Original subtitles

At Cinecittà they used to consecrate the movie stars

by attaching gilded nameplates to the trunks of the pines.

After the war those nameplates were removed.

Like everything else that was part of the Fascist era.

Shots of Cinema City,

which, with the perfection of its technical systems and services

including nine perfectly sound-proofed sound stages,

constitutes a model of the kind.

The head of the government

has opened the new facilities.

A shining affirmation of Italian architecture and technology.

CINECITTÀ BABILONIA: SEX, DRUGS AND BLACK SHIRTS

FINISHING LINE OF THE STARS

The night of the stars,

the night of the falling stars and of those who will keep shining.

Fosco Giachetti.

The last night all together before the world changes.

Carmine Gallone.

The stars of the Italian film industry joke, laugh and dance.

Luisa Ferida and Laura Nucci.

But theirs is a dance of death on the edge of abyss

that will gape open within a few weeks.

Goffredo Alessandrini.

Osvaldo Valenti.

Clara Calamai.

They are only a few days away

from when Italy will enter the war on June 10 1940,

and everything will change,

forever.

However, even though perhaps they fear it,

they don't know it.

The festive evening is still theirs,

it's the night awards are given out by 'Cinema' magazine,

edited by Vittorio Mussolini,

the Duce's son,

who sits among the actors, actresses and producers.

He intended the event to be the first of a series

that would imitate the Oscar ceremony in Hollywood.

There won't be any more nights like this.

What happened on that perfect evening

belongs to another cinema, metabolized by time,

leaving Mussolini's and his cohorts' Hollywood dream

unrealized forever.

This is the story of the men and women

who gave birth to the Italian film industry,

amid scandals hidden from the morality of the time,

adultery and wild passions, drug and black shirts,

in an increasingly strong bond between sex and power,

capable of surviving the ashes of time right up to the present day.

JANUARY 29

Everything began symbolically on January 29 1936,

the date Mussolini laid the first stone of Cinecittà.

An event favored by various circumstances,

among them the fact that on September 26 1935,

the Cines film studios in Via Veio near Porta San Giovanni go up in flames

where, until then, all Italian films had been made.

After the terrible fire at the film studios,

the Fascist regime decides to parcel up

six-hundred thousand square meters of the Quadraro area

on the edge of the city, for reasons of soundproofing.

An enormous space along Via Tuscolana is chosen.

A place that can easily be reached from the center

and isolated from the residential area.

It takes 18 minutes by car

and 35 with the so-called "tram of the stars".

In a few months, 385,000 cubic meters of soil are excavated,

19,000 hundredweight of iron

and 65,000 hundredweight of cement are used.

55,000 meters of cable and 3 million bricks are laid

in 520,000 working days.

...facilities, sound stages, laboratories and workshops.

The Duce visits the bustling worksite...

In 589 days, approximately a year and a half,

Italy and Mussolini have their new Cinema City

which the Duce opens on April 28 1937.

In less than six years, until the bombing of Rome in 1943,

279 films are produced at Cinecittà.

Cinecittà is born

at a particular moment in our political life.

And in some respects it was lucky for Cinecittà

because Luigi Freddi,

head of the press office of the National Fascist Party,

accompanied Italo Balbo

on the famous long-haul flight of '33.

They arrived in Chicago and then he wanted to visit Hollywood.

There, he realizes the Italian cinema needs an industrial structure,

not so much to compete with the American one,

already leader in the market,

but to create a small space

inside the programming

that was to happen in various countries.

The Tuscolana Studios,

according to the financial calculations of the regime's officials,

every year they must produce 30 regular films,

20 short films and 5 outstanding films.

Anybody there? May I?

What do you mean? I am here.

Excuse me, they're not dead, are they?

No, not yet.

They die at five in the afternoon...

Cinecittà is born

because the Italian film industry had gone to zero

at the end of the silent era.

Italy, in the '30s,

had been colonized by American movies.

Films are grist to Fascism's mill,

which perceives

its potential as entertainment but also as propaganda.

And it wants to help it

from an industrial, commercial point of view.

To be financially viable,

it is estimated that the Italian films need to yield

between 30% and 50% of their budgets in the foreign markets.

An average film

costs around two million euros today,

but in the domestic market it can only make back half at the most.

- My profession... - You have a profession? Funny.

In 1937,

to conquer foreign markets exploiting the American launch pad,

is more a financial goal than a propaganda goal.

