• Home
  • About
  • Instagram
  • Disclaimer
  • Privacy
  • Contact
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content

aenigma – Images and stories from the movies and fashion

  • Home
  • About
  • Instagram
  • Disclaimer
  • Privacy
  • Contact

Crew

Irene Lentz – pioneer of an American luxury fashion brand

When it comes to luxury fashion brands, the US can’t hold a candle to Europe, particularly France. Crucially, the US has no tradition of couture. But, in the mid-20th century, one US luxury brand flickered into life and burned brightly and briefly. Its name: Irene, after its founder, Irene Lentz.

Evening gown by Irene Lentz photographed by Cecil Beaton
1951. Evening gown by Irene. Photo by Cecil Beaton. Read more.

Irene grew up on a ranch. As well as establishing her own brand, she was one of Hollywood’s busiest and most influential costume designers, with two Oscar nominations and 123 credits on IMDb. Those scandalous high-waist shorts and midriff-baring top in which we first encounter Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice are down to Irene.

Irene Lentz managed to build her brand in what was, before the 1960s, a sector dominated by men. That’s a distinction she shares with a handful of talented women, notably Jeanne Lanvin, Madeleine Vionnet, Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparell. In the US back then, the other notable dress designer was Claire McCardell, but she was working behind the scenes and aiming for a more casual, mass market.

Irene was a master of her craft, in touch with the zeitgeist and with a flair for marketing. She’s a remarkable and tragic figure, whose story falls into five chapters.

Chapter 1 – Irene Lentz gets going

Irene Lentz is born in 1901 in Brookings, South Dakota, then, in 1910, moves with her family to Baker, Montana. Nine years later she’s on the move again, this time with her mother and younger brother to Los Angeles.

In 1921, she’s working as a full-time sales girl in a drug store, when F Richard Jones (Dick to his friends) drops by and takes a shine to her. He’s a director of silent films at the Mack Sennett Studio and helps Irene to get a job there, initially as a production assistant, later as a star. IMDb lists eight movies in which she appears between 1921 and 1925. During that time she features as one of Mack Sennett’s Bathing Beauties – a bevy of scantily-clad (for the period) eye candy who keep popping up in his Keystone comedies and at any other opportunity.

Irene Lentz photographed by John Engstead
Around 1950. Irene Lentz. Photograph by John Engstead. Read more.

During her acting stint, Irene Lentz spots an opportunity to design and sell clothes to the growing movie community and from 1924–26 studies at the Wolfe School of Design. Dick Jones is still there in the background (or perhaps even the foreground, who knows?) and in 1926 they set up their first shop, on South University Avenue.

By 1929, the business is thriving, they relocate the shop to larger premises and get married. Then tragedy strikes. The following year, just 11 months after their wedding, Dick dies of tuberculosis age 37. Irene closes the shop and leaves for Europe, where she discovers the wonderful world of Paris couture.

Irene Lentz’s account of how she got started demonstrates her skill at building a brand story. Here it is, as reported by Frederick C Othman in Behind the Scenes, Hollywood in the 7 June 1942 edition of The Press Democrat:

She left the ranch when she was 16 to study music here at the University of Southern California. Had a roommate who was too timid to attend night school classes in dress design alone. Miss Lentz went along. After two nights she knew she was going to be a dress designer herself. She finished the course, dropped the music and set up a dress shop on the university campus, with the sign, “Irene.” That’s all the name she’s had since then. Just Irene.

“The campus shop was a great success from the beginning,” she said. “The dresses were cheap, and I do think they had a certain flair, but the real reason for my rushing trade was the fact that my store was the only place on the campus where the girls could smoke. Cigarettes were strictly against the rules everywhere else. So I always had a shop full of prospective clients, smoking. The place was so full of smoke so much of the time that my doctor wouldn’t believe it when I told him I didn’t smoke.”

The coeds smoked and bought dresses and received one of their major thrills when Dolores Del Rio walked into the store and bought an evening gown for $45.

“I never did learn how she heard about me,” Irene said. “But she was wonderful. Many a woman would not have told a soul where she’d bought that dress. But Dolores told everybody she knew. After that I got plenty of movie trade.

“One of my best customers was Lupe Velez. She refused to try on dresses in the fitting room. She tried them in the front room, by the plate-glass window. She always had a gallery.”

What a great account and love the sketches of Dolores and Lupe – the two Mexican superstars pretty much at the peak of their popularity. But, interestingly, no mention of Irene’s acting exploits or, indeed, of Dick Jones. Perhaps she feels that these would detract, or at least distract, from the narrative she wants to promote.

Irene’s tale of how “one day I discovered my passion and, through a combination of dedication and luck, built a business” is a kind of blueprint for so many subsequent start-ups. Notable practitioners are the likes of Markus and Daniel, the eponymous creators of Freitag, and Phil Knight whose memoir, Shoe Dog, recounts his adventures as founder of Nike.

Dolores Del Rio, a loyal Irene Lentz customer
1937. Dolores Del Rio, a loyal Irene customer and adovate. Photo by A L Whitey Schafer. Read more.

Chapter 2 – Irene goes into couture

Following the death of her husband, Irene Lentz goes to France for five weeks and while she’s there she visits the salons run by the Paris couturiers. She returns to the US, her head spinning with ideas. In 1931 she opens Irene Ltd on Sunset Boulevard and it’s a big hit. Within two years, it’s being eyed up enviously by the guys at Bullocks Wilshire, a Los Angeles department store that’s the pinnacle of style and opulence. They’re attracted by both the quality of her product and her stellar clientele.

There’s clearly synergy here and they persuade Irene to move her operation to the department store and open up a kind of French salon. This is a ground-breaking development – the first designer/retail store partnership of its kind. From now on, her clothing label, copied from a logo created by Dick Jones, simply reads “Irene.” Could her original inspiration have come from Gilbert Adrian Greenburg, known simply as Adrian, at MGM?

As a customer, the service you receive is as lavish as the clothes you’re buying. You can see Irene’s original creations modelled in-store. As at the salons in Paris, the team you meet for your fitting includes the designer herself as well as a tailor and a pattern cutter. You also get to have shoes and jewellery picked from elsewhere in the store to complement your ensemble.

The Irene brand already has a following in the film community and the move to Bullocks raises its profile, prestige and prices – one of those tailored suits will set you back $400–700. For the remainder of the decade, Irene Lentz continues to build her clientele among the stars and wealthy wives of studio executives as well as landing commissions from production companies to design the wardrobes for their movies. One of the first is Flying Down to Rio (1933), whose leading lady, Dolores del Rio, insists that Irene design her costumes.

Other divas whose film wardrobe she ends up designing include Constance and Joan Bennett, Carole Lombard, Loretta Young, Hedy Lamarr, Claudette Colbert and Ingrid Bergman. By the late-1930s she is travelling to Paris for the spring fashion shows. And by 1941, even British Vogue refers to Irene’s “Californian elegance.”

Show more
irene lentz picking peaches

1. Irene Lentz in Picking Peaches

A chance to see Irene on the silver screen as a flapper. In this scene from Picking Up Peaches (1924), her co-star is Harry Langdon.

