Month: September 2024

La Dolce Vita opened in New York and Boston the same day – April 19, 1961 – and smashed the first day record in both cinemas. And the weekly record. In truth, given the hype, and the increased ticket prices, that was no surprise. But whereas La Dolce Vita made $16,000 in its first week in New York and $35,000 in Boston, Mein Kampf made $87,000 in New York. In the 1960s, movies lasted in cinemas far longer than they do now. And that kind of longevity cannot be maintained by advertising alone. The two most powerful tools in giving a film ‘legs’ were word-of-mouth and the critics, who could make or break a movie in a way that is impossible these days.

Reviews were superlative. ‘Awesome but moral,’ commented the New York Times. ‘Brilliant’, ‘outstanding’, ‘a masterpiece’, seemed to be the consensus. Another powerful opinion-maker, in that it was her business to put her money where her mouth was, Helen Thompson, bought out 25 complete shows for her Play-of-the-Month club. There were sell-out performances in New York and Boston, but would the rest of the country fall in line?

In an attempt to create a bidding war, Astor screened the movie for 25 cinema owners from the big cities. The Todd Theatre in Chicago was chosen as the next venue, also as a roadshow, but that was for a limited period only and when it moved onto continuous performances (called ‘grind’), it set a new high for ticket prices – $2.50 compared to the previous record of $1.80. In Los Angeles, Herbert Rosenor, owner of two arthouses, guaranteed $75,000 and an eight-week minimum run.

Despite breaking so many rules in the launching of La Dolce Vita, there was one rule that remained sacrosanct.

In the 1960s, delay, which in turn created heightened anticipation, was a powerful marketing tool. It was used by the major studios to build demand for their roadshows. So it did no harm that the rest of America had to wait for La Dolce Vita.

It took three months for the film to reach Los Angeles. On arrival it shattered all records, taking in upwards of $30,000 between the two cinemas. And its first weeks elsewhere that July achieved similar results – $17,000 in Pittsburgh, $14,000 in Baltimore, $26,000 in Detroit. Astoundingly, it was keeping pace with the year’s biggest blockbuster The Guns of Navarone. In its 25^th week at the Henry Miller Theatre, La Dolce Vita registered $25,000 while The Guns of Navarone in its 6^th week at two cinemas took a combined $66,000. In the first week of both films in San Francisco, the war film made off with $32,000 at one 1,400-seater while the art film scrambled £28,000 at two 400-seat cinemas, and both had the same top price of $2.

In Baltimore, the second week of La Dolce Vita beat the second week of The Guns of Navarone. In the weekly national box office chart compiled by Variety, which covered the 24 US major cities, La Dolce Vita notched up fifth position. By August it was fourth and then third. 

Ancillary marketing helped. RCA issued the soundtrack album, which included the sensuous theme as well as Rota’s adaptations in the movie of standards like “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby” and “Jingle Bells.” While the album reached the lower echelons of the Top 50 album charts for  several weeks, which, for an arthouse film would be considered an excellent result, it was overshadowed by its biggest competitor Never on Sunday, which spent over a year there, reaching the top five. Ballantine publishers brought out a paperback of the screenplay with 200 stills.

Controversy was milked when Atlanta threatened to boycott the movie and the Los Angeles Times censored an advert, blacking out most of a prostrate girl with her hands on her breasts. Clubs began springing up calling themselves La Dolce Vita. Archbishop William Scully launched a campaign to prevent its showing in Albany. ‘Pass this one up for the good of you soul,’ he intoned. Getting equal press attention was a review in The Presbyterian Life which called it  ‘a highly moral movie.’ The media latched onto news reports that the tossing of coins into the Trevi Fountain in Rome had trebled.

To prove it was not a one-hit wonder, in July Astor launched its follow-up movie, another Italian film, Rocco and His Brothers, directed by Luchino Visconti. This had been a  box office sensation in Italy, earning over $625,000 in its first year, and the rights had cost $325,000.

Astor had made three versions – subtitled and dubbed versions of the full 175-minute film and an edited 145-minute dubbed one. Now that Astor was a proven success, cinemas opened up to them and it was able, this time, to launch the Visconti film on two cinemas, the Beekman and the Pix. The film was launched on June and broke records at both cinemas, with $15,000 at the Beekman. Using a promotional technique borrowed from La Dolce Vita, to coincide with the launch the company released a single, “The Ballad Of Rocco”, even when there was no such song in the movie, following up with the original soundtrack, by Nino Rota, in August. 

With other backers from Italy and France, it was financially involved in a planned remake of the Hedy Lamarr 1930s sensation Ecstasy and was in negotiation with the new pretenders to the Italian artistic throne, Michelangelo Antonioni and Luchino Visconti.

Astor purchased India by Robert Rossellini and, as if not wishing to lose trace its roots, The State Department Murders and were hoping to conclude a deal with Russell Hayden for three pictures. Having been pipped by Joe Levine to Boccaccia 70, a compendium of short films directed by Fellini, Visconti, De Sica and Mario Monicelli and starring Loren and Ekberg, Astor turned towards the French New Wave.