Cheer up, girls! Here's to our ballerina!

For those working the field, and for those going to see a film,

it's like a Catholic being able to visit St. Peter's Basilica,

for a Muslim to reach Mecca,

for a Jew to reach the Wailing Wall.

Cinecittà represented all this.

Cinecittà in the beginning

does not want to be completely autonomous,

in fact,

dozens of congratulatory telegrams arrive

from all the major studio heads

wishing Cinecittà a great future

and stating they intend to come to Italy to make films.

The Americans start to produce

films set in Italy

as early as 1921.

A continuous journey of American stars begins,

starting with little Jackie Coogan,

who is even received at the Vatican and by Mussolini.

From 1923, 1924,

the occasion is exploited each time

for them to express favorable views of Fascism,

from Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford

among the first huge stars

who arrive in Italy for the first time

at the end of the silent era.

Italy, since the days of the Grand Tour,

has been an obligatory stop for international travelers

who continue to be welcomed

with affection and warmth.

Rome still stands its own as an important European capital,

visited by the stars of the age

and important personalities from all over the world.

To the Maestro Stokowski, caught on camera before he hides in his car,

and the invisible Greta Garbo,

goes the credit for attracting attention to Ravello,

a heavenly corner of the Amalfi Coast.

There are some extraordinary Venetian accounts

of Chaplin's voyage to Italy.

There are some very memorable articles in Venetian newspapers,

of him walking out of the station

and his contact with the Grand Canal

with huge crowds

who applaud him and make him feel at home.

Chaplin was already considering making a film on Napoleon

that was never made.

He remarked that he'd drop

his 'Tramp'

to enter into this great protagonist of history for the first time.

He would have done it

a few years later with 'The Great Dictator',

but it's probably an idea

that starts with his trip to Italy.

Fascism exploits film and sports stars,

like boxer Primo Carnera and racing driver Tazio Nuvolari,

to appeal to other countries.

It is the creation of a Fascist parterre of movie stars

and sports champions,

the base of control and the manipulation of society

of Mussolini's dictatorship.

There are a thousand stories I love from that period,

the behind-the-scenes of those directors and those actors.

The first one I met was in 1939.

I came to Cinecittà...

beautiful, a dream, glamorous.

In 1939, my father took me to Cinecittà

and the character of Macario was born.

I was interested in Cinecittà.

I ran away, I went to see where the bar was,

I thought I'd find Doris Duranti

slapping Clara Calamai.

There was a lot of movement at Cinecittà.

Dear friends, I'd like to introduce...

Alida Valli!

The interviewers are very nice,

when there are no more than two a day.

But today we're already at the third!

- Miss Denis, a quick word! - Another interview? Enough!

The Italian star system was born in those years,

the first to be characterized by a relationship with the mass media.

This is how the stars of the day remember it,

in their memories, in their interviews, in their secrets.

At the time, a middle-class upbringing supplied,

especially to women, a fine set of blinders.

We didn't know anything about politics

and we heard everyone talking so well about Fascism.

The film world was...

a world of scams

and success.

At any cost.

Fascist cinema needed to create stars

to match those of the other film industries.

The Centro Sperimentale, founded in 1935,

provided training for talented actors and actresses,

directors and technicians,

but only the regime's promotion machine

could mold movie stars.

The Centro Sperimentale was a very happy environment.

There were no party officials around.

Maybe because the director was Luigi Chiarini,

a true party official,

whom we had to greet with the Fascist salute.

We were a very tight-knit group.

Pietro Germi, Giuseppe De Santis,

Michelangelo Antonioni.

He was a delightful person.

We talked for hours on end about films,

old actors, old actresses, books,

films we went to see in the suburbs.

One day, this theater will be full

and everyone will be here for me.

The large window open on a garden in bloom.

Paolo's voice.

But the legendary casting couch

is the most direct way to achieve film glory.

Just as you can get onto the sets of Cinecittà

passing through the couches of government ministers

and of the offices of the Fascist Party.

Our father Steno

began making movies at the end of the thirties.

He worked at Marco Aurelio,

and writing lines and things like that he got into film.

He smiled about these movies that made people forget reality.

During Fascism, these films attempted

to sweeten the pill,

they didn't address social themes, just the rich, gorgeous houses,

love stories between countesses

and barons,

to avoid facing the problems of everyday life.

