L'oro di Napoli

I recently watched The Gold of Naples after a prolonged search. Like many others, I first learned of this film through Martin Scorsese's documentary on Italian cinema. While not as famous as some of Vittorio De Sica's other films, I assumed The Gold of Naples would eventually be released on DVD. Years have passed and the only American DVD release is a cheap, dubbed, public domain copy paired with The Bicycle Thief. I recently found a subtitled VHS tape from a 90's dealer (Facets or Sinister Cinema). Although the print is the 107 minute U.S. cut with two stories missing, the experience was well worth it. The Gold of Naples is an anthology film and, like most, the stories vary in quality. However, none of these stories are bad (something I cannot say about many anthology films). The first one has Toto as a man with the misfortune to be stuck living with a bully. This local thug moved in and will not leave. This story I found the weakest, but Toto is something of an acquired taste. The second story features the lovely Sophia Loren as the adulterous wife of a pizza maker. Much havoc ensues when the wife's prized jade ring goes missing. The third story is the funniest (and was prominently featured in the Scorsese documentary). In it, director Vittorio De Sica, himself, plays a compulsive gambler who meets his match in the hotel doorman's young son. Lastly, Silvano Mangano plays a prostitute who marries a wealthy man she has never met. This one is the most melancholy of the stories, a far cry from the good humor of the first three. That is all. I wish I could report on the other two stories, but they remain unseen in America. How about a restoration, Criterion?

Vittorio de Sica knew his home town Naples by heart, as he, like his favourite actress Sofia Loren, practically had grown up there from the gutter. In these six episodes are reflected different insights and aspects of Napolitan life, reflecting both comedy, tragedy, drama and, as always in de Sica's films, deep humanity. One of the episodes is dedicated entirely to a funeral procession of a dead child. The most dramatic episode is the fifth with Silvana Mangano getting married to an unknown man, naturally she is shy and feels rather uncertain about the venture, and gradually the whole scheme of the situation unfolds, and she naturally reacts. Her performance is the most memorable in this film. Sophia Loren is still very young here and brilliant as a pizza hostess selling in the streets with her husband and extricating herself magnificently out of a scandal. Vittorio de Sica plays the lead himself in one of the episodes, actually making a satire out of himself, as he was a great gambler himself and needed some detachment and to handle the situation, which this sequence illustrates perfectly. The brilliant comedian Totó introduces the episodes in a very domestic situation of outrageous difficulties and awkwardness, and he manages it in a very Italian way. In brief, these six chapters of daily life in Naples in 1954 will go through to eternity with the rest of de Sica's films as timeless and ageless expressions of deep sympathy and keen warm-hearted observation.

I am Italian and I saw this movie on TV a few days ago. I had not seen it in the past. Totò is absolutely fantastic in his role. But the most astonishing episode is that of the 'funeralino', the funeral of a child: that is very 'neapolitan' to me. Sorrow and attention to manners are co-existent and you never know whether it is true sorrow or pure acting. Paolo Stoppa is also excellent in his role as a new widower. Of course, the movie is quoted because of Sofia Loren, who was helping her husband in his job of making pizzas. This is the movie where her nickname 'la pizzaiola' came from. While watching it, I did not realize that it had been made so many years ago. It well deserves to be seen.

Vittorio De Sica's tribute to Napoli where he spent several years as a youth. It's a six part anthology linked only by the location (in the U. S. two of the segments were cut, but have now been restored). The portmanteau film blends comedy and drama and has themes of jealousy, sexuality, greed and vanity throughout - all aspects of Italian life as it were.

The most serious chapter, "Teresa", stars Silvanna Mangano as a tainted title character trapped into a marriage of convenience. The most famous is the comedic "Pizza on Credit" featuring Sophia Loren in her breakout role as the duplicitous wife of a humble sidewalk restaurant owner. The best is the briefest, "Funeralino" which is an almost dialog-less journey of a woman (Theresa De Vita) who leads a funeral procession through the streets of the city for her deceased young child. Simple, poignant. De Sica himself stars as "The Gambler" as a henpecked Count who has to sneak away from the Countess in order to place penny-ante bets. The other shorts star Toto (who got top billing) and Eduardo de Filippo.

As with most omnibus films, the quality varies made all the more noticeable in that the opening and closing ones are the weakest. The movie did make Loren a huge star and De Sica does manage to do more than merely make a picturesque travelogue. There is some real poetry in depicting a wide variety of Naples' inhabitants and Mangano is superb.

I wish mildly to dissent from the love fest shown for this de Sica film by my nine IMDB colleagues below. I feel that, like most anthology movies, it is a mixed bag with some estimable sections, and some that are, frankly, on the dull side. Oddly enough, in a group of short films geared toward the comic end of the spectrum, I found that my two faves were the two most somber, namely the moving story of the prostitute Teresa who, remembering the cold world out there that she used to be in, chooses material comfort over love, and the very brief work that deals with a child's funeral procession along the Naples waterfront and that manages, in ten minutes of screen time, to get at the thin line that separates the joys of life from the bleakness of death. The three comedies, by contrast, I found way too broad and strained and excessively pushing the Italian stereotypical envelope, with too much yelling, weeping and general operatic histrionics in lieu of comedy. I will say, however, that Sophia Loren's breakthrough role as a pizza maker's unfaithful wife was striking, as well as a timely reminder that this greatest of Italian actresses could give Claudia and Gina stiff competition in the curvaceous dept. And De Sica's love for his home town comes through so vividly that you can almost smell the pasta puttanesca. B minus.