George Foley snapped up Roger Vadim’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, so controversial no other distributor had gone near it since its launch in September 1959, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad and the new film from Francois Truffaut, hot after Breathless and 400 Blows, Shoot the Pianist. The company moved into prestigious offices in Madison Avenue and recruited more staff including Douglas Netter who joined as international president from Samuel Goldwyn’s head office. Soon it would set up a literary department, its first purchase The Only Reason by Tereska Torres, which, since it was set in Paris, was being proposed as a future project for Vadim.  Confidently mapping out the company’s direction, Foley said, ‘In coming years we foresee co-productions in every major picture-producing locale where satisfactory projects can be created.’

Gradually, Astor achieved its ambition of expanding La Dolce Vita beyond its core audience in the big cities. Mastroianni embarked on a 28-city promotional tour. On October, a double-page advert in Variety announced: ‘All over American cities and towns, theatres that have never played a subtitled picture before are doing terrific business with La Dolce Vita.’

The advert listed cinemas in previously unimaginable locations for an art film such as Little Rock and Hot Springs, Arkansas, Wilmington in Delaware, Macon in Georgia, and Dodge City in Kansas. In all, 162 cinemas had shown the film including nine roadshows, all still running, and nine modified roadshows. The top roadshow run was in New York (27 weeks).  The roadshows totalled 121 weeks including stints in Chicago, Miami, Philadelphia,  Milwaukee, Minnesota, Toronto (US grosses always include Canada), New Jersey and  Vancouver. Astor had bookings for another 134 cinemas.

Towards the end of the year, it started moving into neighborhood theatres where, at lower prices (called ‘popscale’), it played extended runs. In London, after ending its run at the Curzon, La Dolce Vita transferred to the Berkeley where it ran for another 20 weeks, and then went on national release through the National Circuit cinema chain. Its 34^th and final week, in December, at the Henry Miller Theatre generated $10,000. In Italy, it was bracketed with Ben Hur as the top film of the 1960-61 season, beating the Hollywood epic in several cities including Milan.

When all the US figures were in, La Dolce Vita proved the most successful gamble of the year, the three-hour arthouse epic turning into a massive mainstream hit well beyond even the most optimistic expectations of the ambitious Astor, taking in an astonishing $9m (gross not rental).

It ranked 12^th  on the 1961 box office chart, above other big-risk movies like One Eyed Jacks and Cimarron. It finished ahead of Paul Newman in The Hustler, Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, John Wayne in North To Alaska, Elvis Presley in Blue Hawaii, Never On Sunday and Mein Kampf. In that nationwide list, The Guns of Navarone came top, with The Alamo 5th and The World of Suzie Wong 8th. But in the placings for Los Angeles, La Dolce Vita came 5^th, beating all three. Of course, the cognoscenti claimed it was a fluke.  But the simple riposte to that was that every hit film was a fluke, otherwise the supposedly wiser Hollywood heads who had committed millions in One Eyed Jacks and The Alamo would have been left celebrating, rather than ruing, their investment.

Come the year end, La Dolce Vita was on every critics top ten list, if not the film of the year. It was named best film by the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle. It should have been a shoo-in for the best foreign film Oscar. In fact, it was not put forward, as the nomination was done by the Italian government, which believed, bizarrely that La Dolce Vita had won too many awards, and it was someone else’s turn.   

Everyone involved, however peripherally, in La Dolce Vita wanted to build on its  success. Columbia, for example, released La Verite starring Brigitte Bardot in the same Columbia/Curzon duet in London but its first week had brought in only a combined $13,500. But Omat soon faded from the marketplace. Other majors like 20^th Century Fox were inspired to invest in European films, most notably The Condemned of Altona, starring Loren, and Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard starring Burt Lancaster.

Meanwhile, Embassy had not conceded defeat on the arthouse front. Joe Levine knew only too well, from his success with Hercules, how to parlay an investment in a foreign film into gold at the American box office. And it was clear to him that Astor had copied his marketing techniques to turn La Dolce Vita into an enormous success.

So he cast around for another foreign film. He found it in De Sica’s Two Women. This toplined Sophia Loren who had the added benefit of already being a marquee name in the US, having starred with top names like Alan Ladd in Boy on a Dolphin, Frank Sinatra in The Pride and The Passion, John Wayne in Legend of The Lost, William Holden in The Key, and  more recently, Houseboat (which, incidentally, produced another hit single) with Cary Grant.

Noting the success of the English-language Never On Sunday, Embassy was canny enough to make a dubbed version of this film. Of course, for the sake of appearances, a subtitled version was also available, but, inevitably, the bulk of cinema owners, especially outside the big cities, opted for the dubbed version. When Sophia Loren was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar in spring 1962, Levine capitalised on the publicity. She was far from being the favorite. She was the unexpected victor and, naturally, her win boosted bookings and, by association, conferred on Levine the mainstream recognition he craved.

