beauty and the beast

earth’ (1988, 121). While collectively dismissible, however, the foreignness of individual Italians could assume highly visible forms, securing them a firm place in nineteenth-century popular imagination: specifically, the organ-grinder became inextricably associated with Italianness, as well as the subject of heated debates, and a site for the negotiation of Victorian values. Italian street performers in Britain were the heirs of an old tradition in their native country: that of itinerant puppeteers bringing the Commedia dell’Arte to the poor. Indeed, organ-grinders were not the only Italian entertainers to be found on British streets, as an 1850 survey shows: a ‘One-legged Gun-Exercise Exhibitor’, two ‘Italian Pipers and Clarionet Players’, and an ‘Old Man with Dancing Dogs’ are only some of the odd characters identified by the author, Henry Mayhew. The first detailed descriptions of Italian itinerants date, however, from the 1820s, consisting of sketches of a string instrument player, the ‘Bladder Man’, and of a ‘Little Italian Man with Dancing Dolls’ (Sponza 1988, 62). Over this variety of performers, as the century progressed, organ-grinders stood out by their sheer number, figuring as the largest earning group among Italian immigrants in all British censuses until 1891; in 1861, for example, out of 4,185 employed Italians in England and Wales, 872 were street musicians, mainly organgrinders, followed by only 313 makers of statuettes and artificial flowers (Sponza 1988, 326). Until the end of the nineteenth century, most organ-grinders were from northern Italy, usually young and single, but deeply rooted in the extended family of the street musicians’ network. While ties of kinship and regional origin usually linked these men to one another, it was the occupational structure of organ-grinding which insured their mutual dependence: the padrone, or master, not only provided his boys with street-organs, food and lodging, but was also responsible for ‘importing’ them from Italy in the first place (thus assisting chain-migration). A version of the padroni system, applied to other activities such as catering, continued to provide protection to Italian immigrants well into the twentieth century (Colpi 1991, 152); in the 1800s, its functionality was evident in the negligible proportion of Italians confined to the workhouse (Sponza 1988, 65–68). However, while the security offered by the padroni was frequently offset by long working hours and low pay, it was the children in their employment who were at risk of exploitation and abuse; the plight of young organ-boys did, in fact, loom large in the British perception of Italian immigration, lending it a sensational edge which intermittently occupied the press for decades (Sponza 1988, 141–61). Although a first article on child exploitation by Italian immigrants appeared on The Times in 1820, hardly anything was written on the subject for the next twenty years; oddly enough, this was the period in which the number of organ-children rose to an all-time high, to then decline steadily during the rest of the century. In the 1840s, however, interest in the issue was rekindled by the press, sparking off a debate which was to involve British and Italian authorities, culminating in some ineffective legislation on both sides, as well as in a major report by the Charity Organisation Society in 1877. The ‘Italian slave trade’, as it was called by newspapers, became lodged in the public imagination by the case of Giuseppe Leonardi, a fifteen year-old organ boy who, in 1845, was found dying on the streets: an inquiry ascertained not only that he suffered from consumption, but that he had been neglected and repeatedly abused by his Italian master. Adding to the consequent clamour by English and Scottish papers, The Times

History and Representation of Italian Immigrants in Britain |   33

authoritatively spoke of ‘those unfortunate creatures who are brought over in shoals to this country to perambulate the streets with hand-organs’ (Sponza 1988, 147). Implicit references to Leonardi would thereafter inform every account of the organ-boys, as articles and letters in the national press kept the issue alive for years; as late as 1876, a letter by the influential Thomas J. Barnardo was urging the rescue of the Italian ‘White Slaves’ (Sponza 1988, 152). One image of Italianness resulting from this publicity, found in journalistic and literary production, was a pathetic one, in line with the paternalistic sentimentality of the time: pity for the helpless foreigners, who had swapped their sunny land for Britain’s harsh street life, was accompanied by worry about their moral corruption, the expected outcome of their early exposure to sin.1 Organ-boys were thus neatly placed in the cauldron of the great Victorian residuum, the unspeakable mass of beggars, prostitutes, and other undesirables in need of salvation. More difficult, however, is to assess the perceived Italianness of the other Italians in the case, the child-abusing masters, and even the parents back in Italy, allegedly selling their progeny into slavery; one can only speculate whether public revulsion against these crimes was, in any measure, coloured by traditional notions of the Italian villain, abundant in English fiction and drama since the Renaissance, and celebrated by contemporary writers (as in Wilkie Collins’ supremely evil Count Fosco, in The Woman in White, 1860). In any case, it is interesting to consider the sensationalism attached to the organ-boys against the real dimensions of the problem. British censuses reveal that most organ-children, unlike older street musicians, were working with their parents rather than with padroni, let alone ‘slave-trading masters’; they also show the percentage of under-16 itinerants as being a rather low one, as in the Holborn ‘Italian Quarter’, where they decreased from 20.1 per cent in 1841 to 14.0 per cent in 1861, and to 7.2 per cent in 1881 (Sponza 1988, 159). It is equally important, at this point, to assess Italian child-exploitation in the light of the social and legislative reality of nineteenth_century Britain. Until the 1870s, thousands of British children were working factory shifts of twelve hours a day, often dying from related injuries; they were also employed in the mining industry, since the 1842 Act barring children from underground work only concerned the under-10s (Best 1979, 129–36); the Children’s Protection Act arrived as late as 1889, and was, incredibly, an extension of an appeal for a dog’s home by the already existing Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Sponza 1988, 296). In the face of this bleak record on children’s human rights, one may wonder how much scapegoating was behind the sensationalist interest in Italian organ-boys, and the easy labelling of a whole section of immigrants as slave-traders. Child-exploitation was not the only issue to keep Italians in the news. The association of Italianness with nuisance and even danger grew in the mid-1800s, the result of public focus on street music, and on the overcrowded living conditions in Italian areas; these problems mainly affected London, which had the highest concentration of immigrants in the country, Italian and otherwise. Complaints about organ-grinding had first appeared in The Times in 1821, but the relative scarcity of street musicians had led to the subject being almost forgotten for twenty years; in the 1840s, however, as noise levels in general rose in the capital, organgrinders became the main target of an anti-noise campaign which polarized public opinion for decades, and which had in The Times its principal forum (Sponza 1988, 163–64). The

34   | beauty and the beast

conflict between compassion and intolerance, central to Victorian mentality, is evident behind the heated debate over the regulation of street music, with Italian itinerants being alternatively portrayed as gentle minstrels and noisy foreigners; as the 1840s were also the years when the scandal of organ-children hit the news, notions of Italianness must have been increasingly controversial and loaded with meaning. The anti-noise lobby was not simply reacting to unwelcome music and street obstruction, but was also articulating ideological positions and social fears: in the newly emerging bourgeois ethos of work, thrift and respectability, street music was associated with begging, vagrancy, and idleness, as well as with the lowest orders of society who appreciated it. Moreover, at a time when the suburbs had not yet been invented, middle-class desires to be at a distance from social inferiors coexisted with resentment towards the upper classes, who happened to champion street music as ‘innocent amusement for the poor’. Protests against itinerants thus mobilized fear of the proletariat, grudges against privilege, and suspicion of foreigners, in defence of a recently established class identity; it was argued that the rich could easily escape the organgrinders, by moving to another part of their spacious house or moving out of town altogether, while their tolerance was thought to stem from an intrinsic laziness and lack of morals, traits often ascribed to the organ-grinders themselves. In any case, parliament bills aimed at suppressing street music failed to be approved by the House of Lords (Sponza 1988, 163–94). But the final consideration which tipped the scales against organ-grinders was, perhaps, the fact that they were foreigners. The intrusion of outlandish tunes into respectable living rooms was more than a mere nuisance, it was a threat to ‘the Englishman’s fundamental freedom, that of privacy’ (Sponza 1988, 169); indeed, many satirical portrayals of street musicians in the 1800s showed a decidedly xenophobic slant. In an 1820 drawing by G. Cruishank, a crowd of Italian itinerants is immortalized by these verses: ‘Two Hundred RAGG’D ITALIANS/With dancingdogs and mice/Prepar’d for any dirty job/And for all sorts of vice’. Anti-Italianness went hand in hand with racism towards other minorities, as another Cruishank sketch, in 1826, gave an organ-grinder the caricatural Jewish features of anti-Semitic propaganda; in 1859, T. Gilks in the Illustrated London News placed the organ-grinder together with ‘Calabrian Minstrels’ and ‘Niggers’. The particularly vitriolic John Leech graced Punch with explicit cartoons, as in the one subtitled ‘Out with the Foreign Ruffian and his Barrel-Organ!’, in 1864.2 Such chauvinistic extremes were, admittedly, absent from the approach of many anti-noise campaigners, whose petitions gained illustrious supporters like Dickens, Carlyle, and Tennyson (Sponza 1988, 178), but as the overwhelming majority of organ-grinders were Italian, it seems plausible that their association with nuisance would have contributed at least to the creation of a stereotype. Despite all the negative publicity, however, or possibly because of it, many Victorian sentimentalists were inclined to defend and idealize these immigrants: they were seen as the comforters of children and invalids, bringing the warmth of exotic lands to the grimmest corners of a grey city. Street music was also linked to Christmas singing, therefore to fraternity and holiness, and indeed the organ-grinder was often depicted as a benefactor of the lonely and the poor: an illustration by G. Doré, dated 1872, showed a squalid London street livening

History and Representation of Italian Immigrants in Britain |   35

up to organ music, as barefoot children dance around the organist. In the caption, B. Jerrold commented on the striking transformation of the ‘woe-begone alley’, thanks to the efforts of the ‘swarthy player’.3 Such well-meaning if patronizing attitudes characterized the supporters of organ-grinding, to whom the Italians were romantic creatures, as cheerful and musical as Italy was always sunny; Italianness was a syrupy concoction, elaborated in response to subjective needs and social anxiety, just as the ‘Foreign Ruffian’ was the expression of deep-seated fears of poverty and foreignness. This split representation of the Italian immigrant, opposing the villain to the likeable but clownish performer, forms the base of contemporary Italian stereotypes, where glamour and style have been injected into a core image which is either corrupted or laughable (sometimes both, as in the opera-singing, pasta-cooking, mum-loving Mafioso; or indeed in the case of Collins’ Count Fosco, a hugely fat music lover with a passion for breeding canaries). By witnessing the first significant Italian immigration to Britain, the nineteenth century saw the construction of a stereotype based on supposedly direct impressions; pre-existent notions of Italianness, derived from literature and travel writing, were now added on by the tangible presence of the immigrants, whom the media increasingly presented as an issue. The organchildren scandal had brought Italians to the attention of philanthropists and moralists, while anti-noise campaigners had depicted organ-grinders as a threat to English home life; finally, the media frenzy surrounding overcrowding in Holborn promoted Italians to the official status of public menace. The City Press and The Times were the first, in 1864, to raise the issue of overcrowding in the Holborn Italian colony, linking it to poor hygiene and a heightened risk of cholera epidemics (‘fever’); local papers quickly expressed the same concern, as the Ministry of Health confirmed that the Italian Quarter had been the main source of contagion in the 1858 epidemic (Sponza 1988, 196–96). The issue remained a health and social concern for several years, to then sensationally re-emerge in 1879, following a much-publicized medical report (Sponza 1988, 216). Overcrowding was the product of an extensive policy of demolition and displacement, carried out in central London between the 1850s and the 1880s, as well as of the workers’ need for cheap accommodation near their actual or potential place of employment; as a result, fifteen families might occupy a house originally designed for one. To the obvious problems posed by so many people sharing limited space and facilities, must be added the poor construction of these houses in terms of light, ventilation, and sewers; indeed, some had no proper sewers at all (Sponza 1988, 196–97). Public indignation at this housing crisis reached phobic proportions in 1866, when a new cholera epidemic in London fuelled horror stories about Holborn’s ‘fever dens’; fear of disease, however, was soon followed by ethical judgements about the Italians, suggesting that they might actually enjoy their cramped and dirty living conditions, while reports of men and women sharing the same room supported the idea of their intrinsic depravity. Gloating accounts of young girls living with older men filled the press, which also provided descriptions of the organ-grinders’ cohabitation with monkeys and white mice: the resulting portrayal was that of a filthy, promiscuous, repellent community, a threat to the nation’s physical and moral health (Sponza 1988, 199–203). If this representation of Italianness rested on an

36   | beauty and the beast

indisputable fact, the above-average overcrowding in Holborn, it also ignored the English and Irish tenants who made up the majority of its inhabitants: on average, in each overcrowded house, Italians never accounted for more than 18.4 per cent of the occupants (Sponza 1988, 207–11). Public willingness to demonize Italianness was again evident in 1879, when the issue was raised once more by the medical journal The Lancet. Puzzled by the low mortality among Italian immigrants, irreconcilable with their overcrowded homes and dirty habits, the article’s author grudgingly explained it by their being ‘frugal and abstemious’ compared to the English working class; all the same, it was stressed that overcrowding was not unavoidable, but a direct consequence of the Italian love of filth and promiscuousness. Worse still, the ‘uncivilized’ Italian households were the haunts of ‘renowned South Italian brigands’ (Sponza 1988, 216–17). The impact of The Lancet’s report was both symbolic and practical. It crystallized the inclusion of foreign immigrants in the semi-criminal category traditionally containing ‘the poor’, while serving as an authoritative reference for the growing body of opinion opposing immigration. Racism towards Italians must indeed be placed in its wider context, that of the Victorians’ growing anxiety about political unrest, social deviancy, and foreigners; it has been pointed out that ‘the revolutionary year of 1848 was marked by a new Bill for the Registration of Aliens, which was put into effect in 1849’ (Rudman 1940, 21), and efforts to control immigration continued throughout the century, culminating in the 1905 Aliens Act. In any case, when emigration abroad was advocated as a solution to native poverty, the perception of foreign workers as a threat seems hardly surprising. The situation was not helped by the 1892 cholera epidemic in continental Europe, which prompted the Ministry of Health to order an inspection in the London Italian Quarter; the ensuing report, which described sanitary conditions as satisfactory, urged nonetheless the halt of ‘immigration of pauper aliens’ in the interest of public health (Sponza 1988; 221). As inspections of Italian homes continued for the next decade, demolition projects in Holborn displaced the community towards King’s Cross, just as the desperate housing problem of the London proletariat was being recognized by a specific Royal Commission, instrumental in bringing about the Housing of the Working Classes Acts of 1885 and 1890 (Sponza 1988, 219–20); the Act came one year after a major governmental inquiry about foreign immigration, which had also been identified as a national issue (Sponza 1988, 221). The end of the century was punctuated by the clash of pro-immigrants voices of liberal newspapers with those of MPs defending Britain from ‘human flotsam’, and with views on the Italians such as those expressed by W.H. Wilkins in The Destitute Alien in Britain: ‘to them the word “home”, so sacred to English ears, has no meaning at all, and with them decency, cleanliness and modesty become unimaginable things’ (quoted in Sponza 1988, 222). Reservations about the Italians’ morality had been expressed since the 1820s, when the predicament of the ‘begging boys’ had elicited grim predictions for their salvation, as well as generalized contempt for organ-grinders. The propensity to label Italians as depraved, which characterized journalists and clergymen throughout the century, is explained by Sponza as the reaction of the dominant, ‘respectable’ section of British society to three features of the Italian colony: the semi-begging status of its itinerants, the organ-children scandal, and the promiscuous implications of overcrowding (Sponza 1988, 232). The women and girls discovered in Italian

History and Representation of Italian Immigrants in Britain |   37

households may have been just a symptom of the growing female presence in the colony, and indeed the early 1900s would see the establishment of the family unit as the pillar of the Italian community; however, rather than an indication of a certain potential ‘respectability’, the increasing arrival of women from Italy was read as a sign of immorality, as they were supposed to have been ‘imported’ to work as prostitutes (although the preferred term was ‘immoral purposes’). The fact that a small number of these women frequented notorious Italian clubs, where they drank and danced after hours (as did a considerable proportion of British women), was taken as proof of their innate corruption (Sponza 1988, 254); while the argument that Italian girls ‘mature at an earlier age than English girls’ was used as an indictment of their inevitable fall into disgrace (Sponza 1988, 232). In fact, while casual prostitution may well have taken place, no evidence can be found of its widespread occurrence in the Italian community, whose tight social structure and relative economic solvency safeguarded it against this last resort; British figures relating to the expulsion of foreign prostitutes, between 1907 and 1913, show that Italian women made up only 2.5 per cent of the total (Sponza 1988, 237). Prostitutes, however, were not the only supposed undesirables in the Italian community, as its men (and to some degree its women) increasingly acquired a reputation for being violent. Again, this is not surprising in a climate where the Royal Commission on Foreign Immigration could assuredly state that, among foreigners in general, there was a disproportionate number of criminals, prostitutes, and anarchists (Sponza 1988, 241); still, episodic stabbings and murders in the London Italian Quarter, eagerly reported by the press, did nothing to alleviate a stereotype which, as already discussed, was rooted in English literature since the revenge tragedy. Specifically, the 1864 ‘Saffron Hill Murder’, in which an Italian had stabbed an Englishman to death, mobilized public imagination into a perception of Italianness which, until then, had seemed confined to fiction. Local politicians and policemen alike described Italian immigrants as highly irascible, ready to use the knife at the slightest provocation, especially among themselves; passionate jealousy and love of gambling were seen as precipitating factors in fights and killings (Sponza 1988, 243–44). Distinctions were often made, however, between northern Italians, reportedly law-abiding and industrious, and southerners, held responsible for every crime and instance of trouble-making (Sponza 1988, 243): this was particularly ludicrous in view of the scarce numbers of southern Italians in Britain, but as it was a view shared by many Italians themselves, it acquired long-lasting credibility. In any case, violent brawls during games of cards or morra were frequent, and a spate of murders committed by Italians in 1890, completed the alarming picture of a volatile and dangerous people (Sponza 1988, 245). However, there is evidence to suggest that the Italians’ violence was, not infrequently, a response to unprovoked aggression: organ-grinders, and later ice-cream sellers, were easy targets for hooliganism, thus frequent victims of verbal and physical abuse (Sponza 1988, 246, 313). Allowing for this mitigating factor, an analysis of British annual reports on the expulsion of aliens shows the Italians as having not been more violent than other immigrant groups (Sponza 1988, 249). The end of the century, however, saw an increasing number of Italian clubs, whose propensity to break the law provided a distinct new twist in popular perceptions of Italianness. As we have seen, Italian clubs had already a bad reputation because of their lack of ‘respectability’, evident in their nocturnal mixed-sex clientele; but the frequency with which the clubs’ punters were found guilty of

38   | beauty and the beast

unlicensed alcohol-brewing, gambling, and illicit trading, has been argued to have spelt the end for any residual Victorian romanticism about Italianness (Sponza 1988, 251). Admittedly, while revengeful though handsome cut-throats had held their place in Gothic fiction or thrillers, petty fraudsters could presumably inspire only contempt; but insofar as murders, crimes of passion, and even the occasional anarchist terrorist kept making their appearance in British newspapers, it seems doubtful that the sensational, literary side of Italianness could be forgotten. Governmental worries about revolutionaries, using Britain as a base for their subversive plots, were not without some foundation, as the late-nineteenth century saw bomb attacks against the House of Commons, the Tower, Greenwich Observatory, London Bridge, and Nelson’s Column (Holmes 1988, 77); on a more mundane level, there was a small, yet constant stream of socialists and anarchists finding refuge in the country. With the only relatively tolerant regime in Europe, Britain was the obvious choice for exile, and indeed all the most prominent Italian anarchists spent some time there, often settling for many years. As well as internationally famous activists like Enrico Malatesta (Holmes 1988, 77), there were less well-known characters who acquired notoriety through terrorist exploits: one was Felice Orsini, who in 1858 travelled to France on a forged British passport, in order to assassinate Napoleon with bombs manufactured in Birmingham (Rudman 1940, 21). In 1894, two Italians were found guilty of association with Martial Bourdin, the French anarchist who accidentally blew himself up in Greenwich Park, by the untimely explosion of his bomb (Sponza 1988, 264). These were, however, isolated incidents, just as the anarchists themselves were isolated from other Italians in Britain, whom they tried in vain to galvanize into political action. The outlook of most Italian immigrants was, in fact, utterly conservative: it was characterized by conformity, the ambition to be ‘respectable’ and to climb the social ladder, and the belief in self-reliance and hard work. Likewise, the Italian authorities in London were deeply reactionary, anxious to rid the Italian colony of any potential trouble-maker; this attitude was reflected in British-based Italian newspapers, who regularly ignored controversial issues even when they involved Italian victims. When eleven Italians in the United States were lynched for a crime of which they had been acquitted, in 1891, the Italian press remained silent; in 1898, however, it praised the infamous General Bava Beccaris, who had used cannons to shoot striking workers in Milan (Sponza 1988, 260–65). For all the sensational aura attached to it, the Italian colony from top to bottom remained intensely conventional, at the margin of political and social change; a notable exception was the small, elitist group of illustrious exiles who found a warm reception in Britain, and whose most famous representatives were Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi. Italian refugees had come to Britain in three consecutive waves, following a series of unsuccessful attempts to overthrow the governments of Sicily, Naples, the Papal States, and Piedmont. The 1820s, the 1830s, and the post-1848 years saw the arrival of upper-class patriots with strategic connections in British society: many had friends such as Gladstone and Russell (Sponza 1988, 129–32). Their appeal to many British people is easy to see, as the Italian struggle for independence was primarily anti-Napoleonic and anti-papist, as well as being founded on liberal tenets, in line with the beliefs of progressive Victorians; indeed, despite Queen Victoria’s pro-Austrian leanings, public opinion seemed unshakeable in its support of Italian unification, a cause which appeared

History and Representation of Italian Immigrants in Britain |   39

compatible with domestic patriotism. When Orsini attempted Napoleon’s assassination in 1858, Palmerston yielded to French pressure to pass a bill against Italian political exiles, only to see it rejected by the Liberals, who also overthrew his cabinet: it was the victory of those who ‘gloried in the presence of exiles and regarded them as concrete evidence of the superiority of free England to the despotic Continent’ (Rudman 1940, 21). Apart from ideological affinity and self-congratulatory benevolence, support for the Italian cause could also take practical forms, as in the case of Garibaldi’s campaign, for which British aid was ‘financial, diplomatic, naval, and military’ (Rudman 1940, 302); in fact, some British men volunteered to join Garibaldi’s army. Garibaldi’s case was perhaps unique among Italian exiles, as his appeal transcended class divisions: when he visited London, in 1864, more than half a million people from all walks of life were there to welcome him (Rudman 1940, 321). The last quarter of the nineteenth century brought fundamental changes to the Italian community in Britain, whose social and occupational structure ceased to be based on lone itinerancy, becoming increasingly characterized by family-run catering establishments. While the number of Italians in Britain had doubled between the early 1850s and the late 1870s, their working pattern had remained the same, combining street entertainment with some crafts, notably plaster statuettes and precision instrument making; in the late 1870s, however, developments in the itinerant trades led to the expansion of catering, and to the consequent decline of other activities (Sponza 1988, 55–57). The selling of food on the streets was not a new occupation for Italian immigrants, as some organ-grinders had long supplemented their earnings by offering chestnuts, which they brought with them or received in bulk from Italy; the chestnuts were roasted on braziers placed on barrows, and pushed around just like organs, while hand-organ music announced their arrival (Colpi 1991, 58). The same system was applied to ice-cream selling, another side activity usually confined to the summer, but which gradually lost its seasonal or part-time dimension, to become a full-time business; while its success was partly due to its being a specialized trade, virtually monopolised by the Italians, it was also a product of the economic context of the late nineteenth century, characterized by the growing spending power of the urban working class (Sponza 1988, 95). The introduction of paid holidays allowed more free time to more people, while improved public transport put the city centre, parks or the seaside within their reach: ice-cream sellers flocked to these newly popular leisure zones, and the subsequent boom in their trade laid the foundations for the stereotype of Italians in the twentieth century (Sponza 1988, 57). Indeed, British censuses testify to the pervasiveness of the food connection among the Italian community: in England and Wales, the 33 ice-cream and chestnut sellers of 1861 had become 2,824 by 1901; likewise, food dealers and manufacturers, such as bakers, confectioners, and greengrocers, had increased from 103 to 1,252. The number of street musicians, on the other hand, had steadily increased throughout the century, only to shrink dramatically in the early 1900s: out of 2,237 recorded in 1901, there were only 464 left in 1911. By that same year, ice-cream sellers had decreased to 1,281 from the previous figure of 2,824, probably having been absorbed in the growing sector of café and restaurant catering: Italian waiters had risen from a mere 48 in 1861 to 3,565 in 1911, the most numerous working group in the community, which had a total of 15,592 employed that year. The figures for Scotland are even more striking, as they go from recording hardly any Italians at all, to showing

40   | beauty and the beast

a massive increase in their number: from 328 in 1881, to 4,594 in 1911. No confectioners had been registered in 1881, but in 1911 there were 1,693 of them, part of a total of 2,344 employed in ‘Food and lodgings’ (Sponza 1988, 326–27); Greenock and Coatbridge alone had 220 ice-cream parlours (Holmes 1988, 51). Indicative as these statistics are, it must be remembered that they define only part of the Italian community in Britain, revealing popular stereotypes to be based on generalizations more than on facts: in 1911, for example, Italians working in catering in England and Wales amounted to 7,919, against an overall figure of 20,389 registered immigrants. The remaining majority of 12,470 were occupied in various activities, notably domestic service (1,247) and road labourers (499), while many had no fixed employment at all (Sponza 1988, 326). Nevertheless, the perception that most Italians were food-sellers of some sort acquired longlived credibility, just as organ-grinding had been accepted as the epitome of Italianness for most of the nineteenth century; in both cases, the Italians’ high visibility must have helped the establishment of stock images in the public imagination. Ice-cream barrows were often gaudily decorated, announced themselves with catchy organ tunes, and appeared ubiquitous: in Clerkenwell alone, there were over 900 of them by the turn of the century (Sponza 1988, 59). Barrows progressively gave way to horse-drawn carts, especially in Scotland and the north of England, where distances between towns were greater (Colpi 1991, 58). If Italians working as servants or bricklayers merged in the anonymity of working-class life, those employed in the ice-cream business must have stood out, being virtually the only ethnic group engaged in this new and picturesque activity. While employment statistics must be approached with caution, however, they do afford a meaningful picture of the changing social pattern in the Italian community. In the first place, the proportion of women had markedly increased, representing almost a third of all immigrants in 1911, 5,922 out of a total of 20,389. In 1861, there had been only 695 women against 3,794 men, roughly one in six (Sponza 1988, 326). Secondly, the shift away from street entertainment points to a major transition in the lifestyle of most Italians, who had moved from semi-nomadism to settled occupations, often running small businesses: this change had taken place in less than twenty years, between the late 1880s and the early 1900s, but was effectively enforced in 1905, when the Aliens Act made itinerancy practically impossible. Ice-cream sellers had to formalize and structure their trade, typically establishing a manufacturing base, from which barrows would leave in the morning towards their appointed pitches; while the usual padroni still commanded whole networks of vendors, independent families were increasingly competing in the ice-cream market, even gaining control of whole areas in the north of England (a structure still in place in the 1960s) (Colpi 1991, 59–61). The number of waiters reported in the 1911 census is evidence of the Italian infiltration in the restaurant market, often under the orders of non-Italian owners, but increasingly as part of another self-contained enterprise, the selling of food on the premises rather than outdoors: this development took different forms in various parts of Britain, as grocery shops and ice-cream parlours spread through coastal towns, Wales, the north of England and Scotland, while café-restaurants took hold mostly in London. An Italian Swiss, Carlo Gatti, is credited with pioneering ice-cream parlours, by importing

History and Representation of Italian Immigrants in Britain |   41

ice from Norway as early as 1857, although untypically his activity was in London; the Gatti establishment was impressive, featuring a music hall, a coffee hall, and billiard rooms (Sponza 1988, 96–97). However, echoes of the various ‘Italian scares’ of the 1800s followed Italian immigrants in the new century, this time in the shape of public alarm concerning the safety of ice-cream; the issue had first been raised in 1879 by the notorious Lancet report, and had reappeared some years later, when the death of a child had been attributed to contaminated ice-cream (Sponza 1988, 228). As Italians were already considered a health threat, supposedly enjoying overcrowding and filth, it was but a small step to view their quintessential product, ice-cream, as another menace hanging over the unsuspecting nation. This is not to say that worries about the hygiene of ice-cream were unjustified: to all accounts, manufacturing conditions were far from ideal, usually involving makeshift kitchens and storage areas at the back of slums, while selling procedures consisted in re-using the same glass containers for different customers. Indeed, today’s ice-cream cone dates from around 1905, when its introduction to replace the unsanitary glasses ‘saved the industry’ (Colpi 1991, 59). Although the predicted epidemics failed to materialize, safety measures were made compulsory, through the so-called ‘IceCream Clauses of the London County Council Act’ in 1901 and 1902 (Sponza 1988, 100); this appropriate piece of legislation, however, was but an official response to media-induced hysteria, which for decades had intermittently focused on the Italian community as on one more foreign pollutant. Food safety was not the only item on the Daily Telegraph’s agenda, judging from this excerpt from an article in 1898, at the height of the ‘poisonous ice-cream’ scandal: ‘constitution seems to stand motionless and helpless before a horde of unwashed, illiterate, semi-barbarous foreigners, who treat the lives of British children as if they were as valueless as their own’ (Sponza 1988, 229). In spite of racism and health scares, Italian catering continued to thrive, not just through the ice-cream trade but also with the first café-restaurants, which developed in London; from the same itinerant origin of chestnut or ice-cream selling, these cafés initially evolved by adding simple hot food, like potatoes and peas, to their usual fare. At the same time, more and more Italians in London were entering the exclusive hotel and restaurant industry, slowly making their way up the social ladder to the ownership of their own business; in the 1920s, high-class Italian restaurants would be opening in Soho and Mayfair (Colpi 1991, 62–63). The Soho colony was a new addition to the Italian community, consisting of recent arrivals from prevalently urban areas of Lombardy and Piedmont; because of their city origin and their upper-market work environment, these latest immigrants kept themselves at a distance from the other group, where itinerancy and street selling was still common at the turn of the century. Two separate Italian contingents thus developed, the one in Soho and the old Holborn one, which by then had spread into Finsbury: this was still mainly composed of people from Emilia, Tuscany, and Campania (Sponza 1988, 105). Social restructuring, as well as demographic and economic growth, characterized, therefore, the Italian community between the early 1880s and the second decade of the twentieth century;

42   | beauty and the beast

this phase was brought to a halt by World War I, which affected Italians like everyone else in Britain. Italy’s 1915 coalition with the Allied Powers, belated as it was, aided good relations between Italian immigrants and their host country; however, the reverberation of events on the Italian front was to negatively shape popular notions of Italianness, arguably for ever. A unified nation only since 1870, Italy had had no previous chance to prove itself in an international conflict. Soldiers had of course been used by the various states composing the Italian peninsula; indeed, troops from Piedmont had fought for Britain in the Crimean War, and their king Vittorio Emanuele had been awarded the Order of the Garter by Queen Victoria (Rudman 1940, 16). World War I nevertheless saw Italy in an unprecedented position, as she joined powerful military countries as their equal. Italian motives in entering the war centred on the hope of retrieving territory from Austria, specifically the border areas of Tyrol, Trentino, and Trieste; there were also promises from the Allies regarding northern Dalmatia, and parts of Asia Minor. The allure of these possible gains had finally prevailed, despite an initial governmental majority in favour of neutrality; public mood in Italy, however, is difficult to map, as the apparent consensus on non-intervention was broken by pro-war campaigning at both extremes of the political spectrum (notably by the then ‘revolutionary socialist’ Mussolini), as well as by mass demonstrations in Rome, urging the wavering government to join the hostilities (Candeloro 1993, 35, and Taylor 1963, 67). In Britain, enthusiasm at the 1915 declaration of war was the main reaction among the Italian community, who staged exuberant demonstrations in London, Manchester, and Glasgow; on a rising wave of patriotism, a total of 8500 men chose to return to Italy to fight (Colpi 1991, 67). Still, the first two years of war considerably dampened any Italian military fervour, as efforts to shift the Austrians from their positions in the Alps resulted in slight victories on both sides, and major loss of life. Many accounts of the First World War linger on the increasing apathy and despondency of the Italian army, made worse by its officers’ frequent negligence towards the common soldiers, who were given inadequate clothing and provisions (Falls 1966, 4–5); in technical terms, the army had never recovered from the 1912 Libyan war, had ‘little equipment and hardly any heavy guns’ (Taylor 1963, 68). The clamorous defeat at Caporetto, in 1917, has been presented by historians as the time and place where all the components of the Italian war machine – military, organizational, patriotic, emotional – failed together (Falls 1966, Gibbons and Morican 1965, Taylor 1963). The facts are simple enough: a surprise Austrian-German attack, on 25 October, broke through the Italian line at Caporetto, meeting little or no resistance, thus causing the whole front to disintegrate. Chaos and panic spread through the Italian soldiers, who abandoned their weapons and fled or surrendered in their thousands; some even deserted to the Austrians. A later recovery was only possible through the arrival of British and French reinforcements, and indeed Italy would depend on Allied support for the rest of the war. The effects of Caporetto on the Italians were a regret of having joined the conflict, strengthened by bitterness at the terms of the peace agreement, which were judged a poor compensation for their sacrifices (Gibbons and Morican 1965, 69–70); internationally, their sensational collapse in the face of the enemy seemed to speak eloquently of their military worthlessness. There is no scope here to discuss how the contemporary and retrospective mythology of World War I, arguably of any war, has been

History and Representation of Italian Immigrants in Britain |   43

articulated through inflexible notions of courage and masculinity; nor to examine those notions in the light of dominant discourses about nation and gender, or of the cultural, social, and military means of their enforcement. While we are concerned with the history of British representations of Italianness, it is sufficient to say that the Prime Minister at the time, Lloyd George, found it necessary to publicly defend the Italian army against allegations of cowardice (Gibbons and Morican 1965, 69–70); to this day, scholars dealing with Caporetto must face its received meaning, which is in excess of strategic considerations and informed by moral judgements. One British historian circumvents the issue by stating that ‘a general paralysis of the will overcame a large part of the Italian Second Army’ (Falls 1966, 49); others unequivocally write of ‘the Italian disaster’ (Gibbons and Morican 1965, 68, and Taylor 1963, 150). Caporetto even casts a retrospective shadow on Italy’s conduct, as the 1915 war declaration receives this comment: ‘[Italy] did not pluck up her courage to declare war against Germany until more than a year later’ (Taylor 1963, 67). Equally indicative is the defensive interpretation given to Caporetto by a leading Italian historian, who while positing the usual scenario of a tired, homesick Italian army harbouring a ‘spontaneous aversion to the war’, insists on the defeat being a ‘military error’ rather than a ‘military strike’ (Candeloro 1993, 189–90, my translation). Indeed, as Robert Bosworth explains (1996, 66) Italy is regularly excluded from international memories and studies of World War I, both in the English-speaking world and outside it: representations are usually in terms of trenches in Flanders or the eastern front, while the war fought in Italy is ‘all but unknown outside Italy’ […] only Caporetto, yet another Italian military disaster, is remembered.’ The inter-war years were a period of consolidation for Britain’s Italian community, which increased in prosperity if not in size: having reached approximately 25,000 by 1901, it remained fairly stable during the next thirty years. As always, figures given by British censuses only take into account the Italian-born population, ignoring subsequent generations who, though British by birth, would have both considered themselves Italian and been perceived as such; a more realistic estimate therefore places the overall number between 30,000 and 35,000 by 1931. The stagnation of Italian immigration was partly due to restrictions in British policy, specifically the 1920 Aliens Order; but it was also a direct result of Italy’s Fascist regime, which curbed the movement of prospective emigrants and Italian citizens in general. Italians had left their country in relatively massive proportions up until World War I, when emigration had reached an annual peak of 600,000; by the late 1930s, that figure had dwindled to less than 50,000. In Britain, London was home to half of the Italian community, while Scotland as a whole held second place with 20 per cent (Colpi 1991, 71–74). Following a trend started at the beginning of the century, the influx of northern Italians had greatly diminished, replaced by immigrants from central and southern regions, especially Tuscany, Lazio, and Campania; a 1933 census undertaken by the Italian government, of which only the figures for Scotland remain, gives 70 per cent as the percentage of immigrants from central Italy, 18 per cent for those from the north, and 12 per cent from the south (Sponza 1988, 25, and Colpi 1991, 76). The last quarter of the nineteenth century had seen the expansion of the Italian community into the catering sector, most notably ice-cream manufacturing. While this was greatly the result of the Italians’ domination of a specialized trade, matched by the growing spending power of

44   | beauty and the beast

the working classes, it was also determined by pre-existent occupational structures. It has been pointed out (Palmer 1977, 246) that while Italians in the United States and Switzerland built roads and railways, and those in Belgium and France worked in the mines, Italians in Britain were automatically barred from these occupations, the first being an Irish monopoly, the second an industry fiercely protected by the trade unions. The Italian ice-cream connection, however, developed unimpeded, keeping afloat during World War I despite a sugar shortage, and flourishing again afterwards; indeed, the 1920s and 30s were the golden age of ice-cream parlours. Most British coastal towns and resorts sported Italian-owned ice-cream shops, often part of family chains: the names of Notarianni and Forte, for example, were synonymous with real ice-cream empires, whose sumptuous parlours offered suitable leisure venues to the betteroff, as well as affordable diversion to those hit by the economic recession. In fact, one of the appeals of ice-cream parlours was their perceived ‘respectability’, which, unlike pubs, made them appropriate for women and children to frequent. By the 1930s, practically every Italian family in Scotland and Wales owned a catering business, be it ice-cream or fish and chips, or else a sort of convenience shop, selling cigarettes and sweets as well as ice-cream; in 1933, the Association of Italian Ice-cream Vendors counted 4,200 members in the United Kingdom. Ice-cream related activities also became a virtual Italian monopoly, with firms specializing in cones, wafers, and catering equipment (Colpi 1991, 80–82, and Palmer 1997, 254). Meanwhile, a different development was taking place in London, as more and more Italians were making the transition from working in a restaurant to actually owning one; while this social mobility was by no means achieved by the whole Italian community, many Italian restaurants were flourishing, attracting a wealthy and fashionable clientele. Restaurants in Soho and Mayfair, such as Quo Vadis, Bianchi’s, and Bertorelli’s, became very well-known, and Gennaro’s especially catered for an exclusive international set. Only in the 1960s would the less pretentious ‘trattorie’ become widespread (Colpi 1991, 80–81). While catering was now the dominant line of Italian trade, some traditional crafts had survived, notably statuette-making, which had become a settled rather than itinerant business; several Italian firms specialized in the manufacture of mosaics, London alone counting 80 of them in the 1930s. London also saw the greatest diversity in the Italian occupational pattern, as opposed to Scotland and Wales where the majority of Italians were employed in small catering businesses (Colpi 1991, 84–85). The rise of Fascism in Italy had momentous consequences for the Italian community in Britain. The immigrants’ political simplicity and distance from Italy, the Fascist government’s active courting of Italians abroad, and the admiration for Mussolini expressed by British public opinion until 1935, fostered a situation in which most Italians in Britain became supporters of Fascism, if only nominally. Largely ignorant of politics, most of these immigrants had also sketchy notions of ‘Italy’, identifying primarily with their village or region of origin; dialect, rather than Italian, was often the language spoken at home. The new brand of patriotism advertized by the Italian authorities, presented as synonymous with Fascism, was to prove seductive for a minority group which, historically, had met with rare praise and not a little derision in its host country. Accustomed to the total neglect of the Italian embassy, these immigrants were now seduced by its assiduous attentions, part of Mussolini’s plan to impress the British with the munificence

History and Representation of Italian Immigrants in Britain |   45

of his regime; in fact, a contingent of Italian professionals and businessmen had been sent to London to specifically woo the immigrant community, under the direction of the ambassador Dino Grandi. Their initial targets were those men who had fought for Italy in World War I, but soon the whole Italian colony was presented with new schools, hospitals, and holiday camps; every child could expect a Christmas parcel from Mussolini. Even more significant, perhaps, was the substitution of ‘immigrant’ on passports with the more flattering title of ‘Italian worker abroad’. While the full implications of Fascism were understood by few, the much-vaunted slogan of ‘Honour, Family and Fatherland’ was approved by most, as it befitted the highly traditional values maintained by the Italian community. This is not to deny the presence of ‘real’ Fascists among Italians in Britain: there were certainly hard-core party members, but they were a minority, matched by a small number of anti-Fascist exiles from Italy. The majority of people frequenting the fasci, Italian organizations which sprang up all over Britain, were attracted by the frenzy of social activities on offer, from classical concerts to days out at the seaside (Colpi 1991, 8593, Palmer 1997, 255, and Sponza 1992, 140–41). Mussolini’s regime thus fostered and exploited nationalistic feelings among a long-forgotten community, building on a precarious Italian identity which had developed from World War I; this adhesion to Fascism, however, must be placed in context with contemporary British public opinion, which was mostly enthusiastic about Mussolini. The Fascist take-over of the Italian state, in 1922, had been forcefully opposed by British trade unionists, but scarcely criticized by the British press, who had kept a largely non-committal stance; approbation, however, had soon poured in from all sides, including the Labour Party organ The New Statesman, which had described Italian Fascism as ‘a political and social reconstruction on essentially democratic lines’ (Lamb 1997, 61–62). In June 1924, the assassination of the socialist MP Giacomo Matteotti by Fascist squads had shocked international opinion, but had prompted very limited condemnation of Mussolini from British newspapers. Indeed, while the press was to occasionally fluctuate in its opinion of the Italian dictator, he would remain a favourite of British politicians for years, until Italy’s 1935 invasion of Abyssinia irremediably damaged Anglo-Italian relationships; until then, Mussolini was publicly regarded by Austen Chamberlain as ‘a strong man of singular charm’, and by Winston Churchill as ‘the greatest lawgiver amongst living men’ (Lamb 1997, 76). In this climate of adulation, the Italian community’s support of Fascism is hardly to be marvelled at, as membership of ‘the new Italy’ brought with it a claim of respect from British society; it was respect of an ambivalent nature, however, amply based on the idea of Italy as a chaotic nation of feckless ice-cream makers, who had found in Mussolini a much-needed leader. Churchill must have expressed the satisfaction of many when he praised the ‘discipline and order’ of Fascist Italy (Lamb 1997, 76), and it is ironic that by precipitating his country into World War II, Mussolini was instrumental in reverting the British public to its traditional notions of Italy. A definite shift in attitudes towards the Italians marked the 1935 Abyssinian war, which had been enthusiastically supported by the Italian community; economic sanctions against Italy were matched by hostility towards its immigrants, many of whom felt the need to naturalize and become British citizens. Far more dramatic was the impact of Mussolini’s declaration of war, on 10 June 1940. A first, immediate consequence was the arrest of all Italian men who

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had been in Britain for less than twenty years, a hasty and confusedly carried out operation, which led to some disastrous results: among the 4,100 Italians rounded up, there were wellknown anti-Fascists such as Decio Anzani, the Secretary of the Italian League for the Rights of Man, who had arrived in Britain 31 years before. While the inclusion of anti-Fascists in the War Office list remains unexplained, it was widely believed at the time to be a deliberate MI5 plot, aimed at the removal of ‘subversives’ whose names were provided by the Italian secret service (Sponza 1992, 127). At the same time, notorious Fascist Party members were inexplicably left out. Anzani and other anti-Fascists, some of them Jewish refugees, would subsequently die on the Arandora Star, a ship taking Italian and German PoWs to Canada, sunk by a German U boat on 2 July 1940; the number of Italians lost is still unclear, but it is reckoned between 466 and 486. There were 700 victims in total, many of the Italians being elderly men unable to swim, who could not fit into the insufficient number of lifeboats; there was also no emergency drill on board. The inquiry which the British government felt obliged to launch was effectively a whitewash, supported by claims in the press that the high death toll had resulted from the panicky reaction of the internees (Colpi 1991, 115–21). The latter view must be a particularly tragic case of stereotyping, but one which reflected British propensity to exploit clichés for political ends: a Foreign Office document of the same period, promoting the deportation of the entire Italian community, explained that Italian women and children were ‘potential spreaders of panic in air etc. raids from the Latin temperament’ (Sponza 1992, 142).4 As for the Arandora Star survivors, they were collected by other boats heading for Australia, Canada, and the Isle of Man, but their ordeal was not over: those placed on the Dunera, bound for southern Australia, were repeatedly beaten up by the crew, and robbed of all their possessions. Although some of the soldiers involved were eventually court-marshalled, again the whole episode was hushed up (Colpi 1991, 121–23). In Britain, Mussolini’s war declaration brought more immediate grief to the Italian community, in the shape of anti-Italian riots which took place all over the country, on the nights of 10 and 11 June 1940; riots were particularly vicious in Scotland, with Edinburgh being the worst affected city in Britain. Mostly, though not exclusively, street violence targeted property rather than people, as crowds smashed, looted and burnt Italian shops and businesses, completely destroying many of them; more abuse awaited the Italians rounded up at police stations, where people congregated to jeer and spit at them. One irony of this situation is that many of the arrested men, who were middle-aged, had British-born sons enrolled in the Armed Forces. The Italians’ internment was followed by the government’s confiscation of many of their businesses, under the Custody of Enemy Property law; one notable casualty was the famous restaurant Quo Vadis in London. The arrest of the men, and the difficulties of retaining their employment, made life difficult for Italian women and children, who had also to face daily abuse and hostility from their British neighbours; many of their shops closed down, as no-one would buy from the enemy. Italy’s surrender, on 8 September 1943, was followed by a rehabilitating portrayal of the Italians in British propaganda, though it is not clear how this improved public attitudes towards them; it certainly did not bring relief for the 140,000 Italian PoWs spread around the country, who continued to be used in the war effort despite protests from the Italian government, and in violation of the Geneva convention (Colpi 1991, 128–29).

History and Representation of Italian Immigrants in Britain |   47

On the whole, the wartime experience of the British Italian community was deeply traumatic, scarring at least one generation of immigrants, and prompting many to file for British citizenship after the war; this loss of confidence was particularly evident in the catering sector, as many cafés and restaurants which had previously displayed their owners’ name became anglicized, calling themselves ‘Premier Café’, ‘Cosy Corner’ and the like. While this change stemmed directly from wartime discrimination, it was also a response towards lasting racism against the Italians, which continued throughout the 1950s (Colpi 1992, 184–86). It was not all gloom, however, as some once-prosperous restaurants were reclaimed from the Custodian of Enemy Property, regaining and even exceeding their pre-war popularity: this was particularly true of the upmarket establishments in Soho. The post-war period brought fundamental changes to the size and composition of Britain’s Italian community. The war itself provided the first additions, as about 1,500 Italian PoWs remained in Britain after 1945 to work in the agricultural sector, later settling down in various parts of the country, especially in mid and southern England; at the same time, 841 Italian ‘war brides’ arrived as wives of British soldiers met in Italy (Colpi 1991, 129). But a real change occurred in the migratory flux from Italy, which had stagnated during the Fascist years, and now recommenced with unprecedented volume: apart from the would-be emigrants stopped by Mussolini’s regime, there were many Italians whom the war had left destitute or even starving, especially in the south. This mass of desperately poor people found an obvious destination in Britain, which was experiencing a labour shortage and urgently needed extra workers; like countless others, Italians were employed to rebuild the British economy. Whilst only 350 new immigrants from Italy were recorded in 1947, their number had risen to 6,500 in 1949, and reached a peak of 11,520 in 1956; in total, 148,140 Italians moved to Britain between 1948 and 1968, more than five times the number who had come during the entire period of immigration until World War II. Not everybody, however, settled in the country for ever, and in fact 20 per cent of these immigrants eventually returned to Italy; still, the net figure of permanent migration absorbed by 1968 was 118,558, which meant the quadruplication of the Italian community in a period of twenty years. In 1971, a British census recorded 108,930 Italians, a calculation which ignored, as always, second-generation and descendants; Italian sources for 1972 put the total of Italians resident in Britain at 213,500 (Colpi 1991, 134–35). Post-war immigration largely missed Scotland, shifting the weight of the Italian community even more firmly to England, which in a 1981 census held 91 per cent of the Italian-born population; Scotland had 5 per cent, and Wales only 4 per cent (Colpi 1991, 167). Traditionally, Italian emigration to Britain had been from the north of the country, but the new immigrants altered the colony in yet another way, as they were mostly from the south: Sicilians were the largest group, accounting for 35 per cent of Italian-born residents in 1984. In fact, the impact of the new immigration was such that, to this day, 80 per cent of Italians in Britain have southern origins (Colpi 1991, 175). A vast number of the new Italian arrivals were industrial workers, recruited in bulk by the Ministry of Labour, in collaboration with the Italian government; these employment schemes were responsible for the growth of entirely new Italian communities, such as those in Peterborough

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and Bedford, where the first Italians arrived in 1951 (Holmes 1988, 215). Bedford received half of the 15,000 Italian bricklayers recruited by the early 1960s, and was to become the largest proportionate Italian community in the country, remaining so today with an estimative figure of 10,000 (Colpi 1991, 174). Bricklayers were the most numerous group among Italian men, followed by foundry workers and miners; however, a new feature of this immigration was the unprecedented number of women, overtaking the men up to a proportion of three to one. This discrepancy between the sexes continued until the late 1960s, when the reverse trend began. Italian women were mostly employed in the textile, rubber and ceramic industries of central and northern England, but also in the domestic sector, and as cleaners in schools and hospitals (Marin 1975, 93); most of them were single and in their early twenties, and while some eventually returned to Italy, many settled in Britain permanently. Interestingly, very few of them chose British husbands, often marrying instead fellow-immigrants from eastern Europe, who had come to Britain through a similar scheme (Colpi 1991, 145–46). The bulk recruitment of foreign workers was strongly opposed by British public opinion, and was met with implacable hostility by the trade unions, who imposed highly discriminatory contracts on foreigners (Marin 1975, 92); local harassment was also common, particularly in the mining industry, forcing many Italian miners to seek other jobs, or leave Britain altogether (Colpi 1991, 148). The British government seconded public mood by abandoning the scheme in 1951, delegating the employment of all foreigners to individual firms; private companies placed advertizements in the Italian press, or even sent representatives to Italy to attract workers (Holmes 1988, 215). The next stage of immigration was to be characterized, again, by a chain structure, initiated by the immigrants themselves; by the 1960s this was the prime method by which Italians moved to Britain (Colpi 1991, 152). None of these developments, however, affected Scotland, where unemployment was higher and no recruitment scheme applied, and which saw only a few immigrants working in agriculture. Apart from industry, the catering sector was still the obvious destination for Italians in Britain. The old café-restaurants, evolved from nineteenth_century chestnut sellers and found especially in London, underwent new transformations in the 1950s: many specialized in the sale of sandwiches to office workers, others introduced espresso and cappuccino to the British public, thus becoming ‘coffee bars’. The latter were extremely fashionable in the 1960s, attracting a young crowd with increasingly disposable income (Palmer 1977, 259). Unlike their anglicized predecessors, coffee bars sold a form of Italianness (Colpi 1991, 140), associated with continental glamour and a desirable lifestyle; this reflected Italy’s newly fashionable image, conjured up by the clothes, scooters and cinema produced through its relative economic boom.5 The 1950s saw also the popularization of Italian-style eating through the new ‘trattorie’, unpretentious restaurants selling simple, but largely unknown Italian fare such as pasta and pizza. Here again Italianness was advertized, usually in garish fashion through artificial vine leaves, chequered tablecloths, and Chianti bottles as candle-holders. Later, in the mid-1960s, a more classy version of trattoria emerged, gradually becoming the norm at both ends of the

History and Representation of Italian Immigrants in Britain |   49

catering market (Colpi 1991, 141–43). Incidentally, and despite the southern origin of most post-war Italian immigrants, trattorie were mostly owned by northerners, especially those from Emilia-Romagna, usually the most affluent among the newcomers (Palmer 1977, 255–60). In 1969, for the first time, more Italians left Britain than entered it: it was the return migration of many post-war workers, now in a financial position which allowed them to settle down, but it was also the end of Italy as a massive exporter of immigrants. Although some of its citizens still went abroad to work, mainly to Switzerland and West Germany, Italy itself offered new employment opportunities in the heavily industrialized north (Holmes 1988, 215–16). Recently, the Italian community in Britain has been estimated to number 250,000 (Colpi 1991, 166).

Notes 1.  See also Sponza 1988, Chapter 6, 163–94. 2.  All these illustrations can be found in Sponza 1988 – see also 180, ibid. 3.  See footnote 2. 4. However, the Italians were not alone in being considered cowardly and unreliable: when an air raid in Bethnal Green spread panic and killed 173 people in 1943, public opinion blamed the deaths on the allegedly disproportionate number of Jews in the shelters: ‘it was all the fault of the Jews. They lost their nerve […] They haven’t got steadiness like we have’ (Holmes 1988, 185). 5. Incidentally, as we witness today the growth of Britain’s coffee consumption, it is the same Italian sophistication that is allegedly on offer, presented in uniform, globalized fashion by American and Italian chains alike, each of them striving to prove their Italian credentials: Starbucks advertizes vacancies for ‘baristas’, Costa claims to be ‘Il Cuore d’Italia’, and so on. As competition is maintained by an increasingly complex variety of coffee drinks, all bearing little resemblance to anything drunk in Italy, coffee chains seem a particularly crude metaphor for the construction of Italianness, amounting to a marketable commodity tailored to public demand.

2 Italianness in 1940s British Cinema

Introduction The 1940–50 decade saw British cinema crystallizing notions of national identity, while also producing a sudden proliferation of Italian themes on the screen. War developments, Italy’s peculiar position both politically and militarily, and its representation in newsreels, gave rise to an image which did not deny the Italians’ traditional role in cinematic and literary narratives; in fact, it happily coexisted with it. As far as Italianness in British cinema is concerned, a remarkable effect of World War II was that it engendered new viewing practices in the post-war period: audiences would enjoy Italian-based melodramas in the same cinemas where, not long before, they had sat through war reports on events on the Italian front. In at least one case (Madonna of the Seven Moons, Arthur Crabtree, 1944), an ‘Italian’ costume drama enjoyed great popularity while the war was still on. Italianness had thus become part of the spectators’ serious, informative, and ‘realistic’ experience of cinemagoing, as much as of its escapist, pleasure-driven side. This is all the more striking as, by the time Italian-themed films appeared on British screens, the ‘field’ surrounding ‘Italy’ would have comprised not only the latest developments (such as Italy’s surrender on 8 September 1943), but very recent memories of British fighting against the Italian army: thanks to newsreels, these memories would have been strongly visual, impressing audiences with powerful images of the Italian enemy. Lastly, before Italy’s capitulation, British propaganda films offered their own version of Italianness, whose ‘truth’ was strengthened by the authority exuded by actors such as Leslie Howard, David Niven, or Leslie Banks. This complex web of representations was underpinned by past Italian stereotypes; rather than fostering change, World War II confirmed and developed British notions of Italy and the Italians. This chapter begins by examining representations of Italians in British wartime propaganda, both in newsreels and feature films; it follows with a discussion of the role of Italianness in 1940s melodrama, focusing on a variety of case studies. Finally, the chapter concludes by looking at The Glass Mountain (Henry Cass, 1948), Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949), and Private Angelo (Michael Anderson, Peter Ustinov, 1949): these three films, while

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conforming to many Italian stereotypes of the period, are conspicuous for their idiosyncratic style, and their rather nuanced approach to Italianness. After Mussolini’s declaration of war on 10 June 1940, images of Italians pervaded British screens; this new cinematic representation was necessarily split in two phases, as the Italian surrender in September 1943 changed the balance of power in the war, leaving Germany and Japan as targets of British hostility. Prior to that point, however, Italy’s enemy status had been somewhat fuzzily defined: as early as January 1941, in a newsreel depicting the fall of Tobruk in Libya, the Italians were said to ‘regret the war’. This particular short, lasting only six minutes, is nevertheless eloquent in its depiction of the Italian army, presented as a company of grinning men coming out of foxholes, eagerly raising their arms in surrender; or as a group of prisoners smiling at the camera, in sharp contrast with the downcast and sullen demeanour typifying soldiers at the moment of capture. Indeed, the Italians’ obvious cheerfulness on the occasion of their defeat was a constant in British newsreels, as was the account of their military ineptitude, inversely proportional to the valour of the average Tommy, who could boast of taking thousands of Italian prisoners in a day. Wavell’s 30,000 (John Monck, 1942), a 48-minute feature on the 1942 Allied victory in North Africa, is one put-down of the Italian army, patronizing in tone and impressive in figures: contrasting Italy’s failure in Africa with its superior numerical strength, the commentary stresses how the ‘demoralized’ Italians have been wiped out, with over 240,000 of them being captured through the whole campaign. The film closes with a long shot of an endless column of Italian prisoners, ant-like and insignificant amid the vastness of the desert, clearly an improbable match for the victorious British forces. Indeed, military inferiority to just about every party in the war defined the Italians in most films of the time, fracturing their image as the enemy: unlike Nazi Germany, portrayed as a compact and organic evil, Fascist Italy on the screen was largely synonymous with Mussolini, while his army was seen as a reluctant aggregation of unsoldierly men. The tendency to identify Mussolini as the guilty party, responsible for Italy’s war against Britain, and separated from the mass of the Italian people, is evident in Yellow Caesar (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1941), a fifteen-minute composite of real footage and staged sequences. As the title suggests, the film’s subject matter is a cowardly dictator, although Yellow Caesar shows more than that. The first scene does not include Mussolini himself, nor does it introduce an enemy nation armed to the teeth, or a people irremediably corrupted by twenty years of Fascism: instead, we are shown an organ-grinder, grinding away under a giant map of Italy. The narrator announces ‘the story of a man who rose to become a dictator’, but also of ‘a nation who sank under him’; when ‘the nation’ next makes its appearance, it consists of cheerful peasants in folk dress, singing from their carts. Mussolini’s own family, says the voice-over, were just such happy, humble folk; as the young Benito is then shown, in the role of a child thug, the film seems to point to the dictator as an aberration from the Italian norm.1 Indeed, this is implicitly argued by the film, which explains how the Italians are Mussolini’s victims rather than his supporters, having given in to the regime after four years of civic unrest and intimidation by Fascist squads: ‘it shows how much they liked Mussolini’. Later on, the narrator unequivocally makes the point: Mussolini is disliked in his own country, because he has waged ‘a war against the Italians’. And

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the Italians are shown again, in the fields, reaping ‘hard work and death’, the bitter harvest of Fascism. Mussolini himself, the tormentor of his compatriots, appears as a buffoon, which is of course a timeless Italian stereotype; indeed, Yellow Caesar does not resist making fun of the Italians, despite (or is it because of?) their propensity for singing in the fields rather than killing and dying in the name of Fascism. One can only guess how a 1941 British audience, full of warring spirit and the will to fight on the beaches, would have reacted to the information that ‘Mussolini loves above all sounds that of the machine gun; Italians love the concertina’. Surprise would have been an unlikely response, as a prior idea of Italians as fundamentally laughable would have been reinforced. The staged recreation of Mussolini, made to look as ridiculous as possible, and speaking English with a very strong accent, would have also reminded spectators of familiar notions of Italians, especially immigrants; despite all incongruities within a national context, Mussolini is shown to be, after all, just another farcical Italian. Similarly, in another staged sequence, Fascist troops march accompanied by the popular Neapolitan tune of ‘Funiculí funiculá’: the effect is to reveal Fascism as a typical Italian product, at least in its aesthetics. If evil remains the prerogative of Mussolini, who is Hitler’s friend, and the attacker of weaker countries such as Albania and Ethiopia, the surface comedy of Fascism befits Italy as a whole. Yellow Caesar ends with images of innocuous-looking Italian PoWs behind barbed wire, confirming the not unsympathetic attitude of the film towards Italian soldiers. An equivalent treatment of the Germans, in a British wartime production, would be simply inconceivable. A divided representation of the Axis is evident in two films of the period, Ships with Wings (Sergei Nolbandov, 1941) and The First of the Few (Leslie Howard, 1942); the first is partly set in Italian-occupied Greece, and has the Italians (called ‘Itis’ throughout) as farcical puppets in the hands of the dangerous Germans, the ‘real’ enemy, whose scorn for their allies is shared by the British heroes. Incidentally, the only Greek character in the film is also depicted as laughable, but is redeemed by his heroic death at the hands of the Nazis; the Italians, instead, incapable of either evil or heroism, remain notable for being a bunch of greasy foreigners, whose construction of a dam in Greece arouses British incredulity: why would they need water if they don’t wash? Cleaner, though even more clownish, are the Fascists in The First of the Few, shown against the fictional background of an air competition in pre-war Venice; while British pilots collect all the prizes, the clumsy Italian authorities fumble with Mussolini’s telegram, gesticulate wildly, and finally kiss David Niven three times. The Germans, meanwhile, are seen busily organizing the invasion of Europe. An exception to this general mockery of the Italians is a 1941 newsreel, covering the fall of Amba Alagi in Abyssinia, which offers a rare chance of hearing the word ‘honour’ applied without irony to the Italians: it tells the audience that while the latter have ‘crumbled’ under Allied attack, they have only done so after a stubborn resistance, which is rewarded with full military honours. Mostly, however, the prevailing British attitude is that of Wavell’s 30,000, which implies ‘dishonour’ as the appropriate term for Italy, whose men are being taken prisoners at the rate of 32,000 in a single battle. It is beyond the scope of this thesis to analyze why the Italians, refusing to fight for the victory of Fascism, earned such derision, in contrast with the grudging admiration granted to the implacably tenacious Nazis; what must be noted is that to interpret Italian behaviour as cowardly was

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nothing new in the 1940s, but rather the reiteration of an accepted stereotype. As mentioned in the previous chapter, World War I significantly increased this tendency; as John Agnew has argued, a ‘cowardly’ narrative has been applied to the whole of Italian history, seemingly lacking ‘the heroic feats and sharp historical breaks’ associated with other countries, such as the French revolution or the Protestant reformation (1997, 38). In terms of British perceptions of Italianness during World War II, it seems obvious that Fascists who looked like comedians, and soldiers who refused to fight, assisted the construction of an unlikely enemy nation, easy to scorn but too ridiculous to hate. This is not to say that Italians were immune from the animosity poured on the Germans, and in fact, as already mentioned, anti-Italian riots spread throughout Britain following Mussolini’s war declaration (Colpi 1991, 105–08). But while mob violence will always find a suitable target or scapegoat, the representation of Italianness conveyed by British propaganda was not, overall, a negative one – if we take ‘negative’, in this context, to mean ‘deadly’ or ‘evil’. The Italians’ perceived harmlessness, their obvious indifference towards Mussolini’s war aims, and the amicable looks of those who were taken prisoner, all contributed to a rather humane picture, ultimately irreconcilable with hatred and destruction. The Italians’ harmless behaviour towards their official enemies was perhaps the most significant factor, and it was a constant in every Allied country they were sent to. In 1943, when Japanese PoWs in New South Wales staged a bloody revolt to escape from a prisoner camp, not one of their Italian inmates joined them: ‘in however partial and self-interested a manner, these Italians had delivered themselves from the fury of the militarisers and the nationalisers’ (Bosworth 1996, 74–75). All this meant that, by and large, the Italians’ reputation did not significantly worsen from what it had been before the war; indeed, a Mass Observation survey from April 1943, some months before Italy’s surrender, ‘revealed that Italians were relatively popular with the public compared with some of Britain’s allies’ (Holmes 1988, 194). It is not possible here to explore the vastest, political implications of Italy’s screen image, where an indulgent portrayal of Fascism dismissed a sinister period of Italian history; for the purpose of this work, it must be considered how wartime notions of Italianness were not formed in a vacuum, being instead coherent developments of well-established, if selected stereotypes. The sensational Italian villains of British literary tradition, dashing dark strangers usually inclined to stabbing, kidnapping or poisoning, were scarcely translatable into a real-life context of total war, nor could they survive the unmanly humiliation of too-easy military defeat; however, precisely because of the perceived harmlessness of the Italian enemy, these traditional representations were allowed to persist, relegated to the escapist field of melodrama, where they thrived. What British propaganda drew on was the familiar, if subjective experience of Italianness as an idiosyncratic immigrant minority, seen as a loud and picturesque lot devoted to singing, ice-cream making and hairdressing, collectively incapable of inspiring fear; it also built on Italy’s poor record in World War I. The resulting image of the Italians was unflattering but redeemable, facilitating their transition to the role of victims, which was to define them after the 1943 surrender and consequent German invasion; in fact, hints of the unenviable Italian position were already visible in 1942, when the film Desert Victory (Roy Boulting, David MacDonald, released in 1943), celebrating the battle of El Alamein, had stressed how Rommel had abandoned Italian troops in the desert without water, food, or transport.

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Once Italy was no longer the enemy, the contrast between Italians and Germans could be reinterpreted, opposing the endearing vulnerability of the former to the lethal efficiency of the latter. British newsreels and films now appealed to the audience’s compassion, centring their portrayal of Italy on two key factors: the Italians’ rejection of Fascism, and their sufferance at the hands of Hitler and Mussolini. The Liberation of Rome, a 1944 compilation on the Allied advance towards the capital, combined stirring images of poverty-stricken people with those of jubilant crowds, greeting the arrival of British and US troops. Allied leaflets to the ‘Italian friends’ are shown in close-up, followed by scenes of daily life in a city which ‘laughs again’. This sympathetic representation of Italy is also crucial to Naples is a Battlefield (Jack Clayton, 1944), which charts Naples’ progress from devastated war zone to bustling-again community; at the same time, the film recuperates the traditional association of Italy with romance, neatly bringing wartime Italianness to a close. Naples is a Battlefield begins with a postcard view of the bay of Naples, set against the soundtrack of a classic, melodramatic Neapolitan song: this single shot clearly sets out the viewing strategy required from the audience, based on the nostalgic recognition of Naples as the romantic place it was always meant to be. Indeed, the commentary that follows places the city in an innocent historical context, ignoring twenty years of Fascism and stressing instead the old Kingdom of Naples and its many subsequent invaders, of whom the Nazis are described as the latest exponents. As images of ruins replace the idyllic first view, Naples is implicitly linked to the sufferance and hopes of British people, by the narrator’s description of it as a site of ruin and devastation, but also as the first large European city to be freed, on 1 October 1943. Naples is seen as a casualty of war and dictatorship, left in a state of chaos by the retreating Germans, who had cut off its gas and power supplies, leaving its inhabitants to die from hunger, thirst and disease; moreover, German time-delayed bombs had killed a hundred people during the first days of liberation. The film thus asks for unconditional sympathy towards the Italians, and must certainly succeed through its combination of haunting images and positive information: the people filling the screen seem starved, drink from sewers, while being defined as firmly pro-democracy, grateful to the Allies for having brought them freedom. As reconstruction is shown to get under way, a more cheerful portrayal of Naples prevails, through a series of staged dialogues presenting daily interaction between people and Allied soldiers. The film ends with yet another view of the bay, accompanied by the familiar song, unequivocally restoring Italy to its traditional role in British fantasy: the land of sun, music, and love. Introducing her discussion of Gainsborough costume drama, Sue Harper (1987, 167) points to ‘stylistic flamboyance and emotional “excess”’ as the defining qualities of melodrama. That the same qualities have been traditionally ascribed to the Italians may appear coincidental, until one considers the recurrence of Italy as a theme in melodrama, and specifically in British popular cinema of the 1940s. Italian settings and characters were not a random choice, but part of a stylistic and narrative strategy, aimed at the expression of desires normally unacknowledged or repressed in consensus cinema; to examine the function of cinematic Italianness, one must look at the position of melodrama, or the woman’s film, in British culture and society of the period.

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Attempts to define and encourage a national cinema came to a head in 1940s Britain, as governmental and critical concerns converged in support of ‘British values’, a specifically constructed set of expectations and beliefs. While often disagreeing on the best way to convey them, both film critics and the Ministry of Information (MOI) sought to sharpen and narrow notions of Britishness, linking pre-existing national representations to newly established cinematic parameters. The realist canon, steeped in the 1930s documentary movement, and self-consciously opposed to Hollywood’s extravagant escapism, appeared highly suitable for the depiction of what was meant to be a ‘people’s war’; likewise, the austere chronicle of ordinary lives seemed an ideal vehicle for the promotion of those celebrated, and now much-needed British virtues of stoicism and courage. To convincingly portray Britain as an uncrushable nation, whose citizens just ‘got on with it’ in the face of hardship and bombing, was a central issue in the government’s policy towards the United States, and films such as London Can Take It (Humphrey Jennings, Harry Watt, 1940) were produced primarily with the American audience in mind (Murphy 1989, 15); at the same time, the need for morale-boosting and inter-class cooperation led the MOI, and several film-makers, to represent Britishness in terms of democracy, self-control, and resourcefulness. Wartime emergency thus mobilized and intensified established national narratives, as collective identity was constructed by postulating a pre-existent British tradition, specific in ideology and character: the emerging national subject, a somewhat ahistorical blur of ‘English’ and ‘British’, was a regimented version of previous representations. As George Orwell put it, already in 1944, ‘it is probable that the stolid behaviour of the British town populations under the bombing was partly due to the existence of the national “persona” – that is, to their preconceived idea of themselves’ (1947, 12); that preconceived idea had been there for some time, as even E.M. Forster, a sceptic and famously unpatriotic thinker, was writing back in 1920 that ‘when a disaster comes, the English instinct is to do what can be done first, and to postpone the feeling as long as possible. Hence they are splendid at emergencies’ (1936, 7). Distilled through the selective construction of a tradition, and ennobled by the war effort, this pragmatic British character was held in focus by a general social shift towards the essential and the sensible, what Pam Cook describes as the ‘masculinization of culture’ (1996a, 54); as women donned overalls and took over traditionally male jobs, wartime national values were visibly foregrounded, pointing to a ‘serious’ society with no obvious place for frivolity and excess. British cinema, defined in terms of narrative and visual restraint, became a crucial site for the affirmation of officially sanctioned Britishness, and as such was both targeted by government policy and praised by critics; to this day, the 1940s ‘quality film’ is considered the epitome of British film art, and by its virtues alone the period is often seen as the golden age of national cinema. The establishment of an official representation of Britishness, and its expression through a narrowly defined national cinema, must be evaluated in the light of its implications, as well as against the realities of British film production. A first consideration is that the grouping of certain values and characteristics under the ‘British’ label brought, as a logical consequence, the creation of a vast field of ‘un-Britishness’, the location for any behaviour or moral outlook being

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perceived as deviant. The un-British was itself organized into subdivisions, as different qualities were ascribed to specific nationalities, and often patterned so as to reflect war developments. An example is provided by the cinematic depiction of the Soviet Union and Germany, as explained by James Chapman (1998): in September 1939, with the Nazi-Soviet pact recently signed, both countries were seen in the grip of dictatorial regimes, conforming to the notion of ‘enemy’ and being dealt with as such by official propaganda. In June 1941, however, the German invasion of Russia changed British perceptions of the USSR overnight, leading to a representation of the Russian people as mildly exotic, self-sacrificing fellow-fighters: films as different as the openly leftist Our Film (Harold French, 1942) and the Laurence Olivier vehicle The Demi-Paradise (Anthony Asquith, 1943) presented the Russians as likeable, innocent, and heroic. The Germans, on the other hand, were by then uniformly regarded as the incarnation of evil, and while 1939 polls had shown a split between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Germans in the popular imagination, by the time of the Blitz the general British view was that expressed by Robert Vansittart in Black Record (1941): ‘that the Germans were basically an aggressive and barbarous race and always had been’ (1998, 221). The perceived Otherness of Russians and Germans was therefore articulated around the need to identify the ally and the enemy, and in this respect was directly connected to wartime culture at its barest; it is useful, however, to view both cultural production and the national mood not just in terms of the basic distinctions generated by the war, but as complex formations where various needs and desires competed for attention. This brings us back to the construction of Britishness, to the scope of its discursive practices in respect of national self-definition and, with cinema audiences, to its limits as a route to subject-formation. Given that the self-appointed arbiters of national character, the MOI and film critics, presented their vision of Britain as both necessary and authentic, one would expect widespread popular identification with this particular image, to the rejection of conflicting values; wartime cinema-going, therefore, would bear out governmental and critical assumptions. However, this is very far from being the case, as a number of recent studies on the subject have conclusively shown. In the first place, ‘quality’ or ‘realist’ films, supposedly expressing Britishness on the screen, accounted for a rather small percentage of the total British cinema output in the 1940s: in 1940, for example, only six out of fifty-one films released could be considered ‘serious’, rising to eighteen out of fifty in 1943 (Murphy 1989, 233–38). Secondly, cinema audiences showed a marked preference for ‘escapist’ features: Gainsborough melodrama, in particular, ‘outstripped Ealing’s realistic war films at the box office’ (Richards 1997, 111), to the dismay of the critics who found that ‘their favoured films had difficult box-office careers in Britain’ (Ellis 1996, 88). The discrepancy between officialdom, intellectuals and popular taste poses a number of questions, not least an interrogation of the ability of the Establishment and intelligentsia to connect with the ‘people’, whose war was ostensibly being fought; for the purpose of this thesis, however, one must focus on its implications for identity-formation, and for the validity of consensus Britishness as a representation of the national character. In other words, the hard evidence of cinema production and attendance points to official Britishness as a hegemonic discourse, whose apparent unanimity belied a complex and fragmented popular response.

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The specific case of the melodrama, or woman’s picture, whose critical vilification clashed with its huge box office appeal, begs consideration on various grounds: first of all, it suggests a significant counter-discourse at work within British cinema, thus placing realism in a less representative position. Secondly, it points to an alternative value-system as the context for audience identification, and therefore for subject-formation: this approach indeed characterizes recent work on British melodrama, notably in terms of historical representation (Harper 1994) and female spectatorship (Cook 1996a, b). Finally, it calls for an examination of this alternative subjectivity, of its structure and defining qualities. It is at this point that the Italianness staged for the screen should be analyzed, as a constructed nationality fulfilling a specific role, through a fixed set of representations. Melodrama, offering escapist space in a time of hardship, also provided relief from the rigid self-perception brought on by the war: it often did so by employing Italianness as signifier of a specific brand of un-Britishness, of a value-system based on different priorities. Beyond the primary opposition of self and enemy, and the association of self with ally, there remained needs and desires in excess of prescribed self-definitions, which found an outlet in a readily available representation: that of the Italian Other. Madonna of the Seven Moons: Italianness exemplified Madonna of the Seven Moons is a key production in the Gainsborough costume cycle, and not only in view of its popularity with wartime audiences: its narrative structure and visual excess now appear as encoded systems, providing female audiences with vicarious access to selfexpression, freer sexual relations, and fluid, transnational identity. In fact, the ‘woman’s picture’ as a whole can be viewed as a coherent, potentially subversive discourse, counter to consensus British cinema in its rule-defying, woman-centred narratives, typically featuring strong female characters in foreign or period settings. Loosely based on the homonymous novel by Margery Lawrence (1931), Madonna’s plot revolves around the Italian Maddalena Labardi (Phyllis Calvert), the respectable and submissive wife of wealthy wine-trader Giuseppe (John Stuart); the victim of sexual abuse at a young age, she suffers from a split-personality disorder, which grants her a second identity as Rosanna, the free-spirited and assertive lover of jewel thief Nino (Stewart Granger). The arrival of Maddalena’s daughter Angela (Patricia Roc), an Englisheducated ‘new woman’, unsettles her mother’s mental state, precipitating one of her spells as Rosanna and compelling her to leave Rome for Florence, to join Nino. The film’s climax sees Angela, led to the seedy inn of the Seven Moons by her search for her mother, on the verge of being raped by Sandro (Peter Glenville), Nino’s brother, only to be saved by Rosanna/ Maddalena who, having mistaken Sandro for Nino and not recognizing her daughter, fatally stabs Sandro in a jealous frenzy; as Sandro himself stabs her back, she finally dies in her husband’s house. On her chest, a cross lies next to a rose, symbolizing her dual life as saintly housewife and gangster’s moll. Predictably, feminist critique has focused on the pleasurable identification of female spectators with Maddalena/Rosanna, who manages to escape, albeit temporarily, the constraints of patriarchy and ‘respectability’; at the same time, the film’s exuberant foreignness has been read as a challenge to dominant notions of Britishness, providing relief from the austerity of wartime national self-representation. I am referring in particular to Pam Cook’s discussion of

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A chaotic exoticism labelled as ‘Italian’ in The Madonna of the Seven Moons (Arthur Crabtree, 1944). Courtesy of BFI Stills Collection and ITV Global Entertainment.

the film (1996a, b), as well as to Sue Harper’s (1994). Despite the attention paid to narratively and visually encoded subtexts, however, these studies have hardly considered the specificity of Otherness in its Italian representation; on the contrary, the inclusion of the Italian theme in the film’s assessment has been articulated within the unchallenged parameters of Madonna’s own stereotypical vision. The following analysis hopes to demonstrate that Italianness, rather than being a nominal attribute, swallowed up by Madonna’s jumbled exoticism, is instead specifically and traditionally constructed, serving a precise function in the economy of the film’s structure. Cook and Harper share a concern with the empowering subject-position offered by Gainsborough costume drama, and with the symbolic function of fantasy elements in its representation of foreign locations and historical past. Cook’s case study of Madonna scans explicit narration and non-diegetic text, in search of their implications for the construction of spectatorship; her reading of the film effectively places foreignness at its core, as motivation for the identity crisis undergone by its central character. Cook’s analysis of Maddalena concentrates on her dual personality, seen not only as the expression of an inner conflict

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between repression and freedom, but as the organization of that conflict around national or ethnic characteristics. In the first place, as Maddalena’s mental breakdown is triggered by the modern ways of her English-educated daughter, Cook (1996a, 92) sees her relapse into Rosanna as the pathological elaboration of a cultural gap: ‘the release of Maddalena’s pent-up sexual desire is explicitly provoked by a culture clash in which “progressive” English attitudes to sexuality and gender are in conflict with Italian repression’. Secondly, as Rosanna takes over, the extravagant dress-code and exotic imagery accompanying her transformation point to her appropriation of ‘Gypsyness’, as a metaphorical escape to freedom, representing ‘her urge to cross boundaries of time and place and elude the role allotted to her’ (1996a, 94). I would like to argue instead that Italianness, and not Gypsyness, stands as a signifier of freedom in the film, whose entire structure of feeling is based on liberation from anglophile propriety by immersion in Italianness. Shifting the terms of discussion from the construction of subjectivity to that of Otherness, Madonna can be examined as a highly representative document of the complex, but consistent Italy of British imagination. To analyze the terms of the conflict symbolized by Maddalena’s split personality, one must begin by looking closely at her representation in the film, which marks her as Self and Other at the same time. Maddalena’s privileged point of view, the fact that most of the time she is one step ahead of the other characters, encourages audience identification with her; however, knowing less about herself than the audience does, she is also distanced from them, while being constantly scrutinized, discussed and objectified as Other by the film’s authority figures (husband Giuseppe and family friend Dr Ackroyd), as well as by those signifying common sense (the housemaid, Angela and her English friends) or alien territory (Nino and his family). But despite her mysterious Otherness, Maddalena’s inclusion in a uniform, anglicized upper class places her in the same world as the rest of the Labardi set, and ultimately in the world a British audience would identify with, or at least aspire to. It will be discussed later how the Inn of the Seven Moons, and its associated characters, represent ‘real’ Italy on the screen; for the moment, it is enough to recognize that Maddalena and her daughter are equally at odds with it, and that the cultural clash is not between English modernity and Italian repression, as Cook would have it, but between familiar propriety and distinctly ‘foreign’ licentiousness. The film’s basic tension arises from the contrast between Maddalena and Rosanna, not between Maddalena and Angela: detached from the dichotomy experienced by her mother, Angela is effectively outside the terms of the conflict, rather than opposed to them. She is also beyond the melodramatic dimension inhabited by Maddalena/Rosanna, which is validated by the film, and which remains ‘much more powerful and resonant than the busy modern life represented by Angela’ (Murphy 1989, 51). But while Cook (1996a, 92) recognizes Angela’s desexualized image, ‘reminiscent of women’s masculinized wartime gear’, she situates it in a temporal opposition where Angela’s ‘present’ is contrasted to Maddalena’s ‘retreat into the past’. Focusing on the film’s visual discourse, Cook rightly observes how Rosanna’s Gypsy look is not narratively motivated, as there is no indication that any of the owners or punters of the Inn of the Seven Moons are Gypsies; Rosanna’s costume is there to indicate the freedom belonging to another time and another place. It is important to explore the issue of Gypsyness, looking at its relation to the location and representation of Britishness and Italianness in Madonna, to see

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how its function is cultural rather than historical, and directly connected to the film’s construction of Italianness; in order to do this, it is necessary to digress from Rosanna’s world to consider Maddalena’s. Although nominally Italian, the Labardi household presents a strikingly British appearance, providing spectators with a safe platform from which to observe foreignness. Not only do Maddalena and her husband speak English with an English accent, and are indistinguishable from any wealthy British couple, they surround themselves with British friends such as Dr Ackroyd (Reginald Tate) and Mrs Fiske (Hilda Bayley), not to mention their anglicized daughter and her British boyfriend Evelyn (Alan Haines). Together with Evelyn’s artist friends (Peter Murray Hill and Dulcie Gray), who although ostensibly bohemian mingle effortlessly with the Labardis, they appear on the screen as a compact front, the representation of a monolithic well-to-do class sharing the same lifestyle, and whose appearance, accent and manners are unequivocally British; in fact, the only obvious outsider in this flattened-out social group is Sandro Barucci, Nino’s suave brother and Angela’s would-be rapist, whose greased-back hair, dark looks and womanizing habits form a paragon of Italian stereotypes. As for the Labardi set, the ultrafamiliar impression they produce, and the feeling that the whole civilized world must be Englishspeaking, is corroborated by ubiquitous road signs pointing to Florence or Rome, conveniently written in English despite being in Italy. One may object, at this point, that Maddalena’s fervent Catholicism makes her unmistakably Italian, confirming Cook’s explanation of her repression, and fracturing Madonna’s homogeneous representation of an anglicized ‘norm’. A closer look at the film text, however, shows how repression is not linked to Italianness, but to the Catholic church, which is not the same thing. Maddalena’s husband Giuseppe, presumably not less Italian than her, does not share his wife’s devotional outlook: on the contrary, he prevaricates her wishes and has Angela receive a modern education rather than a convent one. What is more, none of the Italian characters we meet show the least interest in religion, and we are in fact told that ‘Nino hates churches’; the film’s representation of Catholicism is split between that of a group wholly outside society (nuns in the convent), and an anonymous crowd sharing a picturesque ritual (a procession, not incompatible with the carnival taking place in the same streets). Maddalena’s Catholic, flesh-denying fervour does indeed mark her as Other, but in relation to Italians and British alike, thus actually strengthening Madonna’s anglocentric point of view. But if Villa Labardi is nothing else than a thinly-disguised British home, where are the film’s ‘real’ Italians? The answer is found at the Inn of the Seven Moons, which, rather than a gypsy tavern, is the heart of ‘Italian’ Florence. Entry to Italy is signalled to the audience by the disappearance of English road signs and British-looking characters, and by the first sample of Italian language in the film, a plaque on the wall indicating the ‘Quartiere di San Cimiano’. Thus unquestionably framed as ‘Italy’, the area remains off-limits to ‘nice’ people such as Angela and her British friends; in an atmosphere charged with colonial overtones, Angela is deemed to need an escort to tour San Cimiano, while the only British person to tolerate it is a painter looking for the picturesque. Colonial intimations do not end here: the film’s construction of the ‘natives’ as a strangely dressed, primitive and lawless bunch, in contrast with the respectable

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anglophiles, freezes Italianness into a ‘system of representations’ as condescending as it is atemporal and ahistorical. Cook’s explanation of Maddalena’s transformation into Rosanna, that it is a ‘retreat into the past’, must be placed in the context of the film’s confinement of Italianness to San Cimiano. The ‘Gypsy’ clothes worn by Rosanna and her circle are not a signifier of Gypsyness, simply because, as Cook points out, Gypsyness is not meant to be there; what is there instead is a farcical depiction of the Italians, drawing on the past as on a rich heritage of stereotypes, steeped in the Italian Gothic of late eighteenth-century British literature. While saturating the screen with an extravagant and assorted exoticism, the film’s visual text is dotted with recognizable Italian references, guiding spectators towards a unified meaning, abiding by its peculiar aesthetics, in Cook’s words ‘chaotically foreign’ (1996a, 96), Madonna nonetheless labels its own chaos as ‘Italian’. Camera work assists this construction of Italianness. A close up of the sign announcing ‘Quartiere di San Cimiano’ is followed by a tracking shot, showing the British painter jostling his way among dirty and overcrowded streets, whose inhabitants shout and gesticulate wildly among ubiquitous lines of washing; barrel-organ music provides the soundtrack. Literally signposted as ‘Italy’, the area offers its most striking sight in the costumes worn by the mostly female crowd: head-scarves and layered flowing skirts, an improbable look for the Italian urban proletariat of the late 1930s (the time when, presumably, the action is taking place). Critics who have focused on a single example of the San Cimiano costume, Rosanna’s ‘Gypsy’ outfit, have explored its implications in terms of individual identity, transgression and liberation (Cook 1996a, b and Harper 1994), but have ignored the collective meaning emerging from its use as a uniform. Like past and recent reviewers of Madonna, Cook and Harper do not question the extraordinary attire of the Florentine people, nor the significance of any insistence on ‘Gypsyness’, namely the re-creation of Italy as a Gypsy nation. Leaving momentarily aside this iconographic confusion, let us return to the film’s visual narrative, which constantly brings the audience back from hybrid exoticism to distinct Italianness. As the camera shows Rosanna settling down again at the Seven Moons, a significant sequence opens with a close up of a large bowl of spaghetti, followed by a zoom out to show Rosanna, Nino and his mother eating at the table. A straw-covered flask of wine and an oil cruet are visible, while above Rosanna’s head, the word ‘Toscano’ on the door further proclaims the Italian character of the scene. Culinary pleasures are, incidentally, a defining attribute of the Seven Moons set, whose sensual indulgence spans from voluptuous eating of fruit to non-marital sex on the grass; by contrast, the Labardis and their British friends spend a lot of time sipping cocktails, and their eating, like their love-making, is mostly absent from the screen. Madonna’s construction of Italianness relies indeed on a dichotomy: that between two sets of moral and aesthetic values, anglicized respectability and Italian depravity. This is not only symbolized by the dual nature of Maddalena/Rosanna, but is also manifest in the contrast among the male characters of the film. As we see Angela travelling to Italy with her upright British boyfriend, the diplomat Evelyn, we are introduced first to Sandro and then to Nino: the former displays all the signs of an unprincipled gigolo, the latter steals their watch. Evelyn’s

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immediate dislike for both men strengthens the definition of two opposite camps, favouring audience identification with the champion of British decency, while identifying the Italian male as the treacherous Other. This primary division is visually enhanced by the physical difference between them: Evelyn’s puny appearance and conservative clothes could not be more different from Sandro’s muscular biceps, shown off by a vest, or from his flashy jewellery and sharp suits. Likewise, Nino’s greased curls and rough demeanour separate him from Evelyn’s low-maintenance look and fussy politeness, or from the harmless bohemianism of the British painter. The Latin Lover archetype, however, is a complex construction, whose flamboyant virility clashes with ‘feminine’ excess, belying a problematic relation to patriarchy; its charm is linked to verbal virtuosity and a preoccupation with looks, two traditional feminine attributes, undermining the Latin Lover’s claim to potency by hinting that he may not be a ‘real man’. It is but a short step from effeminacy to cowardice, and indeed Italian men have been amply accused of both. Madonna’s construction of the villain draws heavily on traditional notions of the Italian male, devising the Barucci brothers as a compilation of stereotypes: passion, charm and good looks combine with machiavellian scheming, womanizing, and violence. Sandro’s and Nino’s propensity to cheat and act surreptitiously, not to mention the use of sleep-inducing drugs as tools of seduction, lend a particularly cowardly feel to their crimes, widening the moral gap between them and the anglicized characters; this major Italo-British divide is stressed again and again in the film, which clearly separates two antithetical versions of masculinity. Sober and humorous, the British display self-control throughout, lacking the Italian eagerness to show off, whether in a knife fight or on the dance floor; their dignified restraint is complemented by costume and make-up, emphasising a solid if dull virility, which does not need to be constantly re-enacted. By contrast, Italian excess turns masculinity into a performance, stretching gender boundaries through an abundance of frills and ornaments. It is impossible to imagine Evelyn voluntarily dressing up as Harlequin, with tights and flounces, as Sandro and Nino do, or even wearing jewellery: his lack of self-embellishment translates into an essential manhood which is, however, virtually desexualized. The Italian man, instead, is feminized through his dual function as subject and object of desire. This gender ambiguity surrounding the Gainsborough Latin Lover is acknowledged by both Harper (1994, 122) and Cook (1996a, 107), who point out how the feminization and eroticization of Stewart Granger played a crucial part in the marketing of Caravan (Arthur Crabtree, 1946) and The Magic Bow (Bernard Knowles, 1946); curiously, neither brings Madonna as an example, although the observation equally applies to Granger and Glenville in the film. The feminization of the Italian male was nothing new in 1944, as Hollywood had long set a precedent with the construction of the ultimate Italian sex-symbol, Rudolph Valentino (who was, in fact, half French); indeed, Harper and Cook draw a parallel between him and Granger, stressing the exoticism and sexual ambivalence associated with their screen personas. More specifically, Madonna’s representation of its Italian ladykillers is indebted to Valentino on two accounts: first there is his role as erotic object, ‘his disposition to be liked, just as any beautiful woman should, according to prescribed rules’ (Leconte 1996, 82, my translation). Secondly,

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Nino’s and Sandro’s fanciful dress code, and their belonging to anachronistic San Cimiano, place them in a temporal limbo which echoes Valentino’s incarnations on the screen: as Malossi observes (1996, 24), Valentino is characterized by an indifference to modernity, usually dressed ‘as a Gaucho, as a Sheikh, as a Young Rajah, an outcast from modernity, a misfit in urban social life’ (my translation). Italianness is then visualized as an historical, cultural, and gender masquerade, implying both its Otherness (it can only be reached by abandoning the ‘normality’ of the self), and its essentially farcical nature. As the masquerade is itself a component of traditional femininity, the functionality of gender in defining national boundaries is much more evident in Madonna’s male characters, whose Italianness or Britishness is inscribed on their looks; by contrast, all women in the film are linked by an awareness of their own bodies, and by an interest in their exposure or concealment, the veiled nuns being an extreme example. Because of her preoccupation with the construction of subjectivity, Cook subordinates national and cultural representations to her search for a single identity, albeit a hybrid one, which she portrays as a sort of Gainsborough ‘new man’: the British actor in continental guise signifies an alternative British maleness, which has absorbed feminine traits through his encounter with foreign culture (1996a, 109). This is a useful contribution to the debate on gender roles, but a total dismissal of the representation of Italianness emerging from the film text: if the feminization of the British male can only take place under Italian identity, then it is Italian masculinity that is being enacted. The idea of Italianness bringing feminine qualities to British maleness implies, consequently, a prior British virility, pure and uncomplicated, which is evoked all the more as the Italian version takes over the screen. In a film like Madonna this is explicitly accomplished, as anglicized heroes offset and even outnumber Italian men; moreover, by the time Evelyn and his friend arrive at the rescue of Angela and Rosanna, the audience must be positively cheering for them. While Granger’s ‘feminization and eroticization’ is certainly suggestive of alternative gender patterns, it remains anchored to precise and separate national identities. Cook quotes Marjorie Garber (1992, 355) to explain how masculine excess in terms of appearance has the effect of ‘overshadowing phallic power with what it attempts to repress, and revealing that no one has the phallus’ (1996a, 109): no one, that is, among the Italian males, who by their very presence allude to the ‘real’ manhood of their British counterparts. Why would feminized masculinity prove so popular at the box office? Cook offers a valuable insight: the identification of Gainsborough costume drama as the answer to a profound cultural need, that for an alternative value-system beyond the boundaries of wartime national identity. In the context of the regimentation and masculinization of 1940s Britain, and of the perceived social duty to uphold rigorous ‘British’ values, it is easy to see how audiences would have looked abroad for a guilt-free dose of unmartial indulgence. Traditional representations of the Italians, particularly of Italian men, provided a ready-made antidote to the national imperative to be serious, good, and brave; and while this association with freedom undoubtedly charges Italianness with positive value, it must be remembered that it is the freedom to be frivolous, bad, and unsoldierly. Stereotyped as the opposite of what is proper, and even of what is real, the Italian Other is of course the object of moral ambivalence, best expressed in the conflicting meanings built in the single signifier of the Latin Lover. It is important in this respect to bear in mind

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how Madonna, as all Gainsborough costume productions, was specifically aimed at a female audience; the dominance of its male gaze is fractured by complicity with women spectators, splitting the film text in two. Just as the rebellious lifestyle represented by Rosanna is validated but eventually punished with death, so the Italian Lover is offered to the female audience as object of desire, only to be replaced by the representatives of patriarchy and order, the ‘good’ British men. It is highly significant that Madonna’s costumes were the creation of a woman, Elizabeth Haffenden, as it is the film’s visual discourse that constructs Italian masculinity as a spectacle, while marking female Italianness with the loose hair and floating skirts symbolizing freedom. This defiant subtext, enthusiastically embracing un-Britishness in all its supposed immorality, obviously endorses different values from those overtly promoted by the film; indeed, because of its functionality as a counter-discourse, and because of its overwhelmingly feminine aesthetics, Madonna (as most Gainsborough costume drama) has been critically reclaimed as ‘an affirmation of the feminine principle’ (Cook 1996a, 109), a subversive, anti-patriarchal, and even anti-nationalist text. One should not assume, however, that the film’s construction of an empowering female subjectivity guarantees its ideological independence from oppressive systems of thought. As Christine Geraghty points out (2000, 79), to assume ‘that the presence of excess is enough to challenge patriarchal positions’ is to risk falling into an unhelpful polarization of ‘good’ excess versus ‘bad’ restraint, reducing subversion to extravagance. While it is possible to identify two positions available to Madonna’s audience, and to label them masculine and feminine for convenience’s sake, it must be acknowledged that they imply different relations to the same stereotype, Italianness: any concession to women’s gaze is made at the expense of the Italian male, reduced to an exotic commodity, while the film’s revelling in Italian life relies on Italy’s image as an uncivilized and corrupted place. What is being validated is the depiction of a foreign culture based on a ‘system of representations’ which, incidentally, is as debasing and patronizing of Italians as patriarchal orthodoxy is of women. Bearing in mind Said’s discussion of Orientalism, one ought to focus on his main assumption, that cultural, historical, and political factors sway any creative work, and see that it can be applied to the analysis of Madonna in two ways. In the first place, the film’s representation of Italianness can be seen as the inventive mobilization of pre-existent ideas, the reliance on traditional images and beliefs summoned up by the word ‘Italian’; secondly, the relation of Madonna to contemporary events in British society can be seen not as a mirror-like reflection, but as a reaction. It is to state the obvious to remark how the film totally ignores World War II, presenting an atemporal world untouched by the very idea of it; as in other Gainsborough melodrama, there is an inability or unwillingness to re-create Britain as a war-free zone, and escapism is achieved by abandoning the place altogether. What must be pointed out, however, is that Madonna’s historical limbo is built on a location, Italy, whose established place in British fantasy guarantees the audience’s suspended belief; in this sense, Maddalena’s transformation into Rosanna is really ‘a retreat into the past’, as Cook argues, albeit a past that never was. Untouched by war, Fascism and its demise, or indeed the arrival of the twentieth century, Italianness is constructed according to deeply reactionary notions, in a literal reaction against the historical moment. By December 1944, when the film was released, Italy was undergoing a period of unparalleled turmoil, having broken its twenty-year consensus on Fascism; it was the

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site of a virtual civil war alongside the global one, was partly occupied by Nazi troops, and its relationship with Britain had diametrically changed since September 1943.2 None of this complex series of events affects Madonna’s representation of Italianness: recoiling from any painful contemporary issue, its stereotypical vision can be traced back not just to the sensational Gothic fiction of eighteenth-century Britain, but also to the influx of Italian itinerants in the 1800s, two cultural referents that, in 1944, had long ceased to have any material correspondence in British society. All this brings us back to the film’s visual discourse, and to the supposed Gypsyness of the inhabitants of San Cimiano. It would be pointless to deny either the presence or the strength of Gypsy undercurrents in Madonna: not only Rosanna, but the whole working-class population observes a peculiar dress code which, if certainly eclectic, is also clearly inspired by Gypsy costumes. The issue is not whether Rosanna’s earrings, shawl and mantilla are Gypsy-looking, but whether this Gypsyness provides a final identity for them, and by extension, for the world of the Seven Moons; it obviously does not, as the film constantly reminds the audience of its Italian subject matter, achieving an iconographic and semantic confusion in excess of any single ethnic definition. This hybridity, however, represents the film’s idea of Italianness, emerging out of the text as the visible expression of a deep-rooted, miscellaneously composed set of beliefs. As discussed in the previous chapter, the nineteenth-century association of Italians with organ grinders, itinerancy, and begging, had created a powerful image which echoed that of the Gypsy; like the Gypsies, these early Italian immigrants had been viewed with a mixture of curiosity and diffidence, reinforcing pre-existent notions of Italy which had pervaded English literature since the Renaissance. A surviving photograph,3 dated around 1890, shows an organ-grinder in Bradford: he has very dark skin, a big moustache, and bushy eyebrows framing a penetrating stare. His hat is angled over thick black hair, a voluminous scarf wraps his neck, as he stands next to two monkeys placed on top of the organ. The outlandishness of such a figure in 1890 Britain is obvious, as is his inevitable incorporation in a British imagery of dark and menacing foreignness. If we go back to Madonna, we find that the residents of San Cimiano look similarly wild and ragged, though even more bizarre, their allure lying half way between the criminal gang and the circus; their Gypsy overtones are not only the legacy of past social and economic conditions, but also the expression of colour-coded stereotyping which, associating dark with alien, mobilizes the same characteristics for different national or ethnic groups. A note is needed here to illustrate just how confused and careless, in this respect, were Madonna’s publicists, reviewers, and even stars. The film’s press book, for example, happily ascribed Gypsyness to the whole cast. When the adolescent Maddalena was raped by a peasant, she was in fact ‘brutally attacked by a Gypsy’; Nino was a ‘wild, low Gypsy character’, and even Rosanna herself was a ‘wild Gypsy woman’. Reviewers must have taken their cue from this synopsis, as they uniformly agreed on Maddalena’s attacker being a Gypsy, on Nino being another one, and on Rosanna being a ‘Gypsy wanton’ (see for instance To-day’s Cinema, 13 December 1944, 9, and Kinematograph Weekly, 14 December 1944, 6). Nor did reviewers become more careful as time went on: in 1982, Lynda Myles wrote in Time Out that the heroine ‘Medelena’ (sic) had a ‘Gypsy bandit lover’ and inhabited a ‘wild, Gypsy world’

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(31 December 1982, 21). But the biggest prize for confusion must certainly go to Stewart Granger himself: the link between his character, Nino, and the latter’s hometown of Florence was totally lost on him. For the rest of his life, apparently, Granger believed himself to have played the part of a Sicilian gangster: ‘I had to sing and accompany myself on the guitar, as apparently all Sicilian gangsters sing and play the guitar […] I had to sit back and let my friends in the profession send me up rotten because of my Sicilian gangster characterization’ (1981, 92–93). Lastly, an ingenious attempt at amalgamation was made in 1993 by Premiere (October, 31), choosing the term ‘Italian Gypsy’ to describe the ethnic stock of the film’s protagonists: this is, perhaps, closer to the mark, as the link between Italians and Gypsies is in fact explicitly made in the film, on one occasion only, when we are told that Nino’s mother ‘had a gypsy mother’. The Barucci brothers are therefore a quarter Gypsy, and their heritage is comfortably blended with the intentional Italianness of their surname, behaviour, and looks. Significantly, the two stereotypes overlap again in Blanche Fury (Marc Allegret, 1947), a Cineguild production, where Stewart Granger plays an Italo-British rogue who, having worn Gypsy garments, is mistaken for a Gypsy; this film’s narrative also constructs a hierarchy of alienness, as the Gypsy community is one step removed from the anglicized exoticism of Granger’s character. These are all representations of foreignness which draw connections between them, stressing the uniqueness and isolation of Britishness, while levelling all foreigners to criminal status; in Madonna, Nino is not only associated with Gypsyness, but with Jewishness, through his partnership with Bossi the jeweller. A stock stereotype, which stands out even in this cliché-ridden film, Bossi is shown rubbing his hands with greed while trying to cheat Nino, for whom he sells stolen goods: the stingy Jew is on a par with the violent Italian, their mutual understanding based on their equal corruption. The equation of Italianness with crime is obvious in Madonna, whose separation of anglophiles and ‘real’ Italians rests on the difference between respectability and vice; when the British painter enters San Cimiano, he is told that in that area ‘Nino is the law’, a reminder of the inhabitants’ low status in social and moral terms. The film’s construction of an underworld carries the narrative, which has its climax in the abduction of Angela and the resulting double murder; here a visual subtext aids the plot, shaping the Seven Moons villains to fit established notions of Italianness, using props and lightning to achieve its effect. Prone to violence and passion at the same time, Nino and his circle are savagely jealous, murder being a common solution to sentimental problems: accordingly, knives are prominently shown, and one of Rosanna’s first gestures when she goes back to Nino is to hide a knife inside her stocking. Stabbing is also the method by which Rosanna and Sandro kill each other, and Nino’s choice in his planned assassination of Rosanna, who is later swapped for Giuseppe. As discussed in the previous chapter, Lucio Sponza has shown that the knife-brandishing Italian, preferably moved by revenge, is a stereotype dating from the second half of the nineteenth century, when the British press revelled in accounts of the murderous activity of Italian immigrants. After the ‘Saffron Hill Murder’, in 1864, ‘ghastly stories in which the Italians appeared terribly keen to cut people’s throats were published with gusto’ (1988, 244); this brought a contemporary dimension to previously vague notions of an Italian threat, which had been based on the revenge tragedy and Gothic fiction. It was because of these literary precedents, however, that sensationalist images

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of Italianness could easily flourish, building on a powerful and long-established stereotype: as Sponza points out, ‘after all, the Italian “stiletto” entered the English language in the early seventeenth century’ (1988, 312). Gothic imagery is abundantly exploited in Madonna, which uses it to signal narrative shifts from British-like locations to ‘proper’ Italy; as Petrie (1997, 130) remarks, lighting and camera movement play a crucial role in the construction of the Seven Moons atmosphere, where strong shadows and extreme close-ups indicate emotion and danger. Cook also comments on this ‘expressionist’ style (1996a, 96), exemplified by the scene in which Rosanna climbs the tavern stairs to verify Nino’s infidelity: ‘high contrast, chiaroscuro lighting, looming architectural shapes and pounding music lend the scene a doom-laden intensity’. In this particular sequence, the use of traditional Gothic mise-en-scene also highlights the complex viewing strategy required by the film. As argued by Mary Ann Doane (1987, 135), the woman ascending a staircase is an iconic signifier in horror cinema, and one ‘which articulates the connection between the familiar and the unfamiliar’; but notions of familiarity are complicated in Madonna, whose ambivalent stance towards Italianness and Britishness is symbolized by the schizoid world of Maddalena/Rosanna. As Rosanna climbs the stairs alone, in tense anticipation of what may be going on upstairs, the audience identifies with her, moving from the known environment of the Seven Moons to the dissolution and juxtaposition of meaning produced by her sudden change into Maddalena. As Angela is rescued by Rosanna’s arrival, and Evelyn and his friend arrive on the scene, a shift in point of view takes place, resulting in spectator identification with the anglicized ‘normality’ of the Labardi set, now opposed to the unfamiliar dimension of the Seven Moons. According to Cook (1996b, 61), the way Madonna plays with spectators’ identifications allows for the creation of a temporary ‘Italian’ subjectivity: ‘audiences were encouraged to imagine themselves as Other through identification with British stars’. This analysis identifies a basic structure of looking, underpinning many films dealing with an obvious Other, but does not account for the peculiarities of Gainsborough’s foreign extravaganza: the point is precisely that audience identification would be with the British playing at being Other. It is true that, through British stars on the screen, spectators could fleetingly experience the Other as a part of themselves; but the film’s irremediably anglo-centric point of view maintains this Other as object, whose relation to the British Self oscillates between extension and dislocation. At the same time, the very playfulness of the performances, and the self-conscious artifice of mise-enscene, confine Otherness to a masquerade. Self as Other must remain a fantasy. Ultimately, Madonna’s construction of an ambivalent spectatorship relies on the intelligibility of its own signifying code: the moral and aesthetic positions identified with Italianness and Britishness sustain both text and subtexts, because they have a correspondence in an established system of cultural representations. The film’s box-office popularity suggests the successful deployment of recognizable structures of meaning, leaving little doubt about the readiness of the British public to accept a stereotypical rendition of Italy. While revelling in its own exoticism, Madonna of the Seven Moons does not encourage a European identity, nor does it oppose the nationalist ethos of the time: instead, the film is entrenched in specific and fixed notions of what it means to be British and un-British.

