Dov'è la libertà...? / Where is Freedom?

[Note that this review may contain spoilers]

Starring the inimitable Toto, this 1952 comedy from Roberto Rossellini immediately engages the viewer through its opening reversal. For Toto’s character, Salvatore Lojacono, is on trial for breaking into prison and is doing his best to ensure he gets sent back there.

Via extended flashbacks punctuated by courtroom scenes set in the present, we learn that Lojacono, a barber, was sentenced to a 30 year sentence for a crime of passion, killing his best friend after discovering that the man had made advances on his wife, now dead, and he has found life on the outside intolerable.

Leaving the prison on parole after 22 years incarceration full of optimism, he first finds the street where his shop used to be is no more; his wife Aida has died while he was in prison.

Following a woman to a dance hall – it is hinted that Lojacono’s desires are of a sexual nature, though the circumspection with which the matter is both discussed in court and represented makes it difficult to tell – Lojacono next becomes involved with a group of dancers who making a bid at the dance marathon record, whom he winds up bankrolling after their manager / impresario admits to being broke. Rather than paying the bills the manager then disappears, rendering the record attempt and Lojacono’s generosity void as they are expelled from the dance hall.

It continues like this as Lojacono meets fellow ex-cons, each of whom proves more interested in continuing their old swindles and schemes than seeking an honest living.

Next, Lojacono happens upon his brothers-in-law who, with their family, turn out to have a fortune in large part based upon selling out a Jewish family to the Nazis during the war.

Even worse, in personal if not social terms, it is revealed that his own crime of passion and honour may have been for naught in that “we’re fighting for this woman’s honour, which is more than she ever did” sort of way.

With its pervasive sense of despair and less obviously focused socio-political critique, Where is Freedom? seems an odd film for Rossellini to have made, but on reflection perhaps becomes understandable when contextualised.

The sense of hope and renewal expressed by his neo-realist films of the immediate post war period, that the struggle against Nazism and Fascism had been for something positive, in leading to a new understanding of the world, had, after all, failed to materialise.

The post-war re-alignment saw the hopes of Catholic-Communist co-operation fostered by the resistance dashed, with the post-war realignment resulting in the latter’s de-facto official exclusion from government and re-definition as an enemy within who would sell the country out to the Soviets.

As such, it is perhaps not so much that the film lacks focus, in the way that Rossellini’s earlier anti-fascist entries did, but that its focus has shifted to the new order’s hypocrisies and those of the people themselves. In the case of the former, it was the way the Christian Democrats (DC) denounced the purported godless materialism of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) on the one hand whilst encouraging the development of a materialistic consumer society on the other. In the case of the latter, it was the unwillingness of the individual – or rather, as emphasised here, “amoral family” – as social and economic actor to engage in the kind of collective action that would have led to the better, more utilitarian outcome for all, as the prisoner’s dilemma and the logic of betrayal rather than co-operation it encouraged led to a worse outcome for most and the worst outcome of all for those, like Lojacono, who played the game by the wrong rules and were taken for suckers.

What this cynical view of human nature – or, bad faith in presuming that there is such a thing as human nature, and, if so, that it was one better understood by the DC than the PCI – also does is position the film an largely unacknowledged link between Bunuel’s 1951 Los Olvidados, with its savage, nihilistic denial of Rossellini’s earlier neo-realist optimism and Ettore Scola’s 1976 Brutti, sporchi e cattivi, with its reworking of neo-realism as grotesque pitch-black comedy.

I Ladri

Much like Contraband 20 or so years later, Lucio Fulci's feature debut is a culture clash crime story set in Naples. The similarity ends there, however, since I Ladri is not a blood-drenched gangster tale but rather a comedy in the vein of the director's mentor Steno.

Events are set in motion by the arrival of Italian-American gangster Joe Castagnato in Naples. He is rightfully suspected of having masterminded a multi-million pound heist in the USA, but nothing has been found to definitively connect him to the crime to date.