In an article Dad coined the definition, "white phone movies"

and this was derived, in our own key, from the Viennese cinema of Lubitsch.

The dominant film genre

is romantic comedy,

which became known

as "white phone movies"

because they were always there on the set.

- Hello? - Your wake-up call, good morning.

Good, thank you.

From my point of view, I can't call it regime cinema

because there are only three or four films that propagandized

Mussolini's government.

At that time, the regime used Istituto Luce,

that was a great invention, founded in 1924,

Its slogan was, "Cinema is the strongest weapon".

I'm convinced that we need to follow the American example,

based on solid business principles

and having acquired the flow of Hollywood storytelling

that doesn't want to enter the European directors' heavy minds

we can finally talk about Fascist cinema.

Vittorio Mussolini was a scriptwriter, a producer,

he was the editor of a great magazine called 'Cinema'

where many of our directors were formed,

names that later became famous,

Antonioni, Puccini,

Lizzani, even Visconti

wrote for 'Cinema' magazine.

Roberto Rossellini was among them.

Vittorio Mussolini hires him for his production company,

"Alleanza Cinematografica Italiana",

and in 1942 he produces

'A Pilot Returns'.

The group of critics

that attacks the light films made by the regime

also includes the fathers of neorealism,

the movement that ten years later

founded the new Italian film industry.

I began at 19 with my first article

in the magazine 'Cinema'.

- Mussolini's. - Vittorio Mussolini's, yes.

Did you go to Villa Torlonia, downstairs?

That would be a great film.

Upstairs, Mussolini,

and downstairs this group of young guys watching banned films,

American films, jazz music.

Meanwhile, upstairs... "We must fight!"

That's the proof that history isn't linear.

There was modernism mingling with Fascism.

Mussolini instrumentally used youth

to then send them to war,

he gave them the chance of writing in the papers

about Hollywood...

and then there was racism...

That's the proof that history isn't linear.

There isn't Fascism first and then... It's all intertwined.

On October 20, 1937,

Vittorio Mussolini goes to the United States,

first to New York, then Hollywood,

to found a co-production company with Hal Roach,

the producer of Laurel and Hardy and the 'Our Gang' comedies.

The Hollywood majors greet him with hostility.

On the same days,

has father Benito and Hitler

began a path of fatal and inexorable rapprochement.

Vittorio Mussolini is anything but a daddy's boy.

His interest in cinema

is at once a great love,

a love that comes mainly from American cinema.

He is totally fascinated by it, at least until 1938.

In 1938, things change,

the alliance with Hitler

and the pressure exerted on him

by Luigi Freddi,

who is decidedly opposed

to this excessively pro-American young man.

But until 1938,

he is convinced

that in order to develop

and achieve financial self-sufficiency,

the Italian film industry

needs to follow the American model.

For our film industry,

following the American model can mean a lot.

We Italians need to feel closer to them

instead of acclaiming the conservative trend

that permeated European filmmaking.

America is young,

while Europe ages.

Being profoundly different is no obstacle.

Vittorio Mussolini had a screening room and showed American films.

In 1938, he writes in the magazine 'Cinema'

that if European cinema

didn't find common thread of European co-productions,

it would be crushed by the American film industry

because it was made up of different races and cultures.

Your wife offered me her friendship.

I didn't reject it, all the more because she was an attractive lady.

In 1942, 120 films are made

that sell 450 million tickets

for a population of 40 million people.

American films conquer 80% of the box office.

For Hollywood the Italian market

is worth 12% of the European market

and is defined by producers in the United States

with the enthusiastic term

"the very best".

The American film industry is a desire machine.

It's a place that is truly inhabited

by dreams of every kind.

That elsewhere that is America

begins to work long before

the Americans contribute to liberating Italy

from Nazi Fascism.

I see American films

from the '30s

as a training ground

for a new Italian character,

that is an alternative

to that constructed by Fascism,

but capable of making its mark.

The stars really were stars. I'll say one name that says it all:

Doris Duranti.

The fact that she was the star of the regime

wreaked havoc among the other actresses.

I was called, "the actress of Mussolini's regime".

"Man-eater."

And the viperish imagination of certain reporters

inspired them to write that,

wrapped in transparent black veils,

I performed, drunk, tossing glasses at golden walls.

Others claimed

they had come upon me naked astride a stuffed tiger,

grabbing the diamonds the notables of the regime tossed at me.