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The Magic Bow, Blanche Fury, and more torrid melodrama He might not have played a Sicilian gangster, but Stewart Granger continued his ‘Italian’ career with two costume dramas, the already mentioned The Magic Bow and Blanche Fury. While neither film matches Madonna’s feverish pitch, they provide more evidence of the specific use of Italianness in 1940s melodrama. The Magic Bow is a fictional biopic of Nicoló Paganini, the famous nineteenth-century violinist; the film again has Granger and Calvert in the leading roles, but the latter, unlike in Madonna, is cast as a non-Italian (a Frenchwoman). The result is that Granger/Paganini acts as the focuser of Italianness, aided by a script and mise-en-scene which isolate him as the main protagonist; despite the presence of beautiful women, this is really Granger’s film, enhancing the role of the Italian male as both subject and object of desire. Against the background of Napoleon’s imminent invasion of Italy, the film opens by showing Paganini as a poor but ambitious musician, forced to rely on the occasional patronage of wealthy admirers; one such benefactor is Jeanne de Vermond (Phyllis Calvert), a French noblewoman who, against the advice of her proud family, soon falls for the violinist’s genius and good looks in equal measure. As Paganini tours Italy to find employment, a succession of fortuitous meetings with Jeanne takes place, during which their rapturous mutual love is established; as the lovers are about to elope, however, Jeanne discovers that she is bid to marry into the French nobility, and that the order comes from none other than the Emperor. Fearful for Paganini’s life, the heart-broken Jeanne sacrifices herself, agreeing to marry the gentlemanly but dull Paul De La Rochelle (Dennis Price), a rising officer in Napoleon’s army; meanwhile, Paganini embarks on a meteoric ascent to fame, becoming Europe’s most feted musician. He remains unable to forget Jeanne, however, despite the crowds’ adulation and an affair with sexy Bianchi (sic, Jean Kent); when he sends Jeanne a romantic invitation to one of his concerts, Paul challenges him to a duel. Though bound by honour, Paganini has never crossed swords in his life, and only the tempestive arrival of Jeanne and Bianchi saves him from death at the hands of the Frenchman. After several pathetic scenes, Jeanne realizes she cannot bring herself to marry Paul, and decides to defy Napoleon and unite her fate with Paganini’s. A straightforward example of the 1940s escapist romp, The Magic Bow revels in its own frivolity, adopting a heavily frilled mise-en-scene which must have had the slighter actors, like Calvert, groan under the weight of their costumes. Visual and narrative excess are foregrounded, almost as if to detract from the film’s ‘serious’ aspect, namely its beautiful music score (with Paganini’s solos played by Yehudi Menuhin). Although dress and make-up construct their own discourse, they are supported by a plot which, insubstantial as it is, reinforces the assumptions on which The Magic Bow is based. The film’s central tenet is the passion-inducing quality of the Italian male, further enhanced by common clichés about artists, and opposed to equally trite notions of orthodox masculinity. As the protagonist, Paganini provides a ready-made Byronic figure, the tormented but sensual individual whose music hypnotizes listeners (mostly female ones). While Madonna of the Seven Moons had shown Nino/Granger dabbling with singing and guitar-playing, The Magic Bow has its male lead as a full-blown musical genius, an archetype implicitly equated with excess, which allows free rein to Italian ardour. Suffering artists have

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graced all kinds of cinema genres, but this representation of Paganini is culturally specific, adhering to the requirements of the ‘woman’s film’ of the time. The first impact of Paganini’s characterization is a visual one: with his long legs clad in tights, and his suitably tormented frown adorned by a carefully arranged fringe, Granger cuts a striking figure from the start, rapidly acquiring frills and embroidery as the film goes on. The violinist’s looks tell a story of constant self-embellishment, expressing character primarily through the body; continually on display, Paganini the musical performer is also performing his own masculinity, though as ambiguously as Nino and Sandro had done in Madonna. Defined by vanity and self-exhibition, the protagonist offers himself to the dual gaze of the public, the film’s crowds (mainly female) and the target cinema audience (also female); by functioning as erotic object for the other sex, Paganini is the paradoxical yet typical Latin Lover, an icon of virility which, however, occupies a traditionally feminine place in the structure of looking. This latent femininity is enhanced by his hair, which is long and wavy, and of course by his costumes: increasingly adorned in fabric and ribbons, with his legs on show, and taller than the rest of the cast, Granger/Paganini is a more arresting sight than his two leading ladies, whom he all but eclipses, despite their lacy petticoats and heaving bosoms. At the same time, the violinist presents a striking contrast to his rival Paul, whose cool demeanour is matched by a sober military uniform; in fact, as the audience is repeatedly told that the French officer has grown up in England, the ‘foreign’ De La Rochelle acts as a channel for national masculinity, aided by Price’s unflappable poise and staccato delivery. Emotions and their control, or lack of it, are indeed the plot’s ingredients, sharply dividing the Italian musician from the film’s other male characters: motivated by unbridled passion, vanity, and unashamed self-indulgence, Paganini is also quick-tempered and unpredictable, the polar opposite of that self-possessed manhood which Price/De La Rochelle represents. This over-thetop characterization, in line with established notions of the Latin temperament, completes the weakening of Paganini’s manly credentials; a virtual compilation of ‘feminine’ attributes, the violinist does not surprise when he is unable to compete in a duel. While constructing its protagonist along ambiguous gender lines, the film does not spare references to his alarming virility: like all menacing dark strangers, the Italian musician is imperious, arrogant, and palpably capable of violence. He is also a born womanizer, who frankly admits: ‘I admire virtue – in others’. The connection between Italianness and deviousness is not forgotten in The Magic Bow, which confers a touch of sinister mystery on Paganini: during one of his concerts, a woman asks another whether it is true that the violinist is in league with the Devil, and is answered that ‘some say he is the Devil’. The very power of Paganini’s music, shown to mesmerize even unwilling listeners, has indeed something disturbing about it, although the protagonist’s own words point to a more banal practice: ‘life is about charming people with music, so that they charm you with gold’. Exerting control on his own life and that of others, the maestro’s violin is nevertheless a metaphor for a different dimension: a world ruled by unfamiliar values. It reminds the audience that, for the duration of the film at least, there is an alternative to British austerity, and to the still very recent wartime ethos. This is nicely illustrated by the sequence showing Napoleon’s arrival at Parma: while Paganini is giving a concert, the

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invading French army gets nearer and nearer, to the total indifference of the musician, who continues to play. When troops at last enter the concert hall, headed by Paul De La Rochelle himself, the Italian virtuoso greets the officer with a complicit smile, and begins to perform a little improvised tune on his violin; De La Rochelle stops dead in his tracks, returns the smile, and turns back with his soldiers. The might of Napoleon’s army has been defused by music: Paganini has won not by force or reason, but by bewitching the French. Cunning, genius, and passion are all tied together in the film, and are all equally dangerous, providing spectators with what they must have come to expect: an Italian hero who does not merely please, but thrills; a wild, handsome, high-maintenance foreigner. The association of Italy with music, of music with passion, and of Britain with the lack of both, is stressed by the presence of Paul, who is English-educated and sexually uninspiring, as well as unartistic. When he protests at having to attend yet another concert, he is told: ‘in this land of music, you must try and hide the fact that you were brought up in England’. The product of English culture is defeated, while the all-conquering Paganini gets world-wide fame and the girl; it is an interesting fate for such an un-British character, and one which calls for a direct comparison with Maddalena/Rosanna in Madonna of the Seven Moons. While the female transgressor is punished with death for her excesses, the male sinner is granted a happy ending; any comment on gender politics here seems superfluous, and better replaced by the consideration that with The Magic Bow, for once, British cinema allows the (male) Italian Other to get away with it. Blanche Fury is an interesting case. Here is a film entirely set in England, among the wealthy landed gentry, with a plot centred on a dispossessed illegitimate son, and his attempts at reclamation and revenge; laced with illicit passion, class hatred, and murder, the narrative is both dense and self-contained. This material, however, was obviously felt not to be enough, requiring the addition of a little extra to add thrill and titillation: enter some Italian blood, in the shape of the illegitimate son’s long-dead mother. The Italian factor was already present in the film’s source, the novel Blanche Fury or Fury’s Ape (Shearing, 1939), by way of the protagonist’s grandfather; this national identification is strengthened in the film, which skips a generation and makes its leading man half-Italian. By inserting this detail in the biography of the protagonist, a character required to convey allure, alienness, and vengefulness, the film offers a clear preferred reading to the audience: the tried and tested ‘field’ surrounding the word ‘Italy’. Set in Victorian times, and shot in lurid Technicolour, Blanche Fury is in fact a Gothic tale, the natural British environment for handsome, dangerous Italian men. The film stars Stewart Granger as Philip Thorn, the claimant to the Fury estate: the son of the former head of the family and his Italian mistress, he is employed as a steward in the house which he should command. Brooding and passionate, Philip is full of hatred towards those who have made him an outcast, but cannot help falling madly in love with a Fury, his cousin Blanche (Valerie Hobson). A poor and distant relation, Blanche is at first a mere governess in the Fury household, looking after Lavinia, the family’s youngest member; driven by ambition, though, she manages to charm the heir, the uninspiring Lawrence (Michael Gough), and marry him. However, the seething passion between Philip and Blanche can hardly be repressed, and shortly after the wedding the two embark on a torrid affair; soon Philip, unable to prove his claim to the Fury fortune by legal means, decides to murder Blanche’s husband, in order to marry his cousin himself, thus

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gaining his rightful place in the family. Philip’s plan is to take advantage of a series of recent robberies in the neighbourhood, carried out by a group of Gypsies; as some of the thieves have already been convicted, the area’s landowners fear Gypsy retribution. Hoping to have his crime ascribed to the revengeful itinerants, Philip dresses up with scarves and a conspicuous earring, breaks into the Fury mansion, and shoots Lawrence. Blanche recognizes Philip, but remains silent; in the coming days, however, her lover turns crazy with greed, plotting to kill Lavinia, the remaining heir to the Fury estate. Horrified and heart-broken, Blanche denounces Philip to the police, and consequently sees him imprisoned, tried, and sentenced to death; in the meantime, Lavinia dies in a riding accident. Before his execution, Philip discovers that Blanche is pregnant with his child: this new heir, his own flesh and blood, will be the inheritor of the family’s wealth. On the same day that Philip is hanged, Blanche gives birth to their son, whom she calls Philip; soon afterwards she dies, leaving the child in the care of her Italian maid. Such an extravagant plot, based on unruly and primeval passions, could have been certainly developed without recourse to foreignness; indeed, The Wicked Lady (Leslie Arliss, Louis Levy, 1945) is an excellent example of all-native, bodice-ripping excess. On the other hand, the privileged place of Italianness in British sensationalism, the result of centuries of tradition, makes it an obvious and desirable narrative ingredient; by giving an Italian twist to its tale of crime and desire, Blanche Fury is, first of all, following conventions and fulfilling expectations. Secondly, by making an un-British character the prime locus of pleasure and sin, the film provides a freer path to the vicarious enjoyment of both. Lastly, the familiarity of the Italian signifier is highly functional in the film’s economy: Philip’s maternal ancestry may be a detail, but one capable of speaking volumes to a well-trained audience. Above all, Philip’s Italianness signals the presence of a different masculinity, facilitating the film’s construction of a specifically ambiguous protagonist: as both erotic subject and object, Philip exemplifies the position of stereotypical Latin Lovers. Like most costume romps of the time, Blanche Fury targets a female audience, channelling subjectivity through the heroine; as a subject, however, the latter is indissolubly tied to her love-object, and indeed their earth-shattering affair motivates the film. When her lover dies, so does Blanche, bringing the narrative to a close. Philip, the trigger of passion and tragedy, is a peculiar objectified protagonist, so often found in the ‘woman’s film’: a male hero offered for consumption to female spectators, who nevertheless retains a masterful, even cruel ascendency over his lover (and, by default, over the audience). At once predator and prey, Philip’s character can only benefit from some Italianness, which automatically situates him in the gender-ambivalent realm of the Latin Lover. Eloquent as it is, though, the Italian ‘field’ still needs placing in an oppositional signifying system: the contrast with Britishness not only defines its function, allowing plot and subplot to be decoded, but permits the audience to enjoy fully their moment of escapism. If pleasure must be derived from escape, then the abandonment of dreary ‘normality’ ought to come first; Blanche Fury links the ‘normal’ to full British credentials (the wholly native Furys) and the status quo (the ruling class they belong to). Half-foreign and cast out, Philip articulates social difference, but he does so as part of the film’s dominant discourse, which subordinates class structure to sexual power: ruthless and murderous though he is, Philip wreaks the most havoc

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by his seduction of Blanche. The contest for the possession of the Fury estate, fought between Philip, his uncle, and his cousin Lawrence, is really a masculine war between two incompatible factions: a war, the film suggests, which the two Furys have lost from the start. The superiority of the half-Italian man to his opponents is confirmed at the end, when his child inherits the whole fortune, but it had been established much earlier: from his first appearance on the screen, as the audience is led to understand, Philip emanates shock waves of sexual tension, thus identifying himself as the dominant male. Conversely, Lawrence’s introduction, in the same sequence, can be best described as a non-event. Later on, Lawrence is banned from the conjugal bedroom immediately after the wedding, while his wife and Philip indulge their mutual passion (something a 1947 film could not show, but heavily hints at). However, as in the case of Philip’s Italian ancestry, the sexual contrast between the two men is not a technical necessity: Blanche Fury would have had enough sizzling passion without the addition of a boring husband. Nor is Philip’s role embellished by the contrast with Lawrence: played by established heart-throb Granger, and exuding virility through script and performance, Philip is clearly an erotic prize in his own right. Nevertheless, the film forcefully compares Philip to his all-British counterpart, the ungainly, desexualized, and abysmally dull Lawrence. Why? The most obvious answer is that Blanche Fury follows a common tendency in 1940s British melodrama: it fosters a temporary distancing of the self from national identifications. By representing orthodox Britishness as stifling and unexciting, the film urges spectators to enjoy forbidden pleasures; at the same time, the protagonists’ eventual punishment avoids any associated guilt. Desire and freedom are projected onto the Other, whose Italian particularity (or Italian-like, as in Blanche’s case) ideally suits the celebration of specific qualities (passion, sensuality, and wildness). As with most melodramas of the period, it is tempting to read the film as the expression of contemporary frustration, the response to war-imposed patriotic models and mores; and as is customary in these productions, British virtue is ultimately not castigated, but rather preserved, as the taint of immorality remains firmly placed on the Other. Philip’s successful disguise as a Gypsy cannot surprise, for Gypsy and Italian are two different, but complementary, facets of un-Britishness; as in Madonna of the Seven Moons, connections between wicked foreigners merely enhance British morality. The easiest way to stress these connections is through physical appearance: traditionally colour-coded, Philip’s dark looks are linked to the Gypsies’, who are synonymous with mystery, sensuality, and menace. Hence the smooth transition from Philip the country groom to Philip the Gypsy bandit. Granger himself, of course, is instrumental in the creation of his ‘exotic’ character, bringing to the role not only the legacy of his previous films, but also his own, untypically dark presence (one wonders how his British career would have developed, had he been a blue-eyed blond). Blanche Fury capitalizes on its male star’s persona, aided in this by the film’s vivid colours (could Granger’s hair really have been that black?). Philip’s Otherness is then embedded in the film’s text, holding together its structure of meaning: even when dressed as a gentleman farmer, he remains, literally, a tall dark stranger, someone who does not fit. Philip’s claim to the Fury estate, explicitly undermined by his illegitimate birth, is also implicitly invalidated by his Italian blood; likewise, his inferior class status matches the Italians’ traditional place in British society (indeed, the only other Italian in the film is a maid). Posed between celebration and castigation of the Other, Blanche Fury

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maintains its ambivalence till the end, when the emblem of British property and propriety is inherited by the newborn Philip Fury: a belated triumph for his father, and possibly an ominous sign of more Gothic tragedy to come. Italianness as a devastating force is the theme of two costume dramas from the late 1940s, A Man About the House (Leslie Arliss, 1947) and The Call of the Blood (John Clements, 1948): here Italy and the Italians appear at their most insidious: signifiers of unruly passions, danger, and death. Set in Victorian times, A Man About the House tells the predictable story of two English sisters, Agnes and Ellen Isit (Margaret Johnston and Dulcie Gray), who inherit a property in the south of Italy from a distant uncle. While both sisters are presented as exceedingly prim and conservative, Agnes, the eldest, displays specially virulent prejudices against the Italians, and only reluctantly agrees to travel south to claim the inheritance. On their arrival in Italy, the two Englishwomen find a beautiful but incomprehensible country: the end of civilization as they know it. After considerable shock at the strange Italian ways, characterized by a free-for-all approach to sex, and a penchant for shouting and singing very loudly, the sisters gradually succumb to the place’s many charms; specifically, their handsome butler Salvatore (Kieron Moore), a gifted singer with the muscles of a brute, exercises a powerful spell on them. Soon Agnes and Ellen swap their severe dresses for feminine, revealing clothes; not only have they discovered their sexuality, but they also seem to enjoy themselves for the first time in their lives. Agnes, totally smitten by Salvatore and consumed by love and lust, agrees to marry him. But the Italian idyll turns into a nightmare: Agnes’ new husband shows his true nature, first behaving like a despotic and jealous maniac, then poisoning his wife in order to inherit her wealth. Ellen soon discovers the truth about her sister’s death, as well as that of her uncle, the villa’s previous owner, who is revealed to have been also murdered by Salvatore; fearing for her own life, Ellen is rescued at the last minute by a gallant Englishman. As a fight between the two men ensues, Salvatore accidentally plunges from a cliff to his death. Order and decency are restored. The film’s plot thus rests on a conventional ‘Italian’ structure: polarization of Britishness (as the righteous norm) and Italianness (as the alluring but sinful paradise of the senses). After a pleasurable taste of what Italy has to offer, providing spectators with the vicarious experience of unrestrained passion, the lapsed British subjects must pay the price: Agnes dies, while Ellen, having realized the horror behind the charming Italian facade, returns, chastised and wiser, to her native values, taking the audience with her. Like many other British narratives of Italian escapades, A Man About the House constructs a world in which class, aesthetics, and morals are divided along national lines; furthermore, as Italianness is gradually divested of its enchantment, to expose the monstrosity lurking behind it, the film espouses classic notions of Italy as an ensnaring, potentially lethal place. To begin with, all Italians in the film are basically servants; although Salvatore is eventually revealed to be a dispossessed aristocrat, the discovery only highlights the Italians’ innate inferiority to the average Briton (an average which is assumed to be middle-class). Salvatore’s blue-blooded credentials have merely an embellishing function, leaving the film’s formal structure intact: a civilized British subject in opposition to a vulgar, socially inferior Italian Other. This is

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especially significant as it is Salvatore whom the film’s gaze indulges upon: its unquestioned erotic object. Desire for Salvatore, therefore, is implicitly subversive, and as such it deserves and receives punishment. As the audience is led, through Agnes and Ellen, to experience Italian people, these first appear on the screen as a noisy but faceless crowd, consisting entirely of porters, butlers, and bare-footed peasants; they are also markedly primitive, sensual and dissolute. Nothing happens to alter this initial representation, which is the film’s essential idea of Italianness. Among this race of hedonistic, folkloristic barbarians, Salvatore stands out only for his exceptional cunning; in aesthetic and moral terms, he is at one with his compatriots, united by a love of garlic, promiscuity, and music. The Italians’ general impropriety is not only present, but amplified in Salvatore who, for instance, enters the sisters’ room without knocking, and displays revolting table manners; like every Italian misdemeanour, these are not simply signs of a lack of refinement, but proofs of strong and uncontrolled sensuality. Quite early in the film, information is given that the sisters’ deceased uncle had an affair with one of the maids; the news is received with shock, as it points to the uncle’s multiple sins. What in a different context would have been a minor sexual transgression, becomes here not just a class, but an ethnic and moral trespass: by erotic association with the Italian maid, the uncle has truly ‘gone native’, and therefore gone bad. Contact with Italianness is indeed so morally unsafe, that even the sisters’ cat feels its influence: as Ellen remarks, their once stay-at-home pet acquires suspicious nocturnal habits the moment it arrives in Italy. The familiar antithesis of righteous Britishness and depraved Italianness is one of the film’s two driving concepts; the other is the enormous pleasure obtained by immersion in the Italian experience, however wicked. This pleasure is primarily sensual (as opposed to sexual), and has its first, external expression in the beauty of the villa and its surroundings; a beauty remarkable for its intensity, indeed for its excess. The landscape is luxuriant and dramatic, and the villa is splendid and opulent; bathed in blinding sunlight, filled with the combined scent of wild flowers and garlic, the place is alluring, but ever so slightly nauseating. Likewise, there is something vaguely disturbing in the sisters’ transformation; their new ‘Italian’ look, which converts them from dowdy spinsters to sexy young women, is accompanied by a physical change: a bodily languor which makes them move slowly and drowsily. Italy is so pleasurable to be stupefying; and amid the stupor, evil can take over. Heat is an essential ingredient in the lethal Italian cocktail, as it is viewed as both hypnotic and sensuously arousing; even more so, as the opposite of cool and rain, it is the crucial Other in a weather dichotomy at the core of narratives of British identity. As Homi Bhaba observes, focusing on English self-representations: ‘to end with the English weather is to invoke, at once, the most changeable and immanent sign of national difference. […] The English weather also revives memories of its daemonic double’ (1994, 169). To notions of a righteous English (British) climate, then, Italian heat stands as its infernal negation: indeed, the Hell of Christian doctrine is a pretty hot place, and the British subject who falls for the lure of southern latitudes does so at his or her peril. Agnes, the eldest sister, is of course the metaphor for this stern warning: her Italian journey is one of progressive enfeeblement, morally (she is lured by sensual enjoyments, forgetting her principles), mentally (seduced by Salvatore, she loses her capacity for judgement), and physically (more indolent every day, she also succumbs to poison). Through Agnes, however, a parallel discourse is

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inserted in the film: by having her, rather than Ellen, spectacularly fall into the Italian trap, A Man About the House suggests that excessive repression, in the long run, may lead to immorality. That is why Ellen, moderately lively, moderately tolerant, fundamentally virtuous, emerges as the ideal Englishwoman, the film’s conductor of subjectivity; her Italian ‘fling’ is modest and shortlived, though a fling nevertheless, and can be easily enjoyed and forgiven. Agnes, like the uncle, has gone too far, and her full consummation of the Italian fantasy is punished with death. The Italy represented by the film, on the whole, can be best described as beautifully insalubrious, honouring traditional notions of the country’s hidden dangers. Salvatore’s domination of Agnes begins very pleasantly, with a stress on his musicality, as when he offers a notable performance of the classic Neapolitan song ‘Core Ingrato’; once he has married her, however, this Latin Lover exhibits a nasty temper and an alarming coarseness: obvious hints of the worse. Salvatore’s murderous scheme might come as no surprise to the audience, alerted by his sudden predilection for wearing a medallion and a bare chest; the sisters help to clarify his true character by describing him as ‘cruel and masculine’. His chosen method of murder, arsenic, could not be more classically ‘Italian’: deadly, but imperceptibly so, and cowardly as well. The film’s ending, which sees the British gentleman beating up the physically bigger Salvatore, leaves no doubt as to the inevitability of this victory, the triumph of the just over the wicked. As in Madonna of the Seven Moons, the moral divide is also a national divide; the audience leaves the cinema reassured of British superiority to the superficially charming Italy. The Call of the Blood is yet another variant on the theme of lethal Italianness, mixing melodramatic aesthetics with a marked sense of ineluctable tragedy. The film is set at the turn of the twentieth century and, like A Man About the House, it begins with the British protagonists still at home, receiving news of an Italian inheritance; after this prologue, the action shifts to an Italian setting. The inheritors, this time, are a newly married couple, David Erskine (John Justin) and Anne Lester (Kay Hammond), an emancipated woman and a brilliant medical researcher; so emancipated, in fact, that she plans to continue working until achieving the breakthrough results she is hoping for. If Anne’s profession is something of a peculiarity, David’s background is even more so, as he is half-Sicilian; he has however never been to Italy, and shows all the external signs of a quintessential Englishman. The couple are pleased to embark on a little adventure, and they travel to Sicily to claim David’s family house: a fatal step, as contact with Italy will awaken unsuspected traits in David’s personality, triggering a series of catastrophic events, culminating in disgrace and death. The Italian island presents a spectacle which, to British filmgoers of the 1940s, would have been deeply unfamiliar. Amid intoxicating natural beauty, a peasant population lives according to ancestral superstitions; their alienness is instantly emphasized by their dress code, conspicuous for an abundance of bizarre hats, and by their incessant singing. The Sicilians’ vocal performances are allegedly so powerful, that they provide an almost hypnotic experience; even Anne, the no-nonsense scientist, appears to feel their mesmerizing spell, and comparison with Ulysses’ sirens are indeed made later on in the film. To guide the couple and the audience through the mysteries of Sicilian life, the film introduces another stereotype, the Italianized British expatriate,

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here a middle-aged, lecherous-looking character called Julius Ikon (John Clements). While the never-seen uncle of A Man About the House does not survive Italy, Julius positively thrives on it, fully assimilated into the culture yet patronizingly aware of it. Through the explanations of Julius, who has apparently nothing to do all day but survey the natives, Anne and David learn that they have arrived to ‘a land of legend and fantasy’, a place beyond the rules governing prosaic Britain; rational thought has no place among the Sicilians, who are entirely controlled by hedonism and fatalistic beliefs. Like the popular Sicilian marionettes, puppets on strings who follow their master’s desires, so Sicilian people follow their primeval instincts, surrendering to fate. Aesthetics, rather than morals, are a Sicilian’s guiding principles, and Julius warns David that ‘Italian blood needs beauty more than anything in life’. David, as it happens, is soon to have a close encounter with the strange Italian ways: intrigued by Maddalena (Lea Padovani), the beautiful daughter of a local fisherman, he approaches her on the beach where she is alone, singing. The girl’s reaction at the sight of the Englishman is that of a frightened animal: seemingly terrified, she tries to escape, and when David attempts to stop her she forcefully bites his arm. In what appears to be a vampiric chain reaction, David begins to feel the sway of the Italian in him, and is greatly tantalized by Maddalena’s rabid behaviour; at this point, Anne conveniently leaves the scene, answering the call of duty and rushing to help a fellow-doctor in Tunis, to combat a raging fever epidemic. While Anne’s removal is a predictable necessity in the film, the means of her departure is significant: as a pioneering woman scientist, she symbolizes rationality and progress, in direct opposition to the sensual primitivism defining Italianness. The obvious foil to the wild Maddalena, Anne looks not only supremely civilized, but also projected towards an implicitly better future, when female lives will be spent rationally and usefully, rather than singing on beaches and enticing married men. Unlike A Man About the House, which contrasted ‘loose’ Italian women with traditional, priggish femininity, The Call of the Blood presents the British ‘norm’ as intellectually emancipating, associating social evolution with self-discipline and self-control; Anne does not sing like a siren or experience sensual ecstasy, but she is on her way to scientific discovery, advancing human knowledge and possibly saving the lives of millions. To a much lesser degree, the same is true of Madonna of the Seven Moons, where the anglicized Angela represents un-Italian pragmatism; however, Angela does not emerge as the film’s subject, nor does she express the film’s emotional conflict, which is literally embodied by Maddalena/Rosanna. The Call of the Blood, instead, has in Anne an authoritative, if austere alternative to the inebriating Sicilian lifestyle, thus placing Italianness in a particularly negative position. Anne’s exit coincides with the beginning of a Catholic festivity on the island: a folkloristic affair where pagan-like rituals soon reach a frenzied pitch. While a noisy procession is under way, onlookers engage in various musical activities, dancing the tarantella to the sound of mandolins and guitars; others play cards, cheating opponents, or start fighting with fists and knives. Among this heathen confusion, the wicked Julius instigates David to pursue his attraction for Maddalena; morally weakened by the pull of his Italian blood, David abandons himself to merriment, first discovering a talent for playing the guitar, and finally succumbing to Maddalena’s sex-appeal. In so doing, he admits to forgetting non-Italian things, such as ‘duty, progress, and civilization’.

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But David’s Italian destiny has only begun to unravel. When Maddalena’s father finds out about his daughter’s ‘dishonour’, he first brutally hits her, then throws her out of the house; now a social outcast, as the ‘loose’ Italians will apparently shun her, the woman kills herself. On receiving news of Maddalena’s suicide, her father exacts his revenge on David, and murders him. The film ends with the saintly Anne forgiving her dead husband’s infidelity, while displaying masterful self-control in the face of this multiple tragedy; after David’s funeral, rather than going back to Britain, she returns to disease-ridden Tunis, to devote her life to science and charity. It is a neat conclusion to this parable of genetic depravity, which condemns the half-caste David to death, the contaminated Julius to perdition, and Italy as a whole to obscurantism; as the representative of healthy, incorruptible British stock, Anne signals to the audience the end of their foreign fling, and the reappearance of duty as a British moral imperative. The Glass Mountain and Private Angelo: different approaches to the Italian theme The Glass Mountain (Henry Cass, 1948) and Private Angelo (Michael Anderson, Peter Ustinov, 1949) stand out in 1940s British cinema for their particular use of Italianness. Unlike other Italian-themed films of the decade, they are not costume dramas with lurid plots; most importantly,

Passion among the Alps: but the Italian love story proves doomed in The Glass Mountain (Henry Cass, 1948). Courtesy of BFI Stills Collection.

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The innocuous face of the Italian army: Peter Ustinov as Angelo in Private Angelo (Michael Anderson, Peter Ustinov, 1949). Courtesy of the Kobal Collection.

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they make direct links with the very recent past, confronting Italy’s role in World War II. This said, it is notable how the films conform to post-1943 representations of the Italians: divested of all inimical suggestions, the latter appear as friendly, likeable figures, explicitly humane symbols in the midst of wartime horror. The Glass Mountain starts by setting its action in 1938, introducing the figure of young, struggling composer Richard Wilder (Michael Denison). Happily married to Ann (Dulcie Gray), Richard is a frustrated artist who longs to create an immortal symphony, but has to write commercial songs in order to make ends meet. Collaboration with the sentimental lyricist Bruce McLeod (Sebastian Shaw) finally brings Richard commercial rewards, but his rise to success is cut short by the beginning of World War II; the Wilders do their patriotic duty, and Richard is enlisted in the Air Force. During an incursion over Italy, Richard crashes his plane in the Dolomites, where he is rescued from certain death by a member of the Italian Resistance, Alida (Valentina Cortese). As he recovers from his injuries, living among Italian villagers, Richard discovers a world of innocence and beauty: surrounded by the pure, dramatic mountain landscape, he develops an intimate friendship with the partisan Tito, a fellow-musician and gifted singer (reallife baritone Tito Gobbi), and with the pretty and selfless Alida. Richard’s feelings for Alida become unbearably intense, leading him to inner torments and scruples; the end of the war, however, calls him back to England, having only betrayed his love for Alida with a rapturous goodbye kiss. Back home with Ann, Richard exists in a state of mental remoteness, unable to forget his Italian experience, and channelling his emotions into composing: inspired by an Italian legend of passion and death in the mountains, he begins to work on an opera, his long-awaited masterpiece. Richard’s mounting distraction leads Ann to discover the truth, and to nobly suggest a separation; her husband, therefore, goes back to Italy and Alida, declares his love for her, and embarks on a blissful life of passion and music. Things start to go wrong, however, just as ‘The Glass Mountain’ opera is completed, and ready to be performed by Tito in Italy: Richard’s remorse about deserting Ann increases, leading him to question his plans for a divorce, and for a new life with Alida. On the opera’s first night, Ann flies to Italy, but her plane crashes in the Alps; she survives, and is reunited with a distraught Richard who vows never to leave her again. Alida, in any case, had already released her lover, sensing that his happiness lay with his wife, duty, and England. The Glass Mountain lays bare British ambivalence about Italianness, opposing an Italy of passion and self-fulfilment to a Britain of reason and responsibility; unusually, however, Italians are portrayed as equals, defined by a marked goodness and even nobility, thus adding real poignancy to the protagonist’s moral dilemma. The film is, first of all, a musical drama: music motivates the plot and defines its protagonists, binding Italy to the narrative through the established association of Italianness with musicality. Nino Rota’s emphatic score supports the film text, employing different styles to indicate shifts between Italy and Britain. As the initial credits roll on, forbidding images of the Alps are accompanied by a highly dramatic melody, which changes abruptly into a light tune, as the camera cuts to a placid British Sunday scene: Richard and Ann are introduced to the audience, having a picnic by the river, in a romantic though distinctly un-passionate sequence. In this way, the film begins by establishing a British

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‘normality’, familiar, tranquil and unthreatening, in opposition to a foreign reality, symbolized by the alien and ominous mountain landscape. As the plot develops, Richard’s British life is presented through his relationship with Ann, laying the basis for the film’s structure: amid the fixed entities of Britishness and Italianness, represented by Ann and Alida, Richard functions as a fluid protagonist, moving between the two, channelling subjectivity through his essentially divided Self. The crucial point about the women in Richard’s life is that they are equally attractive and ‘good’, but incompatible. Ann is lively and pragmatic, and very likeable in a brisk sort of way; the perfect wife, she is often seen indoors, busy with household chores. As the film’s representative of national femininity, she is implicitly associated with domesticity, and with a comprehensible world centred around the inviolable British home. Alida, on the other hand, is not associated with the domestic sphere, and the home she supposedly inhabits is literally never shown; the Italian woman’s place, the film suggests, is in a wild natural environment, so that she is seen riding on a sledge in the deep snow, or winning medals as a ski champion. Alida is also, of course, a partisan, risking her life daily by trekking up the mountains to help the resistance fighters: this activity is the direct counterpart of Anne’s war efforts on the Home front, which, however, are never shown. While both women are defined by moral and physical courage (Ann, after all, flies to Italy on a two-seater plane, which duly crashes), it is Alida who emerges as an epic heroine: not only do we see her going to London to receive a war decoration, but we learn from her, as she explains it to Richard, the tragic legend of the Glass Mountain. A tale of love and death, it centres on a woman deserted by her lover, who ends up committing suicide in a glacier; she returns as a ghost, haunting the unfaithful man until he follows her call to the mountains, where he dies falling into a precipice. As a narrative, this catastrophic legend might equally apply to Alida and Ann, who are both at some point forsaken by Richard, and who produce in him doubts and remorse; the Glass Mountain’s emotional weight, however, rests with Alida. This is not just because the legend comes from her native land, or because Richard ultimately returns to Ann, but for the anguish and pathos which Alida clearly signifies. Cortese is ideally cast in this role, bringing to it a luminous quality which is never far removed from tragedy; Gray, instead, plays Ann as a practical, thoughtful woman, devoid of the slightest hint of tragic drama. In returning her husband to Ann, the film does not so much reward her patience and generosity, qualities equally present in Alida, but rather confirms Ann as the natural recipient of Richard’s loyalty: she belongs to the world he chooses to go back to. It is perhaps superfluous to add that, in the moral climate of 1948, a woman in love with a married man would have probably been expected to give him up; the fact that Alida does so only at the end, when she realizes that Richard needs Ann more than her, qualifies her generosity with less ‘pure’ implications. Initially described by her own people as ‘an angel’, and experienced as such by Richard who owes her his life, Alida remains, nevertheless, the film’s ‘other woman’; her appearance is often marked by a dramatic change in soundtrack and landscape, usually accompanying a shift from England to Italy. However, the narrative of The Glass Mountain rests on a positive construction of Italianness, and Alida’s representation as the mistress is amply tempered by her true love for Richard, and by her belief that he will

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divorce Ann in order to marry her. To emphasize Alida’s virtue, the film shows Richard’s friend, the poet Bruce, meeting her in Italy, and telling her in no uncertain terms that her future with Richard is a foolish dream: their life together, he warns, would be plagued by sin and guilt. Alida responds by recognizing her moral duty, sacrificing herself to allow Richard to return to his wife: this is accomplished with perfect timing, coinciding with Richard’s own misgivings about Alida, and with Ann’s plane crash in the Alps. The film thus presents the Italian woman in a sympathetic light, but doubly filtered through a British point of view: as soon as Richard starts to tire of Alida, his friend hastens the process by bringing morality against her, suggesting her removal to the audience as the only desirable ending. Indeed, Alida’s sway gradually fades away, leaving the hero free to return to Ann and Britain. This construction of a British subjectivity, however, is constantly fractured, as Richard’s Italian interlude is made to correspond to his self-discovery; only at the very end does the film allow for a ‘British’ resolution, having taken Richard’s immersion into Italianness to its supposed extreme. A key scene in the film involves the dialogue between Ann and Richard, after the latter’s return to England: the composer is working furiously on his ‘Italian’ opera, yet is not able to progress as he wishes. When his wife comments on his obvious exhaustion, he replies that ‘The Glass Mountain is all that counts at the moment: nothing else matters, success, or even happiness’. However, as Ann points out that he is behaving like a man possessed, he concedes: ‘I don’t want to be possessed, I want to possess myself’. Richard’s Italian experience, therefore, is expressed through an unbearable tension, through a passion so intense to become a torment: it is an emotional as well as a moral impossibility, a desire which cannot be sustained. Deprived of his self-mastery, Richard is swamped by feelings he cannot control, a fact pointing to the foreignness, and specifically the Italianness, of his passion: in accordance with time-honoured stereotypes, Richard’s loss of self-control, induced by Italy, is clearly also the loss of his British identity. It is here that the opposition between Alida and Ann is most evident: the first is the inspirer of such un-British desire as to cause Richard to lose all power over himself; the latter exerts the pull of reason, convention, and duty. This difference, however, is a function of Richard’s view of the two women, and does not necessarily match their behaviour. It is true that Alida abandons caution to the wind, following her love for Richard and enjoying her happiness while it lasts; self-control, though, is not presented as Ann’s prerogative. Just as Ann had displayed a complete command of her feelings, letting go of her husband without a moan, or a reproach, and with hardly a tear, so Alida is equally stoic in her final goodbye to Richard. The film honours the traditional association of Italianness with lack of self-control, but articulates it through a British subject who has been Italianized: while the Italian Alida never loses the grip on herself, Richard experiences a loss of identity which is, at the same time, a revelation of his other self. It is only through Italy that Richard, a man defined by his musical talent, reaches the height of self-expression: the passion and artistic feelings ascribed to Italy are really a part of himself. When Richard writes to Ann, during his first stay in the Dolomites, that Italian people ‘can only be described in music’, he is pointing to his own reaction to them, rather than to a factual quality of the Italians. What the film shows, then, is a primary example of that ‘dislocation from oneself’ which marks subjective constructions of the Other: Italian passion and drama are not appropriated by the British protagonist, but triggered inside him

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by the Italian encounter. Richard’s eventual renunciation of Italy is not dictated by ineluctable fate, but by choice: the choice between two antithetical sides of himself. Nonetheless, though Italianness in the film is a representation of Richard’s experience, the latter is so overwhelming to leave spectators little room for interpretation. Italians are first seen on the screen through the grateful eyes of a vulnerable, wounded protagonist: after the implied horrors of war, he is nursed by a group of people who not only save his life, but remind him of life’s beauty. The Italian partisans, while gambling with death through their Resistance activities, make a point of keeping unsoldierly things in mind, as explained by Tito: ‘when all this stupid business is finished, we’ll go back to the real things in life: music, opera, ballet, love’. As Tito’s words are followed by a beautiful aria, which he sings accompanying himself on a concertina, Italianness is once again an antidote to wartime grimness: it is the signifier of humane values, but, this time, untainted by cowardice. Throughout the film, and without exception, the Italians are presented as heroic and immensely likeable people whom the British must approve of. When Richard is confronted by Alida’s former fiancee, Gino, the two have a fight (instigated by Richard), but end up gentlemanly sharing a glass of brandy; at the end, as Richard desperately attempts to reach Ann’s plane after the crash, it is Gino who accompanies him on the dangerous mountain climb. Camera work greatly assists the film’s positive take on the Italians, who are often shot in close-up: one of the first Italian sequences, for example, shows Richard regaining consciousness after being rescued, followed by a slow pan revealing the Italian faces one by one. In this way, Italians are given a privileged position in the frame, placed on the same visual level as Richard. Later on in the film, we are shown a thanksgiving service in the local church, to celebrate the end of the war: it is an emotional moment, full of pathos and music, and the congregation is shot in slow close-up, with Richard, this time, being one of them. The camera does not linger on the protagonist any longer than it does on the rest of the crowd, with the effect of erasing the distance between Richard and the Italian Other: indeed, for the duration of this scene, there is no Other, but a collective ‘I’ which has the form and sound of Italianness. Although The Glass Mountain ends with the hero’s decision to go back to Britain, its representation of Italy makes it more than a temporary escape from rules and rationality: it actually posits a parallel Italian universe, where an alternative life awaits the British subject. Paradoxically, it is precisely this parallelism which dooms Richard’s love for Alida, as it implies a split consciousness which is ultimately unendurable. Richard’s last-minute return to Ann is a reassuring solution, but it comes too late in the film to dispel the solidity, and validity, of the ‘Italian’ Self which has been glimpsed. Based on the homonymous novel by Eric Linklater, Private Angelo is as powerful an anti-war statement as ever produced by 1940s British cinema. The film tells the story of Angelo (played by a chubby Peter Ustinov, who had already been cast as a peace-loving Italian in Carol Reed’s The Way Ahead, 1944), a kind-hearted, childlike soldier in the Italian army, whose war is spent trying to avoid combat at all costs; being a very likeable protagonist, Angelo convincingly presents his pacifist philosophy, winning the audience’s favour despite his remoteness from ‘British pluck’. In fact, the film does its best to express the novel’s essential idea, as recapped in its last page: ‘courage is a common quality in men of little sense […] a good understanding