Boccaccio 70 produced another fierce bidding war, this time just between Astor and Embassy. Levine was determined not to lose another prized asset. Again, Levine broke the rules, and on the strength of the directors and stars, pre-sold the movie to distributors in various countries. By the time the film opened, he reckoned he would have already broken even, before he received his share of the profits.

His boldness reached new levels. The four directors in the film had each made a segment that last one hour. He toyed with the option of releasing the movie in two parts. In the end, he simply chopped out the least well-known director Mario Monicelli, leaving him with a three-hour movie. Not only did he intend to present Boccaccio 70 as a roadshow, but it would have two intermissions instead of one, so that each section would be seen afresh.

His new-look company also had two films by Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, who had just won the Best Foreign Film Oscar for Through the Glass Darkly, lined up for distribution and Il Bel Antonio starring Claudia Cardinale and Mastroianni. Already involved, with various partners, in the production of Italian movies, he now had American movies in development. In total, he had committed nearly $10m to Sodom and Gomorrah, Boccaccio 70, The Wonders of Aladdin and Boys Night Out, for which he was paying star Kim Novak $500,000. In addition, he was planning a big budget roadshow film about the San Francisco earthquake plus psychological thriller Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (he pulled out of this after a row with director Robert Aldrich) and The Carpetbaggers (made for Paramount).

Every bit as bullish as Astor, he announced, ‘I want theater owners all over the world to know this is the kind of schedule they can expect from me.’

Until now the director had been the prime tool for marketing arthouse films, but La Dolce Vita and Never On Sunday threw up, for the first time, actors, in the shape of Mastroianni and Melina Mercouri, as dependable marquee names. They became ‘bankable’ names for European producers looking for a guarantee of selling their films to an American audience. Mastroianni appeared in most of the films by the big Italian directors while Mercouri was absorbed into the mainstream in films like The Victors and Topkapi. Fellini, of course, now the biggest box office draw in foreign films, could more or less write his own ticket. He was in talks to make his first American movie, but not with Astor. Instead, he opened negotiations with the Mirisch Brothers, who were known for entering into deals that actors and directors found profitable. 

Part Three tomorrow.

SOURCES: Brian Hannan, La Dolce Vita and the American Box Office Bust-Out (Baroliant, 2018) ; “Brian Hannan Revisits La Dolce Vita,” Cinema Retro, No 33.

In 1961, Hollywood was a casino. The advent of the roadshow and the lure of repeating the big-budget successes of Ben Hur (1959), Around The World In 80 Days (1958), Bridge On The River Kwai (1957) and The Ten Commandments (1956) had seen every studio sink colossal sums on the roll of the box office dice. United Artists had lavished $4m on three-hour epic Exodus about the formation of Israel with a star Paul Newman who had no blockbusters to his name. Columbia had sanctioned an even bigger budget, $5m, for war film The Guns Of Navarone.

Two studios were backing the directorial debuts of two major stars whose inexperience had seen both budgets soar. United Artists was part-funding John Wayne’s The Alamo while Paramount had too much riding on Marlon Brando’s western One-Eyed Jacks. MGM had a roadshow re-make of the 1931 Oscar-winner Cimarron with Glenn Ford and unknown Maria Schell in the leads. Even Disney had been tempted into the big-budget arena with Swiss Family Robinson, its most expensive live action movie.

None of these represented the biggest gamble of the year.

That honour, or should it be folly, went to the three small distributors bidding the unheard-of sum of $500,000 (the equivalent of $5m now) for the US rights for a three-hour Italian black-and-white Italian arthouse film, La Dolce Vita, directed by Federico Fellini.  Despite the success in America in the 1950s of films like the Japanese Seven Samurai and Fellini’s previous La Strada and the current vogue for Swedish director Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal) and the French New Wave, the marketplace for arthouse movies was tiny.

For marketing, arthouse exhibitors depended on movies winning prizes at film festivals or being directed by someone who had previously won such a prize. In the past decade only a handful had ever made $1m. Even the most successful of the recent spate of British films, classed as imports, such as Room at the Top, driven by massive publicity from its Oscar nominations and wins, had barely hit the $2m mark. The most successful foreign-language art movie had been Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman, which had grossed $7.5m. But that had starred Brigitte Bardot in a state of some undress.

Fellini was certainly a solid arthouse marquee name, having been awarded the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in successive years for La Strada (1956) and Nights of Cabiria (1957). In this he had matched the director credited with Italy’s post-war movie renaissance, Vittorio De Sica, who had also won Honorary Oscars (predating the Foreign Film category) for Shoeshine (1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1948). But Fellini was also aligned with the wider European New Wave, in 1958 forming a loose partnership with French directors Jacques Tati (M Hulot’s Holiday) and Robert Bresson (Diary of a Country Priest). Tati had his own company and had already invested in Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac and there had been talk of Fellini directing Tati in Don Quixote.

Filming of La Dolce Vita began in February 1959 with a cast including Marcello Mastroianni, Swedish actress Anita Ekberg and Anouk Aimee. Based on the performance of his previous films, producers Cineriz were dubious about its commercial prospects, but went ahead because it was a prestige picture. When the movie opened in Rome on St Valentine’s Day 1960, it astonished and shocked in equal measure.

