Senza pietà

A rare film noir w/an African American lead, John Kitzmiller, from 1948. Kitzmiller is a GI in Italy who comes in contact w/a travelling woman, Carla Del Poggio, & they hit it off as they spend the night hanging out but Del Poggio has ties to some criminal elements who when they get wind of who Kitzmiller is decide to jump him as he's transporting goods in a truck. The military, assuming he had something to do w/the crime, put Kitzmiller in jail while Del Poggio tries to curry favor w/the head crook to help him out. Kitzmiller escapes from jail hoping to reach Del Poggio but as the dictum of film noir dictates, only bad comes from trying to do something good. Raw & rough w/its edges unshaved, the film pulls the viewer along for this uneasy ride which if you watch enough of these things, you can see the ending from a mile off & we're all the better for it.

A sombre account of a black G.I. attempting to desert in the aftermath of the Italian campaign and his involvement with a local girl, his recapture and second escape, while she has been coerced into prostitution by a gang of traffickers in goods and people, and their attempts to escape together once united.

This only really came to life for me when the doomed couple were on the screen. John Kitzmiller does not come over as an experienced actor, yet this has the effect of making his scenes all the more poignant. Carla Del Poggio is good as his would-be lover. The evils it highlights are with us still very much today. The assertion by another reviewer that the film was banned in the UK is incorrect, along with the implication that the different backgrounds of the leading characters could be a cause of such a ban. In fact it was passed in May 1950 with an 'A' certificate, after two or three minutes of cuts, giving it a running time of ninety-one minutes, which I surmise is the version on the current R2 DVD.

(1948) Without Pity/ Senza pietà (In Italian with English subtitles) CRIME DRAMA

Co-written and directed by Alberto Lattuada that takes place just after the end of WWII with Angela Borghi (Carla Del Poggio) while riding in a train as a stowaway. And while the train was slowing down, another vehicle has been chased by military police vehicles. And because the train was slowing down, one of the men, the military police were chasing happened to climb onto the same cargo as Angela. And while she is ducking to avoid trouble a military officer, Johnny Saxon (Preston Foster) climbed in as well while the escapee he was chasing managed to escape to the other compartment who managed to get away, shooting and injuring Johnny unconscious while the train was moving. And by the time the train makes it next stop, is when she calls help for the injured Johnny. And while he is being taken care of, Angela is then being cross examined regarding her intentions. She tells them she was heading to Leghorn to visit her brother, and their reaction was to bring her to a Christian boarding house for women. And while holding her their, she then builds a rapport with other women. One in particular is Marcella (Giulietta Masina) to which after Angela learns her brother is no longer there like she claimed he has, she then tells Angela if there is anyone she wants to know about, it would be a guy who wears all white, his name is Pier Luigi (Pierre Claudé) we find out later he is a racketeer. At the same time Johnny wants to go back and thank the lady, Angela who has saved him.

What is asinine about this movie is the fact that sometime during the movie, Johnny had the sufficient funds, connections, rides and money to drive Angela to her intended destination which is Leghorn, and for some odd reason the only car she wanted to be driven on, is on the vehicle driven by the racketeer himself; and for some odd reason the sufficient funds he had was spent on having fun at the fair; only when Johnny continues to hang around with Angela is when his problem worsens.

If this movie is at all well remembered or occasionally revived, it is not because of the director or stars. It is because one of its writers and assistant directors was Federico Fellini. Given his later success and directorial vehicles, it is sometimes forgotten that he rose to prominence as a writer of Italian neo-realism movies.

These movies were acclaimed for their efforts to show real people with real problems. In large part they were a response to much of the production facilities in Italy being destroyed in the war and money being in very short supply for film production after the war. If the only setting you have for your movie is the ruined street or the impoverished countryside, you can't ignore that reality in the script.

Director Alberto Lattuada, who had more of a career than promoting Fellini to co-director on VARIETY LIGHTS, directs very competently. The story might have played in Italy in 1948 as the story of a woman reduced to prostitution and her American GI lover, but the production people decided to make her lover Black, for shock value in the American market. Carla del Poggia as the woman overwhelmed by events, is excellent when contrasted with the cynicism everyone else in Italy seems to show. That gives this movie an upbeat, neo-realist message: things may be bad, but good people can find triumph in tragedy.

I saw this film 30 years or more at a university screening. It's probably never been released on videotape and may never be on DVD. I remember it as an affecting drama of a relationship/affair between an Italian girl and an afro-American GI (Kitzmiller). Both characters are sympathetic, with the Italian girl eventual drawn into prostitution by the difficult conditions of a receding World War II. Yet it is those conditions, with the Americans now an occuppying force in Italy, that bring the two together in a way probably impossible but for war. This film could be, I suppose, "neo-realist," and would be nice to "revisit" again to confirm my initial good impression of it.