Show more
irene lentz for lana turner

2. Irene’s scandalous costume for Lana Turner

Lana in a two-piece by Irene is as sizzling as the steak her co-star John Garfield is supposed to be keeping an eye on in this scene from The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).

Show more
irene lentz by lavoi

3. Irene by Greg LaVoi Lookbook

This is Hollywood costume designer Greg LaVoi's Fall 2013 Lookbook Video for his Irene by GV line, taking its inspiration from her creations.

Meanwhile, at a party thrown by her customer, fan and friend, Dolores del Rio, Irene Lentz meets Eliot Gibbons. This is no coincidence. During the 1930s, Dolores is the wife of Cedric Gibbons, the head of MGM’s art department (after their divorce in 1940, he will be seen out with, among others, Carole Landis before getting hitched to Hazel Brooks). Eliot is Cedric’s brother.

Eliot, an erstwhile assistant director, is working as a writer of short stories for newspapers and screenplays for movies. He’s also a keen aviator. So, when Irene expresses an interest in becoming a pilot, he offers to help her finish her required flying hours – a great pretext for spending lots of time together. On New Year’s Eve 1934 he proposes to her and they tie the knot in 1936. The flying lessons continue and, ironically, she gets her private pilot’s license just a couple of days before civilian flying on the West coast is prohibited following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

A member of the wardrobe team makes final ajustments to Ava Gardner’s gown by Irene
1949. A member of the wardrobe team makes final ajustments. Ava Gardner’s gown is by Irene. Read more.

Chapter 3 – Irene Lentz goes to the movies

That attack also proves to be the catalyst for a career change. For a while, Irene has been unhappy with her financial arrangements with Bullocks. She’s been contemplating her next move, including setting up her own manufacturing company. But with the US being drawn into World War II, that seems too risky. So, she’s open to new ideas and approaches.

Louis B Mayer is also in a quandary. He’s facing a raft of departures from his wardrobe team including Adrian, his head costume designer. Irene Lentz is ideally qualified to rescue the situation: she has the talent, she has the profile and she’s not going to be drafted. Encouraged by his wife, one of her many friends and clients, Mayer proposes that Irene join MGM and run its costume department. She accepts but on her own terms.

On arrival, Irene quickly assembles a team around her. The challenges they face are formidable. A multitude of warring individuals and factions to finesse. A hectic and dynamic schedule that requires working all hours. And constant changes of stars, directors and producers that disrupt the best-laid plans.

Easter Parade (1948) is a case in point. When Charles Walters replaces VIncente Minnelli as director, songs have to be rearranged, Judy Garland’s opening scene reworked (so the original costumes for it are no longer needed) and two of Judy’s key ensembles have to be changed. Further wardrobe modifications are required when Ann Miller replaces Cyd Charisse. Then Gene Kelly gets injured and Fred Astaire steps in. Cue further changes to the dance sequences and costumes.

1943. Marlene Dietrich as Jamila in Kismet. Costume by Irene Lentz. Read more.

Another challenge is dealing with stars’ anxieties about their clothes. The studio is full of starlets desperate to impress and established stars worried that their careers may be on the slide. Irene’s combination of empathy and decisiveness are just what’s needed to reassure them.

In spite of all the distractions, though, there are movies for which Irene manages to get her ideas through. In the case of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), one of those ideas is to associate Lana Turner’s character with a colour, as a composer might with a musical theme. So, Cora wears white in every scene except two.

Finally, in June 1949 Irene falls victim to MGM’s internal politics, her departure apparently triggered by her nemesis, Katharine Hepburn (read on for more on her), outraged by Irene’s failure to show up for a fitting. She still seems to be hanging on in there, though, in early 1950, when Doris Koenig’s Vagabondia column in the 2 March edition of Monrovia Daily News Post reports that:

She Is now an executive designer of MGM Studios, besides having her own wholesale manufacturing business – Irene Inc.

So far as her studio is concerned, Irene has no last name. Her driver’s license lists her as “Mrs Eliot Gibbons,” but she has built “Irene” into such a trademark that if you ask the studio operator for “Mrs Gibbons” you draw a blank. Ask for “Irene” and you will be connected with her office…

Consistency is one of the hallmarks of great brands!

Diamond-print suit by Irene Lentz
Early/mid-1950s. Diamond-print suit by Irene Lentz. Read more.

Chapter 4 – Irene goes into ready-to-wear

Back in July 1946, Neiman Marcus let Irene Lentz know that, alongside Christian Dior, Salvatore Ferragamo and Norman Hartnell, she has been chosen as a recipient of their Award for Distinguished Service in the field of fashion. It gets her thinking. She’s sick and tired of dealing with internal politics and having to compromise her designs: “I want to create designs that reflect my taste, rather than cater to those of a director or producer.” She’s also got to the point where she’s established the reputation, the relationships and the team to make her ambition to set up her own manufacturing company realistic.

The one thing Irene lacks is financing. With the help of Harry Cohn at Columbia, she assembles a group of over 20 luxury department stores including Bergdorf Goodman (New York), Marshall Field (Chicago) and Newman Marcus (Dallas). She keeps 51% of the ordinary shares of Irene, Inc while her backers take the other 49%. As part of the arrangement, the stores get exclusives to her designs.

In 1947, Irene Lentz reveals her plans to begin designing her own range of clothes as well as continuing to work at MGM – she has negotiated a new contract to facilitate this. This time around she will be turning her attention to ready-to-wear rather than couture – “…marketing genius. Upscale stores could offer clients the Irene garments that stars loved,” says Mary Hall, founder The Recessionista.  In its Apr 1, 1948 issue, Vogue US, announces the launch:

NEW DESIGN

It is not news that Irene is a designer. Of all the women who design in America today, her clothes have had, in one sense, the widest public: she makes the screen-life clothes for stars of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer where she is head costume-designer. But now the news is that Irene has turned her strong, fresh hand, again, to clothes for private lives, and her first ready-to-wear collection is now in several shops across the country. Consciously limiting her sphere, Irene makes no attempt to cover every phase of her new public’s life; she refuses to touch casual clothes, sports clothes. Instead, she makes the strict but feminine day-suit she is famous for, turns out beguiling afternoon print dresses, establishes her formal evening clothes as events.

Enlarge
Pale grey suit with shutter neckline by Irene Lentz

Pale grey suit with shutter neckline by Irene Lentz

Late-1940s/early-1950s. The jacket's nipped-in waist seems to show the influence of Christian Dior’s New Look but its structured shoulders and the narrow skirt appear to be moving away from it....

Read more
Enlarge
Check silk day dress with black taffeta trim by Irene Lentz

Check silk day dress with black taffeta trim by Irene Lentz

Late-1940s/early-1950s. The setting for this shoot may have been Irene’s boutique at Bullocks Wilshire. A paper label on the back of the photo reads:

5170 Check silk day dress...

Read more
Enlarge
Brocade-trimmed suit by Irene Lentz

Brocade-trimmed suit by Irene Lentz

Early/mid-1950s. Irene’s trademarks were hand stitching, exquisite buttons and luxurious fabrics such as the brocade for this suit. An Irene garment was not cheap, but it was high quality and...