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is much rarer and more important’ (1946, 272). The plot is linear, and mostly an excuse for Angelo to show his determination not to fight: after initial rejoicing at Italy’s surrender, the young private is unfortunately enlisted by British troops, who force him to carry out dangerous missions. The whole narrative is a tug between Angelo, constitutionally adverse to being a soldier, and those who want him to behave in a manly way (first his father, a fascist officer, then the British); as the film ends with an Italy liberated from fascism, and Angelo’s resolutely non-aggressive stance unchanged, spectators are left with a remarkably innocent image of Italianness, temporarily appropriated through identification with the film’s anti-hero. Private Angelo displays its pacifist credentials from the very start, weaving Italianness into them: after the initial credits, accompanied by the inevitable Neapolitan song, the following dedication appears on the screen: ‘To all conscripted soldiers, past and present, the world over: to all those who never really knew what they were doing: to the baffled, the cowardly, the peace-loving: to the vast majority of us, this picture is affectionately dedicated’. To speak of ‘the vast majority of us’ in relation to a list of unmartial traits, in 1949, was no less than an act of subversion: it meant the undoing of years of war propaganda, inviting spectators to shed prior identifications, and to align themselves with the film’s dominant subjectivity. This was evidently the film-makers’ intention, as the press book for Private Angelo introduces the protagonist as ‘a most unheroic hero: but he is a most human one. Ex-soldiers will find it easy to understand his feelings and his actions’. The placement of ‘Angelo’ in the title, the first clue available to the audience, assists the link between ‘baffled, cowardly, and peace-loving’ and traditional notions of Italianness. The film’s beginning is given a contemporary time-frame, referring to World War II as the recent past. The narration is introduced by an ex-British officer, who is about to take an artificial arm to Italy as a gift to a certain ‘Private Angelo’; as he carries out the necessary formalities, he insists on telling Angelo’s story to the custom police, ‘for the good of their souls’. Once more, the audience’s sympathy is directed towards an unknown Italian soldier. From this point onwards, the film takes the form of a long flash-back, as the action goes back to 1943, just before the Italian surrender (here delicately referred to as ‘armistice’). Although the script of Private Angelo closely follows the novel in spirit, it alters its structure significantly: while the original text featured an omniscient narrator, opening up the plot with Angelo in Italy, the film has Angelo’s story told retrospectively, from the point of view of his British friend. This modification functions as a distancing device for the audience, which is led to identify emotionally with the Italian while, at the same time, having him ‘explained’ through British eyes; the film thus fosters a slightly ambivalent spectatorship, a balancing act in which empathy with the Other alternates with repositioning through a British Self (albeit one whose own story is subordinated to Angelo’s). The film’s first sequence encapsulates its motivation: it is the summer of 1943 in Rome, and a Fascist commander appears on the screen, Count Piccologrando (sic), who is also, as it will soon be apparent, Angelo’s father (Godfrey Tearle). Speaking in harsh tones to someone who is still off-screen, the Count insists: ‘you are a soldier and it is your duty to be courageous’. The camera moves to frame Angelo, who is crying; as his father hands him a handkerchief, apologizing for ‘having hurt his feelings’, a conversation develops which shows Angelo’s resolve to surrender

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to the Allies, protesting that Italy has lost the war, and that to say it is not treason but ‘common sense’. As Angelo’s argument would have been amply proved to be correct by 1949, the film, through this brief dialogue, is striking a most un-British connection between being ‘soft’ and being ‘sensible’; it is also exploiting and expanding revisionist ideas of Fascism, by its immediate characterization of the Count as an ageing gigolo with a heart of gold. Indeed, as the next scene brings news of the Italian surrender, the Fascist commander tells his aides to accept the inevitable by showing ‘good will to all men’; in obvious relief, Piccologrando also makes clear that he will now be able to pursue his real interests, namely art and women. The portrayal of a high-ranking Fascist as a vain, harmless charmer, is accompanied by the sight of Italians celebrating the armistice, with a brass band playing opera music in the streets; this jocular representation is contrasted to that of the Germans, unquestionably corrupt, spreading terror among the Italian population. The latter point is especially significant, in that Allies and Italians are shown as having a common enemy, and thus are implicitly joined in a good cause; moreover, the Germans are presented as full of prejudices against their former partners, whom they consider ‘garlic-eating savages’. To ascribe racist views of the Italians to the Nazi army is to effectively discredit those views, but the film does not stop there: it introduces another antiItalian character, Angelo’s English stepmother, portrayed as a miserable harpy. In a variety of ways, then, Private Angelo strives to show Italianness in a positive light, without renouncing an established range of stereotypes; having fun at the Italians, however, is balanced by a depiction of the British who, while collectively blameless, display comic characteristics. Apart from Angelo’s wicked stepmother, Britain in the film is represented by its military: unflappable, upper-class eccentrics, notable for their absolute dedication to fighting. The overt narrative function of the British love of war is to oppose Angelo’s timidity, but this national image also works at a deeper level: exemplary as the British conduct ostensibly is, it feels odd and out of place in the film’s heavily Angelized context, where the dominant mood constantly verges in the direction of non-belligerence. It is true that not all Italians are shown as ‘cowards’: the partisans make an appearance, looking brave and heroic. The general view of Italianness, though, is one which hinges on an idiosyncratic value-system, where notions of masculine courage are openly challenged. A good example is offered by Angelo’s girlfriend, Lucrezia (Maria Denis), who condemns Angelo for lacking the spirit of their ‘clever’ friend Roberto, who has feigned epilepsy in order to escape military service; Angelo replies that he also wishes he had the bravery to totally avoid contact with the enemy. Later on in the film, when Angelo comes home after his spell among Allied troops, he finds that Lucrezia has had a child from a British soldier: dismissing the event, Angelo not only proceeds to marry Lucrezia, but asks the child’s father to be best man at the wedding. Lucrezia herself is unrepentant, pointing out that soldiers who destroy life have always plenty of people ready to justify them, while a woman who creates life must speak for herself. In this way, the marriage of Angelo and Lucrezia becomes another opportunity for restating the film’s pacifist ethos. Furthermore, as the wedding banquet is under way, one of the British guests announces, as a good piece of news, that Angelo has been promoted to the rank of sergeant in the new Italian army, and must therefore return to the front; all the Italians present react with a stunned silence, obviously considering Angelo’s promotion a calamity. At this point, a German spy, disguised among the guests, decides to come clean

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and switch sides: addressing Angelo, he commends the latter’s fear of fighting, which ‘has kept him sane’, while so many Germans have been driven insane by fearlessness, adding ‘forgive my nation and myself if you can’. Indeed, Private Angelo works hard at forgiving everybody, placing Italian non-violence at the core of a new, better world. The film ends, like the novel, with a post-war scene, in which the British officer finally brings Angelo his artificial arm; as it turns out, however, Angelo has only lost a hand, explaining to the baffled Briton ‘you know me: I’m prone to exaggerate’. The end of the war is a chance for the British to sum up the Italians’ conduct, something which is benevolently done: ‘they did rather make fools of themselves in Africa […] they didn’t know what they were doing’. Angelo and Lucrezia, on their part, wave goodbye to the British with affection, watching them walk away, and commenting to each other that they look rather funny. The film leaves the audience on a note of cosy European togetherness, claiming that in the past, ‘when the world was in despair’, the Italians saved it with their painting and poetry, ‘even with their quarrelling’; those who came to conquer Italy went away ‘wiser than they were’. It is a gushing tribute to Italy, so excessive as to point to the film-makers’ need to influence popular notions of the country, in the ambivalent cultural climate of post-war Britain. Kind Hearts and Coronets: the half-Italian British icon In a decade conspicuous for its abundance of screen ‘Italians’, a very special place is occupied by Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949): it is a film about mass murder which has become a comedy icon, but also an overtly British production centred on a half-Italian protagonist. Unlike other films considered in this chapter, it is devoid of both melodrama and sentimentality; unlike most other Ealing comedies, it is openly concerned with sexual desire. More than half a century since it was shot, Kind Hearts and Coronets enjoys a classic status in British cinema, yet its narrative is underpinned by a distinctly ‘foreign’ premise. Set in an unspecified year in Victorian Britain, the film tells the adventures of Luis Mazzini (Dennis Price), the son of a titled Englishwoman (Audrey Fields) and an Italian opera singer (also played by Dennis Price). Events are mostly told retrospectively by Luis himself, often by means of a voice-over narration: he is, in fact, reading out his memoirs, which he is writing from a prison cell, awaiting execution for murder. As explained by Luis, the story begins when his mother, a noble D’Ascoyne by birth, is disowned by her family for eloping with an Italian singer. Mazzini senior dies shortly after Luis’ birth, leaving his son and widow in great poverty; despite various attempts at reconciliation by Luis’ mother, the intolerably proud D’Ascoynes refuse to help them, or even acknowledge Luis’ existence. When, after years of struggling, Luis’ mother dies, the D’Ascoynes deny the fulfilment of her last wish, namely to be buried in the family vault. Luis swears revenge on his mother’s family, while his grief and anger are also boosted by humiliation: forced to earn his living as a shop assistant, he is refused by the girl he wants to marry, Sibella (Joan Greenwood), on grounds of his low social status. Luis decides to inflict the ultimate reprisal on the D’Ascoynes, by aiming at replacing the head of the family, the Duke of Chalfont: in order to do this, he must be the only heir to the title, and therefore kill every D’Ascoyne between himself and the dukedom, eight people in total (all played by Alec

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Exuding elegance even when in jail: Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) negotiates his freedom with Sibella (Joan Greenwood) in Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949). Courtesy of the Kobal Collection.

Guinness). Luis embarks on a coolly planned, systematic murder campaign, wiping out every D’Ascoyne who does not happen to die of natural causes. At the same time, he carries on an affair with Sibella, now unhappily married to dull Lionel (John Penrose), while also setting his sight on Edith D’Ascoyne (Valerie Hobson), the beautiful widow of one of his victims. Shortly after obtaining Edith’s hand, Luis murders the last remaining D’Ascoyne, and finally becomes Duke of Chalfont: it is a short-lived triumph, however, as Lionel commits suicide, and the jealous Sibella contrives to have Luis charged with his murder. The day before Luis’ hanging, Sibella lets him understand that she is prepared to save him, by producing Lionel’s suicide note, on condition that he kill Edith and marry her instead; Luis has to agree, and he is consequently freed. On leaving the prison, he is met by both Sibella and Edith, each beckoning him to her: before he can find a way out, he realizes with horror that he has left his incriminating memoirs in his cell. With its dark undercurrents of desire and hatred, Kind Hearts and Coronets remains an idiosyncrasy within mainstream Ealing productions; because of the thematic complexity

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belied by its surface comedy, the film lends itself to a variety of readings, not least an Oedipal one, in which Luis’ obsessive assault on the patriarchal order stems from an excessive attachment to his mother (male devotion to Mamma being, incidentally, an established Italian stereotype). However, among the many threads constituting the film text, Luis’ Italian heritage serves a number of important functions, supporting the film’s structure at different levels: whether one reads it as a Freudian thriller, a disquisition on the British class system, or simply a comedy, Kind Hearts and Coronets relies on the associative power of Italianness, and its opposition to Britishness, for its development. The film’s connection with Italianness is made from the very beginning, as the initial credits inform spectators that Mozart’s Don Giovanni provides the soundtrack; rather than a mere detail, this information is a clue to the protagonist’s identity, lingering in the audience’s mind during the first sequence, the dialogue between the prison’s warden and the hangman. As these two discuss with reverence the unfortunate Duke they are preparing to kill, the brief scene establishes the film’s overt narrative discourse, centred on the absurdity of class divisions: within a few minutes from the start, therefore, spectators are given the key to two of the film’s underlying issues, Italianness and class. Indeed, Luis’s narration plunges immediately into his mixed parentage, explaining who his father was, how he eloped with his mother, and how his parents enjoyed years of happiness in suburban London, before his birth. This early indication of Luis’ dual ancestry, British and Italian, lays the foundation for the film’s narrative structure, essentially constituted by oppositions: gentility is contrasted to vulgarity, propriety to crime, emotion to calculation, and Britishness to Italianness. Luis’ half-and-half identity serves a crucial double function: on one hand, his Italian blood suggests an essential non-belonging, as well as, by traditional association, a potentially menacing nature. Italianness provides and justifies Luis’ highly alien moral code, allowing spectators to enjoy his murderous activities by means of a national disconnection: as the implacable killer, Luis can be safely viewed as an outsider. At the same time, audience identification with the protagonist is encouraged by Luis’ dry wit, coolness, and gentlemanly manners, unmistakable and positive signifiers of his Britishness; as Sarah Street points out, Luis murders his relatives ‘with elegance, style, coldness and laconic humour (factors which make his crimes more acceptable to the audience)’ (1997, 69). A qualification is necessary here on the word ‘elegance’, which applies to two sides of Luis, his behaviour and his appearance: in the first instance, his elegance consists of a strong dignity and an even stronger tendency to understatement, traditional attributes of British maleness which, as Street suggests, provide an acceptable and redeeming dimension to Luis’ criminal career. A parallel expression of elegance, however, characterizes Luis’ dress sense, which becomes more and more extravagant with the rise of his wealth and social position: in this process, he appears increasingly remote from the film’s other men who, as it happens, are mostly members of the middle and upper classes, and thus prime exponents of the British gent archetype. In one particular scene, when Luis’ murders have already resulted in a significant social climb, he opens the door to Sibella while wearing an embroidered kimono with flapping sleeves: it is a dandy image reminiscent of Wildesque decadence, but also a feminizing display of excessive bodily ornament, something associated with Italian masculinity, but incompatible with orthodox British manhood. Luis’ split identity, therefore, makes it possible for the audience to hold two simultaneous views of his character, while also allowing them to ascribe

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his behaviour alternatively to one or the other of his two selves; indeed, this viewing strategy is constructed at the beginning of the film, as on the back of Luis’ first description (as a member of the British aristocracy), there comes the necessary qualification (he is partially Italian). But just how relevant is Luis’ Italian father in his story? A first consideration is that Luis and his father never meet: the former dies of a heart attack shortly after his son’s birth, and Luis’ knowledge of him comes entirely from his mother’s recollections. A plausible deduction here would be that the Italian father has no bearing on the child’s life; in fact, his memory is kept alive by his widow, who had ‘married for love’, and who is shown playing her husband’s favourite arias on the piano, telling young Luis: ‘your father was a very handsome man’. Through his close relationship with his mother, Luis is brought into contact with his unknown parent, seen through the eyes of a woman in love; on her deathbed, the mother is shown clutching a heart-shaped picture of her husband. The crucial factor in the father-son connection, however, is the casting of Dennis Price in both roles: it points to identification and inheritance from one generation to the next, with the father’s implicit alienness setting the basis for Luis’ deviancy from the norm. Indeed, the two Mazzinis can be seen as the two sides of the Italian coin, fixed in a traditional British representation. Mazzini senior, the opera singer who captivates the heart of the rich British girl, marks the link between Italianness and romance, a link stressed throughout the film by the association of Italy with honeymoons: the newlywed Sibella and Lionel, as well as the Duke of Chalfont and Maude, his bride-to-be, elect Italy as their destination. In the case of Luis’ parents, romance is quickly stretched to the rank of passion, as their illicit attachment requires an elopement and the defiance of conventions. Luis himself, despite his cool exterior, maintains a busy love life, defined by a self-indulgent desire for Sibella (which is socially objectionable, as she is married) and for Edith (which is morally objectionable, as he has murdered her husband). In their different ways, both Mazzinis are presented as transgressive womanizers, but while Luis’ passion is internalized and masked by impassability, his father’s is made evident by his un-British demeanour. The film introduces the elder Mazzini by showing his first meeting with Luis’ mother: it is a music evening at D’Ascoyne castle, and the flamboyant opera singer is performing, trying at the same time to catch the attention of the young Englishwoman. The camera lingers on the moustached Mazzini as he gives her a piercing look, whose steadiness and familiarity suggest exaggeration and un-Britishness; indeed, the very fact that he is singing opera points to excess, completing the film’s portrayal of a conventional Italian Lover. Opera, of course, is traditionally associated with Italy, while conspicuously absent from popular perceptions of Britishness; it might be better known in today’s Britain than in the 1940s, yet it remains a rather alien musical form. Outside its narrow circle of devotees, opera is probably still regarded by the British public as a somewhat farcical art, especially if sung by men; as it is, more often than not, sung by men, it fosters caricatural representations of Italian masculinity. Male opera singers stand in direct opposition to established notions of British manhood, which hover between the strong, silent hero, and the sharp, witty one. For all its passionate and even dissolute undertones, the sight of a grown man bursting into a loud rendition of Don Giovanni – especially when delivered in a slightly exaggerated form – is likely to make

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the British laugh, or want to laugh (unless they be, of course, an opera-wise audience): this is precisely the effect produced by Luis’ father in Kind Hearts and Coronets. Incidentally, it is also the effect sought by today’s advertizers in Britain, who tirelessly exploit the comic potential of opera singing (mostly, if not exclusively, to market Italian goods). Going back to the film, it should be apparent that Luis’ father, despite his insidious Latin charm, is rendered inoffensive by his ludicrousness, itself a sign of his Italianness; as previously mentioned in this chapter, the Latin Lover is indeed an ambiguous figure, feminized by the very excess of his virility. The representation of Mazzini senior is evidently that of a laughable foreigner, which is further stressed in the film by the discrepancy between screen images and commentary: for example, when Luis’ voice tells us gravely of his father’s sudden death, we see a man comically collapsing at the sight of a baby. Similarly, while hearing of the couple’s romantic life in bohemian poverty, we are shown the father singing, as he dries up the dishes washed by his wife: a peculiarly anti-macho image, and certainly at odds with the behaviour of the average British man in Victorian times (or, for that matter, in 1949, when the film was released). This basically harmless view of the Italians, or at least of Italian men, must be also linked to recent wartime notions of Italy as a ridiculous enemy, whose smoke is rarely matched by fire, and whose flamboyant posture is really only an act; despite his commanding stance and loud voice, Luis’ father merely sings, helps with the washing up, and drops dead. That is, apart from begetting a half-Italian son, destined to wreak havoc on Britain’s dominant class: enter the other side of Italianness, the subtle yet ever-present threat. While Luis has clearly inherited his father’s way with women, his charm has undoubtedly a sinister ring; the transition from opera singer to consummate murderer may, at first glance, seem an unlikely one. It is here, however, that the film’s use of established notions of Italianness is crucial, as the theatricality of the Latin Lover gives way to machiavellian plotting and deceit: and what is deceit, after all, if not theatricality brought to the extreme? Luis’ mission, to wipe out every D’Ascoyne who stands in his way, is motivated by revenge and carried out through role-playing, two concepts readily associated with Italianness, as the film explicitly recognizes: for example, when Luis proposes to Sibella in sentimental, kneeling-down fashion, she tells him: ‘get up; you may be half-Italian but you look silly playing a stage lover like that’. The word ‘stage’ (rather than, say, ‘romantic’) points to the specific connection between Italianness and pretence; all the more ironically as Luis is, for once, being genuine. Later on, when Sibella marries Lionel, after spending a night of passion with Luis, the latter congratulates the groom by saying: ‘you are a lucky man, take my word for it’, adding for the spectators’ benefit that ‘as the Italian proverb says, revenge is a dish that people of taste prefer to eat cold’; in this case, coldness is not associated with British self-control or stiff upper lip, but with cool-blooded scheming and vindictiveness. The interplay of revenge and impersonation provides the structure for Kind Hearts and Coronets, but it is a structure dependent on Luis’ partial Italianness for its narrative credibility and its acceptance by the audience. This becomes clear as one looks at the ambivalent attitude which Luis himself displays towards his ancestry. On one hand, by quoting the Italian proverb, Luis is reclaiming Italianness to qualify his attitude towards revenge, thus implicitly stressing a connection with the concept which goes beyond his grievances as a snubbed lover, and

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can instead be applied to his whole homicidal campaign, explicitly driven by revenge rather than greed. On the other hand, when a more apathetic, passionless attitude is required, Luis is quick to lean on his non-Italian or British half. Sibella’s post-honeymoon advances, not particularly welcome anymore, are swiftly dampened by Luis pointing out that Italianness, with its implications of passion and illicitness, is only part of his personality: to Sibella’s insinuating speech, on how her husband’s presence prevented her from having fun with the ‘handsome’ Italian men, and culminating in the reflection that Luis himself is Italian, the latter coldly replies: ‘half’. Incidentally, this scene, which sees Sibella recounting her stay in Italy, summarizes the traditional split view of what the country has to offer, namely high culture (the churches and art galleries which ‘dull, prematurely middle-aged’ Lionel insists on visiting) and frivolity (the shops and gallant men which Sibella is interested in). The stress on Italian honeymoons also plays on the simultaneous association of Italy with romance and simulation, for the two honeymooning couples are in fact fakes: Sibella and Lionel, doomed before the start by incompatibility and boredom, and the Duke of Chalfont and Maude, engaged to each other solely for the purpose of procuring an heir to the Duke. To return to Luis’ attitude towards his dual national identity, it is interesting to note that while his murders’ prime motive, revenge, is tacitly linked to his Italian side, revenge in itself is triggered by a desire to do justice to his mother, not his father. Throughout the film, the D’Ascoynes’ disowning of the English mother eclipses any implicit offence made to the Italian father, and Luis feels indeed compelled to defend only one of his parents: ‘she married for love’. When an exasperated Lionel tries to insult Luis by saying that his mother married ‘an Italian organ-grinder’, the latter jumps to the rescue of his mother’s reputation only. What is taking place here is an appeal from Luis to the audience’s sympathy, based on loyalty towards his English ancestry, rather than on a wish to vindicate his father, or even to rectify Lionel’s claim (after all, if his father was performing in front of members of the aristocracy, he could hardly have been a mere organ-grinder). The Italian father is recuperated only by virtue of having been loved by the English mother: this helps the film to construct a dominant British subjectivity, constantly fractured by hints of Italianness, but dominant nevertheless. Likewise, the narrative stress on Luis’ maternal lineage sustains the film’s master discourse, which is the exposition of Britain as a class-ridden society; however, befitting the ambivalent mood of Kind Hearts and Coronets, this concern for British society is ambiguously articulated, as Luis’ constant vilification of the aristocracy is matched by his craving to be part of it. Viewed from this angle, Italianness functions as a signifier of low class, in opposition to aristocratic Britishness (more specifically, Englishness): if it wasn’t for his mother, Luis Mazzini would remain just that, the shop-assistant son of an Italian immigrant. This class-bound representation is significant, as it points to a view of the Italians as inherently proletarian, or lower than that. As discussed in Chapter One, the equation of ‘Italian’ with ‘beggar’ dates back to the nineteenth century (Sponza 1988, 121), when the image of the organ-grinder had acquired distasteful connotations, creating a powerful image of ragged, uncivilized, and vaguely menacing foreignness. Kind Hearts and Coronets taps this stereotypical heritage, thus managing to convey Luis’ innate social inadequacy and potential threat; as a result, both the aristocratic D’Ascoynes and the bourgeois Sibella

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and Lionel can denigrate him, by drawing on notions of Italians as social inferiors. Luis’ devastating revenge, however, signals the temporary victory of the outsider over the status quo, while confirming the two Mazzinis as thorns in the side of Britishness.

Notes 1. A family aberration Mussolini certainly was: his parents were ardent left-wingers. 2. The new Italian government, in opposition to Mussolini’s regime, surrendered to the Allies and signed an armistice on 8 September 1943. 3. This photograph can be found in Colpi 1991.

3 Italianness and Masculinity in 1950s British Cinema

Introduction: Hell Drivers as a starting point British cinema underwent a gender realignment in the 1950s, as it produced more and more films focusing on men’s concerns, which were aimed at an increasingly male audience (Harper and Porter 1999, 67). In a period of socio-historical change, these films adopted different strategies for dealing with anxiety about gender roles, and confusion as to national goals and status; the male Italian Other served a useful function, catalysing or exorcizing the crisis of British masculinity. The 1950s screen Italian was partly constructed out of traditional cultural references, to which were added recent wartime memories, as well as contemporary images of Italian immigrants. This chapter starts by discussing Hell Drivers (Cy Endfield, 1957), a film which exemplifies emerging trends in the new, male-dominated British cinema, and the role of Italianness in it; the social context of 1950s Britain is also examined, with particular attention to its relation to the film. This is followed by the analysis of other ‘Italian’ films of the period, notable for their similar use of Italian male characters; the chapter ends, however, with the case study of a 1960s film, On the Beat (Robert Asher, 1962), whose style and underlying assumptions, rather than heralding a new decade, provide an apt conclusion to the 1950s. Hell Drivers (Cy Endfield, 1957) is an ideal film to start this chapter with, as it combines a tormented British hero with a striking representation of an Italian man. It is this Italian character who, at some point in the film, comments on his girlfriend’s brashness: ‘this is the trouble with girls nowadays: they have to fight’. Hell Drivers’ implicit regret is that boys also have to fight, driven by destiny rather than by choice, masculinity being compatible with restraint but not with

An earlier version of this chapter was first published as the article “Transnational Maleness: The Italian Immigrant in Hell Drivers” in Cinema Journal Volume 44 Issue 4, pp. 44–56. Copyright 2005 by the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved.

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A troubled masculinity is negotiated through the English Tom (Stanley Baker) and the Italian Gino (Herbert Lom) in Hell Drivers (Cy Endfield, 1957). Courtesy of BFI Stills Collection and ITV Global Entertainment.

pacifism. This ambivalent view is hardly surprising in a film produced at a time of cultural flux, when changes in society fostered confusion about gender roles and national goals; moreover, as audiences targeted by British cinema became male-dominated, Hell Drivers reads like a man-to-man account of disorientation and crisis. It has recently been argued that 1950s films, regardless of genre and outlook, tended to privilege masculine narratives, relegating female presence to minor roles or even eliminating it, by featuring all-male casts in self-contained environments; such single-gender focus has been seen as a reassertion of traditional masculinity, or as a self-absorbed reflection of its crisis (Geraghty 2000). Both interpretations must be taken into account with Hell Drivers, whose stylistic parameters largely follow the all-male standard, while articulating a preoccupation with the masculine and feminine principles which bypasses women altogether. Set in a bleak, unspecified British region, the film follows ex-convict Tom (Stanley Baker) in his attempt for a clean start, and his search for an alternative set of values. Having accidentally caused the disability of his brother (David McCallum) during a robbery, Tom is disowned by his mother; finding himself without home or opportunities after a stint in jail, he is forced to take a job driving a truck for a ruthless and corrupted boss (William Hartnell).

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While ostracized and harassed by the other drivers, he is, however, befriended by one of them, the Italian ex-PoW Gino (Herbert Lom), and by his girlfriend Lucy, the firm’s secretary (Peggy Cummins). As Tom is increasingly targeted by the men’s animosity, he is also persecuted by their brutal leader, Red (Patrick McGoohan), as a potential competitor for the role of fastest driver. Initially resolved to keep out of trouble and redeem himself from his violent past, Tom is inexorably lured into the race to beat Red, whilst forging a strong friendship with kind, peaceloving Gino; he also struggles against Lucy’s advances, torn between sexual desire and loyalty to his friend. After trying in vain to dissuade Tom from challenging Red, Gino takes his place in the truck, diverting Red’s murderous chase onto himself and allowing Tom a clear run. The end sees Gino dead after a fatal crash with Red’s truck, Red also killed in his final chase of Tom, and Tom himself the survivor and the winner. Tom’s struggle to renounce the ferocious male order is not inspired by the opposite sex, as the film’s principal women are portrayed as either cold and unforgiving (Tom’s mother), or amoral and rapacious (Lucy). In fact, in a key scene depicting a fight in a club, we see Lucy inciting the men to hit one another, while Tom tries to stop them. Hell Drivers does provide an alternative to its vision of brutal manhood, but through someone implicitly outside the realm of orthodox virility: the Italian man. Gino’s function is crucial to the film’s search for a new masculinity; specifically, by reworking traditional and contemporary images of Italians, Hell Drivers opposes Italianness to Britishness to construct a dialogic space, where British maleness can be fruitfully negotiated. Once again, the assumption here is that identity is an ongoing construction, based on separation from perceived Others as much as on positive self-recognition; this seems particularly evident in the case of gender and nationality, polarized and performed against the Other if they are to be meaningful at all. As the alienness of women is the foundation of any patriarchal society, masculinity and nationality are inextricably connected, never more so than when the latter is built on notions of soldierly pride and world hegemony. Much has been written on the crisis of masculinity in 1950s Britain (Geraghty 2000, 175–77, Segal 1988, Turner and Rennel 1995), where the reinstatement of civilian life and the demise of colonialism coupled, at least theoretically, with a reassessment of gender roles; in addition, the 1950s were also an age of unprecedented foreign immigration, often perceived as a threat and particularly resented by the industrial working class, whose wartime egalitarian illusion had been replaced by the drive towards middle-class consumerism (Marwick 1996, 63, Geraghty 2000, 28, 33). In this context, a film like Hell Drivers can be analyzed for its engagement with the increasingly visible Italians, whose latest change in status, from military enemy to social minority, was not incompatible with their established stereotypes dating back to the nineteenth century. As has already been mentioned, post-war Italian immigration to Britain was on a proportionately massive scale; in 1956, one year before Hell Drivers was released, an annual peak of 11,520 was recorded (Colpi 1991, 134). Unlike their predecessors, these immigrants came mainly from the rural South, although there were also some 1,500 ex-PoWs, who had decided to settle in the United Kingdom (Colpi 1991, 137). These newcomers fitted uneasily in British urban society, which was not only self-consciously ‘modern’, but also stirred by racial fear, infamously displayed by the 1958 anti-black riots in London and Nottingham. Negative or paranoid confrontation with

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foreignness does seem to characterize post-war Britain, which in 1950 refused to join France and Germany in their new economic alliance; decolonization, begun in 1947 with the independence of India and Pakistan, would inexorably continue for almost two decades, punctuated by conflicts, bloodshed, and the national humiliation of the 1956 Suez crisis. The Cold War hung in the air. In this anxious climate, the foreign immigrants helping to rebuild the British economy met, at best, with a mixed reception: hostility and harassment were all too common. There is a danger of generalizing the plight of post-war immigrants, which took different forms, and was affected by a variety of cultural factors. In the case of Italian male workers, of whom Gino is a representation in Hell Drivers, one can only guess at their average perception and reception by British colleagues; they were certainly preceded by a long-established catalogue of stereotypes, images of musicians, ice-cream sellers, hairdressers, and bad soldiers. It is easy to contrast this notional Italianness with the aggressively masculine standards embraced, at least theoretically, by many British working-class men, especially those who had physically demanding or dangerous jobs. This indigenous workforce would have embraced a collective maleness which, symbolically if not factually, depended on the rejection of femininity for its validation. In his study of gender patterns in industry since 1945, Michael Roper (1994, 106) argues that ‘the character of maledominated occupations is not defined solely in terms of masculine imagery’: the need to constantly reaffirm one’s masculinity means that the female is always too close, implicitly present as Other. When women and foreigners are both perceived as aliens, the Italian man is that hybrid figure combining and equating un-Britishness with unmanliness. By the same token, dissatisfaction with dominant models of masculinity may lead to Italianness, as a possible alternative in the search for a new male identity. Wartime British rhetoric had given as fact the relaxation of class divisions, as people united in the struggle against the enemy; however, despite a political consensus based on the new welfare state, class structures emerged virtually intact from the war. Social change, and social perceptions of that change, centred on marriage and the family, now the focus of increasingly numerous ‘experts’, and always a site for the negotiation of power and identity. Conflicting messages as to the implications of gender difference abounded. Best-seller books on children’s upbringing urged women to stay at home, elevating motherhood to a specialized, if unpaid, occupation; at the same time, labour shortages, and the new jobs created by the welfare structure, made cheap female workers a sought-after commodity. In practice, most women chose to have fewer children than their mothers had had (Marwick 1996, 64), and more married women than ever before went out to work, albeit mostly part-time (Geraghty 2000, 32), implicitly casting some doubt on the male role of the breadwinner. Unrelieved of the duty to support their families, men were on the contrary expected to excel in a time of high employment and economic boom; the reality of the work-place, however, could feel dull or diminishing compared to the drama and heroism of World War II (Geraghty 2000, 176). Now husbands were told to spend more time at home, taking an active interest in their children and marriage. Male sexual prowess went under scrutiny: a 1948 report commissioned by the Marriage Guidance Council defined men responsible for the new goal of simultaneous orgasms, while the sensational 1953 Kinsey report further stressed the needs of female sexuality. Orthodox virility was institutionalized: military service was not abolished until 1958, and male homosexuality was increasingly criminalized by

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a tightening of laws against it. It has been argued that homophobia is closely linked to misogyny, as ‘though the persecution of homosexuals is usually by men against other men, it is also about the forced repression of the “feminine” in men, and about keeping women in their place’ (Segal 1988, 84). According to Lynne Segal, a pervasive misogyny characterized 1950s Britain, both in its dominant values and emerging cultural trends. The much-vaunted domestication of the male brought with it a fear of emasculation, a vision of womanhood as a predatory force, and the recoiling into the safety of traditional masculine pursuits. The idyllic new marriage described by the media, where caring husbands deserted pubs and clubs in favour of their family’s company, belied a situation in which men’s time at home was spent on DIY in the garden shed, rather than washing up or feeding babies. (Segal 1988, 72–74) Alternative role models were found in the fashionable ‘angry young men’, the fictional working-class heroes of John Osborne, John Braine and Alan Sillitoe, whose anger took a distinctly misogynist form.1 To summarize, 1950s masculinity appears to have been available in a very limited range of options, which were, however, contradictory enough to generate anxiety and confusion (Segal 1988, 89). ‘Real’ manhood was simultaneously defined by its traditional attributes, such as strength, authority and ambition, and undermined by changed social contexts and expectations, the ambiguous validation of the ‘feminine’ in the workplace, the family, and men themselves. The masculine imperative to ‘succeed’ was stronger than ever, but deprived of clear goals and strategies. Among these anxieties and pressures, the male-dominated film industry of the time appears as a privileged site of cultural production, where men’s insecurities and fantasies could be articulated, explored, or exorcized, for the benefit of a progressively male audience. Recent film criticism has tended to read 1950s cinema as a reflection of masculine crisis (Clay 1999, 52; Landy 1991, 240, 269; Street 1997, 70); but as Christine Geraghty points out (2000, 178), there is a risk of overestimating the soul-searching taking place on the screen, by disregarding the deep conservatism permeating many cinematic narratives. Mainstream British productions, on the whole, conformed to traditional gender and national representations, especially with the domestic comedy and the war film; their box-office success suggests male resistance in embracing the new, something already evident in the unchanged behavioural pattern at home. The problematic nature of these films lies in their refusal to confront new social realities and cultural discourses; likewise, alternative proposals on masculinity seem not only quite scarce, but significantly affected by the orthodox legacy they try to defy. Rather than assess film texts in terms of their concessions to femininity or patriarchy, it is more useful to identify what routes they lay to the construction of male subjectivity; in the case of Hell Drivers, such an analysis rests on the recognition of its lead character as a new but specific type, what Andrew Spicer calls the ‘ambivalent anti-hero’ (1999, 84). Ambivalence meaning the coexistence of opposite feelings in the same context, it appropriately describes a protagonist who confusedly inhabits both sides of the patriarchal order; a confusion, writes Spicer, characterizing male roles in a number of 1950s British crime films, targeted at young, working-class male spectators. Placed half-way between the post-war ‘spiv’ cycle and the 1960s New Wave, this sub-genre is defined by three innovative factors (Spicer 1999, 84): firstly, location shooting in ‘a composite northern industrial town’, itself redolent of tough masculinity, and contrasting with the southern studio ambience of previous British thrillers; secondly, a bleak visual style, presenting harsh cityscapes

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and oppressive interiors; lastly, a disorientated but tough hero, unclearly positioned in this aggressive environment. Hell Drivers can thus be included in a corpus of films spanning over a decade, from Alberto Cavalcanti’s They Made Me A Fugitive (1947) to Val Guest’s Hell Is A City (1960). While Spicer focuses on a narrowly defined range of films, and on an equally specific ‘British tough guy’, he is not alone in recognizing a new presence on 1950s British screens: Jeffrey Richards, for example (1997, 145), speaks of a distinct ‘brand of masculinity’ exemplified by Dirk Bogarde in The Blue Lamp (Basil Dearden, 1950), exuding eroticism and neurosis, and found in the new ‘British low-life melodrama’. Richards’ prime concern is with the impact of this male type on the national image, and indeed the link between manhood and nation has been acknowledged elsewhere: Geraghty points out that 1950s British male stars were marketed and praised as quintessentially British, unlike their female counterparts, assessed in terms of Hollywood or European glamour (2000, 175). Spicer’s ‘British tough guy’ is self-evidently a national representation, the reflection of changed sociocultural conditions, diametrically opposed to the traditional ‘gentleman’ as embodiment of national character; removed from Hollywood by his national idiosyncrasy, this anti-hero bears, however, its stylistic influence, just like the increasingly Americanized British society. While gangster cinema and film noir are obvious US references, a troubled masculinity can be found in 1950s mainstream productions: Rock Hudson, James Dean and Montgomery Clift all portray tough but sensitive men, to some extent at odds with patriarchal expectations. Nuanced as it may be, British masculinity on the screen remains precisely that: an interpretation of nationality, lending its confrontation with foreignness the implicit value of a national standpoint; the Other, a fixed reflecting surface from which identity bounces off at the Self, defines and challenges at the same time the boundaries of subjectivity. In his study of male roles in 1950s Hollywood, Steve Cohan (1997, 34–36) describes hegemonic masculinity as a discourse, based on the notion of a shared history, and therefore of a common position, for all American men; an equivalent premise defined mainstream British cinema of the period, especially the revived imperial and war genres. While these films presented an elitist and classist national image, articulated through a hierarchical social structure with the officer or upper class at its lead, they centred on the male group as a microcosm of British maleness, defined by a common experience and purpose.2 Against this pattern, a film like Hell Drivers immediately subverts hegemonic assumptions, featuring a lone protagonist, equally outcast by ‘respectable’ society and its transgressors. Tom’s opposition to the gang of truck drivers, an assorted sample of regional identities, establishes from the start an individual path to subjectivity, directing the audience’s empathy onto the British man with no obvious place in post-war Britain. The hero’s inability to rejoin the community or the family is emphasized by his bond with Gino, the other outsider, whose nationally specific alienness, however, symbolizes a separate value-system. The film’s construction of British masculinity is therefore grounded both in difference and sameness: Tom is emotionally separated from his fellow-Britishmen, but nationally defined by the contrast with Gino. At the same time, he is

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tied to the Italian by spiritual affinity and practical circumstances, as in an age of economic boom, the ex-convict and the ex-PoW are both driven to desperate measures to survive. We know that Gino’s initial enthusiasm for life in Britain has waned, and that he has decided to go back to Italy: his disillusion rings emotionally true in the film’s chosen setting: a dismally harsh environment in visual and narrative terms. Enhancing male brutality by associating it with the trucks, often shot in close-ups to create a monstrous effect, Hell Drivers does construct a ‘generic space’ (Spicer 1999, 85) as the backdrop for its masculine drama; however, as Tom negotiates his place in this largely symbolic world, he also confronts a national landscape. Total social alienation is unequivocally expressed through Gino, Tom’s alter ego, representing separation from Britain and anxiety about its future; but as Britain is metaphorically rendered as an allmale hell, this anxiety becomes an interrogation of the meaning of its masculinity. While Gino’s foreignness signifies detachment and alternative, his Italianness provides a specific brand of un-British manhood, typified by a lack of fierceness and competitiveness, and by the presence of gentleness and sensitivity, ‘feminine’ qualities which, incidentally, are absent from most women in the film. Tom’s hint of tenderness, on the other hand, is only obliquely represented, as its full indulgence would be incompatible with orthodox Britishness: an aggressive streak therefore complicates and eclipses the hero’s soft side, laying the base for his inner struggle, and making Gino, a mirror-like suggestion, the catalyst for his crisis. Motivation for Gino’s presence in Hell Drivers is found at three levels: his representation provides a national contrast, while his actions and ultimate death have a transcultural function in both narrative and symbolic terms, holding together the film’s structure of meaning. The audience’s first glimpse of Gino is that of a man holding a bunch of flowers, introduced by the landlady as ‘the only gentleman’ among the truck drivers; obviously Italian, he is immediately placed outside the film’s two complementary systems, the macho world of the drivers and the implicit national environment. Soft-spoken, smartly-dressed Gino is contemptuously treated by the others, though not brutally harassed like Tom, whose tough looks and attitude signal the threat of power and competition; the Italian, instead, despite being the third fastest driver, is laughed at and nicknamed ‘Spaghetti’. The film’s sympathetic treatment of Gino elicits a binary viewing strategy from the audience, simultaneously led to single out and embrace the Other; but Otherness itself is problematized by the revelation, early on in the film, that Gino’s real name is Emanuelo (sic), though his colleagues call him Gino ‘because he’s Italian’. Italianness is thus presented as a self-sustaining concept in the drivers’ signifying system, a construction based on the evocative power of ‘Gino’ and ‘Spaghetti’, and invested with the negative meaning assigned to that evocation. However, while the drivers’ view of Gino is disclaimed by the film, which organises subjectivity around Tom’s perception, the Italianness endorsed by the text relies on the acknowledgement of established national stereotypes. As Gino is held in focus through this double construction, a final layer remains concealed from the target audience, as only Italian speakers will know that ‘Emanuelo’ does not exist, that it is not an Italian name, but the scriptwriters’ lazy attempt at fabricating one. Hell Drivers’ portrait of Gino thus hovers between a free-standing characterization (as Tom’s equal), and a benign compilation of age-old clichés (as Tom’s national and masculine foil). In particular, the film elevates the Italian to the status of non-violent champion, assigning virtue to his extreme passivity, as much as condemning the

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drivers’ viciousness; but as its structure necessitates meekness against fierceness, to externalize Tom’s conflicting tendencies, notions of Italianness as a gentle, feminizing quality are stretched to the extreme. Gino dies a saint, too innocent for this cruel (British?) world, leaving to the British man the business of revenge, achievement, and sex-appeal. This representation of the Italian deserves attention, as it is built on an established stereotype at the expense of another. At a first reading, Hell Drivers may be striking for its avoidance of easy typecasting: the usual dichotomy of formulaic Italian masculinity, coupling effeminacy with womanizing, and cowardice with menace, is here both eluded and subverted, by casting Gino in the role of noble victim. His Otherness is chosen to represent sensitivity and generosity, not only in contrast with ruthless Britain, but against a long line of Italian villains who, as already mentioned, are rooted in Anglo-Saxon consciousness through a cultural tradition dating back to the Renaissance. At the same time, Gino’s passive behaviour, his disengagement from the masculine battle for survival, also stems from longstanding notions of Italianness, centred on its supposed ‘femininity’: whether portrayed as an artist, a cook, a loser, or all of these, the Italian man of this version is never a warrior, and ‘real’ manhood is therefore precluded to him. While fictional Italianness has traditionally conjured up images of machiavellian delinquency, given enduring power by their twentieth_century blend with Mafia narratives, the construction of a feminine Italy is born out of popular perceptions of its immigrants: after all, the historical experience of Italianness for most Britons (and North Americans) has not been one of Mafiosi, but of ice-cream sellers, pizza-makers, and opera singers. Placed in a blurred dimension between likeable and laughable, Italian immigrants through the centuries have stood out for their hardly ‘virile’ occupations: music teachers in the late 1700s, Victorian organ-grinders, twentieth-century caterers and hairdressers, always at odds with the traditional masculinity of their host country. More dramatic has been the effect of two world wars, whose contemporary and retrospective mythologies have helped to crystallize national representations. If British soldiers occupy a collective heroic space that is forever England, thus equating manly courage with a specific idea of nation, international notions of Italians at war are forever anchored to their massive defeats, titubations, and changes of side. As explained in Chapter Two, Italy’s first involvement in a world conflict is chiefly remembered for the Caporetto retreat; yet an unconquerable terror of war has not been an Italian prerogative. Shell shock swept through the western front in World War I, accounting for 40 per cent of its casualties (Rutherford 1997, 72), endowing sufferers with a wordless eloquence: ‘men collapsed into states of catatonia and uncontrollable crying, were struck dumb, blind and deaf, and incapacitated by horrific nightmares, paralysis and limb contracture’. As the bodily expression of unutterable fears, shell shock is viewed by Jonathan Rutherford as the symptom of a gap, that between men’s natural feelings of horror and the dominant legacy of ‘Victorian imperial manliness, impervious to fear and contemptuous of any show of emotion’ (1997, 72); in other words, the mark of a culture where masculine fear could not be acknowledged, being instead effectively controlled through social and military means. As argued in the previous chapter, Italy’s enemy status during most of World War II must have fed British notions of a villainous Italianness; but the Italians’ disastrous war meant that their

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image as a spineless, farcical people was likely to prevail. When total capitulation arrived in September 1943, and the new Italian government turned against fascism, the word ‘fickle’ (of ‘feminine’ connotations) may well have described Italianness in many Anglo-American minds. If now we return to Hell Drivers, we find that its search for a new male identity challenges brutality and coldness, acknowledging yet subverting the unbellicose Italian stereotype: Gino’s refusal to fight places him outside the dominant macho system, but as a martyr rather than as a coward. Pacifist, self-sacrificing, giving up his girl and his life without a protest, Gino transgresses laws specific not just to the film’s male order, but to the patriarchal orthodoxy informing traditional masculine narratives; as Frank Krutnik has argued (1991, 85), ‘male masochism can be seen as manifesting a desire to escape from the representation of masculine (cultural) identity effected through the Oedipus complex’. Focusing on alternative masculine models found in the film noir, Krutnik distinguishes between the ‘extreme masochistic hero’, seen as the antagonist of patriarchal law, and a more common type of hero, characterized by a masculinity which is ‘eroded or unstable’ (1991, 85). Regardless of narrative conclusion, any degree of male masochism disrupts the trajectory towards the triumph of patriarchy, unsettling its eventual completion. Considered in these terms, Gino’s death becomes a necessity in Hell Drivers, which charts Tom’s progress in the male world, and finds it already threatened by his own reluctance to obey its rules: only after the dismissal of ‘extreme masochism’ can Tom negotiate a solution, stipulate his involvement with patriarchy, and allow the narrative to reach its successful conclusion. Despite the self-doubt permeating film text and subtext, the masculine order is finally not abdicated but conquered: as the Italian dies in his friend’s place, he initiates a course of events which will lead Tom to beat Red, get the girl, and ‘go straight’. In other words, Gino’s renunciation of patriarchy allows the British man his own peculiar, ‘new’ adherence to it, transnationally formed in terms of home-grown toughness and Italian softness. As Tom’s fulfilment of the patriarchal promise, however conditional, requires victory at the heterosexual game, a selective use of established Italianness denies the arch-stereotype of the Latin Lover: Gino proves hopeless at attracting Lucy (who, in any case, had fancied Tom all along), leaving the field to the British man and his predestined mate. In fact, Gino’s role in Hell Drivers, subordinate to his relationship with Tom, and defined by an ‘extreme masochism’, is to all effects a traditionally female one: he is there to support the hero, to tame and morally elevate him, as well as to help him succeed (all the while injecting a homoerotic vein in their friendship, further undermining the film’s unstable endorsement of patriarchy). Following traditional ‘feminine’ patterns, Gino’s character is related to the emotional rather than the external, competitive world, and was indeed described by a contemporary reviewer as ‘a lovelorn Italian dreaming of domesticity’ (Today’s Cinema 11/07/57, 5). It must be remembered that Gino’s motive in risking his life for Tom is not to save him from death, but to make him beat Red: by allowing him to win the masculine race, he paradoxically sets him free from the masculine trap, leaving him at the crossroads between the drivers’ sadism and Italian passivity. Spicer sees the victorious Tom as occupying ‘a symbolic middle ground between weakness and corrupt brutality’ (1999, 87): weakness is indeed the final attribute of Italianness, as Gino’s death marks his system as doomed to

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fail, therefore releasing Tom from the pull of non-violence. However, while rejectable as a total alternative, Gino’s legacy of Otherness endures in the ‘new’ British man, supplying missing ‘femininity’ to fulfil his potential as a balanced human being; as in the noir narratives examined by Krutnik, traditional tough masculinity is presented as a symptom of a lack (1991, 88). Crucially, in Hell Drivers this means a lack of outlets for pre-existent qualities: Tom’s concessions to gentleness are present throughout the film, but locked within the limits of the cultural and national alternatives at his disposal. When Red provokes him by stating his intention of making his life impossible, Tom replies: ‘I don’t want any trouble’, only to add after a pause: ‘unless I’m pushed’; later on, as a fight breaks out between the drivers and some local men, he does not participate, and is thus attacked as a traitor by his colleagues. Significantly, as the drivers try to break into Tom’s room, he defends himself by placing Gino’s Catholic altar against the door; as Red’s voice shouts ‘Yellow Belly’, the connection between Tom and Gino is highlighted by the stigma of cowardice attached to both. Lastly, a strong bond with ‘weakness’ is evident not only in Tom’s alliance with Gino, but in his affection for his younger brother, whose timid looks lend a vulnerable edge to physical disability. The film’s construction of masculinity is then dominated by a basic tension, as transcultural attributes are set against the original division from which they spring: on one hand, though formally polarized as opposite modes of being, Italianness expresses what is potential in Britishness, creating an excess ontological space, where identity ceases to be fixed or known. On the other hand, national contrasts motivate the narrative, placing the unchanging, monolithic Italian against the fractured, developable British hero. Every similarity between Tom and Gino is called into question by their difference, marking their relation to the film’s central issues through recognizably separate positions: their outcast status, for instance, does not stop Gino from planning his return to Italy, implying the solidity of a place behind him which is totally missing in Tom’s case. Likewise, the Italian’s lack of dilemmas points to his acceptance of a precise moral code, symbolized by his earnest Catholicism, in obvious contrast to Tom’s independent search for a new value-system. Positive as it may seem, Gino’s unquestioned direction in life reduces him to a one-dimensional reference point, the bearer of fixed qualities which are emulated and manipulated by the troubled British hero; in fact, as Tom increasingly processes Italianness for his own inner development, he also gains control over his external situation, making his alter ego redundant. Transculturation here is a one-way procedure, subordinating a disposable Other to the prior claim of British advancement. Gino never adapts to British life, but neither does he go back to Italy: instead, on his deathbed, he urges Tom to go there, taking Lucy with him with his blessing. The future belongs to Tom, who has internalized and assimilated the Other into his own, new, unmistakably British identity. But what of the Italian immigrant? His fate is not a concern in the film, which constructs a new Britain where Gino’s own story is still out of place. Losers and crooks as Italian foils: The Frightened Man, The Flanagan Boy, and Miracle in Soho As we have seen, Hell Drivers projects a highly representative image of the screen Italian in 1950s Britain: its construction rests on an up-to-date catalogue of stereotypes, while its function crucially assists the exploration of contemporary national masculinity. At the same time, however,

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Michael (John Gregson) chats up the beautiful but unlikely Italian Giulia in Miracle in Soho (Julian Aymes, 1957). Courtesy of BFI Stills Collection and ITV Global Entertainment.

