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Anna Magnani: Roberto Rossellini
built 615 days ago
This conventional scrapbook biography of legendary actress Anna Magnani features clips from her performances in vaudeville, neo-realist movies and Hollywood, alongside interviews with such directors as her former husband Rossellini, and De Sica and Visconti. Apart from trotting out showbiz paeans to her human warmth, dignified resistance to '50s sex-typing and so forth, it manages glimpses of a complex life scarcely touched upon before. DMacp.
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Magnani ... continued pursuing a theatrical career, starring in productions of The Petrified Forest and Anna Christie. Despite her stage success, however, she struggled in film, landing only small roles in pictures including 1940's Una Lampada alla Finestra and 1941's Finalmente Soli. A lead role in Vittorio de Sica's Teresa Venerdi earned good notices, but Magnani then returned to supporting turns, appearing opposite Roberto Villa in 1942's La Fortuna Viene de Cielo. After giving birth to a son by actor Massimo Serato, Magnani was absent for performing for over a year. Upon returning to work in 1943, her options were extremely limited -- the escalation of the war had resulted in a ban on all foreign plays -- so she appeared in a revue, Cantachiaro No. 2. She also appeared with Aldo Fabrizi in a pair of films, the Mario Mattoli thriller L'Ultima Carrozzella and the comedy Campo di Fiori, and in 1944 she accepted a small role in Il Fiore sotto gli Occhi.
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Magnani was Rossellini’s second choice to play the role of Pina. He had originally wanted Clara Calamai, the lead of Ossessione, (a part Luchino Visconti had originally offered Magnani) but she was already under contract and working on another film. Rossellini almost had to resort to his third actress choice because Magnani demanded she be paid the same amount of money the male lead Aldo Fabrizi was earning. The difference in salary was only 100,000 lire, and more about principle than price. Rossellini, whom she called "this forceful, secure courageous man", was her lover at the time, and she collaborated with him on other films.
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Thanks to this focus on Magnani's star image, Celluloide is able to reproduce the opposition in Rossellini's film between the ordinary but heroic Pina and the beautiful but treacherous cabaret actress Marina. In Roma, Città Aperta the character of Marina is played by Maria Michi, who, as Celluloide makes clear, was Amidei's fiancée. While the crew of Roma, Città Aperta is shooting the scene of the lesbian seduction between Marina and the Nazi Ingrid framed by the big mirror in Marina's changing room (according to the tired cliché that identifies homosexuality with narcissism), they are interrupted by a phone call from Anna Magnani. She asks Rossellini for help: her baby is gravely ill and has to be taken to hospital. Rossellini goes and Amidei takes over the shooting. She asks Maria Michi and the other actress involved in the scene to rehearse it first, but Maria is clearly listless and lazy.
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Magnani again worked with Rossellini in 1948, first in the Il Miracolo (The Miracle), a story segment presented in an episodic film called L'Amore (Love), and in The Human Voice. In the first, she played a pregnant outcast peasant who was seduced by a stranger and comes to believe the child she subsequently carries is Christ. American censors condemned Il Miracolo as blasphemous. The Human Voice was based on a play by famed French artist and writer Jean Cocteau, and, in a tour de force performance, Magnani portrayed a desperate woman trying to save a romantic relationship on the telephone.
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Because little of Magnani's work apart from Roma, Città Aperta was released internationally, most audiences did not see her again prior to Luigi Zampa's drama L'Onerevole Angelina, which she ... co-wrote. Her performance won Best Actress honors at the Venice Film Festival and earned raves from critics across the globe. The comedy Molti Sogni per le Strade was also a worldwide success. Rossellini's bleak, controversial Amore followed in 1948; a two-part film, it was notorious for Il Miracolo, which cast Magnani as a naive peasant raped by a drifter she believes to be Jesus. Her relationship with Rossellini ended acrimoniously when he became involved with Ingrid Bergman, and in response to their film Stromboli, Magnani mounted a cinematic response in the form of Vulcano. In 1951, she teamed with Luchino Visconti for Bellissima, and in 1953 starred The Golden Coach for Jean Renoir, who declared her "probably the greatest actress I have ever worked with."
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