The official images of the Italian actresses

were created in accordance with a model controlled by the Ministry of Culture

and imposed in the press.

Some stars, however, become icons.

I wasn't like the other actresses...

Like all the other actresses who, to get a job, went to bed with writers,

with producers, with directors,

as well as actors.

They were nearly all dumb broads

and most of them are long since forgotten.

The first actress to go from Italy to Hollywood was Isa Miranda,

who became famous because of her talent,

but also because she bore a certain resemblance to Marlene Dietrich.

Paramount put her under contract.

The first thing I said when I arrived in Hollywood was,

"Marlene Dietrich is wonderful,

but I am Isa Miranda."

In California I found myself

in a whirlwind of parties,

receptions and gala dinners.

But that wasn't my world.

I loved acting,

not going from one party to the next.

I had to attend them,

but that wasn't my life.

It never has been.

But something jammed the promotional mechanism at Paramount.

Her films were not a success

and Isa Miranda chooses to return to Italy.

Isa Miranda carried the hopes

all these actresses had of going to Hollywood.

She was followed by Alida Valli,

who came out with just her surname "Valli"

on the poster for Alfred Hitchcock's 'The Paradine Case'.

Alida Valli's beauty

approached Olympian levels,

and no wonder her directors, or assistant directors,

fall in love with her and leave important traces of their love.

At the time, girls were supposed to be girls,

whereas women were supposed to be very sexy.

I wasn't jealous of my colleagues.

And yet, among all these women, there was a sort of...

frenzy, of jealousy.

There was jealousy among all the actresses.

At sixteen, I became the head of my family.

I only discovered the pleasure of cinema much later.

The relationship between Fascism and women

is much more complex than it seems.

If, on the one hand, Mussolini forces them to go out

and urges them to take care of their bodies

in the name of good physical health,

on the other, he mortifies them.

Despite the Italian rhetoric

of mother, daughter,

sister, wife,

the true female model of Fascist cinema

is very different from the one flaunted in public.

Women are framed in associations for girls,

for young women, for housewives,

for graduates.

"New mothers for new children"

is Mussolini's slogan that take every chance to extol

the social function of women

in keeping with a precise policy of demographic growth.

Always disappointed and ignored by the powers that be,

women are sensitive to direct appeals from the Duce,

to the mass theatrics that give them

the impression of actively belonging to the nation.

The regime's ideology ostensibly supports women's aspirations,

but in actual fact

it locks them in traditional roles

and it deters them from working.

The anti-feminist view is part of the Fascist credo,

on a par with its violent anti-liberalism,

racism, homophobia and anti-Semitism.

Mussolini was aiming, by mid-century,

for a population of 60 million

in a nation that had 40 million at the time.

Women, in the movies,

undergo a frontal attack in Italy and Germany.

In America, however, the Hays Code,

or Production Code is introduced,

a series of guidelines for film producers

that completely changes

the public's perception of women

and controls it until 1967 when it is abolished.

Religious influence is very important in the film industry,

the power of the Church is taken into account

in America, in Italy,

so an attempt is made to bring about

maximum normalization

of films as of the advent of sound.

From 1933, 1934,

the influence of the Hays Code can be seen in all of Europe.

In Italy, in particular,

the Church sets up

the Catholic Film Center

whose notes are meant to indicate

what can be seen and what cannot.

Even Pope Pius XI is bothered by the cinema.

He publishes, first the encyclical 'Divini Illius Magistri',

then in 1934,

in a meeting of the International Federation of Film Critics

he requests that the cinema be made

"moral, moralizer, educational."

In Italy, during Fascism

there is not much censorship

because there is self-censorship.

The producers themselves...

I've found letters

where they say they are willing

to eliminate excessively unwholesome scenes.

But what does "excessively unwholesome" mean

in films that have already been cleansed

of all desire-inducing effects?

The height of sexuality

can be expressed through gazes.

So, in Berlin, Rome and Los Angeles,

liberated and independent women

are bridled in new conservative narrative canons.

As a viewer, Mussolini preferred films with social content,

musicals, or films about customs in other countries.

He totally let himself go with certain comedy films,

Laurel and Hardy, especially,

sent him into deliriums with their gags.

He hated thrillers or gangster films.

He was astonished at the, to him, enormous number

of Jews operating in the American film industry.