The Catholic Church was outraged, demanding cuts, controversy boiling over when this met with refusal. Fellini had no truck with censorship. He said it was ‘dangerous in any way, in any occasion, because an artist cannot create under the sign of the guilty.’ Initial reaction to the movie was mixed; there was even a smattering of boos at the premiere. But some were already calling it a masterpiece.

Its opening weekend in Rome set a new house record of $16,000 (the equivalent to over $160,000 today) and then it broke every other conceivable record. In May it won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Record giant RCA issued the popular theme tune by Nina Rota in Italy and in France a novelisation,  La Douceur de Vivre, was published complete with screenplay and soon it would appear as an illustrated book in Italy with shooting script and behind-the-scenes photos. Fellini was already planning his next film, The Trip, to star Ekberg and Sophia Loren. After six months, still in its two launch cinemas, La Dolce Vita was taking $15,000 a week in Milan and $9,000 a week in Rome. By October it was outgrossing most new releases. By year’s end it had hoisted a sensational $1.125m in Italy. The season’s box office champion by a considerable margin, it left big-budget-Hollywood films in the dust.

Columbia Pictures, which had sizeable investments in European films, was quickest off the mark, purchasing in August the rights to distribute the film in the UK, where a November release was planned, and the British Commonwealth. Convinced the film was too controversial to receive a Production Code Seal (the censorship system of the time) in the US, nor wishing to drag the company name through any subsequent scandal, Columbia did not bid for the American rights. And so it became the tale of three companies, Omat Corporation, Embassy Pictures and Astor Pictures, who all had the same aim, to reinvent themselves through entering the arthouse business.

They were a disparate bunch. Omat had made its name reissuing old American movies which had been withheld from television. An abortive move into film production with Brotherhood of Evil had almost bankrupted it. But it  had come back to buy a batch of Mexican films for distribution including Beyond The Limit starring Jack Palance and films with lurid titles like Never Take Candy From A Stranger. Embassy was run by Joe Levine, an independent distributor from Boston with an impeccable pedigree until he decided to relaunch himself in 1957 as a wheeler-dealer on a national scale, buying the rights to the Italian-made Attila the Hun starring Anthony Quinn and Sophia Loren and sending it into the American market on the back of more promotional dollars than it had cost to purchase. The next year, on a much bigger scale, he did the same thing with Hercules starring Steve Reeves, opening the movie with 600 prints nationwide in July. It made him a fortune. He followed up with films like Hercules Unchained and Jack the Ripper.

But soon he sensed a change in the marketplace and wanted to build up the prestige of his company away from the exploitation marketplace. ‘A small revolution is taking place,’ he told Variety, ‘among the major and independent circuit operations. Many large houses (cinemas) are converting to specialty and art policies. Demand for those films is growing. That’s for me.’

He bought a French film called The Law, directed by Jules Dassin, and changed the title to the more snazzy, and suggestive, Where The Hot Wind Blows. But by late 1960 he had another reason to be in hot pursuit of La Dolce Vita. He had missed out on Jules Dassin’s new movie Never On Sunday, at that time just opened in New York to record business. Astor Pictures was Embassy on a smaller scale, distributing exploitation films like The Girl in Room 13, Festival Girl and Yellow Polka Dot Bikini. The 30-year-old company had been taken over from the estate of Richard Savile in 1959 by a group including George Foley, financier and vice-president of City Stores Franklin Bruder, and Everett Crosby, brother of Bing and his business representative. Like Embassy, it had bigger aspirations, planning to release 10 features, the most in its history, including three produced by Crosby, in 1961. And then it saw an opportunity to crash the arthouse system.

Each company put in a bid in the region of $500,000 – an astronomical sum for an arthouse flick – for the rights. And each believed its bid had been accepted. In October 1960, Omat claimed it had a deal with Italian producers Cineriz for that sum plus a percentage and promptly announced the film on their distribution list.  Joe Levine contested that, saying he had a ‘handshake deal’ that later turned into a ‘verbal agreement’, binding under Italian law, in front of two witnesses, for roughly the same amount. Astor also claimed victory. But in December Cineriz took out an advert in Variety declaring all claims were premature, as the US rights had not yet been granted. To everyone’s surprise, on January 7 1961, Astor was announced as the winner with a contract to prove it. They had outbid the others, paying a whopping $625,000 for the privilege. Al Schwartzberg of Omat complained: ‘All I know is we had a deal and nobody had told me different.’ 

Even more astonishing, Astor planned to spend a further $400,000 – more than the lifetime gross of  most arthouse movies in the US – on promotion. Just to break even (since the cinema took about 50% of the gross), it would need to make $2.5m. In order to do that, it would have to achieve what had not been done since And God Created Women, guarantee an arthouse film a nationwide release. For a three-hour film foreign film without Brigitte Bardot, it was madness.

Astor wanted to start recouping their investment as quickly as possible. There was just one problem. That would prove impossible in the current system of releasing arthouse movies.