Read more
Enlarge
Check suit by Irene Lentz

Check suit by Irene Lentz

Early/mid-1950s. Irene suits were designed and constructed to show off a woman’s waist. She used plaids, stripes and seaming to help achieve the effects she was looking for. It’s possible...

Read more

For 15 years Irene continues to head up her own business, latterly being persuaded to design costumes for a select number of leading stars.

Chapter 5 – Irene Lentz throws in the towel

On 15 November 1962, with rave reviews from her latest show ringing in her ears, Irene Lentz heads for Hollywood’s Knickerbocker. It’s not a propitious place. In the early 1940s when it was still glamorous, actress Frances Farmer was tracked down there by police and sent to a mental institution. Later in the 1960s, William Frawley of I Love Lucy fame, will be dragged there to die after he collapses from a heart attack on the street.

Irene checks in to the now-faded hotel under an assumed name. That night she consumes two pints of vodka, tries to slit her wrists, then jumps out of an 11th-floor window. Hours later, her body is found on an awning. She has left a brief note: ““I am sorry to do this in this manner. Please see that Eliot is taken care of. Take care of the business and get someone very good to design. Love to all. Irene.”

Early/mid-1950s. Dark suit by Irene Lentz. Read more.

Why? Why? Why?

When you come across a tragedy like this, you search to make sense of it. How could such a talented woman do this to herself? But then how could the likes of Alexander McQueen and Kate Spade follow in her footsteps? Well, in one sense you can never know what’s going through someone’s mind when they make that decision.

The police suggested that Irene was “despondent over business problems and her husband’s illness.” According to her business manager, “Irene had been under a terrific strain. She had been in ill health for about two years.” What more can we say?

She was a woman operating in a man’s world – a fundamentally lonely undertaking. What’s more, she was working in an incredibly stressful environment with all sorts of budgetary, scheduling and interpersonal pressures quite apart from the need for relentless creativity – a killer in itself. On the surface, Irene was self-confident, but under the surface she had her insecurities. This example from Irene – A Designer from the Golden Age of Hollywood: The MGM Years 1942-49 is shocking in its brutality:

On August 2 1944, Irene and Virginia Fisher, her sketch artist, had a meeting with Katharine Hepburn to discuss the sketches for Without Love. Nothing Irene showed Hepburn seemed to meet with her approval. Before leaving, Hepburn quickly listed her ideas, reiterating sharply that she would return the following Monday and hoping Irene “will have designs that are in keeping with my character in the story.” It was the first time that Virginia saw Irene, who was always self-assured, physically shake. “Intimidation couldn’t describe what I witnessed. Irene was terrified by Hepburn’s stinging remarks,” Virginia confided.

Hedy Lamarr in The Heavenly Body
1943. Hedy Lamarr in The Heavenly Body – gown by Irene. Read more.

In the early days there was Dick Jones, and he seems to have been something of a buttress and a Svengali for her as well as the love of her life. They really do seem to have shared a dream. It’s probably no coincidence that reports of Irene hitting the bottle begin to emerge in the early-1930s – soon after his death. The problem got worse and worse as time went by.

Irene’s motives for marrying Eliot may have been praiseworthy but they proved to be a poor foundation for marriage. Around the time of her engagement, she told friends “I felt a need to take care of him.” Then, a year after their wedding, she had a skiing accident, which caused a miscarriage. She was devastated and never forgave herself.

On the other side of the marriage bed, it’s quite likely that Eliot – also an alcoholic – felt outclassed and overshadowed by his brother. World War II might have provided a distraction for him, but within a month of his return rumours began to circulate that he was going out with other women. Shortly before Irene’s suicide, he suffered a stroke (from which he recovered).

If by that time Irene Lentz had fallen out of love with her husband, she had fallen into love with Gary Cooper, according to her friend Doris Day. In her biography, Doris Day: Her Own Story, she remembers:

Irene designed the clothes for several of my pictures so I got to know her very well. She was a nervous woman, introverted, quite unhappy, and at times she drank more than was good for her. She had an unhappy marriage to a man who lived out of the state and only occasionally came to visit her. One time, toward the end of a long evening, when she had been drinking quite a bit, she confided in me that the love of her life was Gary Cooper. Irene was a very attractive woman, a lovely face, and when she talked about Cooper her face glowed. She said he was the only man she had ever truly loved. There was such a poignancy in the way she said it. It really broke my heart.

After that, she several times confided in me about Cooper. I got the impression that she had never mentioned him to anyone before me, and she was so happy to declare her love for him. Thinking about it now, I cannot honestly say whether Irene’s love was one-sided or whether she and Cooper had actually had or were having an affair. But the way she loved him touched jealousy in me, for I had never loved a man with that much intensity.

Cooper had died the year before Irene’s suicide.

Want to know more about Irene Lentz?

If you’re serious about Irene Lentz, you have to get hold of Frank Billecci and Lauranne Fisher’s Irene – A Designer from the Golden Age of Hollywood: The MGM Years 1942-49. Although it’s mostly about her years at MGM, it contains a well-researched chapter on her life up to that point. It has been the main source for much of this piece.

Online sources I have consulted include:

  • Various articles at Newspapers.com
  • Various articles by Mary Hall at The Recessionista
  • California Couture: Irene at Bullocks-Wilshire by Mary Hall for HuffPost
  • Irene Lentz by Hollis Jenkins-Evans for Vintage Fashion Guild
  • The Chic Life and Tragic Death of a Revered Costume Designer by Elizabeth Snead for The Hollywood Reporter
  • A sequel for Irene Lentz fashion line by Vincent Boucher for the Los Angeles Times.

Other topics you may be interested in…

Andrea Johnson, John Robert Powers model.
Andrea Johnson – forgotten supermodel of the 1940s
The Fashion Flight – California comes to Paris
Wilhelmina modelling a chiffon evening dress
Wilhelmina – glamour and tragedy

Filed Under: Behind the scenes, Crew, Fashion Tagged With: Cedric Gibbons, Dolores del Rio, Eliot Gibbons, Irene, Irene Gibbons, Irene Lentz, The Postman Always Rings Twice

Monica Vitti – a sad childhood, a glittering career and a bitter old age

1966. Monica Vitti by Bert Stern.

In the early-1960s, director Michelangelo Antonioni made four revolutionary movies with actress Monica Vitti. All of them now have cult status on the arthouse circuit.

Much has been written about Antonioni’s films, but almost all of it takes the form of reviews and critical appraisals. It casts no light on his relationship with Monica Vitti. What’s clear nevertheless is that for him she was both muse and lover. In that sense their relationship is reminiscent of that of Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina, their counterparts in France.

And while there’s plenty of material available about Anna Karina, there seems to be almost nothing published in English about Monica Vitti. Searches of the Internet (beyond Wikipedia) and even the British Library prove pretty much fruitless. For the time being at least, she remains for the most part something of a beautiful enigma – unless you can read Italian.

