In first part of this contribution by Elena Tempestini, writer, journalist and collaborator of the online magazine Economia&FinanzaVerde, took us into the phantasmagoric and multifaceted world of the serial entrepreneur and art collector Richard Gualino.
In this second and final part Elena Tempestini reviews the activity and initiatives of the Piedmontese entrepreneur in the Lux film, destined to become one of the most important Italian film studios. An adventure, perhaps the most notable, of the multifaceted business and cultural man of our country in the last century.
. . .
The beginning as a distribution house
In 1934 Richard Gualino founded Lux Film, accepted by the fascist regime under the General Directorate of Cinematography, whose aim was to support and, at the same time, control the production of Italian cinema. In the same period other film companies were born, such as "Novella film" owned by Angelo Rizzoli.
It was no coincidence that the first film produced by Gualino with Lux Film was Don Bosco, Directed by Goffredo Alessandrini. The support of a powerful Order like that of the Salesians founded by Don Bosco would certainly have been useful to his image.
For five years, despite the success of the film, Lux did not produce films but distributed them, mainly films made by RKO, an American film company.
RKO, which stands for “Radio-Keith-Orpheum,” was one of the major film production companies in the United States during the golden era of Hollywood. Founded in 1928, RKO produced around forty films a year, such as King Kong and Citizen Kane. Furthermore, it distributed Walt Disney films, feature films such as Pinocchio, Fantasia, Xenerentola, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. RKO was also active in the radio sector as can be understood from its name (Ed.).
Lux film's first major production
In 1939 his friend Valentino Brosio, a Turin intellectual cousin of Manlio Brosio, later Secretary General of NATO, convinced Riccardo Gualino to produce Two million for a smile di Carlo Borghesio and the still unknown Mario Soldati.
The date was important for Italian cinema, as on that occasion the reads Alfieri with which state aid was replaced with an incentive system calculated on the basis of collections and the requirement of a minimum capital of 500.000 lire. The aim was to encourage Italian film production by rewarding successful films.
Gualino moved the Lux Film company from Turin to Rome in 1940, becoming the Lux Film SA. In 1941 the ban on holding public office expired and Gualino was able to become, to all intents and purposes, president.
From that moment on, a new phase of Lux film, with a highly prestigious Italian production. Gualino's skills and knowledge also allowed him to enter the foreign market through the main door. Mindful of his great industrial experience between the first and second decades of the 20th century, Gualino never wanted to buy the theaters in which he could make films, he always preferred to rent them. Certainly the trials he had had to face in his life had led him to make different business decisions from his early days.
Lux Film was a film company with great experience, solidity and prudence behind it and Gualino himself never let himself be carried away by easy enthusiasm or delusions of grandeur.
The calligraphic trend
From a strictly productive point of view, the company's choices were very variable and alternated in the styles offered to the general public. Gualino was a forerunner in giving importance to scores that accompanied the film, immediately realizing the impact they could have on the viewer's emotional concept.
A Nino Rota, among the greatest composers of post-war music and Fedele d'Amico musicologist, Gualino entrusted the choice of soundtracks and also the ability to involve some of the greatest Italian musicians, from Ildebrando Pizzetti a Goffredo Petrassi e Roman Vlad.
The stories represented were taken from literary classics, in order to maintain a productive policy as a symbol of Italian culture. Gualino's Lux Film was responsible for the production of Betrothed, a film directed by Mario Camerini and starring Dina Sassoli as Lucia.
Even the co-productions were made with refinement and respect for the original text, like the blockbuster The Iron Crown by Alessandro Blasetti in 1941, which triumphed in Venice and was judged by Goebbels: «If a German director had made this film, he would be put against the wall today in Germany».
These were films belonging to the so-called calligraphic genre, a cinematic trend, with an expressive complexity and multiple figurative, literary and cinematographic references that isolated them from the dominant context of those last years of fascism.
It was a vision capable of recalling numerous cultural trends and at the same time, harmonizing them in an expressive form achieved through formal attention, the revaluation of the "artisanal" character of cinema. The most famous directors of the calligraphic genre were Mario Soldati, Alberto Lattuada, Renato Castellani and Luigi Chiarini.
A cultured cinema, in which Gualino intervened in the screenplay together with young writers, such as Cesare Pavese, Elio Vittorini, Vitaliano Brancati, Diego Fabbri.
After the war, at the top of Italian cinema
In the post-war period, Lux Film was still the most important company in Italian cinema, but with a new gearbox of strategic structure, no longer a direct producer, but a supervisor of productions independent which could range from complex and cultural films to more commercial films.
Pietro Germi, Giuseppe De Santis, Luigi Zampa, Luigi Comencini, Mario Monicelli, Valerio Zurlini and Luchino Visconti remained linked to the calligraphic and literary genre. The first specialized in the "Southern" genre with dramatic films such as Lost youth (1948) In the name of the law (1949) The path of hope (1950) The Straw Man (1958) and comedies with a corrosive satirical force such as Italian divorce (1961).
These were the years of neorealism, although a Neorealism far from the films of Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica. De Santis directed Riso amaro (1949) and There is no peace among the olive trees (1950). Luigi Comencini shot the short film Children in the city (1946) and, later, The beauty of Rome (1955), while Zurlini signed The girls of San Frediano (1954) and Monicelli I soliti ignoti (1958) and I compagni (1963).
In 1953-54 a further turning point occurred in the company's production line, which decided to abandon the literary and neorealist genre to tackle more expensive and spectacular films. This is how films such as were made with Carlo Ponti and Dino De Laurentiis Attila by Pietro Francisci, Teodora by Riccardo Freda, Ulysses of Camerini, and Senso by Visconti, all from 1954.
The decline
From that moment the slow decline of the company began Lux Film crisis arrives towards the end of the 1950s, when Gualino undertakes a final complex recapitalization operation of the company, which leverages the financial flows generated by the indemnities for the nationalization of electricity.
La Rumianca becomes the center of a complex group, with numerous plants in Italy and significant projections abroad, operating successfully, well before the economic "boom" of the golden years, establishing itself in consumer chemical sectors such as cosmetics, and toiletries and polymers.
In November 1965 Renato Gualino, son of Riccardo, who had died a year earlier in Florence, after having been vice-president of Lux Film for a long time, announced that the company would leave the production activity to dedicate itself solely to distribution.
In 1969 Lux Film was absorbed, together with Rumianca, by SIR by Nino Rovelli. A slow decline and a definitive compromise of the Italian chemical industry began for one of the most important chemical industries in Europe.
. . .
Elena Tempestini
Writer, journalist and photographer, she collaborates with #Economia&FinanzaVerde and is founder of the blog #Prospettive. Her speeches in her voice can be listened to in podcasts on #WhiteRadio. Elena above all likes to investigate the relationship between past and present, trying to give prominence and order to the chaos of events that weave our today. Through the knowledge and study of ancient memories it is possible to retrace events that unite figures of greater or lesser importance for a better understanding of the economic, political, social, cultural, religious, national and international facts of all cultures. To this end she also loves to reconstruct and describe the ordinary lives of the major protagonists, illustrating lesser-known aspects of their lives. She is convinced that we need a new humanism and a new renaissance to rediscover and share the beauty of the world around us and that she also passionately loves to photograph.
