The Films (1955)

Film Reviews from the May 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the Curzon Cinema recently there was an excellent programme, both from the point of view of the film-lover and of the Socialist. The films are De Sica’s Umberto D and a Spanish family comedy called Meet Mr. Marshall.

Umberto D has been described by the filmic “blurbs" as “De Sica’s masterpiece,” and this seems to be one of the few occasions when they are right The film seems to be much nearer perfection than De Sica’s two most famous earlier films—Bicycle Thieves and Miracle in Milan. It is the story of an Italian old-age pensioner and his mongrel dog, and lays bare the misery and unbearable loneliness that workers suffer in their old age.

The film opens with a demonstration by old-age pensioners for an increase in their pensions. The demonstrators have no permit and, inevitably, they are dispersed by steel-helmeted police in jeeps. The film goes on to show in agonising detail the neglect of the old; the indifference of the majority of the young; the distrust even of other old people; and their attempt to cling to their last vestiges of human dignity.

The principal character in the film, a retired government employee, is in arrears with his rent His landlady, a brassy blonde singer, is anxious to throw him out in order to convert his pitiful single room into a parlour. Umberto (that is his name) who has lived in the room for years, is determined not to leave, and sells first his watch and then his books in a despairing effort to rake the money for the rent. In order to save money, he gets himself admitted into a hospital for a week. When he returns home he finds his room in a shambles, his landlady having taken advantage of his absence to start work on the flat. Despairing and tired of life, the only thing left to the old man is his dog, and it is his love for the dog alone that gives him the will to go on living.

The story is all on this simple and unheroic level but, needless to say, has far greater impact than any Hollywood “epic.” I will not spoil the film-goers pleasure by further description of the plot but will be content with some observations on the social implications of the film.

Perhaps the most pitiful and most crying problem that capitalism has thrown up is its treatment of its workers in old age. Condemned to inactivity and loneliness by the “Great God Profit” for which they have sweated away the greater part of their life, they are generously granted an old-age pension which has rightly been described as the final insult to the worker. There is no doubt that it is among the old, both of this country and of the other “civilised” countries, that the problem of poverty is at its most acute. They are condemned to exist on what is no more than a pittance, often in complete loneliness.

Owing to the nature of the Society in which we live, their children are often unable or unwilling to care for them, or even to help support them. The majority have the further indignity of having to apply to the National Assistance Board for money, who enquire closely into their means and capital and also whether they have any relatives capable of supporting them. This film does a very worth-while job in spotlighting this problem, and De Sica (whose Bicycle Thieves flowed that he was alive to the social problems of our day) is to be complimented for doing so and and for making a great film.

The other film in the programme provides the necessary light relief. It is an extremely amusing satire from Spain which turns on the fact that the world in general, and America in particular, looks upon Spain as being a land of gypsy dancers, bullfights, and peculiar hats. The little town portrayed in the film is in the province of Castile, and is as unlike the outsider’s concept of Spain as Devon or Cornwall.

The mayor, who is in co-operation with the rest of the population in "fiddling” their taxes, is informed that the American “Marshall Aid” officials will be visiting the town and showering their dollars wherever they go, and that a suitable welcome and demonstration must be prepared for them. The satire, not only aimed at America, but at almost everything and everybody, is carried out to great effect The sequences in which the principal personages of the town dream about America are particularly good. The town priest, for instance, dreams that he is cross-examined by typical Hollywood gangsters and subsequently, dragged before an inquisition of Ku Klux Klan members who sentence him to the gallows. This seems to be aimed, not only at the "K.K.K.” but also at the Catholic Church and the inquisition.

It is perhaps surprising that a satire of this kind should have come out of Spain, considering that unhappy country's political institutions and economic circumstances, but one frequently finds that films and books of high quality spring from the most unexpected quartos. A good example is Los Olvidados, an excellent film about poverty and juvenile delinquency in Mexico City which showed living conditions at their most debased, and which was sponsored by the Mexican government.