So what can we glean about her to provide a backdrop to the photos showcased here? Well, she was a superbly versatile actress, equally adept at playing the angst-ridden roles in which Antonioni cast her and turning her hand to comedy. Let’s take a look at her through the lens of her career.

Monica Vitti grows up and becomes an actress

Born in Rome in 1931 and christened Maria Luisa Ceciarelli, she has an unhappy childhood, her attention-seeking belittled by her family, her relationship with her mother strained. As the only daughter, she feels she’s treated very differently from her brothers: “I had very strict parents. My two brothers were power and freedom. I was powerlessness and seclusion.” Her experiences as a child will mark her for life – she will never want to have a family and will be wary of marriage.

She makes her stage debut age 14 and acting becomes a form of escapism:

When at fourteen-and-a-half I had almost decided I had had enough of life, I realized that I could act, carry on just pretending to be someone else, and making people laugh as much as possible on the stage and screen; in life it was much more difficult.

Enlarge
Monica Vitti relaxes on a sofa with a magazine

Monica Vitti relaxes

Around 1963. Monica Vitti relaxes on a sofa with a magazine. On the back of the photo is an Italy's News Photos agency stamp.

Enlarge
Monica Vitti with Dirk Bogarde

Monica Vitti with Dirk Bogarde

1966. Monica Vitti with Dirk Bogarde, her co-star in Modesty Blaise. This photo probably taken at the movie's premiere. On the back of the photo is an International Magazine Service agency stamp.

Enlarge
Monica Vitti with Carlo Ponti and Vanessa Redgrave in Cannes

Monica Vitti with Carlo Ponti and Vanessa Redgrave in Cannes

1967. Monica Vitti with Carlo Ponti and Vanessa Redgrave at the Cannes Film Festival for the screening of Blow-Up. A caption on the back of the photo reads:

A 10 414/24
XXè FESTIVAL INTERNATIONAL DU FILM A CANNES
LA GRANDE-BRETAGNE A PRESENTE, AU FESTIVAL DE CANNES, UN FILM DU CELEBRE METEUR EN SCENE ITALIEN MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI...

Enlarge
Monica Vitti in Beate Loro

Monica Vitti in Beate Loro

1975. Monica Vitti in Beate Loro (Lucky Them). A caption on the back of the photo reads:

“Lucky them!!!” (Beate Loro) is the title of the film that Claudia CARDINALE and Monica VITTI are filming, for the first time, together. In the romance of Don Quixote now, Monica Vitti is a modern Don Quixote with a ‘Honda’ and Claudia...

When Monica is 18 years old, her family – brothers as well as parents – emigrates to the US. She stays behind and at some point soon after graduating from Rome’s National Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1953, she assumes the stage name Monica Vitti (her mother’s birth name was Vittiglia). Her early career is unremarkable. She tours Germany with an Italian acting troupe and has a role in a stage production of Niccolò Machiavelli’s La Mandragola in Rome. For a few years she’s a struggling actress, combining theatre work with appearances in a miscellany of made-for-TV movies and series.

Around 1962. Michelangelo Antonioni adjusts Monica Vitti’s costume. Photo by Claude Schwartz.

Monica collaborates with Michelangelo Antonioni

Then, in 1957, Michelangelo Antonioni sees her in a Feydeau farce and invites her to dub the voice of reporter Dorian Gray in his forthcoming film Il Grido (The Cry). One day, working in the dubbing studio, Monica is unaware that he has come in and is standing behind her, watching her. After a while, he says, “You have a beautiful neck. You could be in the movies.” Turning point in her life.

His background and situation are very different from hers. He has fond memories of his childhood and is on his way to establishing himself as a film director, having started out writing screenplays and making documentaries. He is intellectual, aloof, meticulous.

Both Michelangelo and Monica are passionate about their work and fall for each other, professionally and personally. Their first collaboration takes two years to come to fruition and produces L’avventura. According to Monica, “Nobody wanted to take a chance on it and on me, an unknown.” The night that it is shown at the 1960 Cannes International Film Festival turns out to be the inflexion point for both their careers. Its screening provokes boos, whistles and catcalls. But the following morning the tables are turned. A group of highly regarded filmmakers and critics, led by Roberto Rossellini, issue a strongly worded statement:

Aware of the exceptional importance of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, “L’Avventura,” and appalled by the displays of hostility it has aroused, the undersigned critics and members of the profession are anxious to express their admiration for the maker of this film.

L’Avventura goes on to win the Festival’s Special Jury Prize. The following year, in a poll for British film magazine Sight and Sound, 70 critics from around the world nominate it as the second-greatest film ever made, after Citizen Kane. For her performance, Monica Vitti wins the Golden Globe Award for Best Breakthrough Actress in 1961.

Enlarge
Monica Vitti looks at herself in the mirror

Monica Vitti looks at herself in the mirror

Around 1963. According to Fiorella Mannoia, a stand-in for her in various films, Monica Vitti had an incredible charisma. She could arrive on the set disheveled and without make-up, and pass almost unnoticed. But when she returned having made up and combed her hair, everyone just stopped for a moment. Photo by Angelo Frontoni.

Enlarge
Monica Vitti arranges her hair

Monica Vitti arranges her hair

Around 1963. Monica Vitti photographed by Angelo Frontoni.

Enlarge
Monica Vitti with backlit hair

Monica Vitti with backlit hair

Around 1962.Monica Vitti photographed by Angelo Frontoni. Although the photographer's stamp is on the back of this photo, another apparently from the same shoot is published in The Guardian, where it is captioned as "Monica Vitti in L'eclisse" and attributed to Sergio Strizzi.

Enlarge
Monica Vitti has a think

Monica Vitti has a think

Around 1962. Monica Viti sits pensively in a rattan peacock chair. On the back of the photo is a Roma's Press agency stamp.

Enlarge
Monica Vitti pouts for the camera

Monica Vitti pouts for the camera

Around 1963. Monica Vitti photographed by Angelo Frontoni.

Enlarge
Monica Vitti looks at herself in the mirror

Monica Vitti looks at herself in the mirror

Around 1963. Monica Vitti photographed by Angelo Frontoni.

Enlarge
Monica Vitti pouts for the camera

Monica Vitti pouts for the camera

1962. Monica Vitti looks like she's enjoying posing for the camera. According to Fiorella Mannoia, a stand-in for her in various films, "Monica wanted control over all her photos, she was very careful about how it was shot, the lights. She always told me, "When you present your profile, do so like this…" She taught me a lot. On the back of the photo are Agence Dalmas and International Magazine Service agency stamps.

Enlarge
Monica Vitti relaxes

Monica Vitti relaxes

1962. Monica Vitti relaxes with a magazine. On the back of the photo are Agence Dalmas and International Magazine Service agency stamps.

