Boys Town: Italian Style

Luigi Comencini made some gloriously dark comedies in the latter half of his career — LO SCOPONE SCIENTIFICO/ THE SCIENTIFIC CARD PLAYER, INGORGIO (not exactly a comedy but a kind of satire-allegory in which seemingly the whole of Italian society is stuck in a traffic jam with no end in sight, and IL GATTO. But there’s also a streak of warm sentiment running through his oeuvre, which reasserts itself in his last films and TV shows.

PROIBITO RUBARE (1948), his first feature, showcases both attitudes. In part, it’s a warm story about a kindly priest who, on his way to missionary work in Africa, is robbed by street kids in Naples (using the old suitcase trick as demonstrated by De Sica in TOO BAD SHE’S BAD) and decides there are needy children closer to home. Inspired by the MGM movie BOY’S TOWN he resolves to set up a hostel for impoverished urchins. BUT — he’s well-meaning but naive — the city authorities and populace are of little help, and the kids only comes when they realise his boy’s town is a perfect place to hide their stolen loot.

This set-up feels a little like Bunuel’s cautionary tales about the impossibility of being a saint — VIRIDIANA and NAZARIN. But maybe closer to the Boulting Bros’ faint-hearted satire on the Church of England, HEAVEN’S ABOVE! Lots of good, strong questions are raised — how can anybody depend on charity? Can you help people to choose to be good, especially if their life circumstances and formative experiences have been bad?

The movie does let you know by its tone that probably things well end up OK. A young Adolfo Celli as the priest gives us the tone. But things develop nicely — nobody is donating to this charity, and Celli refuses to accept any dishonestly-gained money, so he can’t feed or otherwise support his charges. So one enterprising and well-intentioned lad starts stealing from the stash of boodle, converting it into cash, and popping it in the donations box. Soon the boy’s town is booming, but there’s a crisis looming — what happens when the other boys, and the gangster they deal with, find the swag has been swiped?

It’s very involving, and as with Comencini’s later child-themed films (he made lots) the kids are all brilliant. It probably helped give him a reputation for making “pink neo-realism” — the rosy-tinted, soft-hearted version of the hard stuff. But I quite like pink neo-realism. As long as it manages its tone skillfully and doesn’t totally disgrace the name of realism, there’s an argument that a little lightness will make your social justice message more appealing to audiences, and thus more impactful — IF you still leave the audience with a sense that something needs doing, and that they could help.

Spring Chicken

More chicken abuse in Bunuel’s LA JOVEN/THE YOUNG ONE, a really fascinating suspense piece with a bunch of mismatched characters on an island game preserve.

Various animals turn up and suffer — a tarantula is stamped on by the barefoot young heroine, combining Bunuel’s arachnophobia with his foot fetish. A chicken is gorily dismembered by a raccoon. As with LAS HURDES/LAND WITHOUT BREAD, one is less bothered by the sight of animals doing the unpleasant things that come naturally to them, than by the fact that Bunuel has staged it all. Real death in a fictional context. I think probably it’s a bad idea, even ignoring the ethical aspect — real death or sex seems to disrupt drama, expose the artifice. Anyway, I don’t like it.

Zachary Scott — never shy about playing nasty pieces of work, is a racist AND a child rapist; Bernie Hamilton, the captain from Starsky & Hutch, is much thinner here, as a jazz musician on the run, falsely accused of rape. Bunuel said the film confused Americans because the Black man was both good and bad — he isn’t really, it’s just that the film boldly doesn’t bother to affirm his innocence until it’s halfway through. You have to decide to root for him in a state of anxious doubt, but I think you do root for him, or what I mean is *I* did. I’m using the Kaelian “you” which means “me.”

Claudio Brook, Bunuel’s SIMON OF THE DESERT, is a typically ineffectual priest. And the title character is Key Meersman, whose only other film is ARTURO’S ISLAND, meaning she acted only on islands. She’s not too strong on dialogue (her director may have been of limited assistance, with his somewhat faltering English) but her visual expressivity is on the money. And she has a short way with spiders, which one has to respect.

A haunting film, and it has a great acoustic version of Sinner Man as its only score.

The Rooster Story

Bunuel’s THE BRUTE/EL BRUTO (1953) is a pretty good noir with right-on politics but maybe a little simplistic by his high standards, and maybe not as Bunuelian was one would hope. A slum landlord hires the titular Brute (Pedro Armendariz, no moustache) as muscle, but the man-of-hench is torn between the landlord’s smoldering wife (Katy Jurado) and the daughter of a slum-dweller he’s involulantary-manslaughtered in the line of henching.

Bunuel has far more fun with the landlord’s grotesque household than he does with the decent folks struggling to preserve their crummy homes, and gets caught in the same trap he vociferously accused MIRACLE IN MILAN of falling into — virtuous poor people and awful rich people. “What is the incentive to get out of poverty if to be poor is to be so noble?” he asked I think Octavio Paz. “Social injustice corrupts at every level! The rich are better able to protect themselves from it!” Bunuel was adept at skewering the underlying nastiness beneath the discreet charm, but the poor people in VIRIDIANA and LOS OLVIDADOS are scary and horrible because, one assumes, of the lives they’re forced to lead.

The end of the film is pretty Bunuelian, though, if you can stand a spoiler. Katy J, betrayed by Armendariz, engineers his death, and then… looks at a rooster.

It could be a sop to the censor, like Bette Davis staring at the moonlight on the stairs in THE LITTLE FOXES — a character has committed evil acts and won, so we have to show that despite appearances she won’t be happy, may in fact be driven mad by consciousness of guilt. And it’s quite an imaginative way of suggesting that. But what makes it even better is that it’s not too readily interpreted. It’s Herzogian, both in the sense of implying some grand surreal allegory that can’t quite be formulated in non-abstract terms, and in the sense that it depends on an understanding that chickens are terrifying.