From a racial point of view, he was pitiless with films

where there was "confusion"

between whites and blacks of different sex.

He was irritated by scenes that were too intimate,

kisses that were too long.

One day, he publicly proclaims,

"I'd like Frank Capra

to come and make a fun film about the right to complain against me.

But Mussolini never called Frank Capra

and the Italian film industry, at that time,

is ready to show something more

than those kisses that disturb the head of the government.

Let this sacred crown come!

In 'The Iron Crown' by Alessandro Blasetti,

the actress Vittoria Carpi

fleetingly shows naked breasts.

In 'The Jester's Supper', also by Blasetti,

Clara Calamai also appears for a few seconds

in a memorable topless.

A decidedly liberating gesture.

The actress, a few years earlier,

had attempted suicide due to gossip

about her relationship with the son of a wealthy Tuscan family.

At the time, they said Pius XII wanted to excommunicate me.

But maybe that was just gossip.

The Pope could not have imagined that bare breasts would soon be fashionable.

To think about it today, the scandal seems ridiculous.

Her rival Doris Duranti

is so furious about the attention her colleague received

that during the making of the film, 'Carmela',

she surprises director Flavio Calzavara by making her blouse "explode".

Mine was the first shot of bare breasts taken standing up.

They appear erect, as they were naturally,

proud, with no tricks.

Calamai, however, was filmed lying down,

a notable difference.

There are no scandals of any kind

in the Italian film industry in the thirties.

It's a second, a second and a half,

that appear in movie theaters,

and suddenly the legend of projectionists cutting them.

They cut them and resell them.

Unrelenting wars between stars that are reflected at the box office.

The regime, to combat the American power at the national box office,

passes the Alfieri Law that encourages

the creation of a monopoly.

The state rents foreign films then rents them out

at a higher price.

In protest, the Studios, who want the field clear,

decide to close their Italian offices and withdraw their films.

Furthermore, with the conquest of Ethiopia,

but above all his support for Franco in the war in Spain

Mussolini has definitively alienated

Washington and Hollywood.

American films do not disappear altogether from the Italian market,

this should be remembered.

The eight Major Studios disappear,

but the production companies

that have distributors in Italy,

and not agencies,

keep sending their films.

"Stagecoach" arrives in Italy in 1939

because it was a small production

and Professor Umberto Eco remembers seeing it with his father

and says that this film changed his life

more than reading

the texts of Aristotle,

because he saw in the years

when it could influence his imagination.

So, the Italian movie stars no longer have any rivals.

I remember once, in Venice,

a group of admirers gathered around me

and tried to tear my clothes off.

I was shocked by this purely external manifestation.

I always thought that an actress could expect

her person to be separate from the image the public had of her.

In the end, what is success?

The banality of people recognizing you and the papers writing about you?

Everyone said my name attracted audiences.

We had to compete with

Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.

Our role models were not on the same level,

also in terms of our technical capability.

Let's not forget what Hollywood was

and what the actors were like that we were offered.

A home-made star system has certain advantages

and it tried to make the most of it with all the means at its disposal.

By now, we had taken

the place of the overseas stars in the Italians' hearts.

And we did everything to deserve it.

I was called the "Italian Mary Pickford".

Even though...

really, I would have preferred to be a lady like Myrna Loy

or Merle Oberon.

While Hollywood had become unattainable,

they try to turn Berlin

into a destination for exported Italian stars.

Alida Valli goes to Germany to the Babelsberg studios.

She has recently lost her fiancé, a pilot

killed in the skies over Libya in a firefight,

and she threw herself into her work.

It was the first time I'd seen Jews

with the yellow star on their backs and chests.

My God, it was terrible.

It was the first time I made real contact with the outside world,

with the unimaginable.

At a dinner, she meets Goebbels.

Goebbels?

He was a repulsive dwarf.

I didn't say a word to him all night, and yet...

I could feel his eyes on me like...

like something foul.

He was disgusting.

In Germany, Joseph Goebbels, the minister for Propaganda,

abolishes film criticism as it is defeatist,

Semitic and harmful.

Goebbels sets about rebuilding the German film industry

following the new criteria of Nazism,

based on naturalism and the exaltation of patriotism.

But even Fascist Party officials have a weak point.

Goebbels, the father of six children,

falls madly in love with Lída Baarová,

a 23-year-old actress he had met on a film set.

The Führer, after a lively encounter

with his minister's wife,

orders him to break it off with Baarová.

For his sake, she refuses to go and work in Hollywood.

For her sake, he wants to resign

and become ambassador in Japan, taking her with him.

Hitler rejects this suggestion

and expels the actress from Germany.

The powerful man falls in love with an actress.

The movie world

has always greatly attracted power.

Because, on one hand, there's the idea of possessing it,

of possessing the beautiful woman, the public actress.

Powerful men can do it,

they can take her.

It's always been like that.

Goebbels attempts suicide.

He survives, but Lída is now far away.

She will return to acting after the war,

even appearing

in Federico Fellini's 'I Vitelloni',

who, in 1953 was still, filmically,

in love with her.

During the Venice Film Festival in 1942,

Goebbels and Lída Baarová meet Doris Duranti

and her lover,

the minister for Popular Culture, Alessandro Pavolini.

This latter small, thin, black shiny hair,

is a journalist, perhaps the best pen of his generation.

Aristocratic, cultured,

sensitive and crepuscular.

A great talent,

a father of three and, until he meets the actress,

a faithful husband.

The Hotel Danieli had Italian and German flags, only for four people.

Me, Sandro, Joseph Goebbels

and his friend, the actress Lída Baarová.

The powerful and hideous Goebbels says to me,

"Madam, to have such white skin

you must use marble powder instead of powder!"

But Doris Duranti

sees other men,

like the actor Andrea Checchi who, word has it,

surprised in bed with the actress by Pavolini,

manages to get escape,

covering himself with his clothes in one hand

and giving the Fascist salute with the other.

Weeks later,

in a room where he is watching the rushes for a film,

producer Eugenio Fontana,

who thinks he is stroking Duranti's back,

realizes he is stroking the Minister for Culture's hand.

Still today, in Rome, hoarse social chatter

regale those who did not experience those times

with an fanciful account

of party officials lining up outside my door

to peep through my keyhole,

spying, with my permission,

the amorous exertions of the minister for Popular Culture.

Spies from the Fascist political police, OVRA,

who have eyes and ears in the film world

as it is not considered in line with the regime,

at that time have other things to take care of.

Osvaldo Valenti and Luisa Ferida,

the two cursed actors.

They were partly addicts and partly mad.

They knew everyone,

and in the villa where they lived

things happened that were outrageous for the time.

There were a lot of drugs,

a lot of sex...

Osvaldo Valenti is from a noble family.

He's likeable and generous,

but also violent, vain and a cocaine addict.

He speaks four languages, he doesn't drink or smoke.

He makes fun of Fascist officials and publicly parodies Mussolini.

He is a slightly sadistic narcissist,

perhaps a good man,

but without a doubt, crazy and extreme.

A living contradiction, an anti-Fascist Fascist.

Luisa is a sincere, shy, introverted Mediterranean beauty.

A small-town girl who is seduced by the star

and follows him everywhere.

Her protector

is the producer Francesco Salvi.

He is handsome and athletic but soon falls ill with cancer.

He becomes skin and bone and she remains devoted to him

because she owes her career to him.

I ran away to Rome at seventeen because I had met a producer.

They had told me I had the right face to be a pancake.

And yet,

I was the most beautiful, most famous of my colleagues.

And I had to pay the price of their envy.

Someone told me I was the only real woman among those dolls.

They say that Luisa Ferida's life is hell,

the gossips say he has sexual fits.

The woman, when she is not acting, is segregated at home

and submits to her husband's authoritarian character.

Valenti and Ferida meet on the set

of 'An Adventure of Salvator Rosa',

their accomplice, Alessandro Blasetti, the director.

They don't want to be a secret couple,

and so Osvaldo Valenti says to the producer,

"You're ill

and you know it."

Luisa is here, if you pass, I'll take her."

Cecchino Salvi dies in 1941

and the two actors officially get together.

Film after film, they are the most famous couple in Italy.

He was very handsome

and she was from a very humble background.

Both of them together,

during Italy's greatest destruction

and its rebirth, too...

together they epitomized love and death.

Luisa was a good actress.

But as a woman...

let's say, as a woman...

she did not look very refined.

Osvaldo Valenti transformed her,

imbuing her with charm that made another woman out of her.

Luisa Ferida was from a modest background,

but she was intelligent enough not to be ashamed of it.

She was a simple girl,

madly in love with Osvaldo Valenti.