There were only a handful of such specialist cinemas, just 15 in New York, the biggest city in America. A New York opening was paramount, the gateway to the rest of the American arthouse circuit. The problem was every cinema was already tied up months in advance. Once a US distributor had bought a foreign movie it could take upwards of a year to find a New York cinema to release it in. And there had been a squeeze of another kind. The British New Wave was sweeping into America via the arthouse circuit and swallowing up screens wholesale. Since they did not require either dubbing or subtitles, British films were more accessible to American audiences, and cheaper for distributors.

Out of the approx 700 weeks playing time available annually at the New York cinemas, British films had accounted for 252 weeks (up from 154 the year before) compared to 85 weeks for French films and 45 weeks for Italian films. In addition, the majors had started to use arthouses for the kind of mainstream releases that would appeal to that particular audience. Even with arthouse films, there were trends, and there was a fear that American audiences would start to reject subtitled films altogether.

Never having played this game before, Astor decided to break the rules. To get round the Production Code, they simply did not apply for approval. Technically, they were within their rights; only films made by US companies were required to comply with the Code. After Room at the Top, which had not been passed by the Code, had won two Oscars earlier in the year, the exhibitors organisation (TOA) attempted to plug this loophole, aiming to force cinema owners to play only films passed by the Code.

Even United Artists, which had decided to release Never on Sunday through its subsidiary Lopert to avoid being besmirched by scandal, had submitted the film to the Code, receiving the worst rating. Still, there was no dodging the National Legion of Decency, at the time an extremely powerful force. The Legion passed its verdict whether you liked it or not. By normal standards, given the content, La Dolce Vita should have been condemned. But the Legion had a special category, for films with artistic merit dealing with dubious issues, and it decreed that La Dolce Vita was actually a moral film. Normally, Legion disapproval could boost a movie’s box office, since sophisticated arthouse movie buffs considered the Legion irrelevant. But that only worked if your target market was just the chic crowd. For Astor to have any chance of getting its money back, La Dolce Vita had to break out of the strictly arthouse market.

So Astor made a deal with the Legion. The Legion placed the film in a ‘separate classification’ and pronounced it was ‘animated throughout by a moral spirit.’ The Legion said, ‘The shock value is intended to generate a salutary recognition of evil as evil, sin as sin.’ Nonetheless, there were conditions. The film was cut by five minutes. Astor had to guarantee its advertising would have no prurient appeal, and, more important, agreed not to dub the film  – the Legion felt dubbing would make the film more accessible to a younger, impressionable, audience. To show the film only in subtitles was a massive gamble, especially for the intended wider audience. Then Astor broke the rules again. Initially, in order to gain the impact it felt the movie required, it intended opening it on two arthouse screens in New York rather than one. But, of course, that was just doubling the problem. So with no cinema immediately available, it opened at the 946-seater Henry Miller Theatre in New York, which had never, in its history, shown a film, only presented plays. Astor had to guarantee the theatre $100,000 before the theatre was converted at a cost of $50,000.

Now Astor went for broke, and decided to release La Dolce Vita as a roadshow film. This move – arrogant, impudent or plain crazy, take your pick – was met with universal incredulity. The roadshow was the preserve of big-budget American-made major-studio widescreen colour films like Ben Hur not for foreign black-and-white interlopers. (Two foreign films had gone down this route before, The Golden Coach in 1954 and Tosca in 1958, but both had met with dismal failure). The only thing La Dolce Vita had in common with Ben Hur was the running time.  In truth, Astor hedged its bets, also opening the film in the normal way in a proper cinema, the Gray Theatre, in Boston.

In New York, there was a reserved seat policy for each of the ten performances, one show per night plus matinees on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday. In Boston, there were four shows a day, starting at 11am with barely 10 minutes between each performance, and reserved seats at the weekend. There was one instant advantage to going roadshow – putting up the prices (called ‘hardticket’).  How the film went out to other cinemas thereafter – if it went anywhere at all – would depend on which release technique proved more successful.

Astor embarked on the kind of campaign associated with a roadshow. There were adverts in newspapers and customised PR, it was featured in Life magazine and on television, a paperback tie-in was published and RCA issued six different singles of the theme tune. The trailer was unusual, a scattergun sequence of still images.

From the UK came encouraging news. As well as opening in December 1960 in the country’s most prestigious art house cinema, the 500-seater Curzon in Mayfair to a record gross of $11,000, La Dolce Vita had also opened at exactly the same time in a mainstream West End cinema, the 740-seater Columbia, the first time such a thing had occurred (called ‘daydating’ in exhibitor terminology), grossing $16,000. To put that in perspective, the week’s top film was Tunes of Glory which took $22,000 at the 1,400-seater Odeon Leicester Square. In January, each cinema was outgrossing the West End takes of Burt Lancaster in Elmer Gantry and William Holden in The World of Suzie Wong, which had opened in the same week as La Dolce Vita. At the Columbia it ran for 11 weeks, but was in its 18^th week at the Curzon (still grossing a healthy $6,600) by the time it opened in the States.