So what’s all the fuss about? L’avventura is arguably Antonioni’s first masterpiece. He’s utterly uncompromising in the way he throws down the gauntlet to his audience: no real narrative, minimal tension, almost glacial tempo, desolate landscapes – both physical and emotional. His characters are wrapped up in themselves, incapable of forming relationships, dying of ennui rather than living their lives. It’s an extended meditation on the malaise of privileged contemporary society and the pointlessness of some people’s lives.

It could be dire but it’s not – at least not to the afficionados of the art house cinemas, who relish its sheer audaciousness as well as the wonderful acting, sets and cinematography. At the centre of L’avventura is Monica Vitti. Often she’s sphinx-like, challenging us to make out what’s going through her mind, how she’s feeling. But she can also be mercurial – from time to time emotions flit across her face as her mood lightens and darkens. It’s a mesmerizing performance, bang in line with what Antonioni is looking for:

What happens to the characters in my films is not important. I could have them do one thing, or another thing. People think that the events in a film are what the film is about. Not true. A film is about the characters, about changes going on inside them. The experiences they have during the course of the film are simply things that “happen to happen” to characters who do not begin and end when the film does.

Enlarge
Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Vitti in Venice

Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Vitti in Venice

1964. Posing alongside Antonioni on a boat on the Grand Canal, Monica Vitti seems to be feeling an autumn chill...

Read more
Enlarge
Monica Vitti and Rossana Rory in L'eclisse

Monica Vitti and Rossana Rory in L’eclisse

1962. Vittoria (Monica Vitti), whose relationship with her boyfriend Riccardo (Francisco Rabal) is on the rocks, visits her neighbour Anita...

Read more
Enlarge
Monica Vitti in Il deserto rosso

Monica Vitti in Il deserto rosso

1964. Il deserto rosso is set against a forbidding industrial landscape around Ravenna. Monica Vitti plays the part of Giuliana,...

Read more
Enlarge
Monica Vitti in Il deserto rosso

Monica Vitti in Il deserto rosso

1964. Il deserto rosso is Michelangelo Antonioni's first colour film, so too bad this shot is in black and white....

Read more
Enlarge
Monica Vitti and Michelangelo Antonioni outside the Excelsior Hotel, Venice

Monica Vitti and Michelangelo Antonioni outside the Excelsior Hotel, Venice

1962. Monica Vitti and Michelangelo Antonioni descend the steps in front of the Excelsior Hotel in Venice. A caption on...

Read more
Enlarge
Monica Vitti with Michelangelo Antonioni at the Venice Biennale

Monica Vitti with Michelangelo Antonioni at the Venice Biennale

1962. A caption on the back of the photo reads:

VENICE SEPTEMBER 1962
ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
...

Read more
Enlarge
Monica Vitti filming a scene for L'eclisse

Monica Vitti filming a scene for L’eclisse

1962. A caption on the back of the photo reads:

ROME/ Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni (l’Avventura – La...

Read more
Enlarge
Monica Vitti with Michelangelo Antonioni at the 1964 Venice International Film Festival

Monica Vitti with Michelangelo Antonioni at the 1964 Venice International Film Festival

1964. Michelangelo Antonioni holds the Golden Lion award he has received for his latest film, Il deserto rosso (Red Desert)....

Read more

L’avventura is the film that puts Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Vitti in the international limelight. It is the first of four they make together over the space of just a few years. The others are La notte (1961), L’eclisse (1962) and Il deserto rosso (1964) – all absolute classics.

With her earnings from L’avventura, Monica buys an apartment in Rome. Michelangelo moves into the apartment directly above hers, with an inside staircase connecting the two flats. Like Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard, Monica Vitti and Michelangelo Antonioni are also lovers – their affair lasts a decade before the couple part ways. But before that, Monica does a complete U-turn with her career.

Monica turns to comedy… and tragedy

As Monica Vitti’s fame as an actress grows, offers come rolling in. She’s not interested in going to Hollywood but she’s afraid of getting typecast. So in the mid-1960s she switches from Antonioni’s angst-ridden arthouse films to comedy. In her own words (translated):

I realized I had a talent for comedy when I recited tragic roles in a way that made my friends at the Academy laugh. I understood only later what an extraordinary gift it was.

Enlarge
Monica Vitti on location

Monica Vitti on location

1966. Monica Vitti on location to film Fai in fretta ad uccidermi... ho freddo! (Kill Me Quick, I'm Cold). A...

Read more
Enlarge
Monica Vitti on location

Monica Vitti on location

1966. Monica Vitti on location to film Fai in fretta ad uccidermi... ho freddo! (Kill Me Quick, I'm Cold). A...

Read more
Enlarge
Monica Vitti on location

Monica Vitti on location

1966. Monica Vitti on location to film Fai in fretta ad uccidermi... ho freddo! (Kill Me Quick, I'm Cold). A...

Read more
Enlarge
Monica Vitti on location

Monica Vitti on location

1966. Monica Vitti on location to film Fai in fretta ad uccidermi... ho freddo! (Kill Me Quick, I'm Cold). A...

Read more
Enlarge
Monica Vitti as Sabina in Le Fate

Monica Vitti as Sabina in Le Fate

1966. Monica Vitti as Sabina in Le Fate, which was released in the US as Sex Quartet. Her co-stars include...

Read more
Enlarge
Monica Vitti relaxes on the beach

Monica Vitti relaxes on the beach

1967. Monica Vitti relaxes on the beach in a break from location shooting for La cintura di castità (The Chastity...

Read more
Enlarge
Monica Vitti as Boccadoro in La cintura di castità

Monica Vitti as Boccadoro in La cintura di castità

1967. Monica Vitti as the beautiful Boccadoro in La cintura di castità (The Chastity Belt). An example of the sex...

Read more
Enlarge
Monica Vitti as Boccadoro in La cintura di castità

Monica Vitti as Boccadoro in La cintura di castità

1967. Monica Vitti plays the beautiful Boccadoro, daughter of a game warden and lusted over by the uncouth and misogynistic...

Read more

In 1960s Italy, commedia all’italiana is all the rage. It’s a movie genre that combines straightforward comedy with biting social satire – Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style, 1961) is an early example. Monica is the first woman to establish herself in this genre, which up to now has been dominated by men. Two of her big successes are in La ragazza con la pistola (The Girl with a Pistol, 1968) and Dramma della gelosia: tutti i particolari in cronaca (The Pizza Triangle, 1970).

Enlarge
Monica Vitti as Modesty Blaise

Monica Vitti as Modesty Blaise

1966. Loosely based on a comic strip and directed by Joseph Losey and characterized by Variety magazine as “one of...

Read more
Enlarge
Monica Vitti looks in the mirror

Monica Vitti looks in the mirror

1966. Monica Vitti looks at herself in a make-up mirror in this publicity shot for Fai in fretta ad uccidermi......

Read more
Enlarge
Monica Vitti on the set of Château en Suède

Monica Vitti on the set of Château en Suède

1963. Château en Suède is directed by Roger Vadim and released in the US as Nutty, Naughty Chateau – classy....

Read more
Enlarge
Monica Vitti on set for La ragazza con la pistola

Monica Vitti on set for La ragazza con la pistola

1968. Monica Vitti on set for La ragazza con la pistola (The Girl with a Pistol). A caption on the...

Read more
Enlarge
Monica Vitti as Modesty Blaise

Monica Vitti as Modesty Blaise

1966. The film's plot in a nutshell… Modesty Blaise is summoned by the British government in a plot to deliver...

Read more
Enlarge
Monica Vitti as Modesty Blaise

Monica Vitti as Modesty Blaise

1966. With its op art sets, music by Johnny Dankworth and throw-away attitude, Modesty Blaise is a perfect period piece...

