Rent Bellissima (1951)

Stars in the Eye of the Needle - Bellissima review by CH

“Sparkle, Shirley, sparkle!” With those three words, Mrs. Temple successfully encouraged her daughter to do her best in front of the cameras. This is a world away from Coward's Mrs. Worthington who is advised that her offspring has “a loud voice, and though it's not exactly flat, / She'll need a little more than that / To earn a living wage” (in cabaret versions, he sometimes added a final, salty verse). Both come to mind in watching Visconti's Bellissima (1951), which followed Obsessione and La Terra Trema in his early Neo-Realist phase.

It opens, however, in the full-operatic mode with which he is often associated. A radio broadcast is underway of Donizetti when it is interrupted with the announcement that a film studio is seeking a young girl, around the age of seven, to appear in a film. Auditions are being held and some will then have a screen test.

Small surprise that the scene cuts to the outside of these Roman studios, and, as the camera pans across the hordes of children (none of whom look into it), the noise level grows, and does not cease for another couple of hours. Upon the screen for most of the time is Anna Magnani, forever in black, as, ever excitable, she scrimps to provide her daughter (Tina Appicella, in her only film) with a dress, haircut, photograph to boost her chances, all this kept from her husband (Gastone Renzelli) who sits around, Kowalski-fasion, in a gross vest while dreaming of building a house far from this tenement whose balconies echo with the cries and calls of so many frustrated housewives while films are sometimes shown in the garden to the delight of star-fixated Anna (who is smitten with Burt Lancaster).

All moves at a pace, its script by the prolific Suso Cecci D'Amico (she also worked on Bicycle Thieves and The Leopard), with enough detail of film-making not to distract from such things as a spiv (box-office star, Walter Chiari) who fleeces Anna Magnani of savings garnered through her rest-of-the-day job which finds her traversing the city to plunge a hypodermic into male and female buttocks to ease diabetes - a process which finds yelps scarcely muffled by pillows.

Perhaps only Rocco and His Brothers would come close to the bravura style of this Visconti film, in which he was aided by the young Rosi and Zefferelli (both of whom recollect its making in a half-hour documentary on the DVD, along with Suso Cecci D'Amico, who was to die at close on a hundred). Visconti, with The Damned and Death in Venice, is often described as “painterly” in his use of colour. Here, though, as in his other early films, the black-and-white cinematography catches the diverse locations in a way that feels more accurate than colour would have been. A sign, perhaps, that here is something which draws you in, the pause-button redundant.