Gino remains exceptional within the very parameters which have created him: notwithstanding his one-dimensional characterization, he is endowed with a noble, even heroic quality, considerably offsetting the negativity associated with his renunciation of orthodox virility. While Gino appears in some respects a loser, literally losing the battle for social and sexual supremacy (as well as his life), the halo of sanctity around him places him beyond patriarchal judgement; the same is not true of the representation of Italian men in other films of the period, which, though sharing some key elements with Hell Drivers, relegate male Italianness to the usual spectacle of farce and/or menace. As either losers or crooks, sometimes as both, Italian men unfailingly provide two sample, impossible models for audience identification; regardless of plot and character, the British lead in these films emerges as the only feasible masculine option, equating Britishness with real manhood by sheer negative derivation. Three films, in particular, exemplify the automatic value acquired by British protagonists through associative contrast with Italianness: The Frightened Man (John Gilling, 1952), The Flanagan Boy (Reginald Le Borg, 1953), and Miracle in Soho (Julian Amyes, 1957).

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The Frightened Man focuses on two generations of Italian immigrants, the Rosellis. Roselli senior (Charles Victor), a widower, owns an antique shop, which he runs with the help of Cornelius (Michael Ward), a British man. An ageing figure, with a strong Italian accent and weary appearance, Roselli struggles to keep his only child, Julius (Dermot Walsh), at Oxford, where he is studying architecture; to increase his income, he takes in two lodgers, the lovely Amanda (Barbara Murray) and the respectable Harry (John Horsley). At the same time, however, Roselli is secretly dealing with ruthless gangster Alec (Martin Benson), for whom he sells stolen goods; weak rather than truly corrupted, Roselli is clearly presented as a victim of his excessive paternal love, as his illegal trading has the sole purpose of raising money for Julius’ university fees. However, the latter gets expelled from Oxford after a drunken brawl, breaking his father’s heart; having no choice but to return home, the young Roselli refuses to join in the family’s antique business, being drawn instead to the local underworld. Meantime, the not-too-discerning Amanda quickly succumbs to Julius’ charm, blind to the latter’s abusive treatment of his father, whom he even robs of his savings; as the two embark on a whirlwind romance, the seraphic Harry, Amanda’s erstwhile love interest, limits himself to looking on manfully, smoking his pipe. The new couple abandon the Roselli residence and marry, living on Amanda’s earnings from her secretarial job at a diamond firm; unbeknown to his wife and father, Julius has joined his friend Maxie (John Blythe) in a gang of robbers, headed by Alec, the antique thief. Julius devises a break-in at the diamond firm, but his plan is intercepted by Harry, the Rosellis’ lodger, who was none other than a police detective; gentleman that he is, Harry informs Amanda of the forthcoming robbery, with the result that she and her father-in-law desperately try to rescue Julius at the last minute. Their attempt fails, and Julius, caught by the police at the scene of the crime, falls from a roof while trying to escape, and dies. As a title, The Frightened Man is both self-explanatory and admonishing, though its full meaning only becomes clear at the end of the film: it is about a man who is not a real man (as men ought not to be frightened), and it is a warning to male spectators not to follow in his footsteps (cue what would happen if they did). The frightened man, of course, is Roselli senior: like his son, he provides the audience with a protagonist who, however, is not a subject, as he and Julius are clearly marked as Other. By emphasizing from the start the Rosellis’ moral weakness and doomed personalities, the film shifts subjectivity away from Italianness, a distancing device which effectively creates, at first, an impersonal British consciousness: a national gaze, observing the Italians as objects. However, Harry, a very minor character, gradually emerges as the representative of Britishness (equated with British law); although other British men flank the Rosellis throughout the narrative, their very closeness to them is a preclusion to audience identification. Moreover, as will be discussed shortly, both Cornelius and Maxie are constructed as deeply flawed in different ways, leaving the dull but solid Harry as the embodiment of national masculinity. A first point to make is that the two Rosellis, despite their different characterization, are not antithetical but complementary: they represent the two interlocking faces of Italianness, as they are both crooks (whatever their motivation) and losers (they are defeated and humiliated by other men). The familiar paradigm of Italian maleness, a combination of cowardice and social

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menace, is stretched here to apply to two generations of Italians, suggesting genetic inevitability; any contrast between father and son must be viewed as the negotiation of interrelated traits. The most obvious quality displayed by Roselli senior is weakness: it is evident in his self-destructive attitude towards Julius, in his anxious demeanour, his shuffling walk, and the prominent circles under his eyes. Visually even more than narratively, the father is indeed a frightened man. Against this pathetic figure, Julius presents initially a striking contrast: he looks handsome (unlike any other man in the film), smartly dressed, and totally heartless. Motivated solely by greed, the son is dishonest as much as cowardly, as he takes advantage of his gullible father and of his equally naïve wife; Julius’ glamour, conspicuous in the midst of the others’ drab appearance, is not meant to lure the audience, being immediately linked to narcissism and corrupt ambition. Significantly, the only other characters associated with grooming and luxury are Alec, who is undisputedly evil, and his mistress Marcella (Annette D. Simmonds), clearly a woman of loose morals. Despite their obvious differences, however, father and son are linked by the doomed deviancy which defines them both: unable to control their lives, and to choose right over wrong, they remain failures, beaten by a system to which they do not belong. The only Italians in the film, the Rosellis exemplify 1950s views on immigrants, expected to either conform to British society or undermine it from within. On one hand there is the father, whose greatest wish is to see his child accepted into the Oxbridge circle, the ultimate proof of his integration; on the other hand, there is the son, who is neither willing nor able to succeed at Oxford, preferring to exploit and harm the host country. Ironically, of course, the father’s anxiety to assimilate leads him to crime, thus leaving both Rosellis as potential threats to the British establishment. Narratively condemned to failure and shame, too weak in one case and too caddish in the other, the film’s Italian men are patently unfit as role models; so are, however, the British characters most associated with them. Julius’ friend, Maxie, is a cockney small-time gangster, whose negative image is socially rather than nationally specific (reinforcing the inferior class dimension linked to Italianness); in the film’s preferred reading, Maxie is totally eclipsed by Harry, just as the truck drivers in Hell Drivers are subordinated to Tom’s dominant subjectivity. Cornelius, the father’s assistant, might have been a candidate for audience identification, thanks to his university degree and law-abiding lifestyle; however, he is presented as a whingeing and extremely effeminate character, constantly ridiculed because of it. The result is that Cornelius is also sidelined by the film’s patriarchal discourse, suggesting that Italians, of dubious virility, can only gather crooks and fairies near them. Enter Harry, unremarkable in every respect, but the only man in the film who is not frightened or evil; thus automatically raised to the heights of masculine righteousness, he brings to this role an unmistakable Britishness, signalled to the audience by his pipe and imperturbability. The fact that Harry dislikes Julius on sight reinforces the latter’s identification as the villain, polarizing Amanda’s suitors through a moral and national division; this premise finds its logical conclusion in the film’s ending, when Harry is instrumental in bringing about Julius’ downfall. Invested with lawfulness and morality, Harry is the exponent of a masculine world which, unlike in Hell Drivers, is aligned with the status quo and with rightful authority; just as in Hell Drivers, however, the real man is brave but rejects violence, bides his time, and plays fair. Harry’s virtue is externalised by his ability to keep calm and collected, unencumbered by excess of sentiment (like Roselli senior) or rage (like Julius): lack of excess

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and abundance of self-control, the marks of traditional Britishness, signify manly strength in the film, perfectly offset by their Italian antithesis. The Flanagan Boy offers an equally negative view of Italian masculinity. The film begins its narrative in the shabby, shady world of British funfair boxing. Sharkey (Sid James) and Charlie (John Slater) earn a scant living by touring the country with a fixed act; things seem to change when they ‘discover’ Johnny Flanagan (Tony Wright), a naïve young man with genuine boxing talent. Keenly aware of Johnny’s potential and of their own inadequacy as promoters, they turn to retired boxing magnate Giuseppe De Vecchi (Frederick Valk); a wealthy Italian, Giuseppe has just returned to Britain from the United States, bringing with him a beautiful wife, Lorna (Barbara Payton). Simple and jovial despite his opulent lifestyle, Giuseppe agrees to take Johnny under his wing, arranging for him, Sharkey and Charlie to move into his villa, to begin Johnny’s training in earnest. Life is sweet at the De Vecchi residence, as Giuseppe’s lavish hospitality is accompanied by loud affection for the British trio, whom he insists in considering part of his own ‘happy family’. Lorna, however, the film’s evil femme fatale, soon lures Johnny into a passionate secret affair, facilitated by Giuseppe’s candid trust in his wife and associates. When Lorna urges Johnny to murder Giuseppe, in order to gain freedom and the latter’s vast fortune, her lover is at first appalled, not least because of Giuseppe’s generous and innocent nature; once Lorna pretends to be expecting Johnny’s child, however, he finds himself unable to escape her influence. Although Johnny does eventually kill Giuseppe, by making him drown while he is out fishing, he rapidly collapses under the weight of remorse. While Giuseppe’s murder appears to be a perfect one, as his death is ascribed to a boating accident, Sharkey and Charlie easily guess the truth, but decide to stand by their protege, planning to remove him from the De Vecchi household; in the meantime, Giuseppe’s relatives come from Italy for the funeral, adding further strain to Johnny’s unsteady nerves. In a final confrontation, Johnny tells Lorna their affair is over, and that he means to go and confess to the police; shortly afterwards, though, having subtracted poison from Lorna herself, the distraught young man commits suicide. The end sees Lorna arrested for murder, after Sharkey and Charlie have managed to frame her as Johnny’s poisoner. Heavily structured along gender lines, The Flanagan Boy seems, at first sight, to posit a compact masculine world, in which an evil female wreaks havoc; on closer look, however, this world of men is clearly fractured, as Giuseppe’s ineffectual virility is contrasted with Johnny’s erotic ascendancy, and to the tough, streetwise Sharkey and Charlie. In their construction of Italianness and Britishness, the film’s narrative, visual, and performative discourses create a coherent pattern, opposing a solid, if flawed, British masculinity to the ridiculous Giuseppe. As Lorna is conveniently American, British national identity is articulated solely through male characters: it is a three-headed representation which, despite the gap between Johnny’s sex god image and Sharkey’s and Charlie’s rough looks, presents a homogenous manliness in the face of Giuseppe’s dubious virility. Although the latter, fresh from the United States, describes himself as ‘American’, we see Lorna raising her highbrows at this statement; Giuseppe’s Americanness is only present insofar as America’s mythology abounds with funny little Italians. Classic ItalianAmerican iconography, significantly defined by violence and ruthlessness, is all but ignored

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by the film, whose rendition of the boxing promoter relies on much softer material: Giuseppe is the quintessential Italian buffoon, whose farcicality, unlike that of American mafiosi, is unaccompanied by threat or malice. And farcical he certainly is: rotund and dishevelled, with an almost perennial beatific smile, Giuseppe is constantly gesticulating, singing opera, and loudly professing his love for his friends. With his corpulent figure often clad in satin, or embroidered dressing gowns, the Italian provides a stark contrast to the inconspicuous Sharkey and Charlie, or the sporty-looking Johnny; excessive and effeminate, he is also deeply unattractive, as the audience’s attention is called to his sweatiness, and to the repulsion he inspires in his wife. True, Sid James and John Slater can hardly boast the looks of matinee idols, but their physical appearance is not made an issue in the film: Giuseppe’s body, instead, is constantly foregrounded, and he is frequently referred to by the others as ‘that poor fat guy’. The Flanagan Boy presents the Italian male as explicitly ugly, a non-competitor in the heterosexual game, and an emphatic example of what British men should not be. If Johnny’s two funfair mentors are ordinary national specimens, it is Johnny himself who channels the virile aspirations of male spectators: blond, fit, good-looking, the sexual interest of the film’s leading lady, he stands as the direct opposite of Giuseppe, whom he defeats. Even Giuseppe’s money and lifestyle, which might have opposed glamour to the squalid funfair environment, are turned into a farce. With no good taste, style, or decorum, the clownish promoter is framed into a stock representation, class-bound yet classless, which places any Italian on the lowest position on the social ladder: that of the immigrant. This is further enhanced by the portrayal of the De Vecchi family, shown as a group of backwards peasants who, thanks to their connection to primeval forces, ‘sense’ the truth behind Giuseppe’s death and Lorna’s fake pregnancy. The appearance of Giuseppe’s relatives on the screen is made to look as striking as possible: entirely dressed in black (unlike the others, who do not display any external sign of mourning), they are preceded by the ominous sound of the mother’s walking stick. Nemesis-like, and not speaking any English, the Italian matriarch relies on her children to translate for her, while she stares intently at Johnny and Lorna. Her alienness is obviously meant to be frightening, chiefly because it is linked to an occult world of superstition; her rosary, which she prays with during the murder inquest, is an established symbol of Catholics’ assumed paganism. As Johnny admits: ‘that old Italian woman. She knows. I’m afraid of her, I’m scared’. The possible threat of Italianness is then displaced onto Giuseppe’s mother, leaving her son, who professes to adore her, as a gullible boy who has never grown up; at the same time, the De Vecchis’ evident social inferiority stresses Giuseppe’s inescapable roots. Despite all his wealth, the Italian remains a greasy foreigner who has made good. Performative styles underpin national differences. Italian verbal and gestural excess are contrasted to extreme British laconicism; Giuseppe’s tendency to touch people, and to make eye contact with everybody, is the opposite of the still posture, downcast glances and furtive looks of the British men. As was the case in Hell Drivers, the film constructs Italian maleness as essentially candid, patently out of place in the tough British world, where survival is the prerogative of strong silent men. Johnny’s death does not disturb this structure: lured astray and killed by a (foreign) woman, he is a warning against leaving the safety of patriarchal alliance. While both Johnny and Giuseppe are victims, the first succumbs to circumstances, the second

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to his own inability to judge other men, to be on his guard, and to retain his woman: in short, to his lack of manliness. Though Johnny dies, he has lived like a man (albeit as an unwise one), unlike Giuseppe who has clearly never been masculine enough. As in Hell Drivers, male subjectivity follows an ambiguous line between honesty and corruption, presenting a confused anti-hero engaged in an inner struggle. Although Johnny kills the innocent Giuseppe in cold blood, his crime is preceded and followed by scruples and remorse, as well as by his final intention to confess and expiate: he is thus presented as redeemable: the unwitting perpetrator of Lorna’s evil. The audience is explicitly told that Lorna is the real murderer, as she is so defined at the end by Sharkey who, with Charlie, has acted as a Greek chorus-style commentator throughout the narrative. Moral responsibility for the deaths of Giuseppe and Johnny is firmly placed on Lorna’s head, allowing for the film’s satisfactory conclusion, in which the technically blameless female is charged with murder; as for Sharkey and Charlie, they provide the film with its final shot, as they stand once again on a funfair platform, back in their squalid but manly environment. With Miracle in Soho, the use of Italianness as a negative foil to national masculinity reaches its peak; or rather, one might say, it descends to its lowest depths, as the film’s open racism towards Italian men is remarkable, even by the standards of the period. One has to wait for On the Beat (Robert Asher, 1962), discussed later in this chapter, for a similar barrage of offensive stereotypes. Miracle in Soho centres on the relationship between Michael Morgan (John Gregson), an English road worker, and the Gozzis, an Italian family living in London. Temporarily placed in Soho because of his job, and spending his time literally on the streets, Michael occupies from the start a voyeuristic position, able to observe every movement of the area’s inhabitants; he is thus an ideal focus for audience identification, as a guide into the world of the Other. The establishment of Michael as the protagonist follows seamlessly from the film’s opening sequence, which has an English voice-over introducing Soho: this is first presented as a ‘foreign island’, a quaint mixture of bizarre peoples, all levelled together by their shared alienness. Scots are included in the mix of foreigners, emphasizing the film’s stress on Englishness rather than Britishness. Almost immediately, however, the narrator informs the audience that these Soho foreigners ‘have got knives’, thus hinting at a traditional Italian stereotype, in the context of a well-established Italian area; crime is not shown but implied, and tacitly ascribed to a specific nationality. Indeed, the narrative soon concentrates almost exclusively on Italian immigrants, ignoring the rest of the Soho colony. For all the good-humoured tolerance towards the ‘foreign islanders’, contempt is very close to the surface, articulated through Michael and, therefore, through a male subjectivity. This English hero is rapidly drawn into an Italian circle, initially by default, as he carries on an affair with Gwladys (Barbara Archer), officially going out with Filippo Gozzi (Ian Bannen); gradually, however, he falls in love with Filippo’s sister, the naive and beautiful Giulia (Belinda Lee). Before Michael and Giulia can tie the knot, and thus provide the film with its conclusion, the plot (if one can call it so) sees Michael embarking on a series of confrontations with the Gozzi family; but as Giulia’s mother and sister are peripheral characters, and Giulia herself a monolithic beauty, it is primarily Italian men who are opposed to Michael, providing the latter with endless opportunities to prove his superiority.

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Michael is presented as a self-confessed rogue, excelling at playing darts and seducing women, with little else to recommend him; however, he is endowed with a quick wit, mainly directed at foreigners, and with a rugged charm, pointers of his Britishness and manliness. Such, at least, is likely to be the audience’s interpretation, as they see Michael pitted against the Gozzi father and son, neither of whom is witty, tough, or charming; Italian men, in stark contrast to the national subject, are defined by failure, naivety, and general ludicrousness. It is interesting to note how, after mentioning ‘knives’ and therefore evoking a sensational image of Italianness, the film recoils from any portrayal of Italian men as aggressive or dangerous; it is as if spectators must be given a token reminder of an established stereotype, to trigger the ‘field surrounding the word’, only to be led onto another, associated set of representations. By circumventing the traditional Italian villain, a gothic and so potentially romantic figure, Miracle in Soho concentrates on the Italian loser, leaving Michael as sole candidate for true masculinity. Incidentally, this calculated omission of a well-known stereotype is acknowledged and praised in a contemporary review: ‘the director has rightly declined to exaggerate its [Soho’s] alleged glamour, and has put the accent more firmly on the argumentativeness and good nature of the colony, avoiding crime altogether’ (Today’s Cinema, 24/05/57, v46, n7803: p. 10). As the cuckold boyfriend, Filippo is Michael’s chief competitor, whose fight is already lost before it has started: characterized by timidity and candid trust, he is easily outsmarted by Michael and Gwladys. Even worse, he is prepared to lose Gwladys without a fight; like Giuseppe in The Flanagan Boy (and, indeed, like the saintly Gino in Hell Drivers), Filippo is not a real man, as he has no power over his woman, and no animosity towards other males. Lest the audience should have any doubt on this matter, Michael openly expresses his scorn for Filippo’s passivity, asking Gwladys: ‘what’s he got into his veins? Ice-cream?’. Presumably aimed at provoking the audience’s mirth, and relying on fixed notions of Italian immigrants, Michael’s quip is more than a joke (sic), being a definitive statement on Italian maleness: invested with the authority of national subjectivity, it is the Englishman’s judgement on inferior foreigners. At the same time, innate superiority is what gives Michael the right to offend, as when he goes to the Gozzi’s restaurant and implores the waitress to bring him ‘anything but maccheroni’; it is a right which must be granted by the target audience, British spectators, who are led into alignment with the hero. The fact that Michael is a rascal, the film seems to say, cannot be helped: in fact, his roguish ways are a sign of masculine power, setting him apart from the effeminate Italians. To be a bit of a lad, therefore, is both desirable and patriotic. Just as in The Frightened Man, Italian maleness in Miracle in Soho is presented as a consistent, inter-generational, pan-national problem. As a well-meaning loser, Filippo is clearly continuing a family tradition, as his father (Peter Illing) offers a parallel picture of failure: a photographer by profession, he has never been able to earn a good living, because he is ‘too artistic’. Unfit for business and success, he is however ‘very family orientated’, doting on his daughter (on whom he spies), and son (whom he fights in a rage, only to emotionally make up with him later). Harmless though irascible, the father is a comical figure, whose appearance is, unsurprisingly, small, round, and moustached: another funny little man. Nor is farce confined to the Gozzis, as their male compatriots are meant to be just as ridiculous: the Italian but strangely named Karl

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(Richard Marner), for example, unwittingly provokes great English merriment by swapping ‘wait for’ with ‘expect’, as in ‘my father and I are expecting’. Comic stress is clearly placed on Italian masculinity, although Italians of both sexes are presented as an amusing spectacle: emotional and gesticulating, the whole Gozzi family are paraded on the screen, engaged in loud and volatile exchanges. Interestingly, many of these squabbles and reconciliations take place in the local Catholic church, where the Gozzis seem to spend interminable hours. Despite their struggling financial situation, the immigrants wear very smart clothes, in stark contrast to the rough-looking Michael; once again, however, the British hero seems all the better for his lack of fashion sense, as the film’s portrayal of Italianness puts negative emphasis on display and excess. Michael’s anonymous style is the very proof of his virility, signifying a real man who, unlike women, does not need embellishment. In this sharply divided environment, an apparent link between nationalities is provided by Giulia, Michael’s love interest. Presented as the Englishman’s worthy companion, Giulia is the trophy wife who confirms the protagonist’s superiority; far from unsettling his national status, she rather enhances it, as she appears to be Italian only in name. Inexplicably, the beautiful Gozzi daughter is the only member of her family without the trace of an accent; as well as sounding English, she also looks it, the only blue-eyed blond among a uniformly dark group. While one can only marvel at such obtrusive discontinuity, Giulia’s un-foreign appearance reinforces the film’s structural logic, which rests on the unbridgeable divide between subject and Other: by erasing the visual and aural marks of Giulia’s Italianness, desire is directed towards the familiar, privileging a self-contained national world. This is all the more easily accomplished in view of Giulia’s potential rivals, the other Soho women who are available to Michael. On one hand, we have the miserable-looking, Italian-looking Mafalda (Rosalie Crutchley), clearly a member of the unappealing Gozzi entourage; on the other side there is Gwladys, whose role as a smart tart, cooperating in Filippo’s humiliation, is entirely subordinated to Michael’s dominant maleness. This leaves the innocent Giulia as good wife material, notwithstanding her nominal Italianness: the latter, however, is not likely to deceive the audience, as Giulia’s place in the national environment is clearly marked. The already mentioned article in Today’s Cinema admits as much: as ‘a typically English blonde’, Belinda Lee is ‘impossible to accept as the daughter of an excitable Italian family’. What is striking about this statement is that, in mapping the boundaries between Italianness and Englishness, it highlights a discrepancy between blondness and excitability; rather than observe inconsistencies of accent and appearance, the writer complains about the misallocation of a behavioural trait (implicitly expressed through hair colour). It is precisely this inferred link between ethnicity, manners, and morals that underpins Miracle in Soho, which constructs an automatically desirable (male) identity simply by contrast, against the summarily sketched Italian Other. The free-standing Italian failure: The Glass Cage and Escape by Night The three films discussed above share a common discursive pattern, by setting a male British subject against his Italian antithesis; this is hardly a subtle procedure, although it does require a minimal negotiation between two opposing identities. Italian masculinity is constructed out of a specific comparison, implying the need to elaborate, however briefly, on the respective

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qualities of the two sides. But there are cases in which the Other is spectacularly so, whether because of ultra-crude characterization, or because his representation encompasses an unusual degree of alienness; in these instances the Italian man may be a free-standing figure, whose extreme un-maleness speaks for itself. A prime example is found in The Glass Cage (Montgomery Tully, 1955), which constructs the ultimate Italian loser without recourse to an obvious foil. The film is set, yet again, in the seedy underworld of British sideshows; unlike The Flanagan Boy, however, The Glass Cage deals with openly alien material, as it focuses on foreign circuses, and particularly on freak shows. The bulk of the film’s cast consists of a vast, assorted crowd of circus artists: these are objectified from the start, partly due to their obvious Otherness, partly because they are filtered to the audience through the subjective gaze of the protagonist, Pel Pelham (John Ireland). Despite his North American accent, Pel appears fully integrated into British life, providing an apt channel for audience identification. Privately, he enjoys domestic bliss with his wife Jenny (Honour Blackman) and their child; at work, as a small-time manager of freak shows, he nevertheless lords over the cream of London’s bizarre performers. An established figure in the circus world, Pel also holds some strategic contacts; specifically, he is on friendly terms with powerful impresario Tony Lewis (Sid James). The film opens with Pel in financial difficulties, struggling to find the capital to fund a new show; as he appeals to Tony for help, the latter gives him a large cheque, but questions the wisdom of working in sideshows, rather than joining his own glamorous line. Pel’s answer, ‘I like freaks’, serves a dual purpose in the narrative: it establishes the identity of the yet unseen circus artists (they are all freaks), while suggesting the appropriate audience reaction to them (they are likeable). A specific, though collective image is thus set in place, providing a representational structure where individual characters may be incorporated; this process had already started with the film’s initial credits, which acknowledged the novel The Outsiders, by A.G. Martin, as the source for the script. The plot moves forward as Tony now asks Pel for a favour: he is about to get married, and he is troubled by the blackmailing attempts of an old fling, the Italian circus girl Rina Moroni. Pel promises to go and talk to Rina who, as it happens, lives in the same building as Sapolio, his star freak artist. The visit soon takes place, and the audience is introduced to the film’s Italian man, the fat, excitable, and frankly grotesque Sapolio (Eric Polhman): an interesting precursor of today’s reality shows, his ‘act’ consists in burying himself in a glass vault and starving, watched around the clock by ticket-payers. This bizarre performance is Sapolio’s unique speciality; Pel’s new show will allow him to break his own world record on starvation, 65 days. After exchanging pleasantries with Sapolio and his wife Marie (sic), (Nora Gordon), Pel goes upstairs to have a talk with Rina (Tonia Bern). The daughter of the ‘great’ Moroni, a circus owner, Rina is revealed as a harmless person, who has fallen on hard times and has tried to blackmail Tony without really meaning to; Pel invites her to the party soon to take place at Sapolio’s, to celebrate his impending starving challenge. Later on, after Sapolio’s party has begun, and a collection of variously strange people has been paraded on the screen, a shadowy figure steals upstairs, and murders Rina. The assassin, who is revealed only to the audience, is Harry Stanton (Geoffrey Keen), a colleague of Tony’s, a

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respected impresario and secret extortionist. While the police fail to trace the murder to Stanton, Sapolio suspects him; he starts telling Pel that he may have a clue as to Rina’s killer, but his agent advises him to keep quiet at present, and refuses to hear more. In the meantime, all is ready for Sapolio’s performance: in a doubly voyeuristic sequence, spectators are presented with the ritualized enclosure of the Italian in his glass ‘tomb’, which takes place amid a frenzied crowd of onlookers. Days go by, and Sapolio’s every move is documented by the film, including his fits of impotent rage whenever a member of the public eats in front of him. The Italian, however, is not destined to break his starvation record: Pel has unwittingly betrayed him, by telling Stanton of Sapolio’s suspicions about Rina’s murderer. Without losing time, the evil impresario delivers a bottle of poisoned drink to the glass tomb, and Sapolio is found dead in the morning. In a spiralling succession of events, Pel’s wife is kidnapped, as a warning to her husband not to divulge his newly-formed suspicions about Stanton; however, Pel has already talked to Tony, who is then swiftly murdered. As a last attempt to prove Stanton’s guilt, the police decide to conceal Sapolio’s death, substituting his body with an undercover agent, hoping the murderer will renew his attempt on his life. Stanton does indeed enter the glass tomb, disguised as a nurse, tries to knife ‘Sapolio’, and is duly arrested. The end sees Pel, standing under a giant poster of Sapolio, delivering a warm tribute to his favourite freak, who has nobly ‘died at his post’. One hardly knows how to begin a critique of The Glass Cage: its construction of Italian masculinity is so outrageously bizarre, so perversely grotesque, that it must leave many viewers lost for words. A first point to make is that this representation, extreme though it is, does not emerge out of nowhere, resting instead on well-established stereotypes: nineteenth-century images of Italian itinerants in Britain, outlandish figures performing strange tricks, are combined with notions of Italian maleness as essentially farcical. The solidity of a context around Sapolio is made obvious by the film, which places the starving champion in a clearly defined world of poor, weird, Italianate people living on the fringe: ‘the freaks’. Immediately defined by their presumed anomaly, Sapolio and friends are also automatically contrasted to the normality of the protagonist: Pel might work with freaks, but he is certainly not one of them, and his home life is conventionally respectable. At the same time, while Pel and Tony are sharp and somewhat unscrupulous, the circus artists are innocent, easily victimized creatures; even Rina, the blackmailer, is just a nice girl who has strayed. Evil, in The Glass Cage, is not compatible with the infantile and disenfranchized, being in fact the prerogative of the powerful Stanton, the freaks’ alleged ‘father figure’; Sapolio, on the other hand, is described by his wife as ‘a big baby’. In this context, the Italian man is readily explained from the start, endowed with inherent alienness and weakness; however, his volatile behaviour, melodramatic speech, and comical appearance, are all subordinated to his peculiar ‘act’. Sapolio’s voluntary starvation is made the absolute centre of his identity, offering an absurd and masochistic spectacle which, needless to say, screams ‘do not follow me’ to male spectators. Caged, impotent, and on display, Sapolio’s position is an essentially feminine one; this is not less true in view of the Italian’s horrific, rather than erotic, appeal, as the audience’s fascination is entirely focused on his objectified body. According to Jack Hunter (1995, 7), the fascination with human bizarreness dates to the very beginnings of cinema, operating within a primary

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structure of looking, where the Other is the object of a voyeuristic and sadistic gaze. The Glass Cage replicates this structure exactly, exposing both the gazers and the gazed-at, leaving no doubts as to Sapolio’s role: it is flesh offered for consumption. In a total inversion of traditional gender positions, the Italian man is not only object of the gaze, but of a gaze which marks him out for literal obliteration: his body interests because it is being starved, punished. Punished for what? Partly for its ridiculousness, but chiefly for its willingness to be punished: in other words, for being unmanly. Relentless voyeurism, and pleasure in Sapolio’s starvation, are clearly encouraged by the film, as they are orchestrated by Pel, the protagonist; however, the greatest sanction comes from Sapolio himself, who is shown as being utterly dedicated to his starving career. In other words, the victim is asking for it: he gets what he deserves. The fact that Sapolio performs his ‘act’ out of pressing financial needs, and that his wife admits to occasionally smuggling bits of food into his cage, become irrelevant details in the film’s discourse, which sees Sapolio’s starving as right, proper, and commendable: ‘he died at his post’. The insertion of such unnatural behaviour into the ‘natural’ order of things is, of course, made easy by Sapolio’s feminization; given that fat women are much more usual in show business than fat men (Hunter 1995, 75), the Italian can be seen as an honorary woman in The Glass Cage. Professional masochism and a fetishized body make Sapolio’s femaleness complete, unencumbered by traditional masculine traits: appropriate, though, for a nation whose male exponents have long been considered effeminate. Indeed, a contemporary review of the film praises its main performances, described as ‘straightforward, credible, and accomplished’ (Today’s Cinema, 15/7/55, 12). The Italian starving champion thrills, but does not surprise, as he is kept firmly in his allotted place, a cage: he is not let loose into society, to set a trend for masculine starvation. If there was ever an ‘extreme masochistic hero’ (Krutnik 1991, 85), this must be Sapolio in The Glass Cage, whose timely death saves the film from the disruption of patriarchy. Just as Sapolio provides a powerful example of what men ought not to be, even without recourse to a direct British foil, so the Italian in Escape by Night (John Gilling, Montgomery Tully, 1953) offers the audience a clear picture of masculine failure, unmitigated by the presence of a foreign protagonist. The film centres on Tom Buchan (Bonar Colleano), an American journalist in London, whose life becomes briefly entangled with that of Gino Rossini (Sid James), a notorious Italian gangster fleeing from the police. Tom is a clever reporter, but has a serious drinking problem, which leads to his being dismissed by the newspaper he works for; however, aware of the avid public interest in Gino Rossini, he decides to track the gangster down, hoping for a sensational scoop. Tom begins by phoning Gino, to warn him of his impending arrest (one of the many improbable details in the film’s plot); as Gino goes into hiding, the journalist tries in vain to talk to Rosetta (Simone Silva), Gino’s Italian moll, to get information as to the gangster’s whereabouts. Under Gino’s protection, Rosetta is working as a singer in a prestigious night club, which happens to get raided by the police the same night Tom goes there; in the ensuing confusion, none other than Gino himself appears, kidnapping Tom at gun point, and forcing him to come with him. The two abscond to a disused theatre, whence Gino keeps Tom captive for days, while agreeing to dictate him his life story. Growing frightened and confused,

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Gino loses his grip on the situation, too scared even to fall asleep; his looks become visibly haggard, old, and pathetic. Having engaged the help of a young boy, Joey (Andrew Ray), Tom is able to convey his daily reports to the newspaper’s editor, while Gino makes contact with Rosetta and with his fellow-gangsters, whom he trusts blindly; these, however, who include his brother Giulio (Martin Benson), have been planning to betray him, and to escape with the gang’s loot. As the police finally arrive on the scene, the increasingly desperate Gino goes on a shooting rampage, killing a gang member and attempting to also kill Rosetta and Tom: the heroic journalist, however, manages to save the woman’s life, as well as his own. Gino at last dies at the hands of the police. By presenting an Italian crook who is also a loser, Escape by Night brings two classic stereotypes together. An established set of notions is evoked from the very beginning, when close-ups of newspaper headlines show the word ‘racketeering’, soon followed by fragments of overheard conversation about ‘the Rossini brothers’; in particular, the dangerous gangster is described as someone who ‘is very good to his mother’. The mood is thus set for a display of conventional Italianness, and audience expectations are adjusted accordingly. Likewise, when Gino makes his appearance on the screen, portrayed by a moustached Sid James whose wide, flat eyes seem suddenly to have sloped downwards, spectators know that the Italian man is doomed. Gino’s descent into humiliating defeat is held in focus by a contrast, as it takes place alongside Tom’s self-recovery: initially described as a ‘crazy Yank’, heartbroken after the death of his wife, the journalist is a standard anti-hero who, slowly regaining his mental and moral strength, redeems himself before the film’s end. But while Tom’s presence enhances Gino’s downfall, as well as providing a pleasurable diversion from Sid James’ puffy and weary face, the portrait of the Italian gangster stands on its own: it does so because it also speaks on its own, as a selfreferential sign, collapsing outer and inner characteristics into the single archetype of Italian manhood. At the same time, Gino’s instantly recognizable meaning acts as a warning to male spectators, flashing the spectre of failed masculinity; Escape by Night fulfils every expectation raised in the audience, by combining an all-too-familiar Italian stereotype with an equally predictable narrative trajectory. First of all, the film begins at a point in which Gino’s ‘greatness’ is already gone: with the police after him, the whole country on alert, and his partners in crime plotting his betrayal, the gangster’s days are clearly numbered. The frequent allusions to his past as public enemy only emphasize his present disgrace; moreover, Gino’s tired appearance and neurotic performance point to his loss of self-control, something a British audience would likely equate with loss of power. This fading virility is reinforced by Gino’s constant references to his childhood: as the young Joey befriends the two men, Gino monotonously remarks on the similarity between Joey and himself at the same age. As Joey is a delicate, naïve schoolboy in short trousers, the effect of this identification is to expose the dangerous criminal as an overgrown child. The Italian gangster is thus unequivocally branded as ‘not a real man’, while his rough and ageing looks make him all the more ridiculous. Infantile and quite lost, Gino is even more pitiable for his disastrous assessment of his closer associates: like Roselli father in The Frightened Man, Giuseppe in The Flanagan Boy, and Filippo in Miracle in Soho, the Italian man is defined by

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inability to read people’s motives. It is true that, unlike the other films’ harmless characters, Gino is violent and paranoid; but his violence is ineffective, and his obsessive suspicion misdirected. In the face of an increasingly hopeless situation, Gino clings wistfully to the belief that ‘his friends will fix it’, trying to awe Tom, whom he mistrusts, with his highly connected status in the racketeering world; Tom remains unimpressed, though, and with him the audience, who know Gino’s cronies are defecting with a load of precious stones. Easily flattered and manipulated, the Italian gangster is openly presented as stupid, the target of Tom’s sarcasm and, worst of all, the sugar-daddy of beautiful Rosetta, who does not love him or find him attractive. Gino’s lack of sex-appeal is the conclusive proof of his failed masculinity, the last piece of evidence to unmask his virile pose; the male prowess associated with Italian gangsters, the film suggests, is a facade of bravado belying their inadequacy. This final judgement on Italian maleness is explicitly articulated through Tom, who challenges Gino’s incoherent rage: ‘this kind of talk makes you look small – maybe you’re not so great after all’. On the Beat: moving seamlessly into a new decade On the Beat is a 1960s film, yet it provides a logical conclusion to this chapter: its humour and cultural referents belong to the fifties, placing it at the end of that decade rather than at the beginning of the next. At the same time, the fact that the film was, after all, made in the sixties, shows the strength of traditional stereotypes at a time of new cultural directions. On the Beat offers another variant on a familiar representational structure: centred on a British protagonist who is also a fool, it opposes its comical anti-hero to an impersonal, collective British ‘norm’, as well as to a specific Italian counterpart. However, this initially fractured national image finds resolution at the end, leaving the Italian man as the unassimilable face of masculinity. The film follows the misadventures of Norman Pitkin (Norman Wisdom), a car park attendant at Scotland Yard, whose dream is to be a policeman like his late father; the dream looks likely to remain one, however, as Norman’s diminutive stature is combined with exceptional stupidity. A harmless buffoon, Norman fails to grasp the basics of adult behaviour, indulging his love of practical jokes, and generally making a nuisance of himself; far from being offered a post in the forces, he is barely tolerated by the police. The plot opens with Scotland Yard plagued by a series of unsolvable crimes, suspected to be masterminded by Giulio Napoletani, a notorious Italian gangster; Giulio’s cover, an exclusive hairdresser salon, has so far provided an effective screen for his illegal activities. The film’s central twist becomes apparent at Giulio’s first appearance, as the Italian is in fact Norman’s double (Wisdom sporting a moustache and a curly wig). Much of the film is made up of parallel sequences, contrasting Norman’s attempts to join the police with the latter’s efforts to frame Giulio: the resulting effect is not just a division between two personalities, but a clear exposition of the contexts to which they belong. Norman’s antics take place in or around Scotland Yard, a prime symbol of British authority; even as the simpleton is shown on stilts, assuring the police doctor that he’s tall enough to be enrolled, the audience is reminded of the appropriateness of his desire. To become a British policeman is a manly thing to do, and Scotland Yard is presented as an extension of the protagonist’s aspirations; Norman’s role model, as constantly reiterated, is his father, identified on the screen with the police uniform bequeathed to the son. Conversely,

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the space associated with Giulio is both alien and effeminate: despite the Italian’s reputation as a dangerous criminal, a ladies’ hairdresser appears to be his natural habitat, as he never seems to go anywhere else. The salon is effectively the Napoletani headquarters, inexorably linking the Italian gangster to the world of hair beauty; hairdressing aesthetics, which the film constructs as ridiculously excessive, are opposed to the virile seriousness of Scotland Yard. Likewise, despite his dedication to crime, Giulio is clearly passionate about hairdressing: his longest scenes take place at the salon, where he is shown in ecstatic pursuit of the perfect cut and blow-dry. In an age when celebrity hairdressers had not yet entered the mainstream, the Italian’s favourite hobby must be an obvious sign of effeminacy. Giulio’s and Norman’s narratives move forward, and eventually merge. The first organizes his own wedding to Rosanna (Jennifer Jayne), the daughter of another Italian gangster, while the second loses his job at the Scotland Yard car park. Giulio’s fiancee, however, is a decent girl who has been coerced into the arrangement, and who clearly finds the gangster both loathsome and revolting. In fact, Rosanna manages to escape from Giulio’s place, but her distress at the thought of being forced to marry him leads her to attempt suicide. Enter Norman, who sees Rosanna jumping into the Thames and dives in to rescue her, despite being unable to swim. Thanks to a life jacket, the two avoid drowning, after which Norman convinces the girl that, despite his extraordinary resemblance to Giulio, he is not him. Brought to safety to Norman’s home, Rosanna abruptly leaves the next day, and is recaptured by Giulio’s gang. Meanwhile, the London police are under pressure from the Home Office to solve the Napoletani case; in a desperate attempt to collect evidence against Giulio, they decide to employ Norman as a plant. Pretending to be the Italian gangster, he must try to gain access to his headquarters, at the salon, where hidden microphones have already been found. The plan is put into action with predictably chaotic results, until Norman himself manages to seize Giulio, delivering him to the police. As a recognition of this feat, Scotland Yard reconsiders Norman’s case and employs him as a policeman; at the same time, Rosanna agrees to marry him. While functioning as a vehicle for Wisdom’s farcical acting, On the Beat clearly distinguishes between British and Italian folly. The portrayal of Pitkin as a likeable fool, together with Wisdom’s own popularity, establish from the start that the funny little man, ridiculous as he appears, has nevertheless a place in the national narrative; this is actually validated by his physical identification with Giulio, a device which merely stresses how one must not be mistaken for the other. Rather than an alter ego, Norman is the Italian’s opposite: his final inclusion in the police force, after Giulio’s capture, signifies national unity against Italianness. The discourse underlying On the Beat is one of native, thus ‘natural’, identity versus foreign aberration; the chosen kind of foreignness, in its male version, is one whose traditional representation suits the film’s jocular style. At the same time, the characterization of Norman and Giulio illustrates, in no uncertain terms, the profound awfulness and anomaly of the Italian man. While undoubtedly irritating, put-upon Pitkin has a certain pathetic dignity; or at least, the film strongly suggests that he has. As Robert Murphy has observed (1992, 247), Wisdom tended to play the same character in all his films: the bullied, well-meaning little man, an old-fashioned figure resembling music-hall clowns. It is a role which calls for sympathy from the audience, never more so than

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when the hapless protagonist is threatened by a wicked double; despite Norman’s impersonation of Giulio under police orders, the film’s overall feeling is that the Italian is the usurper, stealing the identity of the likeable British fool. Giulio is automatically cast as twice a villain, the enemy of British law and of harmless Norman; this narrative function, however, is subordinated to his representation as an effeminate foreigner, which alone testifies to his undesirability. The scene which establishes Giulio’s character takes place early on in the film. As part of their investigation, the police send an undercover policewoman (Eleanor Summerfield) to Giulio’s hairdresser, armed with a concealed camera, with the aim of collecting possible proof against him. In accordance with the film’s emphasis on place, it is the salon itself which initially takes centre stage, providing the audience with information about its owner. As the stern policewoman enters Giulio’s headquarters, she is accompanied by a distinctive music score, whose mandolin notes are repeated throughout the film to signal a shift to Italian territory. Immediately, the ladies’ hairdresser is presented as an unreal space, where beautiful hair stylists float around, against an over-ornate, over-filled background. A veritable nightmare of frills and brocade, the salon is a shrine to feminine excess, in its most sugary variation; indeed, a later scene shows one of Giulio’s customers crying in front of the mirror, unable to bear the ecstasy of her new hairdo. Any doubt as to Giulio’s place in this fashion haven is soon dispelled: the Italian gangster is literally enthroned in it, occupying a commanding position from his rococo armchair. With a suave look on his face, Giulio not only oversees all the hair styling, but even graces clients and audience with a little dance number: limp-wristed and hip-swinging, he flits from one customer to another, brush and scissors in hand, executing silly little steps. Every hair creation is preceded by kissing the ladies’ hands and arms, while whispering sweet nothings in heavilyaccented English. It is an exhibition which could be described as extremely camp, if this did not mean depriving camp of any possibility of irony; constantly followed by the policewoman’s gaze, Giulio is clearly an object of serious study, an interesting specimen of an alien race. Improbable as it appears, the Italian’s behaviour is both offered and received as essentially realistic: a contemporary review praised Wisdom’s ‘observant clowning as Norman’s double, an effeminate Italian hairdresser’, describing the performance as ‘character acting’ (The Daily Cinema, 10/12/62, 8698, 6). Another review merely commends the film as ‘clean, wholesome fun’ (Kinematograph Weekly, 13/12/62, 2880, 155). To construct Giulio as an outrageous flirt, while all the time stressing his lack of virility, is of course to conform to traditional stereotypes: as discussed in the previous chapter, the Latin Lover is an ambiguous figure, whose very excess exposes his fundamental deficiency. Through the insertion of Rosanna in the plot, the film’s narrative highlights Giulio’s failed masculinity, showing the Italian to be inappropriate as a sexual mate; the only place where Giulio can relate to women is the artificial, absurd space of the hairdresser. Rosanna, on the other hand, is beautiful in a girl-next-door way, suggesting naturalness and propriety; by choosing Norman over Giulio, the honest-looking girl effectively confirms the former’s ‘normality’. Lastly, On the Beat openly recognizes Giulio’s style as a threat to national masculinity. A considerable part of the film is devoted to Norman’s ‘training’ in Italian posturing, under police direction: to help the confused Pitkin, Scotland Yard officers mimic at length Giulio’s walk (paying special attention

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to the position of the wrists), with unexpectedly convincing results. As they are interrupted by a horrified police chief, the shame and embarrassment on their faces is a clear admission of guilt; order is swiftly restored, but the solidity of British manhood has been, however fleetingly, endangered.

Notes 1. See, for example, this view from Jimmy, the hero of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger: ‘when you see a woman in front of her bedroom mirror, you realise what a refined sort of butcher she is. […] Thank God they don’t have many women surgeons! Those primitive hands would have your guts out in no time. […] She’d drop your guts like hair clips and fluff all over the floor’ (1957, 24). 2. Films such as The Sea Shall Not Have Them (Lewis Gilbert,1954), The Dam Busters (Michael Anderson, 1955), or The Colditz Story (Guy Hamilton, 1955).

4 The New Italian Glamour: Italian Film Stars in British Cinema from the Early 1950s to the Mid-1960s

Introduction As argued in the previous chapter, 1950s British cinema often used Italianness to deal with social anxieties about masculinity; it did so by relying on representations from the past, including the more recent war years, as well as on contemporary notions of Italian immigrants. These perceptions brought no change to the Italians’ traditional image: they acted collectively as a fixed signifier, highlighting the transitional position of the British man. However, a different version of Italianness was being constructed in the same period, the result of socio-economic developments in Italy and Britain. This chapter starts by examining the cultural changes affecting the two countries in the post-war boom, paying specific attention to their cinema industries; it traces the emergence of new glamorous trends, from their 1950s beginnings to their continuation and development in the 1960s. This is followed by an analysis of Italianness in four significant films, focusing on their approach to the modern glamour which Italy represented. Summer Madness (David Lean, 1955), The Millionairess (Anthony Asquith, 1960), and Woman of Straw (Basil Dearden, 1964), star new, if predictable, Italian icons, while The Constant Husband (Sidney Gilliat, 1954) relies on age-old stereotypes to construct Italian sex-appeal. Like most of western Europe in the 1950s, Italy and Britain were slowly emerging from the postwar gloom. Italy was making its presence felt on the world stage through its design, fashion, and cinema industries; it was also becoming a major player in the new phenomenon of mass tourism, attracting visitors not just because of its art and history, but through the novel allure of beach resorts. At the same time, widespread affluence in Britain, coupled with off-beat directions in fashion and the arts, were creating a modern consumer society which was ready to ‘consume’ Italian style.

