CINEMA
Two Pennyworth of Hope.' (Academy.)
SIGNOR RENATO CASTELLANI directed one of the most charming films
• ever made, Springtime in Italy, and I went to see his latest production with far more than two pennyworth of hope, frisking down Oxford Street in a tingle of pleasurable anticipation. I came away battered. It is not that Signor Castellani has lost his flair for taking a slice of humanity—this time a village community living on the slopes of Vesuvius—and juggling with its ingredients, but rather that he has invested it with altogether too much liveliness, for a quiet person like me, that is. His characters of whatever sex or age are motivated solely by passion, their domestic difficulties, their business transac- tions, even their love affairs being transmitted on one high piercing note of deafening intensity. Italians are emotional people, we know, but here they appear one and all to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and the constant stream of clamorous words accompanied by violent gestures makes for an exhaustion and giddiness in the beholder positively detrimental to the health.
The story concerns a young man who has just returned to his village after doing military service, of the jobs, rare and unrewarding, he manages to get and, through the embarrassing attention of his fiery fiancée, lose again. In the hugger-mugger of wailing mother's, hysterical girls, shaking fists and vituperation there lie, like pools in the heart of a maelstrom, one or two scenes of delightful wittiness, notably the one in which, having put all their savings into a station bus, the shareholders quarrel so wildly as to who shall be its conductor that their would-be passengers grow weary of waiting for the vehicle to start and get out of it and go away.
Signor Castellani has certainly provided a picture of ebullient life, loud laughter, loud teats, loud singing, everything full-blooded and vigorous; what he has failed to provide is warmth. No shadow of tenderness brushes Signorina Maria Fiore, who looks like a very young witch escaped from a vaudeville act; no touch of gentleness lies upon Signor Vincenzo Musolino, the stalwart hero; and as for Signorina Filomeno Russo as his mother, her fine performance epitomises greed and sheer, shrewishness. And, ph, the noise! VIRGINIA GRAHAM.
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