We find sometimes that people who are not Socialists have facilities for vividly illustrating things that we say. I would look at Umberto D in that light. Perhaps I can reiterate that this programme is well worth a visit. Both Socialists and those who do not accept our point of view will come away feeling mentally stimulated.

Albert Ivimey

An indictment (1966)

Film Review from the October 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hands Across The City (Paris Pullman Cinema). 

This film has been described as Marxist. It is not. But it is a piece of brilliant angry protest at the way democracy can be brought into abuse by the workings of capitalist society. It snarls in indignant rage at the back-slapping activities and behind-the-scenes deals between right and centre parties of a city council, and it scorns the cynical attempts of the “communist” deputies to fish in troubled waters when the' question of rehousing and land speculation hit the headlines.

Made in Italy, directed by Francesco Rosi, it stars Rod Steiger as Eduardo Nottola, the notorious building tycoon, ruthless in the pursuit of his interests and seeing everything through L (for Lira) shaped spectacles. “Money is not like a car—to be put in a garage and forgotten,” he snaps at his aide, impatient at a holdup in his plans. “It has to be fed every day like a horse.” Or in other words, time is money and every delay is a threat to his profit margins.

For Nottola is indeed after big profits and has managed to get an outsized finger in the pie when decisions are taken by the local authority on slum clearance and rebuilding in a part of Naples. He is a shrewd, flamboyant businessman-cum politician and is not afraid to use his money lavishly when buying opponents over to his side, in a bid to keep his grip on the inner junta of the city council. Early on, his activities are brought dramatically into the limelight with the collapse of a row of derelict houses on the very fringe of his building operations. Two of the occupants are killed and a young boy seriously injured —he loses both legs eventually—and everything is set for a first-class row in the council chamber, with Communist opposition leader De Vita, an eye on the coming elections, pressing for a full enquiry.

Nottola's son is a council official, whose abuse of the site safety regulations has made him liable for prosecution, and has gone into hiding; but later on he is cheerfully handed over to the police in sacrifice to De Vita’s thirst for blood, and in cynical furtherance of his father’s interests. The film leaves no punch unpulled in its relentless portrayal of an administration riddled with corruption and political intrigue in the cause of the profit motive.

And at the end of it all, Nottola is still there, maybe a trifle bloody but certainly far from bowed. His party has lost its majority on the city council, but he has managed to ride out the storm. The new council is just as anxious to curry favour; indeed the election has been more in the nature of a reshuffling than anything else, and many of the old faces are in new places.

True, this is not a Marxist film, but it makes some telling points, and jabs away at the veneer of sickening self-righteousness masking the filth of capitalist politics. As Mayor Di-Angela says to one of the younger deputies in a rare flash of frankness: “Politics is not a moral issue. For the politician the greatest crime of all is to be defeated.” So he tries to make sure that he is not guilty of this by keeping on the right side of those with power and influence.

Then again, Nottola’s survival is symbolic rather than personal. There has been an upheaval, but the dust doesn't take long to settle, and afterwards rich, poor and profit motive are all still with us. Yet this very significance the producers seem to have missed—or refused to face—and we are left to search in vain for an answer to the problem they have so starkly posed. To judge by the dialogue, they do not seem to have much confidence in the working class to do anything about it either, although they do concede that election times can be pretty nerve-racking for some politicians.

This aside, however, the film is worth seeing as an indictment of private property society. “The story and characters, are fictitious.” says the usual disclaimer at the end of the titles. Well, it certainly could have fooled us.