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The association of Italy with beauty and glamour was nothing new: as discussed in the Introduction, it had bewitched foreigners since the days of the Grand Tour, and many a British or American novel had relied on some handsome Italian prince, or bandit, to spice up its plot. Glamorous Italianness had thus been either a highbrow construct, built on the past glory of monuments and artefacts, or a literary or sensational one, based on fictional characters; real-life Italians had been largely excluded from their country’s attractions. Now, however, the source of appeal was contemporary Italy, with its sunbathing, Vespa-riding, espressodrinking population; even more so, it was the glamour of huge film stars like Gina Lollobrigida or Sophia Loren. This ‘made in Italy’ style had, necessarily, little in common with that of the average Italian immigrant in Britain, although it was not unconnected with it: on the contrary, the new Italianness depended in some measure on ever-present stereotypes, the rough material out of which current sophistication was being shaped. The Italian ‘boom’ could be seen as an unusually rapid maturation process, the coming of age of a nation of waiters, where even waiters themselves were suddenly fashionable. In Italy as much as abroad, wide publicity was given to Loren’s and Lollobrigida’s ‘rags to riches’ biographies (genuine for the former, vastly fictional for the latter), presenting glamour and fame as something which had befallen beautiful, barefooted women living in slums. As long as Loren could boast ‘everything you see I owe to spaghetti’ (sophialoren.com/quotes), the new image was firmly rooted in the old one. This dual representation found its way to British cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. From then on, the articulation and reception of Italianness would often acknowledge its fashionable status, sanctioned by Hollywood’s ‘discovery’ of Italian actors and actresses. The presence of Italian stars lent British films an aura of international glamour; but it could not be decoded outside a framework of pre-existing notions. A star’s off-screen persona would inform the Italian character she or he played in a film, while the character itself would be related by the audience to their previous experience of Italianness. This ambivalence was exploited by British film-makers, who cast Italian stars as tokens of continental glamour, spelling prestige and un-Britishness at the same time: while legitimizing Britain’s claim to cosmopolitan chic, Italian icons emphatically stood for what Britain was not. The post-war order had radically altered Britain’s role in the world. The dismantling of the British empire had been steadily gaining pace, and was to be virtually accomplished by 1964; at the same time, the rise of the new European Economic Community (EEC) had created an international force to reckon with, but which clearly did not need Britain for its prosperity. The belated British application for EEC membership, in 1961, had been rejected in 1963; Britain would not join the European Community for another ten years. One consequence of this power shift was, necessarily, the redundancy of traditional routes to British self-definition: world preeminence, and superiority to European neighbours, could no longer be taken for granted. At the same time, exclusion from the new Europe reinforced atavistic notions of isolation and difference; but if these notions remained a significant factor in the formation of British identity (as they arguably still are), they survived in a changed cultural context, where continental Europe was becoming nearer, more familiar, and more attractive. Italy loomed large in this European landscape, as the intermediate point at which politics and tourism converged. The EEC had been born in Rome, with the 1957 Treaties; in the meantime, visitors from all over the world

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had come to the country, with numbers reaching seven million in 1956. Figures for Britain, in the same year, were just 1,107,000; France counted 4,305,000. The unlikely beginning of the Italian tourist boom had been the 1950 Catholic Holy Year, while its consecration would be the 1960 Olympic games in Rome, drawing 100,000 new visitors every day (Bosworth 1996, 178). Fashionable and European, the new Italy was still a foreigner’s playground, but the game was increasingly played on Italian terms: as tourism revenues increased out of all expectations, so did summer affairs between tourists and locals, adding a sexual buzz to Italy’s image, as much as to its self-image (Pellizzari 1996, 119–23; Triani 1996, 136–47). While seasonal Italian playboys kept score, their fame was propagated on the screen by domestic and foreign cinema alike: Three Coins in The Fountain (Jean Negulesco, 1954) won three Oscars, confirming the Italians’ power of seduction in the post-war, post-Valentino age. The allure of Italy’s style, progressing from the Vespas and Lambrettas of the late 1940s, now shone through its famous racing cars, Ferrari, Maserati, and Alfa Romeo; Italian design in general enjoyed a privileged status, comparable to that of Britain in the pop music field (Marwick 1998, 530). In other words, Italy was now exporting fashion and glamour rather than (just) cheap labour, and this was never more visible than in the cinema world. When the new National Film Theatre opened in London, in September 1957, it was inaugurated by Princess Margaret and a selected company of celebrities: Vittorio De Sica, René Clair, John Ford, Akira Kurosava, G.A. Smith, and Laurence Olivier. Together with these prestigious filmmakers and actors, only one all-out glamour icon had been chosen: Gina Lollobrigida, whose sensational looks eclipsed the elegance of the British royal. Handsome De Sica, exuding charm, and beautiful Lollobrigida, oozing sex-appeal, easily stood out in media coverage of the event; the British press, indeed, was a prime channel of diffusion for Italy’s fashionable new image. However, the expansion of cinematic Italianness took various forms, from the casting of Italian stars in British films, to the staging of Italian film festivals, to Hollywood’s publicized ‘discovery’ of Italian talents. These developments took place in the context of a changing British cinema, plagued by declining audiences but moving forward in new directions. The spread of television had taken its toll on the British film industry, which had also been hit by the rise of the new music-orientated youth culture. By 1955, the country had lost over half of its cinemas and two-thirds of its audience (Richards 1997, 149), a clear sign of the end of the old cinema order, further highlighted in 1960 by the closing of the forty-year old magazine Picturegoer (Macnab 2000, 203). The critically acclaimed Free Cinema, New Wave, and ‘Kitchen Sink’ dramas were exciting new ventures, regarded today as the pinnacle of British film art in the late 1950s and 1960s; however, their output was modest in comparison with mainstream cinema, as was their box-office popularity. What audiences most wanted to see, apparently, was the heady mix of action, technology, and glamour embodied by James Bond films, which regularly topped box-office charts throughout the 1960s (Richards 1997, 164). The success of the Bond cycle testified to a craving for thrills and affluence, but an affluence marked by modernity, jet-setting and internationalism, rather than tradition; the casting of Sean Connery, Scottish and virtually unknown, gave Bond’s figure an aura of limitless possibilities. As Robert Murphy puts it (1992, 219), Connery made Bond’s lifestyle ‘seem classless, international,

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almost nouveau riche’, while Jeffrey Richards describes Bond/Connery as ‘a sexual adventurer and essentially classless’ (1997, 163). By transcending the boundaries of class and nation, and unlike his Bond successor Roger Moore, Connery embodied the permissiveness and cosmopolitanism of Britain’s self-image in the 1960s. This new openness was reflected elsewhere in the cinema, as distinguished international directors chose Britain to make landmark films: Roman Polanski (Repulsion, 1965), Francois Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451, 1966), and Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow-Up, 1966). Even more so, foreign stars were becoming a familiar presence on the screen. Rather than being American or anglophones, these new actors and actresses came from continental Europe; while this in itself was not a novelty, as British cinema had experienced an influx of Europeans since the 1920s, never before had Latin types been so prevalent. Most imports had been from central Europe, from Peter Lorre to Anton Walbrook, to Herbert Lom: they were rarely marketed as sex-symbols, and while their exoticism could be used to signify menace or mystery, they were not defined by a radically different look. In fact, they could even assimilate on demand, as did the Austrian Carl Boehm, who played a stereotypically English killer in Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960), or Lithuanian-born Laurence Harvey, the Yorkshire lad of Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959) (Macnab 2000, 148–49). On the other hand, the appeal of the Anglo-Welsh matinee idol Ivor Novello, at its peak during the 1920s, had relied heavily on his Latin looks and Italianate name. From the mid-1950s and throughout the 1960s, southern Europeans were particularly visible among new foreign stars; partly through Hollywood films, British audiences were dazzled by Gina Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren, Rossano Brazzi, Vittorio Gassman, Claudia Cardinale and Monica Vitti. According to Arthur Marwick (1998, 408–09), these stars presented a ‘new type’ of attractiveness which challenged traditional Wasp standards, and which befitted a decade characterized by the celebration of different canons of beauty. A paradox of the 1960s, at least in cinema terms, was that the need to cross boundaries combined with a craving for old-fashioned stardom, such as British films could not, or would not, provide. Audience ambivalence towards stars, however, was not a 1960s phenomenon: for while the period can be described as ‘the era of the anti-star’ (Macnab 2000, 204), it has been argued that stardom has always been ambiguous in British film culture (Landy 1991, 38; Street 1997, 119). Constrained by financial inadequacy and the lack of powerful, vertically integrated companies, Britain’s cinema industry has never been able to emulate Hollywood’s star factory; even more so, it has had to deal with the popular notion that stardom, with its implications of excess and ostentation, may be fundamentally un-British. The latter issue must be seen in the wider context of ongoing debates about national identity, and of revisionist accounts of what constitutes Britishness in British cinema; still, as Macnab points out, many British stars have become such because of their accessible image, eluding mystique by constantly shifting between genres. Glamour was never especially associated with Alec Guinness and Laurence Olivier, two of the most popular British actors ever, while chic and sophisticated Kay Kendall was so out of place in the industry as to appear almost exotic (Macnab 2000, 140, 150, 177). One may add that truly glamorous British names, such as Elizabeth Taylor, have traditionally fled and thrived abroad.

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All the same, the 1960s saw important developments in the presentation and reception of indigenous stars; Connery might have been unique in giving Bond an international twist, but a break from established national stereotypes was evident in other film genres. A contemporary review of Alfie (Lewis Gilbert, 1966) thus described its lead character, played by cockney par excellence Michael Caine: ‘vain, easy-going, autocratic, physically fastidious, cowardly, undomestic, irresistible, he is the sort of man once thought totally un-English […] like the bright new clothes on the new bright boys, he suggests a subterranean national character’ (quoted in Richards 1997, 163). To question whether Alfie was indeed untypical and un-English is beside the point: what matters is his perceived deviancy from supposedly established national traits. It is also interesting that his description fits with stereotypical images of the Latin Lover, words like ‘vain’, ‘cowardly’, and ‘irresistible’ being particularly redolent of the Italian variety. For Macnab (2000, 205), Caine’s role as a ‘charming delinquent’ in Alfie is part of a wider, rebellious trend in British cinema, where stars flaunted conventions on and off screen, while snubbing the formal conservatism of film premieres and festivals. In this respect, stars emulated the behaviour of many pop-idols of the age, themselves cast in highly successful films (such as A Hard Day’s Night , 1964, and Help!, 1965, both directed by Richard Lester and starring the Beatles). This shift in culture and entertainment, which dominated 1960s Britain, meant a challenge to established models of national and celebrity behaviour; it did not alter, however, the oblique relation of British film stars to the already idiosyncratic domestic star-system. A result of this situation was a gap, a glamour vacuum which, as before, was partly filled by Hollywood’s offerings; unlike in the past, however, Hollywood was embracing Otherness in the shape of European stars, who also appeared internationally in films made in their own countries. The cinema firmament, as viewed from Britain, was shining with exciting new stars, none brighter than the Italian ones: not only were these now synonymous with cinematic prestige, not only were they ‘real’ stars in behaviour and presentation, they were also implicitly associated with the very attributes which problematized British stardom. Excess and ostentation were expected of them: they were Italian. These new film icons thus satisfied at once the need for novelty and for tradition; they broke from the familiar star mould in terms of looks, accent, and performance. Their sultry, primal sex-appeal thrilled, because it was foreign and threatening, though its threat was tempered by the audience’s in-built perception of Italianness as exotic, rather than alien. Sophia Loren seemed dangerously seductive, but not exactly frightening; Italian sensuality was just risky enough to tantalize. On the other hand, the Italians’ attitude towards the trappings of fame, consistently star-like and self-indulgent, showed an alliance with classical cinema glamour and the status quo. There was nothing remotely anti-establishment in, say, Gina Lollobrigida or Rossano Brazzi; their glitzy, essentially conservative appearance could never grace black-andwhite New Wave films, with their everyday settings and angry subtexts. But if the confinement of Italian stars to escapist cinema was connected to their self-perception and behaviour (as much as, in the case of Brazzi and Lollobrigida, to their limited acting ability), it was equally due to a British determination to perceive Italianness as glossy and frivolous. Sophia Loren’s dramatic potential was recognized and capitalized on in Italy, where De Sica directed her in the harrowing Two Women (1960), for which she won an Oscar; in Britain, however, she was sought after as a symbol of sex and glamour, and her most significant British film remains the

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farcical The Millionairess. As Terence Kelly put it (1966, 112), a popular belief at the time was that the British public thought of Italy ‘solely in terms of legs and bosoms’. Certainly, for the most part, Italian stars in British cinema served an escapist purpose, promoting a fashionable, cosmopolitan view of the present; this situation was further determined by the reception of Italian cinema, understood in Britain as both critically successful and explicitly sexual. Success meant cinematic authority and trendsetting status, while sex meant sex: the most overt, therefore coveted, expression of the ‘permissive society’. The Italian star was thus the locus at which three discourses converged: stardom, Italian cinema, and Italianness. The rise of the Italian film industry, begun in the 1950s, had attracted international notice, while providing an obvious comparison with Britain’s relatively modest production. In October 1954, the first issue of the British magazine Films and Filming had covered the ‘2nd Italian Film Festival’ in London; the article pointed out that, with nearly 150 new films every year, Italy was second only to the United States in the world film market,1 and declared somewhat gleefully: ‘Hollywood is beginning to panic. First Television, now Lollobrigida!’ (pp. 6–7). As well as its impact abroad, Italy’s prolific cinema was in itself proof of its internationality, as membership of the Common Market facilitated European co-productions; by 1966, over one thousand Italian films had benefited from the system, again highlighting Britain’s disadvantage in comparison to many European neighbours (Kelly 1966, 134). Still, out of all the Italian films produced, only a few obtained nationwide release in Britain, usually those expected to provide ‘continental’ titillation: a prime example is Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1959), which suffered a peculiar fate with its British audience. The film is a dark, deeply ironic meditation on life in Rome in the ‘boom’ years, which caused controversy in Italy because of its attack on the aristocracy and on the Catholic church; in Britain, however, the film owed its distribution to its ‘exploitable sex angle’ (Kelly 1966, 112). Apart from giving the English language the word ‘paparazzi’, La Dolce Vita endures as a term suggestive of a sensual, lax, idle lifestyle, ratified by its entry in the Oxford Dictionary as ‘a life of pleasure and luxury’; it regularly emerges in travel literature, as a description of even the most ordinary Italian pavement-café. It is a curious destiny for a film which denounces the spiritual death behind glamour and glitz, and which is ‘in its terrible bleakness, as moralistic as Dante’s vision of hell’ (Polhemus 1999, 62). This is not to say that British knowledge of Italian cinema was limited to ‘exploitable sex angles’: Neorealism, for example, did find its way to Britain, though mostly to London ‘art-houses’ (Kelly 1966, 112). In any case, preconceived notions of Italianness made even the grimmest, most sexless Italian film liable to be misconstrued: an article on Roberto Rossellini’s The Miracle (1948), in Sight and Sound, warned readers about Neorealism, described as a virtual conspiracy to seduce audiences. Tears need not be shed for the film’s seemingly tragic heroine (Anna Magnani): the Italians, after all, had been ‘masters of illusion […] since the time of Paolo Uccello’ (vol. 19, no. 2, April 1950, 87). 1950 was also the year of Stromboli, Rossellini’s first film starring his then lover Ingrid Bergman; the affair between the two, which dominated gossip columns, significantly damaged their careers and reputations. But if Bergman fell victim of the times’ patriarchal morality, provoking outrage for her desertion of husband and daughter, Rossellini only suffered the indignity of being confirmed as an inveterate

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Latin Lover. Cinematic Italianness, for all its critical accolades, could not escape the required frisson of sexual transgression. Luchino Visconti, who was discreetly homosexual, was noted by the British press for the ‘controversy’ caused by his work (Monthly Film Bulletin, December 1954, 8–9). When feted directors were caught in the intricate web of Italian representations, which blended critical deference with innuendoes, film stars could be expected to fare even worse, as real-life and screen-life became practically indistinguishable: often with the help of the stars themselves. Brazzi, who shot to international fame as the archetypal Italian womanizer of Three Coins in The Fountain, was a married man who basked in the glory of countless love affairs, declaring to the foreign press: ‘I’m always a bit in love with my leading ladies […] I’m Italian so you understand I can’t help it’ (quoted in Panaro 1996, 110, my translation). Foreign journalists could not help it either: a reviewer of Three Coins, in Films and Filming, remarked that ‘Italians seem to be all the rage this summer’ (October 1954, 28). But if Brazzi actively courted the Great Lover label, other (far more serious) Italian actors were persecuted by it. Vittorio Gassman, who had made a name for himself in Italy by playing Hamlet on the stage, followed his wife Shelley Winters to Hollywood only to be offered stereotypical ‘Latin’ roles in risible films, such as the passionate violinist in Rhapsody (Charles Vidor, 1954); the British journal Picturegoer introduced him to its readership as ‘Shelley Winters’s Latin Lover […] a new line in heart-throbs’ (vol. 25, no. 946, 20/06/53, 12). Nor, since its 1950s heyday, has the practice gone out of fashion, as this outburst by a 72-year-old Marcello Mastroianni shows: ‘For 35 years, since I did La Dolce Vita, the Americans have been convinced that I am “the Latin Lover”. […] A label picked up also by Italians and Europeans in general. Because it’s easy: “Latin Lover!”, and one has said everything’ (Mastroianni 1997, 61, my translation). The treatment of female Italian stars was somewhat different. Unlike their male counterparts, they were not framed in the ultimately negative, pre-made representation of the Italian Lover, which depended on equally established notions of no-nonsense British masculinity. As Christine Geraghty has argued (2000, 175), British male stars in the 1950s were not threatened by foreign competitors, as they held a special place in the national culture: ‘the male star image made Britishness a virtue’. British actresses, instead, were assessed in terms of Hollywood and European glamour. If Italian cinema itself was setting standards, Hollywood’s appropriation of its stars invested these with the ultimate authority, making them examples of what film stars should be: inserted in the cinematic metalanguage, a Lollobrigida or a Loren would become a veritable ‘metastar’, introducing a new canon of stardom for British cinema to compete with. Gina Lollobrigida was the first Italian bombshell to hit international screens; invited to Hollywood in 1950, she then starred in The Young Caruso (Giacomo Gentilomo, 1951), while also appearing on the cover of Life magazine. As more American films followed, the British press proclaimed her ‘Italy’s most famous living citizen and No.1 international cover girl’, while disclosing that ‘Marilyn Monroe is lamenting because she is sometimes called “the American Gina Lollobrigida”’ (Films and Filming, vol. 1, no. 2, November 1954, 13). Voluptuous Gina was indeed so famous to be the subject of a documentary, Portrait of Gina (1956), directed by

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none other than Orson Welles. But if Lollobrigida’s buxom Italianness was celebrated as iconic and glamorous, it still echoed its traditional representation as primitively sensual: after all, her cover shot in Films and Filming portrayed her as a dishevelled peasant embracing a donkey, after her role in Bread, Love and Dreams (Luigi Comencini, 1954). The article also stressed the actress’ rustic, low-class origins, announcing that ‘Gina is set about learning to speak Italian (for Gina’s home town accent is nothing to be proud of)’. Lollobrigida’s much-vaunted rags-to-riches biography, just like Loren’s, was in fact an allegory of post-war Italy: exulting in its new fame and elegance, but still partly savage under the gloss. The Italian star was a dualistic symbol of stardom and Italianness, in which the latter was always destabilizing the former; Italy’s farcical aura shone through impossibly beautiful women, giving them an untamed or comical edge. One of the first sightings of Sophia Loren in The Millionairess is ludicrous even by comedy standards, as she breaks her shoe heel and hops around, quite indecorously, and seemingly for ever, on one foot. Comparisons between Loren and Lollobrigida are inevitable, firstly because of Loren’s immeasurably superior talent; their looks, however, were also quite different, as Gina’s classical, doll-like features contrasted with Sophia’s irregular, more openly sexual beauty. Indeed, Loren’s career in Italy was initially hindered by her appearance, considered ‘too vulgar and exaggerated’ for an Italian actress: she was therefore cast in ‘exotic’ parts, such as a Gypsy or Arab woman (Gundle 1995, 367, 370). While it is stating the obvious to remark that the Italian film industry eventually changed its mind, it is tempting to hypothesize that, for the American and British markets, her looks were always just vulgar and exaggerated enough. This was the woman who, according to Time, had ‘a thick Neapolitan accent’, and who ‘in the sultry Roman evenings loves to turn on the record player, throw off her clothes and dance’ (1954, quoted in Gundle 1995, 374). The same Loren who, after starring with Cary Grant in The Pride and The Passion (Stanley Kramer, 1957), was hailed as ‘the most exciting personality that Europe has sent to California in thirty years’, quite simply ‘another Garbo’ (Films and Filming, v3, n7, April 1957, 9). A rough diamond groomed for stardom, Loren’s persona encapsulated the new Italianness, insofar as it was built on the old one: she was synonymous with glamour, but informed by a marked primitivism. This is confirmed by the popularity abroad of her comedies co-starring Marcello Mastroianni, notably Marriage Italian Style (Vittorio De Sica, 1964), which celebrated ‘a backward-looking picture of Italy’ (Gundle 1995, 383), and in which Loren spends half of her time shouting, wild-eyed, in various states of undress. In a totally different genre, the same is true of her Oscar-winning performance in Two Women, which is set in pre-industrial Italy. Histrionics being traditionally associated with both femaleness and stardom, they were ideally combined in Italian actresses, whose melodramatic aura was seen as a function of their nationality; after all, the English language had long used ‘prima donna’ as a description of temperamental and self-important individuals. Indeed, the perception of Italian theatricality as female has deep roots in British culture, going back to the Renaissance (Parolin 2000, 107–35); Parolin’s chosen quote from Ben Jonson’s Volpone, ‘A Strange Fury Entered My House’, would easily describe Loren’s character in The Millionairess. Incidentally, gendered notions of Italian dramatics are central to the ambivalent, feminized construction of the Latin Lover. In the case of Italian actresses, assumptions about their behaviour surrounded their fame;

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Anna Magnani, for example, who had been invited to Hollywood to star in The Rose Tattoo (Daniel Mann, 1955), was portrayed by the British press as capricious and irascible, spending her time on set quarrelling and even slapping people (Films and Filming, November 1955, 6). Tennessee Williams, however, who had written The Rose Tattoo with her in mind, had praised her methodical, measured approach to acting (Casella 1998, 187). These stars’ distinctiveness was then perceived as a blend of looks and performance, vastly qualified by the Italian label applied to them. Being dark and voluptuous was not unique: but the Italian body was inscribed with a specific symbology. The following lyrical description of Sophia Loren dates from 1974, though its underlying assumptions are timeless: ‘legs that talk; Etruscan eyes that sigh; all-over Vesuvian contours, only out-deafened in their clarion call to arms by the over-generous appeal to the senses […] she is, most definitely, definitively, Italian: Neapolitan!’ (Crawley 1974, 9). In terms of their appearance on British screens, Italian stars functioned as complex semiotic structures, not least because they usually played Italian characters: they appeared as if they were, effectively, parodying themselves. It is useful here to bear in mind some basic distinctions between signs, as established by performance analysts: in particular, Martin Esslin (1987, 43–48) distinguishes between the true icon, the iconic sign, and the symbol. The first implies no gap between the sign and its established meaning: the sign simply is. The second denotes a sign which points to its designated object, while the last indicates a sign whose link to its object is purely conventional. According to this model, it is possible to isolate three different functions of Italian stars in British films, as they fulfil the criteria for each type of sign. First of all, as Italians being Italians, they are true icons; secondly, by playing the role of Italians for the camera, they are iconic signs; finally, they are symbols, as they are perceived to represent all Italian women, or men, or Italianness. In practice, of course, they were more than that: because of their fame and good looks, these stars were very much icons of stardom and beauty. Nonetheless, by carrying their dense concentration of Italianness to the screen, they reverberated its assumed meanings, presenting audiences with a specific brand of Otherness. From The Constant Husband to Summer Madness: the rise of Italian glamour The Constant Husband is a good place to begin our analysis, as it provides an age-old construction of Italianness which, in the mid-1950s, was both comfortably predictable and anachronistic. The film follows the misadventures of a man suffering from amnesia (Rex Harrison), who gradually discovers himself to be a serial bigamist; one of his wives turns out to be Lola, an Italian showgirl who divides her time between her family’s two businesses, a circus and a restaurant. Lola and her relatives are a straightforward compilation of Italian immigrant stereotypes; her sex-appeal is wholesome rather than glamorous, and she is not played by an Italian actress, but by French-born Nicole Maurey. Without Italian stars or Italian chic, the film provides a useful contrast to many British and American films of the period, showing the persistence of traditional notions of Italianness; this is not lessened but confirmed by the choice of Lola, a Spanish name, a proof of the enduring British practice of jumbling constructions of southern Europeans. At the same time, however, the film highlights the continuity between old and new representations: the rendition of Lola relies on timeless concepts of the Italian character,

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Jane (Katherine Hepburn) is wooed by her suave Italian lover Renato (Rossano Brazzi) in Summer Madness (David Lean, 1955). Courtesy of the Kobal Collection.

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as much as of the British, or more precisely here, the English one. Rex Harrison is such a quintessential Englishman that, waking up an amnesiac in Wales, he mistakes the place for some foreign country; a paragon of composure and gentlemanly manners, he retains his selfcontrol even when faced with loss of identity, or with revelations of his criminal past. The contrast with Lola and her clan, vociferous, emotional, and volatile, could not be expressed to a greater effect. The Italian star factor is missing, but Lola’s antics are almost a replica of Magnani’s alleged behaviour in Hollywood (Films and Filming, November 1955, 6); they would be perfectly suited to Loren in The Millionairess, as well as to many of Loren’s Italian-made roles. Lola is highly sexual, passionate, and violent. Her behaviour towards Harrison is extremely physical: she kisses him rapturously, and literally imprisons him in her bedroom, in striking contrast to wife number one, the cool Monica (Kay Kendall), who had banned him from the conjugal bed. At the same time, Lola loudly professes to ‘hate’ Harrison, and meets his escape attempts with implacable rage: without ever stopping shouting, she hits him with various objects, then tries to lock him in a wardrobe, only to ardently regret it minutes afterwards. A ‘Strange Fury’ indeed. The other wives, all British, are either passive and bland or poised and sophisticated, as in the case of Monica, a fashionable and independent career girl. According to Bruce Babington (2002, 193), Lola’s ‘extreme physical aggression’ is part of the film’s overall structure, which subverts traditional gender roles and effectively feminizes Harrison’s character. With Lola, it may be added, this feminization is enhanced by opposing Harrison to Lola’s brothers, brutal, gangster-like types who do not scruple in kidnapping him; still, as the film endorses time-honoured stereotypes, Lola’s father (Eric Pohlmann, a veteran ‘Italian’ of British cinema) exemplifies the other side of Italian maleness, sentimental, melodramatic, and farcical. While everyone else in the family advocates revenge on Harrison, who abandoned Lola, the father urges a reconciliation, shouting louder than the others but hugging and kissing him as a prodigal son, with tears in his eyes; fat, moustached, emotional, Lola’s father appears to spend most of his time in the kitchen, singing. Interestingly, it is only the film’s Italian section that links Harrison to the working class: he had been a car salesman during his marriage to Lola, whose style, in contrast to the other wives’ bourgeois respectability, or high-flying glamour, remains defined by the circus and the trattoria. Ignoring Italy’s new fashionable status, The Constant Husband exploits Italianness in its crudest representations, as a foil to its middle-class, polished vision of Englishness. However, even when glamorous Italianness is acknowledged on the British screen, low class and low life are usually not far away: this is the case with Summer Madness, despite its overt representation of Italy as a chic, trendy country. Shot on location in Venice, the film capitalizes on the city’s splendidly decrepit appearance, as much as on hot leading man Rossano Brazzi, the epitome of contemporary Italian appeal since his role in Three Coins in the Fountain. Fashion and glamour are thus blended with Venice’s aura of splendour and decadence, to create a mythological version of Italy. Loosely based on the Broadway play The Time of the Cuckoo, by Arthur Laurents, the film was scripted by its director David Lean and Norman Spencer, who together radically changed the original text: while the setting had been seedy and dull, it was now injected with large doses of gloss and charm. Renato, the Italian protagonist, was

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transformed from an uninspiring swindler to a stylish Latin Lover; as Spencer remembers: ‘our script became so bloody glamorous it wasn’t true’ (Brownlow 1996, 314). This change in the play’s atmosphere was chiefly due to Lean’s own experience of Venice, one of his favourite places in the world, and one which he identified with glamour; while shooting Summer Madness, he stayed at the Grand Hotel and moved around by motorboat, a lifestyle which he described as ‘really high glamorous stuff. And I just loved it. And I somehow managed to capture a certain essence of Venice’ (Brownlow 1996, 330). Lastly, the decision to shoot Venice in all its grandeur was encouraged by the film’s producer, Alexander Korda, who agreed with Lean in making the city ‘the star of the picture’ (Brownlow 1996, 316, 321). Summer Madness relies on the oldest of all Italian plots: a foreigner falls in love with an Italian, with devastating consequences. This basic structure is given a contemporary tone by the stress on mass tourism, on the glamour of sunglasses and speedboats, and by the presence of Brazzi, fresh from the acclaim of Three Coins in The Fountain. True to type, Brazzi plays Renato, a suave art dealer, who preys on prim American visitor Jane (Katherine Hepburn). Renato’s easygoing moral code is forcefully marked in the film, as he first swindles Jane by selling her a fake antique, then begins an affair with her without revealing that he is married. What makes Jane (and the audience) forgive him is, naturally, his Italian charisma, his belonging to a fashionable, hedonistic world where everyone looks good and everything is allowed. La Dolce Vita had not been shot yet, but the basis for its misunderstanding was clearly already in place: the Venice of Summer Madness is a haven of chic lifestyle and free sex, where the café crowd sits in the sun, waiting for the evening session of love-making in gondolas. This Venetian environment is both cosmopolitan and elitist, as the tourists joining in the fun are strictly trendy and beautiful, such as the couple befriended by Jane at her pension; Jane herself, prudish and dowdy, is excluded by the city’s pleasures, as are the vulgar Americans for whom Venice is ‘a Luna Park on water’. It is only through her affair with Renato that Jane blossoms into an attractive, fashion-conscious woman, rushing to buy a new outfit which prompts the hotel cleaner to say: ‘you are so beautiful you look like a real Italian’. And yet, beneath the gloss, Venice teems with low life, exemplified by Mauro, the street urchin who becomes Jane’s almost constant companion. Dirty-looking, ragged, with a precocious smoking habit, the child is in the confidence of Renato and of the pension’s landlady (Isa Miranda), running errands and arranging nocturnal meetings between the latter and her lover (meetings which, needless to say, take place in a gondola). The grubby world of Mauro the street child is thus linked to Renato, the film’s Italian star, as well as to Miranda’s character, recreating the eternal Italian paradigm of beauty and decay. The landlady, seen through Jane’s eyes, is clearly a woman of loose morals, though remarkably happy; despite being past middle age, she appears glamorous and carefree, assuring Jane that in Italy ‘age is an asset’, and needn’t stop one from being sexy. This is a far cry from traditional representations of older Italian women, usually doomed to fatness, black robes, and the kitchen; the landlady, in practice an ageing widow who has to rent rooms for a living, is in fact in the same league as Renato (himself not so young), and as all of Venice’s beautiful people, simply because she is Italian. This shift in representation, of course, is a direct consequence of the new perception

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of Italy characterizing the 1950s. The idea of Italianness as a glamourizing leveller clearly dominates the film (casting hope on the future of Mauro the urchin), as the Italians themselves reiterate it for Jane’s benefit; Renato, more than anyone else, functions as the iconic sign of this general glamour. The undiscussed male protagonist and star, Brazzi plays a middle-aged family man, whose job involves cheating tourists from a little shop: not the sexiest of roles, in theory, but one which becomes so thanks to Italy’s special aura. Impeccably dressed, poised and seductive, Renato acts as an ambassador for his compatriots, who, he explains, like mainly to have fun, sing, and make love by the canals; his suggestive declaration to Jane ‘I am a man, you are a woman’, is a prompt to the audience to recognize Italian philosophy in a nutshell, and Renato/Brazzi as the prototype of Italian men. In fact, Brazzi’s lines in the film consist almost entirely of sententious mottoes, presumably a commentary on life seen through Italian eyes: ‘the most beautiful things in life are those we don’t understand’; ‘relax and the world is beautiful’; ‘every woman should surprise a man at least once’; ‘everything happens sooner or later’, and so on. While he suavely delivers his lines, Renato does not cease to be an ordinary Italian man, and it is precisely his ordinariness that marks Summer Madness as a modern interpretation of Italianness: framed by the new canons of the tourist boom, Renato’s portrayal is a democratization of the counts and bandits of old. The film can be contrasted with Where Angels Fear to Tread (Charles Sturridge, 1991), for example, which clings to E.M. Forster’s Edwardian vision of Italy: a country of good-looking barbarians, where all but upper-class men are embarrassingly ignorant, and possess frightful table manners. Gino, Forster’s Italian ideal, is expected to disappoint simply because he is the son of a dentist, and disappoint he does: his charm is uncultured and farcical, and to succumb to it is to descend into lower and primeval regions. In the 1950s, however, Italy was a rather different proposition: it exuded mass-appeal, as its citizens, regardless of social position, enticed collectively more tourists than ever. The whole country, or rather the idea of it, was endowed with style, understood as a modern commodity, which could be experienced and bought. The Italy of Summer Madness is a place where glamour is essentially classless: as Jane’s new sexiness is brought out by the purchase of Italian clothes, and validated by the hotel cleaner, the film enacts the fantasy of a nation whose fashionable power can heal the drab. The man drinking espresso at the next table needs not be a prince in disguise, just a Brazzi lookalike, ready to seduce through a combination of sexual predatoriness and romanticism; he will wine and dine his prey, buy flowers for her, as well as sing beautifully because, as Jane explains, all Italians do. The film, however, reverts to tradition in its epilogue, which sees Jane heading back to the USA, ending her relationship with Renato. Sacrificing pleasure and love to convention and duty, the heroine is making a moral statement on affairs in general and Italy in particular: as implied by the film’s title, Italian seduction belongs to the folly of a hot season, being ultimately not real nor right. It is a reminder that Summer Madness was shot in 1954, still very distant from the ‘permissive’ 1960s; as the work of David Lean, it is tempting to see the film as imbued by the same moral discourse of the decidedly anti-glamour Brief Encounter (1946). Indeed, the two films have been seen as thematically linked, as one of the fantasies nursed by Laura, Brief

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Encounter’s protagonist, is an image of her and her lover riding in a gondola on Venice’s Grand Canal (Silver and Ursini 1974, 136): an unrealistic, unrealizable dream, soon to be shattered by Laura’s return to her prosaic married life. Given that Summer Madness had its title changed to Summertime (Tempo d’Estate) for the American and Italian markets, it is also tempting to isolate a core of specifically British morality in its dominant discourse, beneath the veneer of international co-production and distribution. This is not to deny, of course, the validity of other possible readings of the film: Jane, for instance, could be seen as a strong and independent woman, who takes control of her life by refusing to live it on Renato’s terms. In its representation of Italianness, however, Summer Madness follows a predictable and cautious trajectory, where Renato and his environment are opposed to Jane, the film’s subject; thus clearly identified as Other, Italy functions successively as a site of pleasure, alternative, and reassurance of the preferability of the subject’s own, non-Italian reality . At the beginning there is Venice: its splendour, glamour, and apparent freedom dazzle the protagonist, and through her the spectator. Despite her Americanness, Jane attracts audience identification in a British cinema, not least because of her disassociation from other American tourists, portrayed as vulgar and ignorant or arrogant and pretentious; presented with most Americans’ gross inferiority, British audiences can relax and allow Jane, as a fellow-civilized, to guide them through their reading of the film. Hepburn’s popularity may facilitate this process, but the evocation of audience affinity rests primarily on her role: isolated from the tourists as well as from the native masses, she is the film’s lone conscience, through which subjectivity is channelled and meaning constructed. As a self-contained emotional system, Jane elicits empathy with her portrayal of unfashionable, unhappy middle age; she represents ‘normality’ against ‘summer madness’, retaining only a token un-Britishness in her tendency to speak loudly and call people ‘cookie’. With identification established, spectators can vicariously partake of glamour, cosmopolitanism, and sexual transgression: so far an entirely pleasurable experience, involving the recognition and enjoyment of a seductive, though distinctly outlandish lifestyle. As Italy’s pleasures become irresistible, audience alignment with the protagonist causes a critical self-detachment: the contest between dull familiarity and foreign excitement seems already settled, and Italianness is shifted from a mere dream to a desirable alternative. While this alternative unravels, however, Jane and the audience are made increasingly uncomfortable by its implications: the wonderful Italian existence is underpinned by a questionable moral system (‘madness’), ultimately incompatible with the associated values of subjectivity (‘normality’). The film therefore highlights Italianness as an enticing option, but forbids it outside the parameters of a holiday, implicitly destined to end. Jane must go back to Ohio, the audience must leave the cinema; still, heart-breaking as it appears, the departure from Italy takes place in a climate of inevitability, where the relief of rightness and virtue compensates for the loss of excitement. It is here that, paradoxically, the very magnitude of the Italian experience serves a reassuring function: its seduction is inversely proportioned to its acceptability, placing the greyness of domesticity in a rather more attractive light. In contradiction to its visual and emotive text, which articulates Italy as a source of pleasure and freedom, the film’s moral discourse tells a different story: to be unglamorous is not only permissible, it is perhaps even better than the alternative. Fashion,

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beauty, and thrills can be left to the Italians, because they are constituted by it; the solidity of familiar conventions is where ‘real’ (non-Italian) life takes place. This narrative resolution expresses an extremely conservative view, locating Summer Madness in a transitional position, caught between old and new approaches to Self and Other; it also exhibits certain British attitudes towards all things continental, defined by attraction, suspicion, and a sense of misplacement. Finally, a vague inferiority complex completes the picture, as glamour (like stardom) is seen as beyond Britain’s reach, and therefore dismissed as unnecessary (or rather un-British). Italian bomb-shells: The Millionairess and Woman of Straw As has been mentioned earlier, whenever Italian stars played Italian characters in a film, a specific dimension was added to their total screen image: Italianness, belonging to their real-life persona as much as to their role, affected and shaped other attributes. Obviously, this dynamic correspondence is at the core of the very concept of stardom, which exceeds by definition the confines of filmic space and time: stars are built on their off-screen presence (artificial as this may be), as much as on their acting style or genre predilections. Indeed, Barry King (1991, 174) has

HyperItalian: Sophia Loren is beautiful and wild in The Millionairess (Anthony Asquith, 1960). Courtesy of the Kobal Collection.

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The face of the new Italianness: but the allure of Maria (Gina Lollobrigida) rests on precarious foundations in Woman of Straw (Basil Dearden, 1964). Courtesy of the Kobal Collection.

suggested that in ‘the interaction of filmic and non-filmic discourses’, the latter have a superior impact than the former, making stars chiefly the product of their appearance in media other than the cinema. That is to say that photos, interviews, gossip in the press, biographies, television appearances, even commercial advertizing, all contribute to define a star as such, while highlighting his or her uniqueness at the same time. It must be noted, however, that ‘non-filmic discourses’ about stars are never limited to biographical material, but include large amounts of assumptions about the various social ‘types’ to which they may belong: nationality, ethnicity, class, and gender, are an integral part of a star’s total character. As far as screen performance is concerned, the strength of a star’s image may actually clash with the character portrayed, or suit it only in part: Richard Dyer (1974, 143–46) talks of a ‘selective use’ of some of the star’s particular attributes, and of a ‘problematic fit’ in some cases. In some other instances, though, a ‘perfect fit’ is achieved, so that the perceived meaning of a star’s aura matches the requirements of the screen role: two separate discourses not only collide, but coincide, leaving no gap between interpreter and function. By applying this concept to Summer Madness, for example, one can see how Brazzi’s

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fame as a Latin Lover made him an iconic choice for the part; the fact that this fame was partly due to his previous film roles, especially the one in Three Coins in The Fountain, only shows the reciprocity between cinema and identity. Certain stars, however, are too complex constructions to ever fit ‘perfectly’ into a role, which they are more likely to imbue with their own image: the more nuanced this image is, the more variable is their relation to their screen character. An uneven borrowing takes place between star and role, as well as between star and his/her archetypal trait. Sophia Loren, for instance, while defined by her nationality as much as Brazzi was, articulated it in her own personal way, transcending the generic prerequisites of the Italian sex-symbol; consequently, her screen roles are infused with a specific brand of Italianness. Although Loren’s persona developed considerably over her career, as she gradually acquired sophistication and poise, she retained an earthy, wild edge, an aura of excess in her already excessive Italian star image. A comparison with Gina Lollobrigida illustrates this point. As already discussed, the two actresses looked very different: they were both beautiful and voluptuous, but Loren’s physicality surpassed Lollobrigida’s in more than one way. Loren’s presence was literally bigger: she was taller (1,71m against Gina’s 1,64m), as well as bustier (96cm against Gina’s 92cm) (De Laborderie 1964, 12). Her face was slightly asymmetrical, with a long and prominent nose, which she had kept despite some pressure to have it re-shaped; moreover, her demeanour and style were not so much sexy as sexual, seemingly uncontrived and uncontrolled. Her hipswinging walk was distinctive, if not instinctive: she had allegedly trained for it, by walking into a room between two lines of chests with their drawers open, closing them one by one with her hips (De Laborderie 1964, 19). Portrayed as rivals by the press, Gina and Sofia appeared together in London in 1954, at the ‘Italian Film Festival’, when they were introduced to the Queen: while Gina followed the protocol by wearing an expensive but discreet outfit, Sofia’s dress was so low-cut that her breasts almost fell out of it when she bowed. The risky moment was immortalized by the photographers (De Laborderie 1964, 24), and Loren’s unbridled curves made news. Lollobrigida, a star from head to foot, combined exquisite beauty with a sense of etiquette, while retaining something of ‘the girl next door’ in her appearance, albeit of a once-rustic, now glamorous Italian girl; men would have comfortably introduced her to their mother. Loren, though six years younger, had nothing girlish about her; mothers might well have disapproved of her palpable wildness. What Loren expressed was a most primitive idea of Italianness, whose glamour had more basic foundations than Lollobrigida’s, as well as having a powerful, unpredictable edge; in the ambivalent sphere of Italian stardom, always redolent of a not-so-distant backward past, Sofia was the half-savage creature to Gina’s sweet buxom shepherdess. Half-savage and all-beautiful was, in essence, the fundamental principle of AngloSaxon constructions of Italianness: Loren was the ‘hyperItalian’ among Italian film stars. At the 1954 Italian Film Festival, when she attracted attention through her ill-fated choice of dress, Loren was still three years away from true international fame; her Hollywood consecration would be The Pride and The Passion, where she starred alongside Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra. More high-profile films followed, including Desire Under The Elms (Delbert Mann, 1957) with Anthony Perkins, Black Orchid (Martin Ritt, 1958) with Anthony Quinn, and It Started In Naples

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(Melville Shavelson, 1960) with Clark Gable. Loren had become the leading lady of some of Hollywood’s most famous actors; her furs and jewels, which she had long adopted, now fit her curriculum, and she exuded stardom. By the time she came to Britain to shoot The Millionairess, Sophia Loren could, and did, dominate national film news: she carried with her the glitz of Hollywood and the allure of Italy, a veritable glamour cocktail. The fact that her co-star was to be Peter Sellers, a much-loved comedian but hardly a sex-symbol, was enough to make the British press gasp in awe: ‘the excitement over The Millionairess began when it was announced that Sophia Loren would be playing opposite Peter Sellers in her flirtatious scenes. The press was agog. On her arrival in London, long before the shooting of the film began, the press was invited to witness the introduction of Peter to Sophia’ (Minney 1976, 179). Loren’s image as a true diva was further enhanced by the revelation, disclosed by the press, that she had insisted on wearing her own jewels in The Millionairess: her screen glamour, therefore, was also her real-life glamour. When Loren’s uninsured jewellery got stolen, mid-way through the shooting of the film, she stoically turned up on the set the next day, every inch the professional as well as the star. Indeed, although her Oscar for Two Women would not arrive till the following year, by 1960 Loren had finally gained recognition for her talent. In comparison to, say, Rossano Brazzi, whose ‘Latin Lover’ tag summed up his two-dimensional image on and off screen, Loren was a greatly more layered configuration; this complexity contributes to the treatment of Italian glamour in The Millionairess, which is rather elaborate, in spite of the film’s farcical tone. Based on Bernard Shaw’s homonymous play, the film dilutes much of its social critique, but retains a moral structure where ethnicity and nationality are linked to ethical positions. The Italian protagonist, Epifania Parerga (Sophia Loren), is treated as an absolute glamour icon, but she is not simply defined against Britishness: together with her Indian male lead (Peter Sellers), as well as an assortment of British characters, she is part of a triangular pattern, where certain stereotypical aspects of three national identities are played off each other. Epifania’s sexy Italianness, alluring and overpowering, is contrasted with Indian self-effacing spirituality, as well as with British practicality and domesticity: through these representations, The Millionairess follows traditional stereotypes, once more framing Italian glamour into an aesthetic and moral discourse. Of course, this construction of Italianness is not just produced by the narrative and visual texts, but is once again an automatic result of the way in which Italy is ‘placed’ in the film: it is indeed ‘the field surrounding the word’. Epifania is an Italian first and a beautiful heiress second, just as Renato in Summer Madness is an Italian before being a seducer. At the same time, however, the film significantly departs from the past, celebrating Italian stardom almost without reservations. While Summer Madness had abandoned Renato/Brazzi to his foreign world, endorsing the heroine’s return to her sensible life, Epifania/Loren is the ostensible winner in The Millionairess, sweeping through British and Indian barriers to impose her will and her ways. Moreover, alterations to the original play increase the narrative stress on Italianness: when Shaw had subordinated national stereotypes to a concern with ideology and class, the film puts nationality first, making ethics and politics the appendage of birthplaces. As Epifania’s sex-appeal conquers all, spectators are offered a glamour feast which prioritizes Italian stardom and beauty, creating a style hierarchy which has other nationalities (and other versions of nationalities) at a lower place. In fact, Epifania’s looks and personality are so extreme, and so

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extremely powerful, to immediately point to two essential elements in the film’s structure: the contrast between excess and restraint, and the unequivocal celebration of the former. An Italian heiress living in England, Epifania is ‘the most beautiful and richest woman in the world’: this fact is insisted upon by the various British characters, as well as by Epifania herself. Through her distinctive screen presence, Loren acts out such a demanding role to perfection, giving an over-the-top performance at every level. Aided by her ‘exaggerated’ physical appearance, she couples the most intense sensuality and melodramatics with impeccable comic timing: Shaw’s somewhat dry, measured dialogue is transformed into a wild farce. The film’s very first shot of Epifania, before the initial credits, shows her in a regal pose, seated as if on a throne, listening to the reading of her father’s will: wearing a chic black dress and vast amounts of diamonds, she just sits and glitters, a true glamour queen. She also sports a conspicuous hat, the first of many she will wear in the course of the film. Epifania’s next sighting consists of a camera pan over her body, hardly covered by a minuscule sparkly dress, and kitted out in suspenders and stockings; she lies on her bed sobbing, and lifts her head up to shout, banging her fists. She looks sexy, fiery, and unmanageable: the archetypal Italian woman. Her next scene, which sees her in conversation with her dead father, highlights the film’s self-conscious role-playing: Parerga senior looks at his daughter from various statues and portraits, all bearing the face of Peter Sellers, while speaking in the latter’s unmistakable voice. The paintings depict Sellers in various rhetorical guises: on a horse, in military uniform, or as a colonist subduing the natives; this Imperial imagery, combined with Sellers’ implied English presence, eclipses the Italianness of Epifania’s father, mocking national representations by revealing them as masks. The audience is led into a world where stereotypes are deliberately appropriated, and then flaunted: Sellers plays at being Italian, at being ‘British’, and of course, later on, Indian. Likewise, Loren performs the Italian for the camera, in an open display of theatricality which sets her apart from the other characters. The exchange between Epifania and her father also helps to outline the film’s plot, as she reveals that, disappointed by her husband’s dullness, she intends to commit suicide. Accordingly, the next sequence sees her jumping in the Thames, where she does not manage to drown, suffering the further humiliation of being observed and dismissed by a man rowing nearby, the Indian doctor Ahmed el Kabir (Peter Sellers). Epifania’s suicidal condition is cheerfully disregarded by the doctor, who wishes her ‘jolly good luck’ in her attempt to die. The Italian millionairess, already presented as extreme in beauty and behaviour, is here ridiculed by the Indian’s deadpan reaction: although Sellers’ interpretation, and his fame as a comedian, make his role a decidedly humorous one, Loren’s indignation after her futile, melodramatic dive in the river mark her as the film’s most ludicrous character. This portrayal continues as she visits her lawyer, Julius Sagamore (Alastair Sim), in order to file for divorce, draw her will, and declare her intention to kill herself; Sagamore/Sim indulges Epifania’s hysterics by treating her as a spoiled child, displaying impassability and a sarcastic wit (qualities which, despite the actor’s Scottish origins, identify him here as the archetypal Englishman). Indeed, the duet between Sagamore and Epifania functions as a crucial establishing scene, with particular implications for a British audience: as Loren’s histrionics are rebuffed by Sim, spectators see a beautiful but

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crazy foreigner outwitted by a familiar, well-loved figure of their national cinema. Loren gives a virtuoso performance here, as she recites her lines in weighted, over-dramatic tones, while constantly moving within the frame; at last, she falls through a chair, screaming. Sim, instead, remains quite still throughout, his voice never rising. The advantages of English self-control, however, are soon put into question, as Epifania scornfully tells the lawyer: ‘you are not a man, you are an Englishman’; such a statement, coming from a beautiful and fashionable woman who has just dismissed her husband as ‘a sexless fish’, underlines The Millionairess’ thematic organization. Sex-appeal and glamour, the lack of them, as well as the lack of interest in them, define and divide the film’s characters, clearly opposing Epifania to everyone else: her aggressive beauty, clad in sexy designer clothes, makes her aesthetic position antithetical to that of the unglamorous English, or the ascetic Indian. Loren’s status as international star and beauty queen reinforces the contrast, as the film sets Epifania against her husband’s new love, the homely Polly Smith (Virginia Vernon), and Sagamore’s long-suffering lover, his dowdy secretary Muriel (Pauline Jameson). Epifania’s dazzling appearance likewise drives the plot, as the Italian’s awareness of her own sex-appeal is matched by Dr Kabir’s determination to resist it; from their first meeting on the Thames, the film charts Epifania’s attempts to seduce Kabir into marriage. In tune with the general mood of open simulation, role-playing has an essential place in Epifania’s courtship of the doctor: in order to capture his interest, the heiress does not hesitate in faking illness, mimicking pain and suffering whenever Kabir is present. Loren’s performance in these scenes is characterized by prolonged and loud moans, and by insisting on offering her wrist, tongue, or back for examination. The pinnacle of Epifania’s pretence, however, is her disguise as an ‘Indian’ patient, yet another attempt to lure the doctor to her bedside: when he duly arrives, he finds her dressed (very scantily) in colourful veils, surrounded by burning incense and votive statues, enjoying her ‘exotic’ masquerade. Epifania’s scheming, nevertheless, seems initially doomed, as the obstacles in her way are ideological as well as practical: the doctor is a holy, self-sacrificing individual, who has made it his life’s mission to administer to the poor, abhorring the self-indulgent lifestyle which characterizes the Italian heiress. Furthermore, Epifania’s choice of husband is subject to a clause in her father’s will, stating that she will inherit his fortune only if she marries a business-minded man, capable of turning 500 pounds into 15,000 by his speculations. Kabir, sexually attracted but morally repulsed by Epifania, tries to rebuff her predatory advances by putting a similar quest to her: in order to marry, his chosen woman must demonstrate financial acumen, and gain a small fortune by her efforts alone. Kabir, put to the financial test, gives his five hundred pounds away, hoping to dispel Epifania’s matrimonial intentions for ever; the latter finds employment in a pasta-making workshop owned by Joe, an Italian immigrant (Vittorio De Sica). Overcoming Joe’s resistance to machines and modernization, Epifania in a short time turns the business into a modern, profit-making factory. However, as Kabir has nothing to show for his 500 pounds, Epifania now attempts to buy him by building a model hospital opposite his surgery, offering to make him its director; as even this plan fails, she threatens to lock herself up in a monastery of her own creation, then to commit suicide. Defeated at last, and increasingly enthralled by Epifania’s sex-appeal, Kabir capitulates and consents to marry her.