On the other hand, by now, unexpectedly, La Dolce Vita had competitors for that sophisticated in-crowd. Major studio Columbia, which had baulked at Never on Sunday, had  Mein Kampf scheduled to open in New York the same month. Jules Dassin’s Never on Sunday, which cost just $125,000 to make, was already doing terrific box office. On the one hand, the fact that a foreign film, equally controversial due to its content, was making money, could be construed as good. On the other hand, since the films appealed to the same audience, there were doubts whether the restricted marketplace could accommodate both. In addition, Never on Sunday had a far more popular theme tune, a singles chart-topper, the music acting as a powerful promotional tool for people who had never heard of the movie. And although the subject matter of Never on Sunday was prostitution, it was treated in such a light-hearted, charming, way that people fell in love with the film. And it had been made in English, not dubbed, so its appeal was instantly more universal.

Yet Never on Sunday demonstrated the pitfalls facing small distributors like Lopert and Astor. Black Orpheus, distributed by Lopert, had won the best foreign film Oscar in 1960, but the week it won was taken off the Plaza, the cinema owned by Lopert, because another film was pre-booked. There was just no flexibility in the arthouse industry. Like others in the market Lopert trod a fine line between art and profit. And in same month as Black Orpheus won the Oscar, Lopert announced twelve new films, more bread-and-butter than arthouse, including two horror films, one from Japan and one from Italy, and a Brigitte Bardot movie which would change its title from The Woman and The Puppet to the more sensational A Woman Like Satan. If a subsidiary of major studio United Artists could not survive in the arthouse field, what chance was there for an upstart like Astor?

Part Two tomorrow.

SOURCES: Brian Hannan, La Dolce Vita and the American Box Office Bust-Out (Baroliant, 2018) ; “Brian Hannan Revisits La Dolce Vita,” Cinema Retro, No 33.

I was riveted. This is one of the most extraordinary films I have ever seen. Highly under-rated and largely dismissed for not conforming to audience expectation that horror pictures should involve full moons, castles, darkness, fog, costumes, nubile females exposing cleavage, graveyards, a male leading character, shocks to make a viewer gasp, and the current trend for full-on gore. So if that’s what you’re looking for, give this a miss. Even arthouse critics, spoiled by striking pictures by the Italian triumvirate of Fellini, Visconti and Antonioni, were equally scornful. For the most part this takes place in broad daylight and set in an impoverished town in the Italian mountains, so primitive farmers till the soil with horse and plough and water is collected in buckets from the river.

One of the most striking aspects of the picture is that it creates its own unique universe. The townspeople are both highly religious and deeply superstitious, every traditional Catholic ceremony matched by old-fashioned ritual. Even some of the formal traditions seem steeped in ancient belief, sinners marching up a steep hill being scourged or carrying a heavy rock, in a convent the tree of a suicide covered in barbed wire. Less conformist notions include a wedding night rite involving shoving a scythe under the bed to cut short Death’s legs with the bedspread covered in grapes to soak up evil and discord arranged in the form of a cross to act as bait for bad thoughts and poison them before they can cause the couple harm. When the people run through the town brandishing torches it is not, as would be genre tradition, to set fire to a castle but to vanquish evil from the air.

It is filmed in austere black-and-white. In the Hollywood Golden Era of black-and-white movies lighting and make-up transformed heroines, rich costumes enhanced background. Here, if the heroine is wearing make-up it’s not obvious and the only clothes worth mentioning are a priest’s robes or a plain wedding dress. Otherwise the most arresting feature is the stark brightness against which the black-dressed figure of the heroine Puri (Daliah Lavi) scuttles about.

And although there are no jump-out-of-your-seat shocks, there are moments that will linger on in your mind, not least the heroine enduring a vicious extended beating from her father, an exorcism that turns into rape and the sight, Exorcist-fans take note, of a spider-walk, the young woman’s torso thrust up high on elongated arms and legs. Virtually the entire success of the picture relies on atmosphere and in places it is exquisitely subtle, the audience only realizes she has been raped by the look on her face.

The picture opens with a dialog-free scene of stunning audacity, foreshadowing the idea from the start that image is everything. Puri pierces her chest with a needle, cuts off a chunk of her hair to mop up the blood, throws the hair into the oven and rams the crisp remains into a loaf of bread. Not to be consumed as you might imagine, but as a tool of transport. Shortly after, having failed to seduce Antonio (Frank Wolff), she tricks him into drinking wine infused with the ashes of her bloodied hair, bewitching him, so she believes, to abandon his betrothed. In an echo of a Catholic sacrament she shouts, “You have drunk my blood and now you will love me, whether you want to or not.”  

The next morning when collecting water at the river she has a conversation with a boy Salvatore only to discover he has just died, his death blamed on her because his last words were a request for water, which she is judged to have denied him. She is beaten by women. She is feared by everyone in the village, her family tainted with the same brush, wooden crosses nailed to their door. She is not a ghostly figure, flitting in and out of the townspeople’s lives, an apparition tending towards the invisible, but fully formed, highly visible in her black dress and anguished expression, doomed by often vengeful action and forceful word.