Read more
Enlarge
Monica Vitti as Modesty Blaise

Monica Vitti as Modesty Blaise

1966. Modesty Blaise is nothing like the runaway box-office success its producers hope it will be on its release. Not...

Read more
Enlarge
Monica Vitti as Modesty Blaise

Monica Vitti as Modesty Blaise

1966. Unlike her male counterparts in other spy thrillers of the time such as James Bond, Modesty Blaise is an...

Read more

During the remainder of the 1960s and through the 1970s she also works with a number of international film directors including Luis Buñuel – Le Fantôme de la Liberté (The Phantom of Liberty, 1974). But outside of Italy and of the arthouse circuit, she’s probably best remembered as the eponymous heroine of Modesty Blaise (1966), in which the criminal-mastermind-turned-secret-agent she plays is the antithesis of the characters she assumed for Antonioni.

In the 1980s she makes a few more films, including a last one with Antonioni, before returning to the theatre both as actress and teacher. She also has an unsuccessful go at writing and directing as her career gradually winds down. In 1995 she marries Roberto Russo, with whom she has been living for ten years, and soon after that she is diagnosed as suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease.

Monica Vitti died on 2 February 2022.

Show more
l'avventura

1. Monica Vitti talks about L’avventura

More specifically, she talks about the hostile reception the film received the night of its premiere at the 1960 Cannes International Film Festival… and the unexpected critical support it garnered the following day.

Show more
il deserto rosso

2. Il deserto rosso

A news clip of Michelangelo Antonioni at the 1964 Venice International Film Festival followed by a trailer for Il deserto rosso.

Show more
modesty blaise

3. Modesty Blaise

A trailer for the zany, spoof-secret-agent comedy thriller – a rare opportunity to see Monica Vitti in an English-language film.

Show more
comedy vitti style

4. Comedy Vitti Style

An audiovisual essay by Pasquale Lannone including clips from seven Monica Vitti movie comedies. An accompanying note is available online.

Want to know more about Monica Vitti?

If you can get hold of a copy, The Continental Actress – European Film Stars of the Postwar Era by Kerry Segrave and Linda Martin has a brief chapter on Monica Vitti.

Online, as well as Wikipedia there are a few articles worth reading:

  • Monica Vitti compie 85 anni, ecco i dieci motivi per amare quest’attrice unica by Arianna Finos for la Reppublica.
  • Monica Vitti compie 87 anni, ma lei non può festeggiare: ultime notizie at Virgilio.
  • L’eclisse: Antonioni and Vitti by Gilberto Perez for The Criterion Collection.
  • Monica Vitti – Icon, Diva, Comedian! at arsenal.
  • Monica Vitti Alian Elkann interview.
  • A Note on Comedy Vitti Style (2015) by Pasquale Iannone at Necsus.

Russian Information Network promises much but doesn’t seem reliable.

Other topics you may be interested in…

Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard
Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard – fiction and friction
Claudia Cardinale – up for a challenge
The paparazzi – shock horror birth of a monster
Yvonne Furneaux as Emma in La Dolce Vita
Yvonne Furneaux – glamorous English export

Filed Under: Crew, Films, Stars Tagged With: Cannes International Film Festival, commedia all’italiana, Il deserto rosso, L’avventura, La notte, Michelangelo Antonioni, Modesty Blaise, Monica Vitti

Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard – fiction and friction

Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard are one of the most celebrated couples of the early-1960s. Their relationship lit up the screen in a succession of stylish and influential films that helped define French New-Wave cinema.

No sooner had they discovered that they couldn’t live without each other, than they found that living with each other was almost impossible too. The relationship was a dream – a dream that couldn’t survive the realities of day-to-day life for more than a few years. In the end, the cinematic chemistry just couldn’t compensate for Jean-Luc Godard’s and Anna Karina’s fundamental incompatibility.

Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard
Around 1963. Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina contemplate her new shoes.

Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard – a tale of two childhoods

Jean-Luc, one of four children, is born in 1930 into a prosperous and cultured French family. He grows up in Switzerland and later describes his childhood as being like “a kind of paradise.” Age 16, he goes to Paris to study for his baccalauréat with a view to going to engineering school. But he gets distracted initially and then obsessed by films. Although three years later he manages to get a place at the Sorbonne, he drops out and ends up spending most of his time at the cinema with his mates, who include future directors François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette.

Age 19, J-L is in his element, writing complex articles about the nature of cinema and reviews of films and helping Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette with their first short films. For a year or two, he lives a bohemian life in and around Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the place to be for intellectuals, artists and singers in post-World War II Paris. He’s quite prepared to do what it takes to pursue his obsession. To avoid conscription, he claims Swiss nationality and to raise money he steals from his grandfather and from his employers.

For most of the 1950s, J-L works in a variety of roles in and around the film industry. Then, François Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows) triumphs at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival and puts French New Wave cinema on the map. The stars are aligning to enable J-L to make his first and breakthrough feature film – À Bout de Souffle (Breathless).

Show more
French new-wave cinema

1. Jean-Luc Godard and French new-wave cinema

In the early days of French new-wave cinema, Jean-Luc Godard creates a unique film aesthetic and transforms his leading ladies into fashion icons. This short M2M video outlines how he establishes this je ne sais quoi attitude and style.
Show more
The mesmerizing Anna Karina

2. Anna Karina’s guide to being mesmerising

This BFI video uses clips from Jean-Luc Godard's films Bande à Part and Vivre Sa Vie to illustrate why Anna Karina becomes such an iconic figure of the early-1960s.
Show more
Interview with Anna Karina

3. An Interview with Anna Karina

Anna Karina comes across as very young and fetchingly shy in this 1962 interview for the French TV programme Cinépanorama. Her modesty and charm are in marked contrast with the interviewer's overly aggressive interjections.

J-L’s approach is nothing if not unorthodox. As his cinematographer, he hires Raoul Coutard, originally personal stills photographer for General de Castries, commander of the French forces around Dien Bien Phu when they were defeated by the Viet Minh in 1954, and a documentary cameraman for the French army’s information service in Indochina. J-L favours a hand-held camera and a minimum of artificial lighting. He writes the dialogue day by day rather than working from the original screenplay. And when it comes to editing, he makes extensive use of jump cuts.

The critics love À Bout de Souffle and so do audiences. The film makes about 50 times its original investment in profits and, thanks in no small part to the publicity campaign he’s orchestrated, much of the attention is focused on J-L himself.

Anna Karina by the Seine
1960. Anna Karina poses by the Seine.