Eddie Critchfield

Film: Juliet of the Spirits (1966)

Film Review from the March 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Juliet of the Spirits, directed by Federico Fellini 

We have scarcely settled in our seats when we are transported into a magic garden. The lush vegetation parts and we gaze on to what appears to be a house of the type to be seen in every very posh area, but which on later reflection we realise to be a very pale imitation of an ancient feudal manorial castle set in its own grounds. As if to emphasise this point, the next scene is set inside the “battlements" and we see the lady of the house surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting attending to her toilette. Great emphasis is given these early scenes and we are left in no doubt of the deliberate play on the analogy between the feudal ruling elements and our latter day parasites.

What are we discussing? Frederico Fellini’s latest film Juliet of the Spirits. Fellini, who has made such films as La Strada, La Dolce Vita and “8½’ must command the attention of those wishing to take a very close and keen look at the world they are living in. For this is precisely what Fellini has done. His skill lies not just in his techniques of film making, but more precisely on his penetrative insight into human behaviour and its background of the modern day capitalist world with its money grabbing ambience of privilege and deprivation, wealth and poverty, power and impotence.

In particular, Fellini sets his films in Italy, and he conveys with Goyaesque flashes of insight the upper crust of Italian capitalist society, with its pimps, gigolos, sycophants and hangers-on of every type and description, their idle chatter, their endless quest for amusement and diversion to still the boredom of useless and inactive lives, their constant almost diseased preoccupation with their bodily needs and desires, sex rating only second to food. But Fellini makes clear the universal application of his searing indictment (and this has occurred in all his latest films) by the introduction of the same brand of parasitical element from other countries all over the world, each with their own characteristic “national" qualities with particular reference to France, England and the U.S.A.

Is there a particular socialist appraisal of this man’s work? There can be no doubt that there is. Underlying all the situations and characters appearing in Fellini's films, is the class divided society of capitalism which is universal in the world today, and in which virtually every human being in the world is involved in one way or another. Fellini does not search in the heavens or in some mysterious recess of the human psyche to explain why people talk and behave as they do. He searches, and finds ample cause for investigation in, their immediate environs, that is in their economic and social background.

Guilietta, the central figure in Juliet of the Spirits, and of the flimsy plot on which Fellini hangs his work, is a middle-aged woman married to a wealthy man whose source of wealth is indeterminate but substantial. He brings home with him one evening a coterie of friends, a motley crowd who obviously represent a spectrum of the upper crust and their parvenus. Their behaviour, talk and manners would be more suited to the circus floor, not to be too unkind to the undoubted talents of circus artists. Throughout the film this crew or their indistinguishable next-door neighbours flit across the screen in one scene or another and in situation after situation, as if Fellini is determined that we shall not be allowed to forget the follies and foibles of our so-called betters.

Our hero husband is no longer sexually interested in his wife, and he has attached himself to more attractive mettle, but presumably he must keep in line with bourgeois family morality, so he dissembles as best he can to his wife. She, simple soul that she is, having had a stern religious upbringing, takes a little time to cotton on. On the urgent advice of her sister, a lesser innocent, she puts the matter into the hands of a detective agency. The meeting at the detective’s office is a brilliant microcosm of every solicitor’s and lawyer’s office where the sordid facts are covered over with sugared words, double-entendres and hypocritical pretensions. The bill, with its lengthy logistics, is never presented . . .  till the end. Although she is a woman fully acclimatised to the corruption and double faced morality of her class, our heroine sits through it all apparently mute and unbelieving.

All in all, the character and behaviour of our heroine seems to be at odds with her class background. This in possibly the weak point of the film. The spirits mentioned in the title of the film are those which Guilietta finds herself subjectively tormented by. Whether this is just a useful peg on which Fellini hangs some brilliant scenes, or whether they have other subtle purposes, is difficult to determine. In any event, we are continuously led back to the real world around us and all the film’s characters never cease to be palpable and tangible. In other words, Fellini, the arch realist, is having a little game. Poetic licence, no doubt. Those who have seen La Dolce Vita may be disappointed. There is not the fierce clarity and relentless exposure of every aspect of our society, high and low.