Much of the film involves Puri being beaten or chased or captured, at one point trussed up like a hog. Attempts to exorcise her, whether pagan or Catholic, focus on getting the demon to speak his name. The ritual performed by heathen priest Guiseppe involves blowing on a mirror before taking on sexual aspects which culminate in rape. The Catholic version in a church in front of her family is primarily, as it would be in The Exorcist, a duel between the priest and whatever possesses her.

Movie producers took one look at the beauty of Palestinian-born Daliah Lavi (Blazing Sand, 1960) and thought she would be put to better use in bigger-budgeted pictures made in color that took full advantage of her face and figure and that stuck her in a series of hardly momentous movies such as The Silencers (1966) and Some Girls Do (1969). They should be ashamed of themselves for ignoring her astonishing acting ability. And much as I have enjoyed such films, I doubt if I could watch them again without thinking what a waste of a glorious talent. This is without doubt a tour de force, as she alternatively resists possession and adores the being who has taken hold of her mind. She dominates the screen.

The rest of the mostly male cast are dimmed in comparison, as if overawed by the power of her personality. Future spaghetti western veteran Frank Wolff (Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968) comes off best. Director Brunello Rondi (Run, Psycho, Run, 1968) is better known as a screenwriter for Federico Felllini. He made few films, none matching this in scope or imagination, perhaps as a result of the picture not receiving the praise it deserved. Even now it does not have a single critical review on Rotten Tomatoes.

One other point: you may have noticed that in general the proclivities of male horror characters are never in need of psychological explanation. Nobody considers that the Wolfman must have suffered from childhood trauma or that a vampire drinks blood because he was a rejected suitor. Strangely enough, as would be the case in The Exorcist and other instances of female possession, psychiatry is usually the first port of call and here all reviews I have read implicitly see Puri’s actions as based on sexual inhibition and rejection by Antonio. 

We are so conditioned to watching old movies on tiny screens it comes as something of a primal shock to see them in all their original glory. Most festivals lean towards the arthouse end of the cinema business so it’s all the more delightful to find an event that without apology concentrates on the mainstream. Widescreen Weekend takes place at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, England, and mostly in its Pictureville Cinema, the only venue in the country equipped to show Cinerama pictures in the original three-strip version which requires three projectors.

And while most other film festivals attract general movie lovers, this one appears to appeal in large part to those who have had something to do with the movie-making business or its technical side. Speakers might include, for example, Cinerama restoration specialist Dave Strohmaier or Kevin Brownlow, editor turned director, and among the audience you might find people like Keith Stevens from Australia, a former operations executive with Village Roadshow there, but who started out as a projectionist and regaled me with tales of projecting The Sound of Music (1965) in its original roadshow run.

There’s a limited number of movies that were made, mostly in the 1960s, either in Cinerama or 70mm, so the event has expanded to take in the earlier Cinemascope and the other versions of widescreen technology on which Hollywood depended as the marketing hook to bring back audiences from the all-encompassing maw of television in the 1950s. Later films whose directors understood the cinematic impact of 70mm are also added to the mix.

You are transported back to a time when screens were just enormous – this one is 51ft wide – and were curtained, and those curtains would not open (to the sides) until in typical roadshow fashion, a lengthy musical Overture, highlighting aspects of the movie’s music, had run its course. There is something quite sumptuous about sitting in a movie theatre staring at huge red curtains and waiting for the house lights to dim and the music to begin.

Roughly half-way through the movie itself, the curtains would close for an intermission, and before the picture restarted there would be more music, what was termed the Entr’Acte. Some DVDS of roadshows contain both Overture and Entr’Acte but there is a lightyear of difference between hearing them in your lounge and being exposed to them in a picture house built to bring out their best sound.

This is a homage not just to old movies but the old way of seeing a movie.

In previous years the programs have included Ice Station Zebra (1968), West Side Story (1961), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Ryan’s Daughter (1970), Khartoum (1965), a pair from William Wyler that could not have been more diverse – Ben-Hur (1959) and Funny Girl (1968) – This Is Cinerama (1952), and Carol Reed’s  The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965). Throw in a healthy helping of 1950s Cinemascope and Vistavision features and more contemporary pictures which embraced 70mm and you have the makings of an always satisfying weekend.

So one of the highlights is to see old favorites. This year we are being treated to the three-strip version of How the West Was Won (1962), your feet tapping immediately at the sound of the driving Alfred Newman score, David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago (1965), which was blown up from 35mm to 70mm for roadshow, one of the original Cinerama travelogs Seven Wonders of the World (1956) and Stanley Donen musical Funny Face (1957) in Vistavision. For many the highlight will be a showing of the forgotten La Fayette (1962) in 70mm, at the time the most expensive French movie ever made.

There’s a Hitchcock strand including the 70mm version of Vertigo (1958), Cleopatra (1962) in 70mm, John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) and Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1961).

The event takes place in two cinemas so there’s up to six movies a day. This year’s edition begins today and ends on Monday. I’ll be there. If you’re going and are a subscriber to my blog feel free to say hello.