One of the actresses J-L interviews for a part in À Bout de Souffle is Anna Karina. Up to this point, her story could scarcely be more different from his.

Born in Denmark in 1940, Anna Karina has a turbulent childhood – one that could hardly be less like “a kind of paradise.” While she’s still a baby, her father leaves her mother, and her mother leaves little Anna with her grandparents. From age four, she’s in and out of foster homes until, age eight, she moves back to live with her mother and stepfather, who’s now on the scene. Feeling unloved and unwanted, Anna tries time and again to run away, plays truant and leaves school age 14. She finds work as a lift operator, an illustrator’s assistant, as a film extra – she wants to be an actress – but she’s drifting. Then, one evening in 1958, she has a row with her stepfather, he beats her up and that’s it. She ups sticks and heads for Paris with the equivalent of US $15 in her pocket.

There, she lives on the streets until a priest helps her find a room just behind the Bastille. Of course, she finds herself wandering around Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where she’s spotted by photographer Catherine Harlé who is setting up a modelling agency. It’s not long before Anna establishes herself as a top advertising model. She’s on her way and she’s learning to speak French by hanging out at the cinema.

Two shoots help to shape her future. At one she meets Coco Chanel, who tells her she has no chance of breaking into acting so long as she goes by her birth name of Hanna Karin Bayer and rechristens her Anna Karina. The second fateful shoot is for a TV ad for Palmolive soap, which has her in a bath up to her neck in soapsuds. It is here that J-L first comes across her. He makes contact with a view to offering her a part in À Bout de Souffle.

A series of misunderstandings

So why does Anna Karina not appear in À Bout de Souffle? Well, J-L is a geek, all wrapped up in himself. Jean Seberg, the film’s female lead, describes the impression he made on her at their first meeting – “an incredibly introverted, messy-looking young man with glasses,” who didn’t look her in the eye when she talked. When Anna arrives to meet him, he’s again wearing his trademark dark glasses.

With little ado, he tells her she’s got the job, adding offhandedly, “Mind you, you’ll have to take your clothes off.” Anna is outraged. J-L, taken aback, mentions the Palmolive ad. She retorts that underneath the soapsuds she was fully clothed and she doesn’t do nude work. At which point she flounces out.

Enlarge
Anna Karina by Giancarlo Botti

Anna Karina

1965. A portrait of Anna Karina. Photo by Giancarlo Botti.

Enlarge
Anna Karina in Alphaville

Anna Karina

1965. Anna Karina in Alphaville.

Enlarge
Anna Karina by Philippe Le Tellier

Anna Karina

1967. A portrait of Anna Karina. An International Magazine Service stamp on the back reveals that the agency received this print on 11 September 1967. Photo by Philippe Le Tellier.

Not to be deterred, a few months later J-L asks Anna to come back to audition for nothing less than the principal female role in his next film, Le Petit Soldat. Urged on by her friends and impressed by encouraging press reports about À Bout de Souffle, she goes to see J-L a second time. Once again, he does little to put her at her ease or show that he’s taking her seriously. He just looks her up and down and tells her: “Okay, you got the part. You can come and sign the contract tomorrow.” That proves impossible because legally Anna is still a minor. So she has to persuade her mother, with whom she hadn’t been in contact for a year, to sign the contract on her behalf.

Then there’s the advert J-L placed in a trade paper before giving Anna her role.

Jean-Luc Godard who has just finished “Breathless” and who is in pre-production of “Le Petit Soldat” is looking for a young woman between 18 and 27 who will be both his actress (interprète) and his friend (amie).

The first Anna Karina knows of this is when she reads in France Soir, one of the country’s most popular daily newspapers, that Jean-Luc Godard has found his “amie” for his next film. She jumps to the conclusion that “amie” means “girlfriend,” with the implication that she’s slept her way to the role she’s been given. She calls the producer’s office and says she’s pulling out and they can find someone else for the part. It takes J-L, knocking on her front door with 50 red roses and an assurance that she’s misinterpreted the ad, to get her back on side.

Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard
Around 1960. Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard in love.

Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard get together

It’s spring 1960. In the middle of filming Le Petit Soldat in and around Geneva, there’s a dinner in Lausanne for the whole crew. At the head of the table is Anna’s current boyfriend, flanked by J-L and Anna. Halfway through the meal, J-L passes her a note under the table before getting up to go. It says: “I love you. Rendez-vous at the Café de la Paix at midnight.” Her boyfriend snatches it from her hand, reads it and pleads with her to stay with him. But his pleas fall on deaf ears. When she arrives at the café…

He was sitting there reading a paper, and I was standing in front of him waiting. And I thought it was for hours. Of course it was maybe for three minutes or two minutes. And then suddenly he said, “Oh here you are. Let’s go.”

Game on. When they return to Paris, she moves in with him and they enjoy exploring Paris by night, going to the movies and seeing friends. But it’s not long before cracks in their relationship begin to appear.

A match made in hell

Their backgrounds, personalities and motivations are poles apart. In his professional life, J-L is full of self-confidence. He’s an intellectual and, in his chosen field an uncompromising revolutionary, reclusive by nature and wedded to his work, which leaves little space for Anna. But his desire for Anna to give up acting and his jealousy when she wants to work with other directors suggest that he’s insecure in his private life.

She, on the other hand, is desperate for love, warmth and reassurance in the wake of her unhappy childhood and the father she never knew. She needs someone to pay attention to her, to help her fight the loneliness with which she’s had to struggle. It’s bad enough to be with someone whose mind is elsewhere much of the time he’s with her. Being left at home while he’s away at work is nothing less than a torment.

Anna Karina with Jean-Claude Brialy and Jean-Paul Belmondo in Une Femme Est Une Femme
1961. Anna Karina with Jean-Claude Brialy (left) and Jean-Paul Belmondo in Une Femme Est Une Femme.

Meanwhile, J-L uses his films to work through his emotional responses to what’s going on between himself and Anna. He originally conceived Une Femme Est Une Femme (1961) as a frothy comedy but ends up adding an autobiographical element to the story and using it as a vehicle to explore aspects of his relationship. Jean-Claude Brialy, who stars opposite Anna Karina in the film, later recounts how: “They tore each other apart, argued, loved each other, hated each other, screamed at each other.”

When Anna gets pregnant, J-L insists on marrying her. Perhaps it suits them both: it gives him more control over her, and her the security she craves. For a time, they go out together with friends but J-L is ill at ease and taciturn in company. Desperate to get back to work, he disappears off the scene.

I could never understand his behaviour. He would say he was going out for cigarettes and then come back three weeks later. And at that time, as a woman, you didn’t have any chequebooks, you didn’t have any money. So he was off seeing Ingmar Bergman in Sweden or William Faulkner in America. And I was sitting around the apartment without any food.

It gets worse. One night, J-L gets home to find Anna has had a miscarriage. She’s covered in blood and freaking out. She’s in such a bad way that she needs not just to go to hospital but to stay there for a while. When she comes home to recuperate, J-L can’t cope and gets some friends to look after her while he goes off for his work.