No one better than me knows how little of a Fascist Valenti was.

He was an anti-Fascist who squandered his fortune in Paris.

Valenti had...

an irresistible taste for showing off.

She was a decent actress,

but irremediably marked by her lower-class background.

She spoke without intelligence, she dressed within taste.

Valenti made her his woman and, poor guy, tried to be her Pygmalion.

He changed her hairstyle,

he improved her make-up, that was always too heavy

and he tried to make her wear sexy,

but well-cut clothes.

The result?

It looked like he was going around with a dolled-up pony

that was exhausted from being fruitlessly mounted.

As to their Fascist faith...

I wouldn't bet on it.

I realized that Osvaldo and Luisa who were seen as fervent Fascists,

on the evening of July 25 1943,

when Mussolini was deposed and arrested,

yelled their enthusiasm from a window at the Hotel Ambasciatori,

hurling abuse at Mussolini.

They expressed their enthusiasm with such virulence,

I was stunned.

Italy entering the war does not stop the film industry,

but in July 1943,

Cinecittà was bombed.

In Venice, which was spared the bombs,

in a decadent climate of waiting,

"Cinevillaggio" was born, an attempt to reconstruct

the splendor of a new Cinecittà on the lagoon.

It is a delusion,

and everyone knows it, but in spite of this,

films are made.

The icons of Fascism

and Mussolini's few true supporters in the film world

all go there.

The majority of the actors, however, stay in Rome,

waiting for the Allies who are liberating Italy from the south up.

In that moment, politics and history split the film industry.

Why did we go to Venice?

Because we were broke.

Fascism didn't have anything to do with it, I didn't care.

Osvaldo, however...

Osvaldo...

Osvaldo always wanted to be at the center of attention.

In Rome, meanwhile, the day of reckoning has come.

Anti-Fascist intellectual and director Luchino Visconti is arrested.

The actress Maria Denis

decides to step in to have him freed.

I knew she had been in love with Visconti.

Since he was an anti-Fascist, a hardline one,

it seemed that... he was in jail for three days.

And she, like Puccini's Tosca,

went to Koch

a someone said that perhaps...

they kissed, or maybe more,

but she did everything so that Visconti was freed the next day.

Pietro Koch is the leader of a gang of paranoid sadists,

recognized as a "police formation"

specialized in hunting partisans and communists,

in torturing and killing them.

In 1942 I met Luchino Visconti.

He squeezed my hands in his.

An enveloping squeeze

that affected me.

He was handsome.

I was struck by his eyes,

that were black, possessive with something cruel in them.

I think I fell in love with him on the spot,

against all reason.

Subsequently my enchantment with Visconti

led me to me meeting another man.

The "partisan hunter",

the "torturer" of the Republic of Salò.

Pietro Koch.

In my memory,

the face of one remains...

inextricably tied to the other.

And...

they remind me of love,

shame,

betrayal and...

pain.

After that Luchino Visconti didn't want to see her again... a bit strange.

The fact that Visconti never wanted to acknowledge this...

I think he was ashamed.

Things don't go any better for Doris Duranti,

who, having moved to Florence to be closer to her lover,

is arrested by the Gestapo

and charged with being of Jewish descent.

I am not Jewish.

But I've always had such respect for these people that I felt I was one.

The Germans suspected Pavolini of being a Jewish sympathizer.

So, I met Germans who were very different

from the handsome gentlemanly ones I had frequented.

At the Gestapo, I found myself in front of seven men who stank of alcohol.

They ordered me to get undressed

and so I was forced to show them the most beautiful breasts in Italy.

They fell silent

and that reassured me.

I was shivering with the cold

and that made my nipples hard,

which were oblivious to the humiliation

I was being subjected to.

Three days later, Duranti is released and invited to leave for Venice.

Osvaldo Valenti had an authentic passion for the 10th MAS.

He had obtained a rank and demanded that Luisa Ferida did the same.

They had gone crazy

for uniforms

and the shred of power that they felt as they strolled in St. Mark's Square.

They threw a lot of parties,

very audacious, it was said.

I met them, greeted them briefly in high-ranking salons,

where their drug-addled gazes ruined the atmosphere.

I tried cocaine

that the upper-class ladies

offered the way they once offered cigarettes.

I let them pour more than one dose into my champagne.

Then someone picked up two young prostitutes from the street

to kick off the orgy.

On June 2 1944, the Americans enter Rome.

Among the many citizens who greet them

is Alida Valli,

who had married in March and is already pregnant.

Pietro Koch moves to Milan to continue

his cruel war on anti-Fascists.

Valenti and Ferida go there too and they become friends.

Some say that Ferida,

high on cocaine,

shows herself naked to the tortured prisoners

in the cells of Koch's gang's base

known as the "Sad House".

The Allies advance,

the partisan struggle is at its height

and the film industry is at a standstill.

April 28 1945,

Benito Mussolini and Claretta Petacci are shot by partisans.

The same fate awaits Alessandro Pavolini.

There was no way out,

we women understood this better than our lovers.

On the night of April 13,

10 days before my 28th birthday

14 before they shot Sandro

and strung him up by his feet in Milan,

we made love for the last time.

Doris Duranti manages, incredibly,

to escape to Switzerland hidden in a rug.

Thanks to her marriage to a Customs officer,

she avoids being shot

and emigrates to South America.

She returns to Italy in the fifties,

but only makes sporadic appearances.

On April 29, Osvaldo Valenti and Luisa Ferida

are shot by partisans in Milan.

He is thirty-nine,

she is thirty.

There are various versions of their execution.

Some say that she was very frightened

and asked why she had to die so young.

Another, a partisan officer,

distressed at having to kill a star,

remembers heartened by Ferida

who apparently said...

"We were Fascists and we did what our bit

and now you have to do your bit."

However, all versions agree on one detail:

Osvaldo Valenti died holding a blue sock

that had been worn by his son Kim during his four days of life.

Luisa dies at his side.

She is pregnant for the third time.

No one wanted to forgive them their success.

They were

rather exceptional,

especially him.

He was an extraordinary film presence

and a remarkable actor.

That's what democracy is, being judged by others.

A dictatorship is being in a system

that is closed.

And these actors like many others,

participated in this system and were powerful

because they were icons, images for everyone.

I took part in the resistance,

yet when I talk about them, to be just,

I wonder whether Valenti wasn't a little less guilty

than many others who camouflaged themselves as anti-Fascists.

I'd like to know

to what extent we can talk about a true delinquent

or a poor drug addict.

Italy was supposed to be the land of movies,

something that came true after the war.

That idea that was born there

was confirmed by the greatness of our fathers' filmmaking

which became free,

but was able to have the institutionalization

of the film industry behind it.

Cinecittà,

the Centro Sperimentale,

the idea that film is a salient part of the culture of a country

and that we were very good at doing it.

And this,

after Fascism, we inherited for the greatest films

that we made.

The Italian Left, after Fascism,

understood how important it was

to have the intellectuals on side.

And it understood this because Fascism had done it.

Fascism created...

intellectual cultures as a fundamental

to upholding the regime,

that wasn't enough because then there was the war.

All of Italian culture, its cinema,

has always been predominantly

a culture and a spectacle made by those on the left.

What didn't happen in the thirties

happens in the fifties.

Cinecittà is transformed into a refugee camp

that takes in 3,500 people

between 1945 and 1946.

They try as much as possible

to postpone the reopening of Cinecittà

and to pass a law

that will breathe life back into the Italian cinema.

But thanks to the intelligence

and the strategic capacities

of Minister Andreotti,

Cinecittà can start up again because

the way is clear for American films,

but the law of 1948 imposes that the American majors

reinvest a part of their profits in Italy.

It is the birth

of Hollywood on the Tiber

that allows the true revival

of Italian filmmaking

that will pass

from the two, three dozens of films produced in a year,

to two hundred and fifty films a year,

production and co-production.

The stars of that time were truly stars,

now they are...

they are no longer anything...

They were stars because they represented a certain type of woman

who at the time you didn't see in the street

and then everyone copied them.

These women, these actresses

transmitted much more than the stories they told.

They sacrificed their private life for their audiences.

It is thought that a star's life is a wonderful life,

but it's not true.

In reality, in private they were very fragile.

For the women there's an extra part,

often they've lived lives where they are consumed behind the men.

But that's part of the female story.

And sometimes you wonder, "But how did they do it?"

CINECITTÀ BABILONIA: SEX, DRUGS AND BLACK SHIRTS

FOR ALL THE STARS WE HAVE FORGOTTEN

Translation: Susan Adler

subtitles edited by Elvira de Majo Ombre elettriche®