In his earlier films, the Socialist could draw his conclusions clearly. Now it is no longer so. Perhaps Fellini has mixed too much among the higher circles which he describes with such devastating accuracy. Has he forgotten the wider world that he depicted, for example, with such compassion in La Strada?

Max Judd

Mixed Media: Pier Paolo Pasolini (2015)

Pier Paolo Pasolini

The Mixed Media Column from the November 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-75) was murdered forty years ago on 2 November 1975. He was a heterodox Marxist, a poet, novelist, and film director of exquisite poetic cinema where he showed a natural sympathy for the sub-proletariat and peasantry.

Pasolini was a member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). His 1948 novel Il sogno di una cosa (The Dream of Something) derived its title from Marx's letter to Ruge in September 1843; 'It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality'. Because of a homosexual scandal, Pasolini was expelled from the PCI in October 1949 'for moral unworthiness.' He retorted 'I am and will remain a Communist', and in every election Pasolini declared his support for the PCI. Enzo Siciliano writes 'to be a Communist was for Pasolini almost a fact of nature ... he believed with the strength of faith, that it was in communism that the instinct of self-preservation and the will to survive took form. For him ... communism had to do with love, and also making love.'

His formative ideological influence was Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), a founder of the PCI, whose Quadermi dal carcere (Prison Notebooks) were published in 1948. Pasolini's poem Le ceneri di Gramsci (The Ashes of Gramsci) written in 1954 'outlining the ideal that illuminates', is also a paean to Gramsci's 'rigour.' Like Gramsci, Pasolini believed in the idea of unifying consciousness through history. His poem is also a demand for a new morality whereby the individual would be salvaged in his entirety, in his specificity, and the pressing need for economic justice. Maurizio Viano in The Left According to the Ashes of Gramsci writes 'what attracted Pasolini was Gramsci's idea that intellectuals must engage in a pendular motion across the vertical spectrum of a class society, the duty of suturing high and low, mind and body.' This is what Pasolini aimed for in his first two films, Accatone (1961), and Mamma Roma (1962). They are naturalistic studies of dispossessed Roman sub-proletarian lives in slums using authenticity, and uncompromising raw poetry, depicting pimps, prostitutes, petty thieves, and the illusion of petit-bourgeois redemption.

Teorema released in 1968 demolishes bourgeois ideals, showing the aridity of the modern bourgeoisie where sexual repression and taboos hold the family and the capitalist social structure together. Teorema portrays a stranger who seduces the members of a bourgeois family; the maid, the son, the daughter, the mother, and the father. The father appears to be jealous but it is not clear if he is, as in the Oedipal scenario, jealous of the son, or whether he is jealous of the stranger for being able to do to the son what he, as the boy's father, incestuously desires. With seduction of the father, the whole patriarchal and capitalist structure collapses. The father is stripped of his illusion, and strips himself of his property handing over his factory to the workers.

Pasolini shared Gramsci's faith in the revolutionary potential of the Italian peasantry. Gramsci wrote in L'Ordine Nuovo of 2 August 1919 that 'the peasant has always lived outside the rule of law, he has never had a juridical personality, nor a moral individuality. He lives on as an anarchic element, an independent atom in a chaotic tumult'. In his Prison Notebooks of 1935, Gramsci wrote 'folklore should be studied as a 'conception of the world and life' implicit to a large extent in determinate strata of society and in opposition to 'official' conceptions of the world.' Pasolini's 1970-74 Trilogy of Life which includes Il Decameron, I Racconti di Canterbury (Canterbury Tales), and Il fiore delle mille e una notte (Arabian Nights) portray his delight and celebration of demotic folk tales and peasant life of pre-capitalist worlds. The Trilogy depicts a lost world of prelapsarian sexuality with no Freudian or religious guilt. Arabian Nights are dreamlike stories of love, potions and betrayal, filmed in Eritrea, Iran, Nepal, and Yemen. Here, Pasolini strips away Islamic proscriptive ideology to show a relaxed and euphoric delight in the act of love, appreciation of the human body, scenes of carnality smothered in the sounds of laughter in a magic universe watched over by 'Qada' or fate.

