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The "machine that kills bad people" turns out to be Cocteau's death camera, freeze-frame and all, to Roberto Rossellini it's "a comedy, my friends." The distance between neorealism and surrealism is a short one, the seaside village displays wartime scars but not before it's erected as a cutout diorama by the big hand in the sky (cf. Lubitsch's The Doll). The wizened wanderer who's run over on the road is subsequently seen grinning at the fireworks in the religious procession, the shabby photographer (Gennaro Pisano) welcomes him into his shop and is rewarded with the power to petrify anyone to death with the click of a shutter. (The first to go is the local bully, buried with his arm frozen in the fascist salute.) Human venality has made saints stingy with miracles, says the stranger, and yet soon there are extra fish in the ocean and millions of lire arriving from Rome. The bishop wants the money for a new Byzantine cupola, grasping relatives circle a catatonic matriarch, Yankee tourists plan to turn cemeteries into vacation resorts, even the protesting proletariat is more interested in whistling at Miss America. "I'll show them," sputters the stooge wielding the "evil eye" instrument, the exasperated artist now a disgruntled executioner. A sardonic parable, a laboratory experiment unlike anything in the filmmaker's oeuvre, the concealed horns of a devious medium. Images that illuminate life can also snuff it out, a wry view completed a decade later in the denunciation of Illibatezza (RoGoPaG). The toy set is put away at the close, Rossellini's advice being to "listen and laugh with an open heart." With Giovanni Amato, Marilyn Buferd, Pietro Carloni, Joseph Falletta, William Tubbs, and Helen Tubbs. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |