Cinema cannot do without Naples. It's not a catchphrase, it's been repeated by all those who have dealt with the city in their careers. Directors, performers, screenwriters, producers, sooner or later feel the call of the most "theatrical" city in Italy. As Neapolitans we know this and when we see the city on film, we rarely express judgements, because Naples is one, one hundred, one thousand. The narrative is simple and complex at the same time, as anyone who writes a script knows well, writes the actors, then with the first takes everything changes. The city and its people weigh on the starting idea. This has been happening since the post-war period, everyone stunned by "Napule mille colori" as he sang Pino Daniele.
There is one film in particular which, after 70 years, still arouses the most genuine feelings of a suffering and carefree, sad and mocking, simple and branded people: it is The Gold of Naples directed by Vittorio DeSica. This film will be screened at the pre-opening of the 81st Venice Film Festival. Restored by Filmauro of Aurelio and Luigi De Laurentiis, with the artistic supervision of Andrea De Sica, will have its world premiere Tuesday August 27 in the Sala Darsena of the Lido. The screening pays homage to three events: the 50th anniversary of the death of Vittorio De Sica, the 70th anniversary of the release of the film, the 90th anniversary of Sofia Loren, the September 20.
Among the hundred films to save
The six-episode film is one of the masterpieces of Italian cinema and its director. De Sica was born in Sora, in the province of Frosinone, but throughout his life he was very close to Naples, which he considered to be his adopted city and where he shot several films. For the Gold of Naples in 1954 he chose the best actors of the moment: Sophia Loren, Totò, Silvana Mangano, Paolo Stoppa, Eduardo De Filippo, Tina Pica. He did not spare himself on extras taken from the street, as did all of neorealism which thus gave life to a cultural and artistic design later copied in other countries.
It all starts with a written text. The Neapolitan writer Joseph Marotta he was inspired by post-war Naples for his stories and Cesare Zavattini as an extraordinary neorealist author, he drew a screenplay that inspired dozens of other directors and screenwriters for the iconography of one or more sets. The youngest in Venice will have the opportunity to see one of the 100 films produced in the world to be saved. Through the skill of a master, they will relive the complicated moments of a city that has never been tamed with respect to the defeats that the 900s had imposed on it. There is all of Italy in that film, a less scenic, more closed, perhaps respectable country.
Throughout history, Naples has had all kinds of dominations, phases of splendor and obscurity, an art capital with Paris and London, it has been much offended but has always redeemed itself. The authentic scenes of the film with the alleys and the characters that animate them were taken by De Sica for what they really were: Sofia Loren, pizza chef-icon of beauty and jealousy, Totò, victim and rebel of a gang, Eduardo professor of wisdom, teacher of a raspberry to an austere and unpleasant nobleman.
Film to study
There is no caricature in the narrative but the depiction of a people light-hearted and discordant, never unique. The role that De Sica chose for himself as a card player - a loser - against a lively boy is amazing. The director was known for his passion for gambling, but in Marotta's writing, and therefore in the film, he brought back the taste for gambling, the tenacious challenge against life's adversities, symbolically identified in 40 playing cards
The film was presented at Cannes in 1955 and received the Silver ribbon for the interpretation of Silvana Mangano. On the occasion of the presentation at the Biennale, the judgment of Martin Scorsese, struck by "way he moves effortlessly between comedy and tragedy.” De Sica was an authentic interpreter of the life of Naples which paradoxically when “L'Oro” was filmed was preparing to experience a new season of aggression at the hands of a power-hungry part of its people. De Sica will often say this in interviews in the 60s and 70s. Living in the city today, we all recognize that The Gold of Naples was, ten years earlier, the artistic work most in contrast to the urban depredation of the 60s represented in another 1963 masterpiece by Francesco Rosi “Hands on the city”. The pre-opening of this year's exhibition, therefore, with a masterpiece to study, pays homage to three historical circumstances but above all to an entire people who know how to recognize the value of their gold.