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The film’s construction of Italian glamour is then achieved through Epifania’s parallel relationships, each of them highlighting the contrast between the millionairess and her archetypal foils: the restrained professional (British), the frumpy female (British), the noble Samaritan (Indian), and the inefficient, charming rogue (Italian). As will be discussed shortly, the character of Joe is radically changed from the original play, directing the audience’s attention to his affinity with, as much as differences from, his compatriot Epifania, pointing to current transformations in Italianness; the British, however, provide the first comparison to Epifania. This is not just because British characters are more numerous, but because the action takes place in London: for all its international flavours, the film is firmly set on home ground, suggesting a domestic gaze at work, surveying the strange ways of foreigners. Prudish, sly, hypocritical, practical, definitely unglamorous: the film’s portrayal of national identity owes nothing to the exciting decade just begun, and everything to traditional stereotypes of Britishness. Whether because Shaw’s pessimistic view of Britain coloured the script, or because the swinging 1960s were still in their infancy, or simply because established notions of self-definitions are hardest to challenge: the fact is that The Millionairess refuses to grant its British characters the glamorous emancipation it freely bestows, through Epifania/Loren, on the Italians. This representation of the British, of course, enhances all the more the star-like quality of the Italian temptress; more specifically, what divides the British from Epifania is not lack of sex, but of glamorous sexappeal, the very difference separating common mortals from film stars. While the film, on one level, does much to illustrate Gyorgy Mikes’ famous quip ‘Continental people have sex life; the English have hot-water bottles’ (1986, 35), it also shows some of its Englishmen having a sexual side. Sagamore has an eight-year long affair with his secretary, while slimy psychiatrist Dr Bland (Dennis Price) is clearly smitten by Epifania’s physical charms. The fundamental differences between the Britons’ attitude towards sex and Epifania’s lie in their own un-sexy appearance, their total lack of passion, and their distaste for flaunting. There is no positive side to this prosaic state of affairs: unlike in Summer Madness, self-control and a no-nonsense dress code are no guarantee of moral rectitude. On the contrary, The Millionairess exposes the fallacy of anti-glamour moralism: when Epifania accuses Sagamore of being an Englishman rather than a man, he replies that her father appointed him as his lawyer precisely for this reason, implicitly equating English unsexiness with honesty and reliability. However, as the film goes on, it is revealed that Sagamore has been cheating Epifania’s family for years, even persuading her father to insert the bizarre marriage clause in his will, to prevent Epifania from marrying. Likewise, his fastidious reaction to Epifania’s talk of her sex life belies his own longterm illicit liaison. Consequently, Italian glamour in The Millionairess is not synonymous with sexual transgression or petty corruption, which are instead English prerogatives; like the wealth it is associated with, Epifania’s glamour signifies pleasure and power. It is true, of course, that both are denounced by Dr Kabir as instruments of moral corruption: but the doctor’s surrender to Epifania points to the defeat, or irrelevance, of such a belief. Furthermore, Kabir is not entirely devoid of a little appetite for glamour, as shown by his reaction at being invited to a fashionable restaurant by a scientific society: he observes, with evident satisfaction, that he will now be able to tell Epifania that he is ‘a man who goes to Romano’s for annual dinners’. The choice of an Italian venue as a symbol of sophistication reinforces, of course, the film’s equation of glamour with Italianness.

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The Millionairess, therefore, places glamour in a relative context, where moral positions are acknowledged only to be cast aside, leaving Epifania’s dizzy allure to be desirable in itself (by the British) and despite itself (by the Indian). While clearly powerful and seductive, however, the Italian heiress remains an object of ridicule, appearing majestic and undignified at the same time: a feat, perhaps, which only Sophia Loren could have accomplished so well. From the film’s beginning, when she breaks her heel and later falls through a chair, to the end, when Kabir tells her to take off her hat because ‘she looks very stupid with it’, Epifania/Loren exceeds the parameters of glamorous beauty. Likewise, though clearly identified with Italianness, she is constantly surpassing the established criteria for ‘average’ Italian exaggeration; even her father tells her that ‘she always over-dramatizes everything’. As the father has the voice and face of Peter Sellers, he appears detached from his daughter’s traditional Italian traits, suggesting that Epifania’s extreme behaviour is her own peculiarity, rather than a mere national characteristic. This is again consistent with Loren’s persona, excessive in looks and performance; at the same time, however, her prima donna antics befit her star image, confirming her as the diva she is meant to be. She oversteps, as it were, the boundaries containing her already ‘excessive’ compatriots, or other film stars. While all stars, regardless of nationality, may be expected to be capricious and self-important, Italian ones can be perceived as taking the cliché a step further: their behaviour is linked to a prime Italian stereotype, the idea of negation of self-control. From Anna Magnani slapping colleagues on set, to Rossano Brazzi seducing every female co-star because ‘he can’t help it’, instincts get the better of the Italians; consequently, these actors fit by default screen roles which expressly require lack of restraint. In Loren’s case, gossip columns and generic notions of Italianness only add to her looks and acting style, which in themselves suggest a lack of self-mastery. As Epifania Parerga, a rich, pampered, and fashion-conscious character, she still manages to look vaguely unkempt: her hair, without a hat, is usually ruffled, her dresses often torn, unfastened, or soaking wet. It is the semi-dishevelled look of a woman who can’t, or won’t, even control her own clothes and hairdo. Incidentally, the same is true of Anna Magnani, who made untidiness into a fine art; although of course Magnani, unglamorous yet not unsexy, was never a star or a sex-symbol in the way Loren and Lollobrigida were. Through the combination of narrative, visual, and performative discourses, Epifania/Loren is thus constructed in opposition to the film’s other characters. While functioning as a general Italian foil, she soon grows into a specific example of Italian womanhood, pitted against the dowdiness, modesty, and feminine devotion that characterize Muriel and Polly Smith. As these examples of British femininity take a secondary role in the plot, the film’s overt structure becomes one of Epifania against men: she emerges as the incarnation of Woman. The weight of Italianness, however, casts an ambivalent meaning on Epifania’s supreme femaleness: on one hand, her beauty, glamour, and sensuous manners are in line with notions of Italians as seductive and sex-driven, so that she appears to fulfil a most traditional feminine vocation, that of attracting and pleasing men. Admittedly, she doesn’t fully succeed: men are mostly scared of her, and she resorts to psychoanalysis to find a solution. Dr Bland confirms the propriety of her feminine ambition: when she tells him that she wishes to make a man happy, he replies that ‘the female of the species can aspire to nothing higher’. On the other hand, Epifania’s difficulty in carrying out her feminine duties – which are easily performed by her

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British counterparts – poses a question, as to whether the Italian prototype she represents is really preferable, or ‘right’. Just like the Latin Lover, who exudes virility but attracts suspicions of not being a ‘real’ man, so the Italian goddess falls short of accepted feminine standards: her passionate nature and forceful sex-appeal are too extreme, too overwhelming, too ‘Italian’. Sophia Loren cannot be ultimately understood, remaining intensely ‘foreign’: her glamour is desirable but disorientating, elegant yet almost unladylike. In emotional and formal terms, on Anglo-Saxon screens, Loren functions as the polar opposite of Grace Kelly, the epitome of cool glamour: Kelly’s reactions, as those of an ice-queen, could be predicted, her behaviour relied upon, and one could always try to melt her. But what could possibly be done with Loren/ Epifania? In The Millionairess, as in Summer Madness, glamour is represented as power over the unglamorous; but unlike in Summer Madness, power here is a female attribute, and as such it is difficult to accommodate. It is not by accident that Kabir, exasperated by Epifania’s relentless propositioning, accuses her of being ‘like a man’, that is, unreserved and unchaste; in fact, the issue of female sexuality is one on which British and Indian viewpoints, otherwise very different, are shown to agree. Epifania’s unhappy love life is chiefly ascribed to her aggressive sexuality and insatiable demands, allegedly caused by an Oedipus complex: in other words, she is psychologically unbalanced and in need of therapy. While she does eventually conquer Kabir/Sellers, the latter’s identification with her father points to an Oedipal resolution, even to a partial breach in Epifania’s formidable domination. But the coupling of Sellers and Loren also has other implications. Despite his role as the Indian doctor, Sellers would be inevitably perceived as himself by a British audience: his Indianness, presented as a joke, could not detract from his fundamental Englishness, or from his fame as a national comedy icon. It seems superfluous to say that Dr Kabir, as an Orientalist construction, remains of prime interest in any assessment of British notions of Otherness; however, in respect to the film’s take on Italian glamour, Kabir is essentially Sellers, and his screen marriage to Loren legitimizes Britain’s claim to a new, fashionable Europeanness. This is attested by the British press’ interest in the meeting between the two stars, when The Millionairess had not even yet been shot; for all his celebrity, Sellers had retained an Everyman look about him (which was part of his appeal), and could be framed with Loren into a match between domestic ordinariness and foreign sex-appeal. Furthermore, despite the marked differences between Kabir and his British surroundings, the doctor’s extreme self-denial can be seen as an extension of self-control, itself presented as a British trait; likewise, his quiet sarcasm is not dissimilar from Sagamore’s. Ultimately, the men sparring with Epifania are united by their un-Italianness: they consequently find her bizarre, while she finds them baffling or dismissible. There is only one male character whom the heiress understands immediately, and that is Joe, the Italian immigrant. In the biggest intervention made by the film to Shaw’s play, Joe is not any faceless, oppressed proletarian, but Epifania’s fellow-countryman: a working-class, roguish, old-fashioned Italian, played with old-fashioned charm by Vittorio De Sica. Joe retains only his name from the original play, being reconstructed in such a way as to highlight the gap, and the continuity, between old and new Italianness. The man described by Shaw as ‘an elderly man, anxious, poor, and ratlike’ (1936, 171) appears in The Millionairess as a flamboyant, womanizing pasta-maker, middle-aged but certainly not old. Happily surrounded by his spaghetti and employees, the ‘girls’ he prefers to

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machines, Joe is exploitative but unambitious, suave but rough, crafty but simple: he belongs to the timeless world of Italian immigrant stereotypes, untouched by modernity and glamour. The contrast between Epifania and Joe could not be greater, yet their shared Italianness is inescapable; as their meeting happens mid-way through the film, Epifania’s credentials are already firmly established, as unquestionably Italian as Joe’s formulaic appearance. The accent they both have in speaking English emphasizes the link between them, as well as the singular event of Epifania meeting a compatriot. Moreover, the casting of De Sica as Joe adds a further element of tradition to his character: despite his fame as a key director of Italian Neorealism, De Sica was best known to the general British public for his acting, especially his lightweight roles in the Bread, Love, And… trilogy (Luigi Comencini, 1954, and Dino Risi, 1956). These rural, old-fashioned Italian comedies saw him playing a mature Latin Lover opposite Gina Lollobrigida and, in the third film, Sophia Loren herself; but while Loren and Lollobrigida, through their acting careers, progressed to full glamour status, De Sica on the screen remained an attractive, ageing gentleman, whose looks were good but unexceptional. Represented through such an older, charming-yet-ordinary figure, Joe provides the perfect mirror to Epifania, who exemplifies the evolution of basic Italian stock: a refined, glossy reincarnation of the sweatshop’s ‘girls’, the millionairess is still at home among pasta-makers, but takes pasta many steps further. Under Epifania’s direction, spaghetti becomes big business, the sweatshop turns into a shiny, modern environment, the workers wear smart uniforms, and Joe himself is transformed into an elegant, expensively dressed manager. This new situation, however, does not suit Joe, who pines for the old days, and eventually uses his new wealth to recreate some primitive working arrangement: a little pasta workshop, where he can boss ‘girls’ around. As Epifania comments, ‘some people are simply not made for leadership and progress’: Joe refuses to embrace modernity, clinging to the system which will keep him a small fish, forever unsophisticated like the old, poor Italy he came from. (Incidentally, De Sica’s screen persona belied a complicated and often glamorous man, well-acquainted with the high-life and addicted to casino gambling). In Shaw’s play, the relationship between Joe and Epifania highlights a concern with the inhumanity of capitalism; the film retains that relationship as one between ruthless financial doctrine and benign exploitation, but it also uses it as a reflection on Italianness. In contrasting Epifania’s dangerous glamour with Joe’s rustic charm, The Millionairess creates a tension between desire and nostalgia: to this day, British fantasies of Italy are infused with both. Old and new notions of Italianness coexist in Woman of Straw, evoked through the presence of the first international star to emerge from post-war Italy: Gina Lollobrigida. An undisputed glamour icon, and a far longer established celebrity than her male lead Sean Connery, Lollobrigida is compared in the film to the lowest of Italian stereotypes, such as ‘moustached women with sweaty armpits’; while she appears infinitely remote from this representation, she is linked to it as to the ‘original’ she has departed from. The film’s treatment of derogatory ideas about Italians seems intentionally ambiguous, implying the possibility of Lollobrigida being an amazing improvement on a repulsive prototype. Woman of Straw is set in the opulent world of a fabulously wealthy English family, the Richmonds, where heritage and old money mix with a modern, technology-enhanced lifestyle.

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The sadistic Charles Richmond (Ralph Richardson), seriously ill and confined to a wheelchair, rules the family estate with an iron hand; his playboy nephew Tony (Sean Connery) hates him, not least for being virtually excluded from his uncle’s will. When Charles instructs Tony to find him a new nurse, the nephew engages the services of Maria Marcello (Gina Lollobrigida), with a view to make her marry Charles and become the beneficiary of his fortune; after his uncle’s death, he tells her, he will expect a million pounds for himself. Half-reluctant but tempted, Maria agrees to the scheme and becomes Charles’ wife, acquiring a humanizing influence over the old man, whom she gradually starts to like. Things go wrong, however, when Charles suddenly dies at sea, before his new will, leaving everything to Maria, has been registered. Tony persuades Maria to take Charles’ body back to England, pretending that he is alive, while he takes the will to the lawyers; he is in fact setting a trap for her, and when medical tests reveal that Charles has been poisoned, Maria is charged with murder, leaving Tony as sole heir of the Richmond fortune. In a last-minute twist, new evidence emerges, including the testimony of Charles’ butler, pointing to Tony as the real murderer: as Tony attacks the butler, the latter accidentally kills him in self-defence. Maria at last inherits Charles’ wealth. Woman of Straw is a consciously fashionable film: its main theme, the exploration of greed among the jet-set, allows for foreign sequences shot on location in Majorca, for the display of the latest desirable gadgets (such as in-built stereo speakers), and for a style extravaganza which has Lollobrigida modelling an assortment of Christian Dior outfits. This indulgence in modern glamour is underpinned by two parallel subtexts, hinged on Lollobrigida’s well-known presence. On one hand, there is an acknowledgement of the new Italianness, whose continental chic validates British claims to sophistication: the coupling of Lollobrigida with Connery, himself exuding national charisma after two Bond films,2 seals Britain’s new status. On the other hand, Maria’s dazzling appearance is constantly qualified, as if it were a somewhat surprising achievement; this ambivalence is achieved subtly, as the film’s overt discourse consigns all racism and prejudice to the psychotic Charles. The action begins at the Richmond estate, where Charles and Tony are waiting for Maria’s arrival: as the uncle rants about ugly women smelling of goat’s cheese, the nephew smiles sardonically, knowing how the Italian nurse will confound Charles’ expectations. Maria is thus an object of interest and discussion before she appears, and the audience is made aware (or reminded) that Italians, according to certain views, are unattractive, uncivilized beings. As Charles is clearly presented as evil and deranged, the film’s disavowal of his views is implicit, and soon confirmed by the arrival of Maria herself, a vision of beauty and style even in her demure working clothes (which she will presently swap for designer suits, glittering evening gowns, and floating nightdresses). In this way the film, from its very beginning, presents the audience with a clear viewing strategy, in which one version of Italianness must be selected above the other; selection, however, does not necessarily imply a denial of the alternatives, and the evocation of Italian ugliness resonates all the more because of Maria’s divergence from it. Rather than being negated, the offensive stereotype is contrasted with its opposite: Maria/Lollobrigida does not so much prove that Italians are not primitive or repellent, but rather that they needn’t be. This makes sense if one considers how Charles’ views, extreme as

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they appear, are not without references in British culture: after all, it was Shelley the Romantic who had described Italian women as ‘perhaps the most contemptible of all who exist under the moon; the most ignorant, the most disgusting, the most bigoted, the most filthy’ (quoted in Sponza 1988, 126). Moreover, as the champion of Italian womanhood, Maria rests on rather fragile foundations: when Charles asks her whether she washes daily, she replies that she does ‘because her job requires it’. The audience may well wonder whether, in a different profession, her ablutions would continue. Even her beauty is by no means secure: at her glamorous wedding to Charles, her exotic appeal prompts two guests to comment that Italian women ‘tend to age overnight’. We don’t see Maria turning forty, but we are explicitly told that she might look a wreck by then. Woman of Straw, however, is not concerned with the future, placing its Italian goddess in a present which still echoes of the past. Of course, the use of Lollobrigida as a glamour icon is not questionable: she is the film’s major star, she sports an amazing wardrobe, and the all-male cast is made to look uniformly enthralled by her, from the two Richmonds to the butlers. Maria’s appearance carefully balances sex-appeal with elegance; true, she spends most of her free time undressing, admiring herself in front of the mirror, and lying suggestively on her bed. But her underclothes, though revealing, are quite decorous: she always keeps a knee-length slip on, and even on a cruise we never see her in a bikini. While Sophia Loren paraded a vast lingerie collection in The Millionairess, Lollobrigida’s dress code here, though not exactly chaste, displays some propriety; this difference is consistent with the two stars’ performative styles, as well as with their public personas. As mentioned before, it was not Lollobrigida’s breasts which nearly spilled out in front of the Queen; with none of Loren’s wild streak, Lollobrigida was, literally, a rather static personality and actress. Loren’s aura of excess, as we have seen, was her own development of an alleged national trait: in other words, it was her peculiar appropriation of conventional Italianness, her signature added to a well-known sign. As Epifania Parerga in The Millionairess, Loren represented continuity with the past through emotional and behavioural patterns, while embodying modernity in aesthetic and social terms; it was Joe/De Sica, as the roguish immigrant, who incarnated old Italianness in a complete and unambiguous way. In social status terms, Epifania’s tie to old Italian identities could be only one of national memory. In Woman of Straw, instead, Maria is made to represent both versions: the repellent Italianness evoked by Charles is really an extreme development of a traditional stereotype, whose link to Maria goes beyond mere contrast, as she herself has experienced poverty and emigration. Early on in the film, Maria tells Tony how she decided to leave her home in the Italian South, because of its desperately poor conditions; Tony replies that he chose her for his ambitious scheme because she looked ‘like a woman who wants’. Moreover, Tony assures her that he knows ‘everything about her past’, feeding the audience more hints about the Italian nurse’s career as an established adventuress. These hints, however, remain undeveloped, leaving Maria posed between naivety (in relation to the Richmonds) and cunning (in relation to the audience), as much as between new and old Italianness. What the film does make clear, though, is that Maria’s glamour is an innovation, achieved through her flight from squalor and her social climbing; this is visibly stressed by the scene in which,

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disgusted by Charles’ cruelty, she secretly abandons his yacht and makes her way to a Spanish village. Rather than the glitzy environment of wealthy ex-pats, the setting for Maria’s escape is a depressingly poor Latin back-water: as she checks into a dismal hotel room, waiting for the Richmonds to come and ask her back, there is a palpable sense that she does not fit there, especially as the place echoes the Italian world she has left behind. Yet precisely through this association with a generic poor South, Maria is placed in a dualistic, transitional position, in reach of modernity and glamour but still too close to her immigrant roots. Woman of Straw leaves no doubt as to where Maria belongs most: from the Bondesque initial credits, where her stylized profile in black and red dominates the frame, to the film’s ending, which shows her as the mink-clad mistress of the Richmond fortune, she is clearly identified with glamour. Lollobrigida’s fame, of course, greatly reinforces this identification; but just as her ‘rags to riches’ biography had been part of her construction as a star, so Maria’s role as female glamour icon is tinted with unglamorous reverberations.

Notes 1.  It seems extremely likely that by ‘world market’ this 1954 reviewer meant ‘western world market’. 2. Dr No (Terence Young, 1962) and From Russia With Love (Terence Young, 1963).

5 Italianness, British Cinema, and Thatcherism

Introduction British cinema of the 1980s has been framed by its critics into a causality of time and place, perhaps more so than the film output of different post-war decades. This seems inevitable considering the social turmoil in 1980s Britain, the terms in which a newly dominant ideology was maintained and challenged, and the neat chronological span of the political leadership representing it (1979–90); while the 1979 Tory electoral victory signalled a turning point in British politics, three consecutive Thatcher governments provided the period with a unified quality, legitimizing subsequent analyses of a nation living under Thatcherism. However, if governmental policy and philosophy delimited the context in, and against which, culture was produced, it is ultimately not Thatcherism itself that defines the 1980s, but rather the tensions and discrepancies it generated. British cinema of the time appears inescapably, if varyingly, positioned in relation to crucial contemporary issues: the gaps between official narratives and personal experience, the merging of the personal into the public, as well as the economic, political, and social results of Thatcherite rule. This final chapter begins by examining Britain under Thatcherism, focusing on the connections between 1980s politics, constructions of national identity, and national cinema. It follows with the analysis of three significant films: Another Time, Another Place (Michael Radford, 1983), A Room With A View, and Where Angels Fear To Tread. The first epitomizes the new, adventurous cinema of 1980s Britain: a co-production between Channel 4 and Umbrella Films, it openly questions received boundaries of nationality and subjectivity. The second and third film are prime examples of heritage cinema, a thriving genre in the 1980s, and one which carried its style and concerns into the 1990s, as shown by Where Angels Fear To Tread. These films are defined by a nostalgic but troubled framework, articulating an ambiguous, anxious approach to British identity and destiny. 1980s British governments presided over a country increasingly ripped by divisions. Breaking the post-war political consensus, typified by the commitment to full employment and to a welfare

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system, the new Tory administration ‘came into office with a clear policy to cut public expenditure and reduce state intervention’ (Andrews and Jacobs 1990, 3); pursuing its doctrine of a freemarket economy, based on monetary strength and privatized services, it set out to undermine, underfund or dismantle civic institutions, from universities to local governments to the trade unions. As productivity rose and manufacturing declined, the gulf between rich and poor grew dramatically, as did that between North and South; an increasingly unemployed, homeless population was pitched against one of high-earning, private- sector workers, the sharers of Thatcher’s ethos of aggressive self-interest, and of a world-view dominated by winners and losers. While this New Right advocated, and boasted of, a return to ‘traditional’ values of family and order, Britain was witnessing the decline of the nuclear family, an increase in divorce and births outside marriage, and a worsening crime problem; bitterly fought strikes, and political and racial riots were escalating, as was the suicide rate among the young (Richards 1997, 24). In this ‘Two Nations’ scenario, Thatcher’s successive victories were the visible expression of a countrywide split; but if the Tory triumph was placed in a parallel universe by the socioeconomical reality of millions, Tory discourse on the national character provided an equally obvious case for non-alignment. For while notoriously denying the existence of society, Thatcher readily manipulated ideas of nation, combining neo-conservatism and jingoism with the appeal to ‘tradition’, to create a narrow, regressive, and xenophobic national narrative. Labelling her political project as a mission to restore Britain’s greatness, the Prime Minister wrapped up her vision in the suggestive guise of Victorianism, mobilizing selective accounts of an extremely complex age; redolent of power, empire and progress, these filtered notions of Victorian Britain constituted a model which, as belonging to the past, pre-existed Thatcher and her electorate, deriving implicit naturalness and desirability from its status of ‘great tradition’. It so happened that a competitive, intolerant and individualistic outlook was sold as the essence of Britishness, automatically outcasting whoever it left behind. According to Julian Wolfreys (1994, 2), the social make-up of this ideal neo-Victorian nation hinged on heterosexually determined families and individuals, from which Thatcherism ‘structured a seemingly unified and normative model of national identity’; the government’s economic penalization of single parents, and its introduction of the infamous clause 28 preventing councils from promoting homosexuality, certainly testify to this. But while social and sexual control were clearly on the Tory agenda, they were tools for a wider national construction, which placed the nuclear family at the core of a white, English, insular, and, for all its rhetoric of progress, backward-looking Britain; this representation found arguably its fullest expression in the 1982 Falklands war, when Thatcher’s populist management of the crisis was matched by popular and media jingoism. More mundanely, but not less significantly, Thatcherite Britishness was typified by a fervent anti-Europe stance, coupled with references to a lost, purely indigenous way of life, anti-modern in its greenness and pleasantness; as Stephen Haseler points out (1989, 29, 109–12), the Arcadian myth had indeed been resurrected from the nineteenth century, but losing its egalitarian quality in the process, to become a prerogative of the conservative and the affluent, sections of society who were also likely to warm to Thatcher’s ‘feudal’ style of government. Haseler’s contention is that while neo-Victorian paternalism tapped on attitudes genuinely rooted in national history, it excluded the strand of irreverence, resistance, and anti-authoritarianism also belonging to British

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culture (1989, 29). But Thatcher’s revivalist project was all the more effective as it endowed its Britishness with an in-built righteousness, presenting the boycott of European legislation, or the chastening of the unemployed as work-shy, as a moral and patriotic duty. Again, there was nothing new in the opposition of a virtuous Britain to an immoral rest of the world, continental Europe in particular: as a collective self-representation, it had appealed for centuries to various strata of British society. To grasp the logic of this national construction, one has only to look at an apologist of Thatcher like Shirley Robin Letwin (1992, 336–38), who sees Thatcherism as the quasi-mystical recuperation of a native moral tradition. As Letwin’s story goes, the British way of life had been defined by individualism, reason, freedom, and order, inspiring awe and envy in foreign visitors; temporarily if inexplicably, these superior ethics had been cast aside, in favour of ‘a quite different morality imported from France and Germany’, or simply ‘a foreign morality’, which had made Britons ‘increasingly well disposed to collectivism’. But the British moral code never quite disappeared, merely going underground, waiting for Thatcher to evoke its memory in those who had foolishly abandoned it: enter three consecutive Tory victories, three mandates by vox populi to rid the country of un-British influences. This is not to say that all Tory voters subscribed to such a narration: support for the Conservatives was often pragmatic (Hill 1999, 14), based on personal aspirations of economic profit (in itself, of course, a fully Thatcherite approach). What mattered was the existence, promulgation and validation of a certain version of national identity, as part of the discourse underpinning the prevailing system; because it was part of that system, it came to be contested and refuted by Thatcher’s opponents in a variety of ways, together with other social and economic aspects of her political doctrine. Film-makers were certainly not alone in their challenge to Thatcherism, nor was the official Opposition: the 1980s saw an intense protest activity from relatively disparate positions, notably student and anti-nuclear organizations, trade unions, lesbian and gay movements, supporters of local government and, finally and fatally, anti-poll tax campaigners. Regardless of their differences, most of these dissidents were not just expressing an ideological disagreement, they were also smarting from the damaging effects of Tory policies; in the case of British intellectuals, film-makers, and artists, a peculiar and mutual ill-will defined their relationship with the government, who applied the market principle to academia and the arts, justifying them if they made a profit and cutting their funds if they did not (Quart 1993, 23). The cinema industry, by and large incompatible with Thatcherism because of its generally liberal outlook, found itself turning to television for collaborative projects, especially to Channel 4, whose film output was typically low-budget and anti-establishment (Hill 1999, 29–30). While 1980s cinema was not often explicit in its anti-Thatcher stance, most film scholars agree on its frequently implied challenge to governmental ideology: for example in Dance with A Stranger (Mike Newell, 1984), The Defence of the Realm (David Drury, 1985), or Letter to Brezhnev (Chris Bernard, 1985). There is also critical consensus on the virtual impossibility of identifying a pro-Thatcher film school: unlike Hollywood, which largely sanctioned Reagan’s ethos throughout his presidency, British cinema is seen as engaged with the status quo from a consistently critical standpoint (Hill 1999, Quart 1993, Richards 1997). Indeed, insofar as

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many films of the period can be seen as a coded response to Thatcherism, it has been suggested that the latter triggered some of the best productions of the 1980s (Quart 1993, 16). Negotiating the Self through the Other: Another Time, Another Place Based on Jessie Kesson’s homonymous novel, Another Time, Another Place is set in rural Scotland in 1944. The action takes place in a very small, remote community, suddenly faced with the unsettling arrival of some Italian PoWs; soon, however, a connection is struck between the Italians and Janie (Phyllis Logan), the lonely young wife of a local farmer. The only villager to view the PoWs with fascination rather than hostility, Janie is especially attracted to Paolo (Claudio Rosini), the better-looking of the group, but eventually surrenders to an affair with the roguish Luigi (Giovanni Mauriello). Against the bleakest of Scottish backgrounds, where natural beauty is offset by rain, harsh work, and stifling village mores, the relationship between Janie and the Italians becomes one of affinity as well as attraction, but it develops on ambivalent lines: while the PoWs’ exoticism, friendliness, and relaxed attitude provide a glimpse of an alternative world, the liaison with Luigi fails to deliver emotional fulfilment. As news of the end of the war signals the Italians’ freedom, and Janie’s return to her dismal existence, Luigi is

Jane (Phyllis Logan) experiences the dizzy pleasures of Italianness in Another Time, Another Place (Michael Radford, 1983). Courtesy of the Kobal Collection.

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wrongly accused of the rape of a local girl; although Janie defies social ostracism by confessing that he was with her at the time of the rape, thus providing him with an alibi, he is still charged, under military law, with familiarity with a British subject. The end sees Luigi confined to jail, while a desperate Janie confesses her affair to an unsympathetic neighbour. The film’s complex engagement with notions of Otherness, and its interrogations of nationality and subjectivity, provide a destabilizing commentary on the rigidity of normative identity; chosen representations of Italianness and Scottishness are essential to this process. By dismantling prescribed routes to self-definition, Another Time, Another Place implicitly confronts Thatcherite values: boundaries between national Self and Other, ruthless work-ethics, rural idyll, even the non-existence of society, are thrown into question. A logical starting point is to identify the film’s position in the cultural landscape of its times: its relation, and that of Scotland itself, to the cinema and politics of 1980s Britain. Scholars dealing with 1980s British cinema are rather fond of categories: having identified the dissident quality of much of their subject matter, they then classify it in terms of form and content. Accordingly, films are divided into ‘art-house’, ‘heritage’, and ‘revisionist retro’ (Richards 1997), ‘art’, ‘heritage’, and ‘state of the nation’ (Hill 1999), or ‘heritage’, ‘last new wave’, and ‘out-ofthe-mainstream’ (Friedman 1993). The authors’ application of these labels is enlightening, but also points out the films’ overlaps and similarities, making them a useful referent for this paper, which searches for correspondences beyond considerations of genre. And what many of these films have in common, at some level, is a vindication of deviancy: from Another Country (Mariek Kanievska, 1984) to Mona Lisa (Neil Jordan, 1986), from My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985) to Scandal (Michael Caton-Jones, 1989), difference is given predominance in the narrative, suturing spectators into the film text by constructing subjectivity through the Other. If the so-called ‘art’ cinema does so most explicitly, self-consciously upsetting aesthetic and narrative conventions, subversive undercurrents can also be found in mainstream productions: A Room With A View, for example, despite its popular heritage appeal, mercilessly criticizes Edwardian upper-class morality, as does Maurice (James Ivory, 1987) with its exposure of hypocrisy and homophobia. The revisionist representation of a much-glorified past, the rebellion against prescribed national mores, as much as the revelling in controversy, hit straight at the heart of Thatcherism, unsettling both ‘tradition’ and its opportunistic manipulation; indeed, television adaptations of Dickens’ bleakest novels, which proliferated in the 1980s, have been read as an attack both on Thatcherism and its complacent version of Victorian values (Richards 1997, 347). By the same token, the avant-garde approach of much ‘art’ cinema does not preclude political critique: films like The Ploughman’s Lunch (Richard Eyre, 1983), or The Last of England (Derek Jarman, 1987) engage with both. Hybridity of film genres characterizes the 1980s, as a British tradition of socially committed and ‘realistic’ cinema is fused with formal experimentation, often shifting the focus from the industrial working class to the issues surrounding ethnic and sexual difference (Hill 1999, chapter 10). In short, 1980s cinema sees the deployment and blend of disparate genre conventions, often articulating present concerns through rewriting the national past. In the light of this pattern,

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Another Time, Another Place can be firmly placed among its contemporaries, as it combines ‘realistic’ mise-en-scene and camera work with a more ‘art’ approach to editing and narration; it also critically revisits a space in British history – the World War II home front – which has traditionally been treated with reverence. Above all, the film celebrates difference and a fluid identity, not least because of its ambivalent representation of Scottishness: if emphasis on a Scottish identity implicitly decentres notions of Britishness, the fragmentation of the former, through Janie’s crisis, problematizes the very concept of national boundaries. The opposition of Scots and Italians, to a British audience, favours an initial viewing strategy which aligns spectatorship with the Scottish point of view: but it is precisely this point of view that the film dissolves, complicating the interplay of British and Scot with the uneasy contrast between various positions, too slippery to fit into prescribed categories. This essential instability is aided by the Scottish setting, insofar as Scotland is both part of the whole (through its location in the United Kingdom) and Other (through its cultural, historical, and political dissociation from the centre): it provides a middle standpoint from which to view the whole, as well as mediating the relation between core and periphery. Indeed, a contemporary review of Another Time, Another Place (Time Out, no.672, 8 July 1983, 34), stressed ‘how central to notions of indigenous British cinema the films set on the Celtic fringe have become’, drawing attention to ‘their reputation as the most “natural” repository for extremes of screen emotion’. These are interesting comments, for while ‘extremes of emotion’ undoubtedly befall Janie, their extremeness struggles to emerge in her stifling native environment, which is exactly what happens to the English protagonists of many ‘heritage’ films; the foregrounding of Scotland may naturalize emotion, through the implicit evocation of traditional un-Englishness, but here Scottish passion still needs the Italian trigger to surface. However, to compare this film with 1980s heritage cinema is to find significant differences, as well as similarities: they both look critically at the past, both present difference or foreignness as an antidote to national flaws, but the stylistic nostalgia which is so striking in, say, Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, 1981), is totally lacking in Another Time. Visual pleasure here derives solely from the Scottish landscape, ‘realistically’ as well as artistically constructed, but not historically specific: the camera rolls over fields, rock and sea, zooming out to a laden sky, then closing in to vivid spots of wild flowers. The overall effect is of a beautiful, bleak place, scarcely affected by human presence, and therefore timeless; the 1940s simply afford a sombre mise-en-scene and narrative causality. The only nostalgia in the film is the longing for what may have happened, but didn’t: the heroine’s unfulfilled desire for other times and other places. Janie’s Scotland is emphatically not that of Chariots of Fire, rural and austere though that is, because it lacks the romance and innocence which Chariots ascribes to Scottishness and denies to old-guard Englishness; if we accept that representations of the past contain reflections on the present, then Another Time is a far more pessimistic film than most heritage ones, having a desperate rather than anxious perspective, and placing the alternative symbolized by the Other firmly out of reach. The film’s version of Scottishness, and its absolute contrast with Italianness, will be dealt with in greater depth through the rest of this chapter: for the moment, it suffices to say that Another Time delivers a severe blow to idyllic notions of the countryside (shown as a soul-destroying, body-numbing place), of the value and rewards of hard work (here enslaving and futile), and of self-reliant communities defined by a combination of these two (lethal). This portrayal is dependent on the Italian PoWs for its effectiveness, not just because they appear

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unused and unwilling to work in the harsh local conditions, but because they represent the fantasy of Italy, the place where people always sing and the sun always shines. Lastly, Scotland seems an appropriate site for a critique of the status quo, given its tenuous endorsement of Thatcherism throughout the 1980s. Not only did Scotland have only a minimum, at times a mere handful, of Conservative MPs, it was also the part of Britain where the drop in Tory votes, and increase in Labour, more than doubled rates in the rest of the country (Haseler 1989, 49); this was partly due to what has been called ‘the Englishing of the Conservative party’, as well as to the perception of Thatcher’s assault on civic institutions as an attack on Scotland itself (McCrone 1992, 145, 210). As the economic gap between North and South widened, northern and rural parts of Scotland were badly affected; the collapse of the oil price in 1984 resulted in more job losses, a situation which continued to worsen even among signs of national recovery, bringing parts of Scotland, by July 1987, to top the list of British districts with rampant unemployment (Champion and Green 1988, 20). The increasing alienation from British politics, felt by many Scots throughout the 1980s, found its outcome in the positive result of the 1997 devolution referendum (Petrie 2000, 153–69). It seems appropriate here to specify that, as this book approaches Another Time as a site for the negotiation of national identity, its focus is on the role of Italianness in the process; while Scottishness is considered as the film’s dominant source of subjectivity, it is discussed in terms of its dynamic relation to the Other, on whom it depends for its own, negatively derived construction. It is therefore beyond the scope of this work to inquire why, or how, a Scottish author and a philo-Scottish director have privileged this representation of the country: though its presence, and its relevance to the issues explored, must be acknowledged. The Italian PoWs have a pivotal role in Another Time, Another Place, indeed providing its principal motivation. Not only does the action begin with their arrival and end with their departure, confining outside frame and narrative the implied, Italians-less space and time; the film also moves forward by mapping their relationship with the protagonist. Essential to the plot, the Italians are equally indispensable to the film’s structure of meaning, whose oppositional arrangement relies on specific national representations: despite the non-identical configuration of subject and nationality, Italianness and Scottishness remain symbolically polarized to the end, antithetically signified although their signifiers elude them. As Scotland, the meeting ground, lays claim to its priority, an apparent hierarchy is constructed, placing a ‘natural’ Scottish Self before the Other; but the very sharing of Scotland with the Italians unsettles the system, as Otherness is made to define Scottishness by contrast, casting doubts on its naturalness. This is evident from the opening sequence, whose first image, a grey choppy sea, is shown as the object of Janie’s anxious gaze, only to be followed by a similarly bleak landscape, where the camera tracks the jeep transporting the Italians; their presence is initially revealed by their Neapolitan song,‘Santa Lucia’, then by a closer shot of the jeep, where the group of prisoners is huddled together. The next scene brings us back to Janie, going out in the pouring rain to prepare the Italians’ accommodation, as explained by the brief exchange with her husband; finally, we have a long shot of the Italians on the desolate road, ending in

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a close-up of Luigi’s face, whose dismayed expression, and oath under his breath, eloquently declare his feelings about the place. The thread running through these scenes is the Scottish experience, represented here in terms of landscape and weather, alternately seen through the eyes of Janie and of the Italians: it divides them, by force of their different relation to it, but it also contains them both. Scottish space acts as a barrier as well as an overlap. It is the prelude to a dynamic encounter, where confrontation with Otherness will outline and challenge prescribed national boundaries. Since the film constructs subjectivity around Janie, unhappy and Scottish, Italianness becomes both catalyst and function of her own alienation and desire, which are gradually unravelled by her involvement with the PoWs; as the Italians’ speech is never subtitled, the target audience’s understanding matches Janie’s, whose instinctive affinity with the prisoners is limited by language, or lack of it. While the Italians’ voice is heard, it remains only approximately understood, making Janie’s interpretation of Italianness the one which literally makes sense of it. At the same time, Janie’s emotional closeness to the Italians validates them as subjects, creating an interplay of perspectives, enhanced whenever the camera takes up the Italians’ point of view. Michael Radford has stressed this duality (Monthly Film Bulletin, vol.50, no.595, August 1983, 228), commenting on his use of ‘the old two-shot over the shoulder, which proved perfect for emphasising that we’re seeing Janie through the Italians’ eyes and they through hers’; but while the two positions complement each other, Janie remains the film’s major agency, as well as a member of the host community, responsible for constructing the audience’s experience of both Italianness and Scottishness. As already mentioned, the film finds a causal and chronological structure through World War II, which determines the PoWs’ presence in Scotland and affects its duration; it also creates a powerful motive for the Italians’ outcast status, investing with specific animosity any local hostility towards strangers. By the same token, Janie’s illicit liaison with Luigi is amplified, taking on the significance of a defection. But while the war is part of the film’s background, it plays a remarkably minor role in defining its characters, making Another Time a revisionist production in two ways: first of all, it does not represent collective identity in terms of resilience against wartime hardship, replacing war-specific references to courage and sacrifice with an a-temporally stoical Scottishness. Secondly, by changing austerity for a noble purpose with austerity for its own sake, the film deglorifies native dourness, negatively opposing it to Italianness, whose traditional indifference to fighting is translated as endearing vulnerability. The polarity of bravery and cowardice becomes one of hard and soft, establishing the essential demarcation line between the two national positions, and investing with moral value the allegiance to one or the other: despite the loving representation of its landscape, and the occasional suggestive flash of local folklore, Scotland in the film is an oppressive, frigid, almost brutal place, where Janie has to turn to the Italians for emotional warmth and sympathy. If Scottish culture has traditionally been dominated by ‘the two mythic structures of tartanry and Kailyard’ (McCrone 1992, 174), romantic and dazzling the first, bucolic and quaint the latter, it is a very grim version of Kailyard which appears in Another Time, minimizing the affectionate humour of its nineteenth-century literary source, and concentrating on ‘a Scotland of parochial insularity, of poor, humble,

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puritanical folk living out dour lives’ (Craig 1982, 7). So negative is this portrayal of Scotland, that it results in a virtual upturning of war positions, making the Scots prisoners of their own ethos, and the Italians both liberated and liberators, by virtue of their freer approach to life. A particular, symbolic scene encapsulates this paradox: the war has ended, and we see the PoWs abandoning their work in the fields to run away excitedly, shouting ‘the war is finished’ as they cycle past the mute Scottish farm-hands, who watch them in complete stillness, as if anchored to the ground. Nor do we see any local happiness, or even interest, greeting the news of peace. Later on, when Luigi tells Janie to come to Naples, she replies: ‘I’ll never get away from here’. This inversion of captivity is made explicit in the novel (Kesson 1992), when it is also specifically tied to female experience: women on the farm are repeatedly described as ‘prisoners’, or ‘real prisoners’, in comparison with the Italians. Indeed, the raw Scottish countryside, on the screen and in literature, has often been connected to female subjectivity, leaving the urban struggle of industrial Scotland as a preserve of male suffering (Petrie 2000, 206); this could be explained by the claustrophobia of rural life, obviously a mirror for the experience of many women. For the purpose of this thesis, the link is significant insofar as it binds Janie to the Italians by virtue of their prisoner status (temporary for the PoWs, permanent for Janie), as well as through their common ‘femaleness’: the Italian prisoners, unfit for heavy manual work, always cold, and with nothing of the soldier about them, are typically ‘female’ in their physical frailty. Their need for warmth speaks of an innate fragility, as does, incidentally, their need for letters from home, whose absence causes unashamed despair; when complaining about the weather, or asking for gloves to work outdoors, the Italians implicitly invoke their country of sun and comfort, making their body a metaphor for place and, by association, emotions. It is not a coincidence that Janie, the PoWs’ friend, is the only villager to rebel against the back-breaking, exploitative work expected of her: all the other women accept it, albeit grudgingly, as a matter of course, carrying it out with far more energy and strength than all the Italians put together. Scorned by the locals as inept (‘they haven’t got the knack’) as well as idle, the prisoners oppose a passive resistance to Scottish work ethics, again positing a moral choice between two positions. It is a fairly clear choice for the audience, who may pity the local workers for their gruelling daily routine, but is left with no illusions about the thankless, abusive, and diminishing nature of their efforts. The Italians, whose wartime screen depiction was, at best, one of simple and backward folk, are here associated with urban modernity: they are not used to working with their hands, nor can they light an oil lamp, for they have never seen one. The favourable angle from which the Italians’ experience is shown, and the unromantic depiction of Scottish farm life, can also be seen as disclaimers of Thatcherite rhetoric, which stressed the virtues of hard, self-reliant work, the idyllic rural origins of Britain’s greatness, and the myth of self-made success. The Italian prisoners in Scotland are indeed work-shy, but who watching the film can blame them? Who would aspire to the villagers’ life? Janie, the most prominent Scottish character, obviously hates her work in the fields, regardless of the little extra income it generates. A significant change is made here from the novel, which has Janie’s husband sympathetically telling her that she needn’t go back to the fields; the film, instead, portrays him as greedy and almost ruthless, merciless in the face of his wife’s exhaustion, assuring her that she would do better the next day. It is a clear shift towards a division between brutal Scottish ethics and un-Scottish ‘softness’, as well as a brilliant metaphor for the Tory vision, in which work for work’s sake is enough,

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poor people are idle (especially foreigners of the southern European kind), and compassion or welfare merely encourages their idleness: indeed, the 1979 Conservative manifesto brandished the intention of ‘restoring the will to work’ (Andrews and Jacobs 1990, 5). The representation of Italianness in Another Time is then both traditional and subversive: traditional because it rests on the age-old, northern assumption that anybody living in milder climates must be lazy. Spaniards and Latin Americans, for example, are meant to live through an endless siesta, postponing work to a ‘mañana’ which never comes; Italians are expected to lie in the sun, singing and making love. These stereotypes are by no means confined to British culture, finding world-wide currency even among the detractors of workaholism: Henry Miller (1987, 10–11), for instance, has written that ‘until I was about ten years old I never realized that there were “warm” countries, places where you didn’t have to sweat for a living, nor shiver and pretend that it was tonic and exhilarating’. The Italians in Another Time, while conforming to established canons of indolence, are a subversive force in the film’s status quo, which they undermine by attracting the heroine’s as well as the audience’s approval: they do so not simply by default, opposed as they are to an untenably depressing way of life, but through the film’s construction of Italianness as repository of emotions. Together with Janie, whose own feelings are awakened and clarified by their presence, the Italians form the film’s emotional system, based on instinctive affinity rather than verbal communication, casting a negative judgement on those falling outside it (that is, on the whole Scottish community minus Janie). So the figure of Jess, for example, the woman who won’t talk to the PoWs as her husband is missing on the Italian front, is constructed as a cold mask of hatred, attracting none of the sympathy which may have been hers; after news of her husband’s death at Monte Cassino, her influence extends to the whole village, whose ostracism of the Italians is all the more intolerable since, as Umberto points out, no Italian has fought at Monte Cassino. And, one may add, Italy is at war with Germany. But native hostility needs no logic or accuracy, being an extension of the petty, chilly intransigence which does not even spare its own: one is not led to expect much sympathy from Jess when, at the end, Janie breaks down in grief on her doorstep. To the cold, lonely world of the village, the Italian group is contrasted as a source of good-willed human contact: in fact, its closeness to Janie is spelled out to the audience through the exchange of iconic signs, symbolising shared humanity in the face of local and global politics. Janie’s introduction to Italianness takes place through a visual experience of the prisoners’ life at home: she is shown photographs of Luigi in Naples, of his mother, of Paolo’s wife and child, as well as the image of the Madonna to whom Luigi is devout. Umberto, on the other hand, has a picture of Alida Valli on the wall. Linguistically, the scene is one of intense effort on both sides, but Janie’s emotional comprehension is immediate, as is her appreciation: she obviously likes what she sees. At Christmas, we do not see gifts being exchanged among the Scots, but only between the prisoners and Janie, who, dictionary at hand, wishes them ‘Merry Christmas’ in Italian (or at least makes a good attempt at it). All the while, references are made to the prisoners’ affective life: Paolo ‘is desperate’ without news of his wife, Luigi cries for his mother who is ‘maybe dead’, while the discovery of his cousin in the nearby camp is greeted with loud joy and embraces. This often-evoked family environment, the

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Italians’ security blanket, is contrasted to Janie’s loveless, childless marriage, and her total lack of relatives or real friends. Umberto, the most self-contained of the group, says at one point: ‘we also suffer’: but that ‘also’ can refer to Janie only, whose sadness and loneliness are mirrored in the Italians’ anguish, without the recourse to the hope and memories which they have. The Scots do not display their emotions, whether positive or negative, not even on the rare occasions when they are supposedly enjoying themselves: the Christmas Ceilidh, for all its music and singing, has a rigid, formal arrangement which largely segregates men from women, discouraging Janie’s female companions from dancing, as they ‘won’t make fools of themselves’. The contrast with the PoWs’ Christmas celebrations is striking, characterized as these are by frantic singing and sensuous dancing. Likewise, Janie is the only Scot whom we see crying or expressing distress, as a stiff-upper-lip standard determines local behaviour; even after the rape episode, as the raped girl gives way to hysterics, her fellow-villagers remain singularly unsympathetic, maintaining a phlegmatic demeanour throughout. Interestingly, the girl in question is a sort of outcast in the community, considered ‘loose’ in view of her flirtatious manners, especially in dealing with the Italians; as the rapist himself is an unknown Italian soldier, whose crime and punishment fall on the innocent Luigi, we see drama neatly contained within the sphere of Otherness. In fact, small-scale dramas punctuate life for the Italians, who are shown crying, swearing, and arguing with each other loudly and publicly. Their Catholicism, essential for Luigi and at least accepted by the other two, is emotional, graphic and picturesque, providing comfort but not oppression; Scottish religiosity, instead, is social rather than devotional, a puritanical code of action, unspoken but ever-present in the cult of sensory deprivation, of physical and verbal restraint, and in the total absence of frills and fashions. Janie’s interest in new clothes, one feels, is bound to remain wishful thinking, frustrated from the start in a place where not even husbands pay the odd compliment; the Italians, on the other hand, openly admire her, insisting that she is ‘beautiful’ when she appears at the Christmas gathering. Indeed, the deficiencies of Janie’s husband are mostly reducible to laconic inexpressiveness, making him one-dimensional and vaguely hostile, a standard member of the Scottish community; Kesson’s novel, however, contains potential for his redemption, describing him as a man who has simply lost the habit of words, perhaps even the need for them. The film’s treatment of the husband, keeping him in line with native dourness and firmly outside Janie’s emotional life, has the effect of reinforcing national oppositions, contrasting the undemonstrative Scottish male with the exuberant, charming Italians. Apparently aimed at sharpening these divisions, the script departs from the novel in yet another way: originally, Janie is a new bride, recently settled in her husband’s village, which she finds very different from the (unspecified) part of Scotland she comes from. Longing for ‘some inland country’, she struggles to fit in among ‘alien’ surroundings (1992, 7) and petty neighbours with ‘microscopic eyes’ (1992, 23). Omitting all this, the film obliterates differences within Scotland as a cause for Janie’s alienation from her environment, equating its version of the country with Scotland itself, as the realm to which Janie cannot belong. One result of this change is the construction of a Scotswoman as Other in relation to her fellow-Scots; the Italians perform a crucial function here, forcing Janie to review her values and loyalties, and to ultimately support Luigi against her own group.