In 1975 Pasolini went from joy and vitality to deep mourning when he made Salòo Le centoventi giornate di Sodoma ( Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom) which transposed the Marquis de Sade's ‘psychopathia sexualis' to Mussolini's Fascist state of Salò in Northern Italy of 1943-45. Pasolini links Fascism with sadism, sexual licence and oppression, portraying the sadistic impulses of the bourgeoisie. A banker, a duke, a bishop and a judge inflict upon imprisoned teenagers in a series of Danteesque circles of hell - increasingly cruel sexual tortures ending in executions using four modes of current judicial killing - hanging, shooting, the garrotte, and the electric chair. Salò is transgressive cinema, full of brutality and despair.

Shortly before his murder, Pasolini wrote, 'never has Marx's statement that capitalism transforms human dignity into exchange goods made more sense than today'.

Steve Clayton

The Sweet Life (1961)

Film Review from the January 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

La Dolce Vita, the Italian film now showing at the Columbia and the Curzon, is worth attention. The action is centred in Rome over seven days and nights (a sly dig at the story of creation?). The opening sequence sets the scene for the bitter, searing and uncompromising revelation of our diseased society. A helicopter is carrying an effigy of Christ low over Rome followed by another occupied by a newspaper reporter and photographer. Subsequently we learn that these two are attached to a scandal-mongering tabloid but we surmise that in the meanwhile that this is a stunt and that the occasion is one of the not infrequent religious holidays. Suddenly we see St. Peter's Square below. Thousands are gathered receiving benediction from the Pope. We are left in no doubt of the relationship of the events—two stunts both concerned only with a cynical exploitation of ignorance, fear and uncertainty.

That evening we see the same reporter in one of the more exclusive night-clubs of Rome smelling out sensation and scandal and noting the useless itineraries of the notables of "society". Eventually he finds himself alone in the company of a rich young heiress who takes him to her palace (the term is used literally) in her fabulous car. There they encounter two prostitutes. The rich young lady, sensing a common bond with one of these (for as we are made well aware, they are two opposite sides of the same coin) offers to take her home. The contrast between the affluence of the rich and the dismal quarters of the prostitute is driven home cruelly. The more so since the rich young thing, weary no doubt of the boredom of her parasitical existence decides to fornicate with the young man in the prostitutes' own bed, suffusing herself, as she imagines with the sensuous pleasures of promiscuity. Of the coarseness, the soliciting, the squalor, the pimps, the degradation, she knows—or wants to know—nothing.

Another episode is in an altogether different vein. A little boy and girl claim to have had a vision outside their home and to have spoken to "Our Lady". The credulity and hysteria which follow lay bare the blind belief and ignorance which go with religion. We see the maimed and crippled gather for succour. Others come out of curiosity, anxious not to miss any possible "modern" miracles. All this is exploited shamelessly by the methods of modern mass communication. The pent-up frenzy and the latent violence that is its accompaniment bursts forth at the end into the immolation and despoilment by the crowd of the tree where the vision is said to have appeared. Symbolic this of the brutality and violence underlying blind faith and belief so characteristic of our time.

Another episode takes us into the palace of a rich aristocrat where a party is taking place. The utter depravity and stupidity of these people are hammered home in scene after scene. Lechery, promiscuity, avidity, inanity are all ruthlessly exposed. We are never allowed for an instant to forget that these people are possessed of enormous wealth and resources. The great disparities of wealth ownership so characteristic of capitalist society are made clear for all to see. These people are portrayed for what they are—useless, parasitic, diseased.

The final orgiastic episode may be said to crown this unsparing condemnation of hypocritical capitalist morality with one code for the poor and one for the rich.

Max Judd