Simple small-town morality tale, brilliantly told, with a quiet nod to The Blue Angel and Citizen Kane. Shy dirt poor farmer’s daughter Claudelle Inglish (Diane McBain) after falling for the handsome Linn Varner (Chad Everett) expects to be married when he returns from his Army stint. But he rejects her. Initially, devastated, keeping all his letters and the dancing doll she had won with him at a fair, she decides that lying in bed all day and staring at the ceiling is not going to work. So she smartens up her frumpish look with lipstick and turns her simple wedding dress into a more attractive outfit.

She discovers that the boys are so desperate to come calling on this new-look creature that they will bring presents to every date, ranging from the biggest box of candy in the shop to a pair of red shoes. Encouraging her determined manhunt, dissatisfied mother Jessie (Constance Ford), who has endured twenty years of broken promises throughout marriage to hardworking Clyde (Arthur Kennedy),  beseeches her to go after a rich man. Luckily, there is one within the vicinity, the widowed S.T. Crawford (Claude Akins) who happens to be their landlord. Crawford tries to bribe Clyde with free rent and other benefits to put in a good word, but to no avail, the father believing that true love cannot be bought and, furthermore, will alleviate abject poverty.

Claudelle bluntly rejects Crawford as “too old and too fat” but takes his present anyway and, under pressure, agrees to go for a ride with him without allowing him to stop the car. Dennis Peasley (Will Hutchins), eldest son of a store owner, believes he is the front runner, deluging her with gifts, naively believing she is his sweetheart until he realizes he is in competition with a horde of other local boys, including his younger brother, and outsider Rip (Robert Colbert). Jessie, seeing the prospect of a rich husband slip away, embarks on an affair with Crawford. Soon, Claudelle has the entire male population in the palm of her hand, piling up presents galore. However, tragedy, in the way these things go, is just round the corner.

What struck me first was the subtlety. Nothing here to bother the censor, beyond the immorality on show, and despite Hitchcock breaking all sorts of sexual taboos with Psycho the year before. This isn’t an all-hot-and-bothered essay like the previously reviewed A Cold Wind in August or a picture that pivots on twists-and-turns like A Fever in the Blood, both out the same year. It took me a while to work out Claudelle was actually having sex with all these guys.

The initial shy girl blossoming under the first blush of love is done very well, a gentle romance ensuing, Claudelle still withdrawn in company, agreeing to an engagement even though Linn cannot afford a ring, waiting anxiously for his letters, adoring the dancing doll,  paying off a few cents at a time material for a wedding dress. It’s only after she receives a Dear John (Dear Jane?) letter that it becomes clear, though not crystal clear, that sex has been involved because that word is never spoken and that action never glimpsed. Only gradually do we realize that present-givers are being rewarded, and as her self-confidence grows she is soon able to pick her own presents.  One look is generally all it takes to have men falling all over themselves to give her what she wants, which is, essentially, a life where promises are not broken. But the closest she gets to showing how much she is changed from her original innocent incarnation is still by implication, telling a young buck she is “pretty all over.”

I was also very taken with the black-and-white cinematography by Ralph Woolsey. The compositions are all very clear, but in the shadows Claudelle’s eyes become glittering pinpoints. The costumes by Howard Shoup won an unexpected Oscar nomination, his third in three years. Veteran director Gordon Douglas (Them!, 1954) does an excellent job of keeping the story simple and fluent, resisting all temptations to pander to the lowest common denominator while extracting surprisingly good performances from the cast, many drawn from Warner Brothers’ new talent roster.

Diane McBain (Parrish, 1961) handles very well the transition from innocence to depravity (a woman playing the field in those days would be tagged fallen rather than independent) and holds onto her anguish in an understated manner. In some senses Arthur Kennedy (Elmer Gantry,1960) was a coup for such a low-budget production, but this could well have been a part he was born to play, since in his movie career he knew only too well the pain of promise, nominated five times for Best Supporting Actor (some kind of record, surely) without that nudging him further up the billing ladder. His performance is heartbreaking, working his socks off without ever keeping head above water, repairs getting in the way of promises made to wife and daughter, kept going through adoration for his wife.

Constance Ford (Home from the Hill, 1960) is heartbreaking in a different way, scorning her loving husband and dressing like her daughter in a bid to hook Crawford.  Television regular Claude Akins is the surprise turn. In a role that looked like a cliché from the off – i.e. older powerful man determined by whatever means to win the object of his desires – he plays it like he was auditioning for The Blue Angel, hanging on every word, being twisted round her little finger, demeaning himself as he is made to wait, sitting downcast outside the Inglish house like an rejected schoolboy. Of the younger cast, Will Hutchins was Sugarfoot (1957-1961), Chad Everett was making his movie debut, and Robert Overton had appeared in A Fever in the Blood (1961). Leonard Freeman (Hang ‘Em High, 1968) wrote the screenplay based on the Erskine Caldwell bestseller.

And where does Citizen Kane come into all this? The dancing doll Claudelle won at a fair when dating Linn is something of a motif, never discarded, as if a symbol of her innocence, and in close-up in the last shot of the film.