The head of the Naples police, Commissario Di Savio, brings Joe in for a friendly chat and indicates that he has finally met his match. His faith in his own and his men's abilities seems somewhat misplaced however, with the QDN - Questura di Napoli - seeming to lack anything comparable to the FBI's high-tech scientific methods whilst Di Savio himself constantly forgets his underling La Nocella's name.

Meanwhile stevedore and petty criminal Vincenzo Scognamiglio, who was working when Joe's ship arrived at the dock, discovers gold hidden in amongst a consignment of pineapple jam from the US. His wife Maddalena soon puts two and two together and realises how Joe managed to get his loot out of the US and into Italy.


A noir-ish moment

She thus makes Joe an offer, not so much of the cannot refuse type as of the accepted to humour variety, setting the stage for all manner of double crosses and, in the case of Maddalena's in-laws, bungling...

Though now Euro-cult interest in I Ladri concentrates more on its director than star, Toto; attractive female lead, Giovanna Ralli; or the not entirely coherently inserted Guys and Dolls-style song and dance number featuring Fred Buscaglione, it's probable that at the time of its release Fulci's name was the least thing attracting audiences to the film.

Specifically no-one in 1959 would be aware that it was to mark the debut of a director who would go on to exert a strong influence on horror cinema worldwide, and if anything would seem likely to have pegged Fulci's career as following that of his mentor or other Italian style comedy figures like Big Deal on Madonna Street's Mario Monicelli or Love and Larceny's Dino Risi in trajectory.

Or maybe Fulci's 1960s career was, with the critical - if not commercial - difference that he ended up making vehicles not for Toto or Alberto Sordi, as respectable / international / art house faces of Italian comedy, but rather Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia, their disreputable domestic-only equivalents.

Fulci's direction here is basically classical, with a preference for two- and medium length shots rather than close-ups and for fluid camera movements over montage style editing. In this regard it's fascinating to watch I Ladri and contrast Fulci's approach here to his later style, with the film serving to demonstrate just how radically Fulci's film-making practice changed over the course of the 1960s with the twin inspirations of new wave explorations of the hand-held camera and the zoom lens and Sergio Leone's experiments with the wide-screen frame and Techniscope process in particular.


The local gangster

The other obvious difference is the aforementioned absence of violence. Everyone, including the gangsters, is presented as basically harmless, preferring outsmarting to rubbing out the opposition. Admittedly this is in tune with the film's generic nature - though here we can also note that the same year's Some Like it Hot indicates that even the St Valentine's Day Massacre could be used as unlikely springboard for comedy - but it is still far removed from what many would expect give Fulci's later work and reputation.




Guys and Dolls

The closest the film gets to a "violence number" is the aforementioned production number, in which Fulci goes out of his way to make what could easily have been a somewhat stagey interlude cinematic. If the relationship between it and the narrative is perhaps something of the inverse of a film like Zombie, where the narrative exists more for the set pieces rather than the other way around, it nevertheless thus confirms that, even at this stage, Fulci had a talent for the big moment. (I would exempt The Beyond from this split, arguing that like Argento's Inferno, it is a film where the set-piece / narrative distinction no longer withstands.)

Those familiar with Don't Torture a Duckling may also see certain precedents in Fulci's position on issues of Italian identity, with the Neapolitans often proving smarter than they let on in using time-honoured cunning against more modern technologies, and the always-ambiguous figure of the Italian-American gangster. Depending on one's point of view, or indeed, who is asking the question, he is an admirable figure and / or a reprehensible one, demonstrating the best and / or worst of Southern Italian character traits.

Those who see the director as an arch-misogynist may be surprised by his treatment of Ralli's independent and resourceful heroine compared to her somewhat dim-witted husband and his immediate famiglia, the one a habitual layabout and the other a religious / superstitious - delete as you see fit - kleptomaniac.

Those not concerned with Fulci's status as auteur, meanwhile, may simply concern themselves with the question of whether or not the film is sufficiently funny, entertaining and worth a watch. The answer on each count has to be a yes.