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The more Another Time polarizes national positions, the more it problematizes them, placing Otherness inside as well as outside cultural boundaries, thus offering Scottishness and Italianness to the audience as open questions. A complex take on national identity is inherent in the film’s structure, which, as we have seen, introduces Scotland to British spectators as a likely starting point, rather than as the traditional Celtic fringe of Anglo-centric national narratives; the Italians, and not the Scots, seem the obvious Others in the story. But national definitions become increasingly slippery as the film goes on, revealing Janie’s alienness among her own people, important differences between the PoWs themselves, and Luigi’s failure to live up to Janie’s Italian idea. The film’s main protagonist, Janie guides the audience’s perception of Scotland, as she experiences her environment as a uniform, repressive force; mediator and translator between Scottishness and Italianness, she nevertheless retains an outsider’s point of view, hence easily in line with that of the PoWs. In fact, Janie’s emotional alienation is complemented by the latter’s cultural Otherness, deepening the film’s endorsement of difference: to the unspoken gap between Janie and her community, the Italians add their loud, empirical understanding of the place, reinforcing Scotland’s frigid portrayal with the symbolism of landscape and weather. In providing a distinct view of Scottishness, the Italians necessarily appear as a coherent unit, an image enhanced by their shared captivity, linguistic bond, and behavioural pattern: this wholeness, however, disintegrates under the weight of their distinct personalities, values, and regional identities. The prisoners’ own awareness of their differences is expressed from the start, when Luigi suspiciously refers to Umberto as ‘a bit of a Bolshevik’; later on, the vociferous argument between Luigi and the others remains untranslated, but its violence shocks Janie, who perceives the group as an organic, compact alternative to what she has previously known. Similarly, geographic diversity within Italy means nothing to her. She equates the seductiveness of Naples, the one place she hears about, with the country as a whole. Indeed, as one of Italy’s iconic representatives, Naples operates much in the same way for a British audience, on whom the city’s aura of danger and beauty is not lost, providing an apt background for Luigi’s insidious charm; ‘see Naples and die’, that trite but enduring maxim, already contains uncomfortable hints. The choice of Luigi as the ‘bad’ Italian, then, may not be coincidence, as he is in some way the most ‘Italian’ of all, his character resting on a well-worn stereotype; but this ‘hyperItalianness’ acts as a dividing factor among the group, whose final break-up is caused by his indictment for rape. Far from drawing his fellow-Italians closer to him, the accusation hanging on the Neapolitan’s head widens the rift between them: when Luigi is first questioned about it, Paolo and Umberto are shown exchanging an eloquent glance, clearly prepared to suspect that he may be guilty. If the Italianness represented by the three prisoners ultimately falls apart, so does Janie’s Italian dream, a development in which Luigi has again a pivotal role. Paolo, rather than Luigi, is Janie’s first choice, whom she must give up on finding that he is desperately in love with his wife; Luigi, on his part, does not fit notions of tall dark strangers and, even worse, has a totally unromantic behaviour towards Janie. His one and only chat-up line, ‘is it possible to do jiggy-jiggy?’, must rank as abysmal among Latin Lovers everywhere. Failing to meet Janie’s expectations, Luigi

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however keeps them going, mixing sentimental outbursts with references to his hometown, Naples, described or implied as a paradise of all the senses; by comparison Scotland, swathed in thick rain, offers ‘nothing for look’. And yet, despite occupying opposite positions in their relationship, Janie and Luigi are exactly matched at one important level: their lonely prisoner status. It is Luigi, of all the Italian PoWs in the various camps, who is prevented from going back home, tainted by a crime he has not committed, and perhaps, as Janie’s husband suggests, never to see his Naples again. Likewise, Janie is the only villager who mourns the Italians’ departure, the final crush of her hopes and desires, which consigns her forever to a desolate life on the farm. Well before these final events, however, Janie’s loneliness had found an echo in Luigi, the most desperate of the group, who lacked Paolo’s family news or Umberto’s intellectual resources; Kesson’s novel (1992, 20) makes another explicit link between them, furnishing both with a difficult, ragged childhood, so that Janie can ‘instinctively’ empathise with Luigi’s background. Another Time leaves them equally ostracized and misunderstood, somehow connected by their personal tragedies, despite and beyond any national differences. Indeed, accidental as it first appears, Janie’s involvement with the unresponsive, unlucky Luigi, serves two essential purposes: narratively, it sustains the hopelessness and futility of Janie’s existence, keeping her firmly on a doomed course. Symbolically, it maintains the idea of Italianness as an unattainable dream. The more Janie invests the Italian Other with specific meaning, the less she is able to control him, resorting to a stubborn and constant reinvention: ‘Will you always love me? Will you love only me?’, she asks Luigi, extracting the predictable answer: ‘Only you. Always’. As Janie, Luigi, and the audience know that this answer is a lie, a performance is being foregrounded as signified of the Italian Lover: the result is itself a classic stereotype, the Italian charmer in which the Lover and the Rogue blur, two functions of Italianness defined by performance as much as by self-performing. In an otherwise enthusiastic review of the film, the Italian journal Bianco e Nero (no.3, July/September 1985, 98) laments Luigi’s formulaic characterization, as someone who ‘embodying faults and virtues of the Mediterranean male, has no difficulty in seducing the young woman’ (my translation): faults, yes, but the alleged ‘virtues’, presumably verbal charm, assiduous behaviour, and romantic posturing, are scarcely present in Luigi, who captivates Janie because she herself supplies the missing traits in her mind, to complete the construction of her Latin Lover. The film’s articulation of national identity, then, appears to rest on a paradox: while mutual opposition defines notions of Italianness and Scottishness, these also inhabit a parallel structure of meaning, where construction and performance prevail. Not only is the Italians’ representation organized as Janie’s subjective creation, and reinforced by Luigi’s behaviour (the performance of a performance): Janie’s membership of her own national group is essentially formal, maintained by constant reinsertion in the Scottish pattern. In the face of her great affinity with the Other, Janie’s Scottishness amounts to a socially determined baggage of habits and rules. It may be useful at this point to clarify the scope of ‘performance’ as a social practice. Summarizing critical work on the subject, Marvin Carlson (1996, 4–6) draws a link between actors, repeating lines on a stage, and individuals in ‘real’ life, who adapt their behaviour to the perceived demands of their environment: both are aware of a gap between themselves

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and their actions, both experience a ‘double consciousness’ from which they actively direct their performance. While spontaneous or unconscious behaviour clearly falls outside the realm of performance, how many actions are really spontaneous remains a point of debate, since every society naturalizes its own rules of normality; social inclusion will depend on the individual’s ability, or willingness, to put on a specific act of display, that of ‘a recognized and culturally coded pattern of behaviour’ (1996, 5). If one accepts that role-playing informs social intercourse and determines social belonging, one can read ‘typical’ national mores as the compliance to known expectations, which therefore precede and predetermine the individual; in fact, Carlson suggests that we define as performative any activity which ‘involves a consciousness of doubleness, through which the actual execution of an action is placed in mental comparison with a potential, an ideal, or a remembered original model of that action’ (1996, 5). The concept of a prior ideal, to which social beings strive to conform, has proved particularly useful in the field of gender studies, which has challenged assumptions of a ‘natural’ gendered identity; in particular, Judith Butler (1991, 24) has argued that gender is not innate, but assumed instead through performative practice, which ‘constitutes as an effect the very subject it appears to express’. This performatively formed subject, then, is not the manifestation of a prior psychic reality; social performance, perforce repetitive, is fractured by gaps and intervals between each act, revealing the psychic as that which exceeds the performance, and constantly threatens to undo it. Butler’s conclusion is that identity is not self-identical, and that psychic excess is the site for the subversion of imposed identifications. Shifting this theory from gender to national identity, it is easy to see its applications to Another Time: although protagonists and their nationalities are linked, they can never be conflated, making Self and nationality perennially misaligned. Psychic excess is evident whenever individual agency, desire or conflict come to the surface, not merely breaching social rules, but subverting received ideas of both Self and Other. In fact, notions of Otherness come into Butler’s work, which looks at psychoanalysis to cement its central argument. Most psychoanalytic accounts of the formation of the Self, she points out, posit a separation or loss, followed by incorporation of, or identification with, a missing ‘Other’; Freud was the first to advance this thesis in reference to mourning and pathology, in Mourning and Melancholia (1917), but later developers of his theories have continued to find it useful, albeit adapting it to their own different models of thought. In her analysis, Butler (1991, 26–27) sees the Self becoming such only after the loss and incorporation of some ‘Other’, which therefore remains at the core of the Self, forever making Otherness part of the whole, while disrupting the possibility of self-identity. Going back to the film, Janie’s extreme but indefinite longing clearly precedes the Italians, whom she however collectively ‘recognizes’ as her lost Other: difference and kinship not only coexist, but fill the void at the core of her (Scottish) Self. Janie’s identity is not self-identical, for she needs Italianness to make it whole, if always inherently unstable. One could ask, at this point, just what place or meaning has nationality in Another Time: as Italianness and Scottishness become progressively elusive concepts, whose identities are they? As the film moves forward by emphasizing the individual over the collective, the answer may well be that they are nobody’s identities, in the sense that they don’t define anyone’s subjectivity; what, however, the two nationalities accomplish on the screen, is the delineation

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of two antithetical structures. In the last analysis, the film presents national identity as a system, social and moral as much as representational. Acquiring specific meaning only if compared to another system, Italianness and Scottishness are not absolutes, but can be read as series of coherent, organized behaviours, which are embraced, performed, and imposed by and over members of a given group. This collective identity does not just subsist pragmatically, but is nourished through its idealization and internalization by the community it defines: the group thus constructs its own image. At the same time, a similar system provides an epistemological framework for comprehending the Other: certain traits, beliefs and behaviours are ascribed to the outsiders, equally caught in a ‘system of representations’. A group’s specific notions of the Other will not be accidental, but dependent on their mutually exclusive relation; Robert Young (1990, 139) is again useful here, with his notion of the Other as the externalization of a split, a site for the projection of repressed or disavowed qualities. All this is evident in Another Time, which produces meaning on two levels: on one hand, it exploits well-known stereotypes, ‘systems of representations’ which are familiar and significant to a British audience, and which provide the film with a recognizable formal structure. On the other hand, by exposing Janie’s own construction of the Italians, as well as her struggle against Scottishness, the film makes clear how Italianness is a much-needed receptacle for Janie’s own repressed desires. This last point has proved problematic to accept for some of the film’s critics, incensed by the negative portrayal of Scotland: John Brown (1984, 42), for example, is disparaging of what he sees as an ineffectual cliché, ‘the image of the isolated Highland, rural community facing disruption from the outside world’. This approach to Another Time seems to miss its main point, which is rather the concern with the havoc thrust on individual identity by the power of the community; in other words, the film distinguishes between its own systems of national representations and the individuals caught up in them. Against the Thatcherite vision, which denied the social, recognizing the collective only in the sum of single allegiances to an ideological national order, Another Time presents a society that is very much alive, dynamically constituted by the interaction between each person and a given system. It is precisely this instability which permits the separation of a prescribed Scottish identity (which excludes Janie), from a Scottish society (which includes Janie and her internalized Italianness, and thus the possibility of difference and change). There is, perhaps, just the tiniest amount of potential in this social representation, but it does at least conjecture the possibility of hope; like the psychoanalytic Other, forever disrupting but also completing the Self, Otherness is the film’s designated site for subversion and fulfilment. Italianness and the heritage film: A Room With A View and Where Angels Fear to Tread If Another Time, Another Place can be read as a direct challenge to the Thatcherite ethos, the films next considered in this chapter are defined by ambiguity: like the heritage cinema they typify, they ostensibly pay homage to national ‘tradition’, while belying a potentially subversive discourse. A Room With A View and Where Angels Fear to Tread are tightly structured around notions of Italianness; although their vision is essentially stereotypical, they approach Italy and the Italians as destabilizing forces, casting doubt on dominant narratives of British identity.

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British inhibition melts away in Italy in A Room with a View (James Ivory, 1985). Courtesy of the Kobal Collection.

A flourishing genre under Thatcherism, heritage cinema has been especially related to the historico-political context of its production: it is understood as a reaction to conservatism, or, more frequently, as its expression. In fact, ‘heritage’ is but a loose definition for a cluster of films set in Britain’s imperial past; while many of these films are renditions of classic literary works, notably by E.M. Forster and Henry James, others, like Chariots of Fire, are not based on canonical fiction. Diverse though it may be, all heritage cinema does have something in common: a preoccupation with the conventions of late Victorian or Edwardian Britain (mostly England), a lavish mise-en-scene, and a middle-class, visually beautiful representation of national society. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these films have aroused great controversy among their critics. Despite their huge box-office appeal, heritage productions have been often savagely attacked, accused of promoting a reactionary, celebratory version of national identity. Andrew Higson (1996b, 233) expresses a still widespread view by stating that ‘one of the central pleasures of the heritage film is the artful and spectacular projection of an elite, conservative vision of the national past’. An opposite assessment of heritage cinema also finds currency, so that Jeffrey Richards (1997, 169), for example, insists that these films are ‘profoundly subversive’. Undoubtedly, in the case of literary adaptations, heritage films are often at odds with the sharp irony and social critique of the texts they are based on. Apparently minimizing the original

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The demure Caroline (Helena Bonham-Carter) about to succumb to the lethal Italian charm exuded by Gino (Giovanni Guidelli) in A Room With A View (Charles Sturridge, 1987). Courtesy of the Kobal Collection.

debate on class prejudice, gender roles, and national mores, the films focus spectacularly on outward dazzle; in doing so they capitalize on the nostalgic appeal of period properties, which include not just buildings and costumes, but the original novels themselves, as well as their authors. For the purpose of this thesis, the portrayal of Britain thus presented has direct repercussions on the construction of spectatorship, of the national subject, and of Italianness. Insofar as the heritage project finds its place in a national cinema, in the sense of a cinema actively committed to represent the nation, it immediately encourages audience identification along predictable lines: guided through an allegedly authentic picture of their own ‘heritage’, British audiences may have difficulty in placing themselves outside the circle of the (British) protagonists, effectively allowing the film’s notions of national identity to stand for them on the screen. By the same token, the reception of the heritage film abroad will be greatly affected by the expectation of its being representative of British culture: hence the review of A Room With A View in Cahiers du Cinema, whose title was simply ‘Cup of Tea’ (November 1986, no.389, 59–60). There is a strong case for a joint discussion of A Room With A View and Where Angels Fear to Tread: both films are based on homonymous novels by E.M. Forster, are largely set in Italy, and even share some of their stars (Helena Bonham-Carter and Rupert Graves). Above

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all, the two films present parallel plots, featuring Italy as the catalyst for their development. Far from being just a picturesque setting or random narrative background, Italy is rendered through a specific representation which determines its crucial role in the story; in other words, its functionality in the economy of the film text is strictly related to the symbolic, aesthetic, and moral associations of Italianness. In order to identify the films’ formal organization, it is useful to return to two basic concepts argued by Said in Orientalism: the first is that geographical and national distinctions, with their derived attributes, are largely man-made, so that physical and theoretical boundaries are seen as circumscribing certain moral and mental characteristics. The second point is that the difference ascribed to a given social group is codified and organized, becoming a veritable system which frames the Other into a specific stereotyped vision. To apply these criteria to the films under discussion, is to recognize how their structure rests entirely on a primary division: the opposition between Italianness and Britishness; it is also to contrast the development of the British characters (and consequently the possibilities opened up for their national identity) with the immobility of the Italian ones, and the permanence of Italy as an unchangeable symbolic space. A Room With A View and Where Angels Fear to Tread trace what are essentially journeys of self-discovery for the British protagonists, characterized by a flight from an oppressive, hypocritical, and soul-numbing culture, to arrive at a new level of consciousness, ‘revealed’ to them through their Italian experience. A Room With A View focuses on Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham-Carter), a wealthy, naive, and, like so many of Forster’s characters, ‘muddled’ young woman; as the film opens, she has just embarked on her first European tour, visiting Italy with a chaperon, her prim older cousin Charlotte Bartlett (Maggie Smith). The impact of Italy on Lucy is nothing short of stunning, triggering sensual awakenings and undefined longings; a beautiful but alien environment, the country overwhelms the heroine through its mixture of sun, heat, handsome men and, apparently, a staggering amount of nude statues. As Lucy’s conventional world collides with this strange and exotic place, the girl’s confusion is increased by a chance encounter, at a Florence pension, with some fellow travellers: the bohemian Emersons, father and son (Denholm Elliott and Julian Sands), whose unorthodox manners entice Lucy but alarm Charlotte. The son, George, is in fact another extremely ‘muddled’ youth, confused about life and rejecting most social formalities. The Emersons adapt easily to Italy, for which they seem to feel an affinity, just like two other English tourists, the old and eccentric Miss Alans (Fabia Drake and Joan Henley). At the same time, Lucy sees the Italians being patronized or reviled by Miss Lavish (Judy Dench), a writer of romantic fiction, and Mr Eager (Patrick Godfrey), a zealously virtuous vicar. The film’s dominant discourse is thus set in place, by outlining differences between Italianness and Englishness; characters are divided in two camps, with the heroine posed in the middle, facing a fundamentally moral choice. Motivation is then found in Lucy’s struggle to find her own truth, and eventually to emerge on the other side of her native environment: the ‘Italian’ side. The plot moves forward as romance blossoms between Lucy and George; it is, however, a peculiarly un-British kind of romance, unleashed and influenced by the alien country in which they find themselves. In a key sequence, the two lovers are brought together by sharing a traumatic experience, the sight of a fight among local men, ending in bloodshed and death. Once back in England, though, conventions again take

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over, and Lucy gets engaged to Cecil (Daniel Day-Lewis), an eligible but pompous, unsexy fool; Cecil, as it happens, professes to love Italy, and peppers his speech with pretentious Italian phrases. While the engagement confirms Lucy’s place in her social milieu, her brother Freddy (Rupert Graves) and the sympathetic vicar Mr Beebe (Simon Callow) are critical of it, strengthening the division of the film’s characters in two opposite factions. This apparent order is shattered when the Emersons reappear, renting a house in the neighbourhood; a crisis ensues, until Lucy, first torn and disoriented, understands at last that her happiness lies with George, and with the rejection of the arid conformity which Cecil represents. Where Angels Fear to Tread is thematically and structurally close to A Room With A View, but provides the added interest of a main Italian character. The film charts yet another Italian journey: this time the English, middle-class travellers are the widowed Lilia Herriton (Helen Mirren), and her friend Caroline Abbott (Helena Bonham-Carter). Opening with the two women’s train departure, the film next shows Lilia’s in-laws at home, receiving some shocking news: in the village of Monteriano, the impulsive Lilia has become engaged to Gino (Giovanni Guidelli), a younger man and the son of a local dentist. Outraged at the thought of Lilia marrying a lower-class foreigner, Mrs Herriton (Barbara Jefford) decides to send her son Philip (Rupert Graves) to Monteriano, to stop the wedding. On his arrival, though, Philip finds Lilia and Gino already married; a lover of Italy himself, he is nevertheless disgusted at the union, especially as the handsome but vulgar Gino seems to confirm his family’s preconceptions. After Philip’s return to England, the Herritons sever all communication with Lilia, never replying to her letters; this situation is soon upset, however, on finding out that Lilia has had a son, and has died giving birth. Immediate plans ensue, aimed at removing the baby from the corrupt Italian environment; while not as determined as his mother and sister, Philip agrees once again to travel to Italy, to bring the child back. Things come to a head in Monteriano, as Philip and his bigoted sister Harriet (Judy Davis) are joined by Caroline: initially meaning to ‘rescue’ the baby herself, as reparation for her complicity in Lilia’s marriage, Caroline rapidly succumbs to Gino’s charm, especially after witnessing the man’s passionate love for his son. Caroline vows never to take the baby away from Gino; meanwhile, the bewitching Italian atmosphere is working its magic on Philip. The three Britons attend an open-air opera concert, which fails to impress Harriet, but completes the Italian conversion of Philip and Caroline; moreover, Gino himself makes an appearance, unsuspicious of the baby-snatching plan, and greets them affectionately. Totally captivated, Philip and Caroline prepare to return to England empty-handed; at the last-minute, however, Harriet steals the baby, smuggling him onto the carriage which is taking them to the station. But the carriage is overturned in a sudden storm, and the baby is killed by the fall. Gino must be told: Philip brings him the news, and is viciously attacked by the other, driven crazy by grief and anger; Caroline’s tempestive intervention avoids, perhaps, another death. The end sees Gino reconciled with his two English friends, who leave for England; the return home is very sombre, though lighted by the growing affection between Philip and Caroline. Narrative similarities between A Room With A View and Where Angels Fear to Tread should be obvious, though a structural difference divides the films: while Italianness in A Room amounts to the influence and atmosphere emanated by Italy, Where Angels channels the

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Italian ‘field’ through a specific and highly visible character, Gino. Nonetheless, in relation to the protagonists’ relation to Italy, the two films are identical. The main British subjects initially acquiesce in the views and expectations of the Grand Tour, content with ticking monuments off a list; however, they gradually undergo a shift in perspective, abandoning their emotional and moral atrophy, and choosing the path of truth to oneself, which Italy has revealed. As already mentioned, Forster’s criticism of contemporary morals does not always make it onto the screen; however, it is important to acknowledge how the novels’ exposure of a shortsighted and patronizing reading of Italy is retained by the films, and that this is enough to maintain the ambiguity of the original texts. While denouncing traditional British notions of Italy as a fabrication, the narrative relies on an essential Italianness to provide a mirror for the problems of Britishness, effectively giving the films, like the novels, a double-shell structure: an unacknowledged construction within the construction. Moreover, one version is not so dissimilar from the other: what is really being discussed is not Italy, but rather the British approach to it. It is indeed their attitude towards Italy that distinguishes ‘good’ characters from ‘bad’ ones: in A Room, the Emersons’ and the Miss Alans’ instinctive appreciation of the country is clearly privileged, and contrasted with Miss Lavish’s sensational exploitation of it, or with the bigoted condescension of Mr Eager. In leaving Cecil for George, Lucy swaps a pretentious intellectual, who fancies himself ‘Italianate’, for someone capable of blending in with Italians. Similarly, in Where Angels, it is Mrs Herriton’s and Harriet’s contempt for the Italians which marks them as representatives of Britishness at its worst. But while appreciation of the ‘real’ Italy is the measure by which characters are assessed, the fallacy of the country as a knowable, qualifiable entity creates a paradox at the core of the narrative. Whether blinkered or enlightened, British eyes are looking at the same object, an Italy which needs to be grasped in absolute terms for the process of British self-definition to take place. Choices made during script-writing and shooting are significant in this respect, as they aim at presenting a single, unambiguous meaning for Italy as a whole. In A Room, for instance, the early sequence entitled ‘In Santa Croce Without Baedeker’ establishes one of the film’s major assumptions, the association of Italianness with art, sensuality, and danger. The camera leads the audience into the Santa Croce church, to show a disciplined group of British tourists listening to their guide, Mr Eager: the latter’s commentary on Giotto’s medieval frescoes stresses their lucky escape from the ‘taint’ of Renaissance, ‘untroubled’ as they are from ‘the snares of anatomy and perspective’. By assigning this statement to an obviously dislikeable character, the script (here accurately reproducing Forster’s text) achieves several objects: it reminds spectators of the traditional identification of Italy with the Renaissance, inviting them to prefer it to the medieval one, precisely because it is being dismissed by the voice of Anglo-Saxon Puritanism. It also introduces the theme of nudity, therefore of sensuality, in connection with Italy, which is reinforced in the next scene: here Miss Lavish shocks priggish Charlotte Bartlett, by declaring Italy the place to let oneself open to ‘physical sensations’. A parallel shot shows again Santa Croce, where a panoramic view of the square is followed by a succession of close-ups of its statues: naked, contorted and menacing, they almost fill the frame, overwhelming Lucy as the camera takes up her gaze. At the same time, extra-diagetic music adds to the sense of threat exuded by the statues, and which finds its tangible culmination in the next scene, a messy and deadly fight between two Italian men. This is the event, of course, which violently shakes

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up the ‘muddled’ Lucy and George: they suddenly become aware of place, time, and their own feelings. The film thus presents some British characters who find Italian physicality offensive (Mr Eager and Charlotte), one who is lured by it (Miss Lavish), another two, the heroine and her lover, who experience a shift in consciousness through it: this variety of reactions, however, is only relevant in terms of how Britishness is articulated and challenged. As far as the construction of Italianness is concerned, the film’s message is unequivocal: Italy, unlike Britain, is the site of the body, with its implications of life, sex, and death. In Where Angels, as the plot maps Philip’s and Caroline’s inner growth, Monteriano ceases to be a postcard location, becoming the place to discover love and death; lust and grief come into the equation by association, making Italy a ‘total experience’, in contrast to England’s emotional vacuity and physical inhibition. But while the English characters are given a chance to develop, sustaining an implicit debate about the nature of Englishness, Italianness is forever cast in its given representation, without alternatives or indeed the need for any. This becomes obvious by comparing the films’ beginnings with their endings: each plot completes its trajectory, a full circle is achieved, so that symmetry highlights the magnitude of the changes occurred. A Room departs from the novel by introducing a new scene at the very end, in which a letter from Lucy on her Italian honeymoon tells Charlotte ‘you’ll be glad to hear that the Pensione Bartolini is its own dear self ’, adding that even the British guests are a replica of the previous ones, to the point of including another Lucy and another Charlotte. The letter is read aloud by Lucy, who is shown with George having dinner at the Pensione: to symbolize her transformation from uninitiated maiden to knowing woman, she is now dressed in black, in contrast to the creams and pastels worn throughout the film. While Lucy has evolved, Italy has conveniently remained the same, ready to provide opportunities for another set of inexperienced British tourists. This idea is even more forcefully expressed in Where Angels, again by changing the original text. While Forster closes the novel with a train in motion through Italy, lending a transitory sense to the conversation between Philip and Caroline, the film transports this final scene to an English station platform, neatly recalling the opening shot of Lilia’s and Caroline’s departure. The audience knows that everything has changed for Caroline and Philip: they are back home, wiser and better, to start a new life. Even Harriet, the archetype of British self-delusion, has been affected by the terrible Italian events, and returns in shock. But in Monteriano, for Gino, everything remains the same: neither friendship with Philip and Caroline, nor the death of his wife in childbirth, or even the virtual murder of his child, have failed to bring the slightest alteration to his carefree existence. As Philip explains, Gino ‘knows that the things that have made him happy once will probably make him happy again’. A caricature more than a character, Gino is left as he was first found: in the eternal Italian world of pasta, opera and football, untouched by life’s big questions. Introduced on the screen as a bad-mannered heart-throb, who eats spaghetti and plays ball with the same noisy energy, the film’s only Italian character sails through tragedy by remaining always the same: he is ultimately defined not by his exceptionality (his extraordinary passion for his child has vanished with him), but by his sameness, his adherence to long-established standards of Italianness, which blur iconography and meaning into one. It is worth quoting in full what Said writes on the limits imposed on the Oriental by western representations (1995, 102), as by

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substituting ‘Italian’ for ‘Oriental’ one has a fitting commentary on Gino’s role in the film: ‘the general category in advance offers the specific instance a limited terrain in which to operate: no matter how deep the specific exception, no matter how much a single Oriental can escape the fences placed around him, he is first an Oriental, second a human being, and last again an Oriental’. Frozen indeed into a system of representations, Gino remains the custodian rather than the owner of the ‘other’ life, that alternative universe of the soul which Caroline and Philip have experienced, and profited from: the Italian, accidentally leading others to a higher level of perception, is himself too infantile and too elemental to be aware of it. All this is not to deny Forster, or Sturridge, the right to depict Gino as a childish womanizer. What needs to be pointed out is the suggestive power of such a representation, its inscription in a long-established cultural tradition, and its parallels with Orientalist discourse, insofar as the Other is limited to a specific function (the unwitting catalyst for change), role (seductive villain), and appearance (dark, good-looking, and vulgar). In cinematic terms, the objectification of Gino is achieved by never letting the camera take up his point of view: like the Italian landscape, he is a spectacle, seen exclusively through British eyes. The same is not entirely true of A Room: in a scene featuring the British group being driven around Tuscany, Mr Eager decides to throw out the driver’s girlfriend, as the two have dared to kiss. The unfortunate girl is then shot in medium close-up, left on the side of the track while the others drive on: by lingering on her, and on her evident resentment of Mr Eager, the camera allows the Italian gaze to take over briefly. Similarly, in the earlier sequence in Santa Croce, close-ups of the statues precede the shot of Lucy looking at them, giving the impression that they are actually observing her, initiating the exchange of looks. These shots, however, are rare interludes in a tightly-focused narrative, aimed at maintaining Italianness within certain specifications, and at letting British perceptions of it guide spectators through a preferred meaning. While both films follow the original texts in replacing the ‘wrong’ reading of Italy with the ‘right’ one, they totally lack the irony of Forster’s novels, where the very condition of the tourist is problematized, and any version of Italy retains a self-conscious fragility. In the films, instead, the picturesque and the beautiful are foregrounded, inviting the audience to find satisfaction in aesthetic nostalgia: Forster is indeed transformed from a modernist into an antiquarian (Higson 2000, 37). While the novels’ author seems to acknowledge how ‘the urge for a new start, a reform that would sweep away all previous texts […] finds utterance in only another text’ (Buzard 1995, 14), the films’ assured editing of the original narratives leaves no doubt about the fixed boundaries of Italianness. The presentation of Italy through the British gaze, the scarce subtitling of Italian speech (completely missing from A Room), together with a British-led narrative and a lavish visual style, define Italy as a perennially known, passive, splendid background: the space where Britishness, and its relationship to what Forster calls ‘the inner life’, are negotiated. In both A Room With A View and Where Angels Fear to Tread, narrative structure and form are determined by the films’ singling out of inhibition, hypocrisy and snobbery as the main British ‘faults’, as much as by symmetrical motivation: these traits require an antithetical double to set them off. A specifically problematic idea of Britishness moves the plots forward, as the films trace the search for a solution to the characters’ inner conflicts; at the same time, Italianness is

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shaped in direct response to the supposed deficiencies of Britishness, supplying both a tangible alternative and a catalyst for transformation. Obliged to provide a contrast to emotional and physical inhibition, Italianness embodies excess and lack of self-control, whether behavioural or artistic: in Where Angels Fear to Tread, Gino’s jealousy and violence, paternal obsessiveness and vengeful grief find a less dramatic parallel in the opera singer, whose massive (excessive) body size is matched by her over-the-top performance, as much as by the loud rapture of the audience. A Room’s presentation of Italian art focuses exclusively on its presumed sexual unrestraint, first hinted at by Mr Eager, later displayed, somewhat grotesquely, in the shots of the Florentine nude statues. While British inhibition finds its opposite in Italian excess, British hypocrisy is contrasted to Italian frankness, which is not the same as lack of deceit. Gino fools Lilia into believing that he loves her, proceeding then to have affairs behind her back; when she confronts him with the truth, however, he good-humouredly admits everything, just as he later admits to Caroline his intention of remarrying for purely practical reasons. Similarly, the driver of A Room lies to Mr Eager, describing his girlfriend as his sister, only to give up the pretence as soon as it is challenged. Charming and open, but with a tendency to cheat and unleash upheaval, the Italian Other has an aura of danger, steeped in British traditional notions of treacherous dark strangers: while Gino is finally treasured as a friend by Philip and Caroline, he remains someone who has abused his wife, tried to kill Philip, and cast his foreign spell on Caroline, who falls hopelessly in love with him despite herself. Philip’s earlier comment on Caroline’s proposed visit to Gino, that the latter ‘will marry her, or murder her, or do for her somehow’, retains a certain validity to the end. It is on the issue of class prejudice that the films are perhaps most ambiguous. Ostensibly, A Room and Where Angels are at pains to condemn British snobbery towards the Italians, by making the least likeable characters patronizing and arrogant in the extreme. Mr Eager’s dismissal of Italy is such, that he considers its history and art best studied by British scholars; Miss Lavish’s infatuation with the country rests on its image as a primitive place, inhabited by child-like creatures. Before his ‘awakening’, Philip joins his mother and sister in tolerating Italians only if they are aristocrats: nothing less would be a match for the British middle class, while the notion of a dentist in Monteriano is enough to spoil Italy’s appeal. Viewed from this angle, the films are exposing British attitudes as arrogant and bigoted; however, the films’ own portrayal of Italy tells a different story. The fight scene in A Room, depicting individual violence among an excitable mob, adds a working-class flavour to its evocation of primitive passions: in offering a spectacle of men let loose, Italy is bringing the lower classes closer to Lucy. In Where Angels, the casting of Gino as an unrefined gold-digger, with a stress on his bad table-manners and inaptitude for polite conversation, constructs an Italian ‘good savage’, making Italianness inherently low-class; thus British highly-civilized inhibition is tempered by Italian wildness, and Gino’s brutality is forgiven in view of his genuine barbarity. While Philip and Caroline may dabble at ‘going native’ in Monteriano, their sombre return to Britain makes Italianization an isolated event: useful as a

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life-changing experience, Italy remains outside the realm of the ‘proper’ world. Just like the Oriental, whose perceived difference is dismissed as archaic or alien, only to be idealized as an antidote to the West’s spiritual crisis, the Italian is viewed through an ambivalent framework, which is patronizing and myth-making at the same time. Not all of the films’ inconsistencies, however, result in the rigid delimitation of Italianness: paradoxically, the insistence on a certain view of Italy contains possibilities for its own subversion. While the films’ overt structure relies on a distinction between Italian and British traits, the preoccupation with transforming British characters through immersion into Italianness reveals a different subtext, in which national distinctions are subordinated to individual qualities and potentialities. This is clear if one considers A Room, where, through the Emersons, British tweedy quaintness is linked to Italian wildness: the eccentric father and son, country-loving, unruly and outspoken, are able to mingle with both groups. To discuss trespassing British characters, it is useful again to look at theoretical models of identity-construction: Robert Young’s concept of the Oriental Other (1990, 139), seen as the externalization of western inner dislocation, bears directly on the films in question, where Italianness is the manifestation of latent qualities, excluded from dominant versions of British identity. Robin Cohen’s ‘fuzziness’ (1994, 18–19), the idea of a flexible or permeable barrier between one’s identity and that of others, is also enlightening: self-definition, built on a principle of innate separation, is in fact precariously achieved through constant negotiation. To apply this model to A Room and Where Angels is to uncover a paradox, by which Britishness and Italianness, supposedly antithetic poles of identity, serve as relative positions along the common, on-going path of self-discovery. In both films, when British characters infringe perceived rules of national conduct, they adopt Italian standards not to relinquish their identity, but to find it. Their successive return to Britain cannot alter what Italy has highlighted: the confluence of opposing qualities into a single individual; the frontier between two sets of values has, indeed, turned out to be fuzzy. Viewed from this angle, the major difference between the various British characters is not the degree of their adherence to Britishness, but their interpretation of it: an interpretation which may incorporate, permanently or transitorily, some supposedly Italian characteristics. Paraphrasing Said once again, one can say that the reclamation of Italianness takes place when Italy is approached intuitively and not textually, when its qualities are felt and recognized, rather than detachedly known from a text: hence the difference between Cecil and George, the first vainly assuming the airs of an ‘inglese italianato’, the second never voicing a single comment on Italy, but instinctively being at one with the place. While Lucy’s confused Italian experience remains characterized by the need for ‘a view’, the Emersons are the only British tourists not to endorse a textual attitude: as fuzzy in-betweens, they effectively expose the artificiality of national distinctions. This level of meaning is carefully underplayed by the film, which clings to its oppositional structure; the Emersons’ difference, and to a lesser extent the Miss Alans’, are contained under the catch-all, if vague, category of ‘English eccentrics’. In Where Angels, on the other hand, trespassing British characters embrace Italianness having consciously renounced their textual baggage: Philip and Caroline lack the Emersons’ radical

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philosophy, or the Miss Alans’ child-like openness, so their Italianization is more a course of action than a pre-existing condition. Notwithstanding their token native transgressors, A Room and Where Angels leave little positional choice to British viewers, who are inserted in a binary structure dividing the British protagonists (those ‘like themselves’) from the Italians (the Others). With the virtual absence of the Italian gaze, each film constructs subjectivity around its own, narrow notions of Britishness; the effect is the same as that observed by John Hill in another heritage film, Maurice, which ‘still inhabits the world of those it criticises’ (1999, 92). This lack of alternatives results in the privileging of a specific national image, making the few available subject positions ‘the only legitimate positions of the national subject’ (Higson 1995, 275); the imposed distance between Self and Other reinforces a rigid construction of Italianness, structured along stereotypical lines. While the films point to the fuzzy Emersons, or to the less fuzzy Philip and Caroline, as to preferable, gap-bridging positions, meaning remains ultimately based on the ‘naturalness’ of Britishness. As the self-doubt permeating the original texts is hidden from view, literally buried under a mass of lace and architecture, so the blurring between nationalities is unacknowledged, thanks to a visual and narrative pledge to ‘national heritage’; the fact that the British premiere of A Room was in aid of the National Trust, and took place in the presence of the Queen Mother, leaves no illusion as to the intended presentation of the film. A different view of heritage cinema, however, places it alongside melodrama, or the woman’s picture, by reading its iconographic excess as the coded expression of emotions (Monk 1994). Just as melodrama has been reclaimed by a number of feminist film critics (Cook 1996a,b, Harper 1987, 1994), who have pointed to its subversive potential for female audiences, heritage films may be seen as foregrounding pleasures which are usually dismissed, or trivialized, by male-dominated cinema. Considering A Room and Where Angels from this perspective, their visual dazzle appears as significant as the equation of Italianness with excess; Italy affords a vicarious relief from the repression associated with Britain in the film, and from the return to it which, it would seem, must conclude every Italian escapade. Just as women spectators watching a melodrama would identify with the heroine, enjoying illicit freedoms until the final punishment, so a British audience may relish the experience of Italy through that of the protagonists, equally terminated by their re-incorporation into British society. There is no scope here to analyze Britain’s production of its own stereotypical image; it must be noted, however, that the pro-excess argument rests on a highly conventional, negative version of Britishness. Characterized by emotional inhibition and sexual repression, and immersed in almost constant rain, these archetypal British subjects, like those depicted by the films, are really no more than caricatures: ready to match, in their rigid identities, the equally stereotyped Italians. Ultimately, the crucial factor in the reception of heritage cinema is the claim to authenticity of the whole heritage industry: films are implicitly given the reliable status ascribed to museums, listed buildings, classic literature, and other films. As authenticity lends authority, these films’ representation of Britishness, or Italianness, reaches the screen already validated. In A Room and Where Angels, every narrative thread and subjective shot contributes to place authority

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with the British characters, albeit those who are able to see beyond the national ‘muddle’. Mr Emerson, who guides Lucy and George out of their maze of self-delusion, or Philip and Caroline, who achieve their own self-awareness, are clearly representing moral authority; in particular, Caroline’s authoritative aura gives her the last word on Italy, and her final position can be seen as symptomatic of both films. After playing a reconciliatory role, drawing Gino and Philip together after the child’s death, Caroline stands for wisdom and ‘true’ knowledge; when she declares that she will never visit Italy again, she explains that she does not need to, because she understands Italy ‘perfectly’. It is a statement which neatly closes the British journey of self-discovery: after knowing oneself through knowing Italy, the latter is no longer useful and is abandoned, to remain a distant Other with no place in ‘real’ life.

Conclusion

This work has aimed to assess the representation and function of Italianness in British cinema; through the analysis of visual and archival evidence, it has demonstrated conclusively a number of contentions. In the first place, it has shown that the images of Italy and the Italians found in British films are not formed in a vacuum, but belong to a long-standing tradition: since the Renaissance, British society has produced specific notions regarding Italy, which have maintained some essential characteristics throughout their development. These notions have resulted from the overlapping and blending of various narratives: canonical and popular fiction, perceptions of real-life Italians as well as of Italian culture, scholarly accounts of Italian history, and finally advertizing and, of course, films themselves. In particular, the second half of the twentieth century has seen the proliferation and cross-fertilization of ideas of Italianness, as mass tourism, mass media, and cinema created an ever wider context for the ‘field’ surrounding the word ‘Italy’. Nonetheless, as shown in Chapter 2, already in 1940 British cinema could tap a rich source of Italian stereotypes; these stereotypes were used, then and afterwards, in specific and systematic ways, while all the time being affected by social and historical developments. On the basis of my textual and contextual analysis, it has been possible to identify the fundamental qualities of traditional Italianness, and the way it operates – or is made to operate – in British narratives, specifically cinematic ones. This investigation has taken place within a definite conceptual frame: postcolonial theory. Hinging on a primary division between Self and Other, the colonial approach to identity-formation can be usefully applied to situations outside colonialism, as this thesis has shown. In particular, British constructions of Italianness can be effectively compared to western notions of the Orient; the recourse to Edward Said’s Orientalism has proved that, in British culture, Italy and the Italians are placed into a ‘system of representations’, delimiting and defining a priori their characteristics and scope. Like the Oriental, the Italian Other is located at the junction of highly ambivalent discourses: as the perceived repository of un-Britishness, he/she is both desired and detested, admired and feared. As in the Oriental’s case, the Italian’s perceived alienness serves an essential function in the articulation of self-definition: it delimits, by negative derivation, the boundaries of British identity.

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While part of a generic ‘foreign’ category, Italianness is especially constructed as the opposite of conventional Britishness; just as Italy is imagined as perpetually sunny and hot, in contrast with a grey and rainy Britain, Italians are expected to excel at un-British behaviour. The basic tenets of British self-definition have stayed remarkably constant, and Italianness has also received a consistent representation: it signifies excess versus restraint, fantasy versus pragmatism, and sexiness versus inhibition. It equally represents deviousness, chaos, and immorality against British fair play, decency, and order. While some of these characteristics are also ascribed to other nationalities, the Italian ‘field’ brings them together in a singular way. Not only does Italianness comprise all of the above and ideas of beauty, decay, menace, and cowardice; these traits are themselves subject to a dominant representation, the combination of fashion and farce which is peculiarly Italian. The result is a powerful but polyhedric image, whose expression has received different emphases in the history of British cinema. World War II, and its immediate aftermath, was necessarily a time of crude differentiation; however, while Italy and Britain were both the subjects of propaganda, the former’s ambiguous enemy status allowed for a complex cinematic rendition. Recorded in war footage, war films, and torrid melodrama, 1940s Italianness remains the richest and best example of Italy’s place in British cinema: its failed soldiers, pacifist anti-heroes, and seductive villains illustrate the fundamental split on which Italianness is built. At the same time, the sweeping power of Italian-based costume drama testifies to its essential escapist function. The 1950s brought a new slant on constructions of Italianness, as Britain struggled to absorb social and cultural change. While gender roles were being reassessed, depictions of newlyarrived Italian immigrants, mostly male ones, were chosen to portray Italianness on British screens; these Italian characters conformed to long-standing representations, but were used to articulate contemporary doubts about British manhood. Meek and masochistic, or brutal and corrupted, Italianness encapsulated a flawed, inadequate masculinity, against which national maleness could be tested and negotiated. Parallel to these developments, however, Italy’s own changing society was having profound repercussions on perceptions of Italianness: in particular, a booming Italian cinema projected a modern and glamorous image, exemplified by the star-like quality of its actors. This latest brand of Italianness, coveted and exploited by British films, rested in fact on established notions of Italians, seen as desirable, sexy and beautiful; it was a return to Italian seductiveness, but reframed and reworked through the canons of the new Europe. In the troubled landscape of 1980s Britain, where national identity was being questioned and reassessed, cinema was vastly concerned with definitions of Britishness. The Italian Other was used once more as the archetypal foil, and as a tool for self-discovery; inhabiting a foreign fantasy world, where freedom and self-expression reigned, this 1980s Italian was inserted into a quizzical, yet nostalgic exploration of the British past. Symbolizing an alternative to the limitations of Britishness, Italianness remained concordant with its previous versions, while posing a direct threat to the national identifications championed by Thatcherism.

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This book has shown the consistency and endurance of Italianness in British cinema; though significantly affected by historical and cultural factors, the strands constituting Italianness have come together in predictable ways. At the same time, national identities remain ongoing constructions, liable to be reshaped and subverted; as ‘Italian’ and ‘British’ continue to be meaningful terms, their dynamic interaction is likely to be fruitful, and produce new possibilities for the formation and negotiation of subjectivity.

Filmography

D: Director(s) Another Time, Another Place. 1983. D: Michael Radford. Blanche Fury. 1947. D: Marc Allegret. Call of the Blood, The. 1948. D: John Clements. Constant Husband, The. 1954. D: Sidney Gilliat. Desert Victory. 1943. D: Roy Boulting and David MacDonald. Escape by Night. 1953. D: John Gilliing. First of the Few, The. 1942. D: Leslie Howard. Flanagan Boy, The. 1953. D: Reginald Le Borg. Frightened Man, The. 1952. D: John Gilling. Glass Cage, The. 1955. D: Montgomery Tully. Glass Mountain, The. 1948. D: Henry Cass. Hell Drivers. 1957. D: Cy Endfield. Kind Hearts and Coronets. 1949. D: Robert Hamer. Madonna of the Seven Moons. 1944. D: Arthur Crabtree. Magic Bow, The. 1946. D: Bernard Knowles. Man About the House, A. 1947. D: Leslie Arliss. Millionairess, The. 1960. D: Anthony Asquith. Miracle in Soho. 1957. D: Julian Amyes. Naples is a Battlefield. 1944. D: Jack Clayton. On the Beat. 1962. D: Robert Asher. Private Angelo. 1949. D: Michael Anderson and Peter Ustinov. Room with a View, A. 1985. D: James Ivory. Ships with Wings. 1941. D: Sergei Nolbandov. Summer Madness. 1955. D: David Lean. Wavell’s 30,000. 1942. D: John Monck. Where Angels Fear to Tread. 1991. D: Charles Sturridge. Woman of Straw. 1964. D: Basil Dearden. Yellow Caesar. 1941. D: Alberto Cavalcanti.

Works Cited

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Girelli

Beauty Beast and the

and the

Italianness in British Cinema

Recent years have seen an increased interest in issues of national identity and representation, and cinema is a major medium where strands and layers of representational systems come together in cross-cultural dialogues.

About the author Elisabetta Girelli is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews.

ISBN 978-1-84150-244-1

Italianness in British Cinema

Italianness in British Cinema

Beauty and the Beast provides an account of the specific development of depictions of Italy and the Italians in British cinema. Girelli draws upon cultural and social history to assess the ongoing function of ‘Italianness’ in British film, and its crucial role in defining and challenging British national identity. Drawing on British literary and filmic tradition to analyze the rise of specific images of the Italian Other, this book makes original use of archival material such as WWII footage – and a selected corpus of significant British films.

Beauty and the Beast

Elisabetta Girelli

Beauty Beast

00

9 781841 502441

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Elisabetta Girelli