When he gets back he feels guilty and rents a villa in the south of France so that he and Anna can spend some quiet time together. But on the way, he loses his resolve, turns the car around and tells his wife it’s impossible – he needs to return to his work.

In autumn 1961 while filming Le Soleil Dans L’Oeil (Sun in Your Eyes), Anna has an affair with the film’s director, Jacques Bourdon. When she tells J-L she wants to leave him, he trashes their apartment and she takes a drug overdose. Once again, she’s hospitalized. But in January 1962 the couple are back together again, thanks not least to the prospect of collaborating on J-L’s next film, Vivre Sa Vie (My Life to Live).

Enlarge
Jean-Luc Godard with Brigitte Bardot

Jean-Luc Godard with Brigitte Bardot

1963. Jean-Luc Godard and Brigitte Bardot on the set of Le Mépris. Photo by Shahrokh Hatami.

Enlarge
Jean-Luc Godard with Brigitte Bardot

Jean-Luc Godard in conversation with Brigitte Bardot

1963. Jean-Luc Godard discusses a scene with Brigitte Bardot on the set of Le Mépris. Silhouetted in the foreground, co-star Michel Piccoli has a drink.

Enlarge
Jean-Luc Godard with Brigitte Bardot

Jean-Luc Godard with Brigitte Bardot

1963. Jean-Luc Godard prepares to shoot a scene for Le Mépris with Brigitte Bardot. A caption on the back of the photo reads:

À Rome Brigitte Bardot a commencé le tournage du film “Le Mépris" d’après l’ouvrage d’Alberto Moravia, sous la direction de Jean-Luc Godard.
24/04/63 821 Deb Ag. Dalmas

For a time after that, Anna and J-L work apart from each other on different films – she with Jacques Rivette on a stage production of La Religieuse (The Nun) and, in Spain, with Pierre Gaspard-Huit on Shéhérazade, he on Les Carabiniers (The Soldiers) and, with Brigitte Bardot in Rome, on Le Mépris (Contempt).

At weekends, they often meet up in Paris and Rome. One night at a nightclub, someone asks Anna for a dance. When she gets back, J-L slaps her face in front of their friends and bystanders. Instead of reacting with anger, she sees this as proof that her husband still loves her – a telling indication of both her state of mind and the state of their relationship.

Late in 1963 the couple separate again, and once again J-L uses a new film as a way of getting back together. There’s a pattern here. The film in this case is Bande à Part (Band of Outsiders). But while he’s off working on pre-production, Anna tries to commit suicide again. She’s rescued by their decorator when he returns to retrieve his keys, which he forgot to take with him when he left for the evening. J-L’s response is to send her to a mental hospital. When she’s cleared to leave, he collects her and tells her that shooting will start in three days’ time. The movie proves to be a lifeline:

I had come out of hospital. It was a painful moment. I had lost the taste for life at that time. In the meantime I had lost weight, I wasn’t doing well, neither in my head nor in my body. It’s true: the film saved my life. I had no more desire to live. I was doing very, very badly. This film saved my life.

Enlarge
Eddie Constantine, Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina

Eddie Constantine, Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina

1965. Jean-Luc Godard, flanked by Eddie Constantine and Anna Karina, consults the script of Alphaville.

Enlarge
Eddie Constantine and Anna Karina prepare to shoot a scene for Alphaville

Eddie Constantine and Anna Karina prepare to shoot a scene for Alphaville

1965. An assistant's arm stretches out holding a mirror as Eddie Constantine and Anna Karina prepare to shoot a scene for Alphaville. Another assistant attends to her dress.

Enlarge
Anna Karina with Eddie Constantine in Alphaville

Anna Karina with Eddie Constantine in Alphaville

1965. Eddie Constantine is an almost ghost-like presence in the background as the spotlight falls on Anna Karina in Alphaville.

It also effects the reconciliation J-L is seeking. But not for long. Anna’s next two movies are Jean Aurel’s De L’Amour (All About Love) and Maurice Ronet’s Le Voleur de Tibidabo (The Thief of Tibidabo). While filming the latter, Anna has an affair with her director/co-star, she separates from J-L and the couple file for divorce. In spite of which, they agree to collaborate on his next film, Alphaville. Once again, J-L’s preoccupations with his relationship percolate through, with Eddie Constantine’s character trying to teach Anna’s character to say the words “I love you.”

Anna Karina in Pierrot le Fou
1965. Anna Karina in Pierrot le Fou

Next up for the ex-couple is Pierrot le Fou (Pierrot the Madman), in which J-L casts Anna as an unscrupulous floozy who cajoles her now-married ex-lover into eloping with her, leading him on to his ultimate destruction. Based on the plot synopsis, you would imagine that by this time there’s no love lost between the couple. And you’d be absolutely right. Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna’s co-star, describes them as “like a cobra and a mongoose, always glaring at each other.” Their last feature film is Made in U.S.A., J-L yet again unable to help himself referencing his relationship with Anna in the film and being mean to her on set. And that’s it for Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina – after seven and a half years, the curtain comes down on both their personal and their professional relationships.

Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard go their own ways

Both Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina go on to forge remarkable careers. His place in movie history is assured. John Patterson, writing in The Guardian, puts it like this:

Godard is as revolutionary and influential a hinge-figure in cinema as Joyce was to literature and the cubists were to painting. He saw a rule and broke it. Every day, in every movie. Incorporating what professionals thought of as mistakes (jump-cuts were only the most famous instance), mixing high culture and low without snobbish distinctions, demolishing the fourth wall between viewing himself as a maker of fictional documentaries, essay movies, and viewing his movies as an inseparable extension of his pioneering work as a film critic for Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s.

Anna Karina continues to work in the movie business, both as an actress and, on a couple of occasions, as a director. She also has a career as a singer, collaborating with Serge Gainsbourg on a couple of hit songs, Sous le Soleil Exactement and Roller Girl. And she writes several novels.

Enlarge
Anna Karina filming Luchino Visconti's The Stranger

Anna Karina

1967. Anna Karina filming Luchino Visconti's The Stranger. A caption on the back of the photo reads:

REPORTAGE No 64/67

“The Stranger”, internationally-acclaimed novel by Nobel Prize-winning French author Albert Camus, is at last being brought to the screen.

Directed by Luchino Visconti, it stars Marcello Mastroianni, Anna Karina and Bernard Blier.

Released world-wide by Paramount Pictures, it is being produced by Dino De Laurentis with Mastroianni’s Master Film and Algeria’s own newly-formed production company, Casbah Film.

Marcello Mastroianni and Anna Karina are photographed in a scene shot on a stretch of sand near Gaeta, about 80 miles south of Rome.

Photo by Emilio Lari for the Pierluigi Photographic Agency.

Enlarge
Anna Karina

Anna Karina

1968. Anna Karina in a floral dress. An International Magazine Service stamp on the back identifies the date this print was received by the agency was 2 August 1968.

Enlarge
Anna Karina

Anna Karina

1970. Anna Karina wearing a timepiece choker. An International Magazine Service stamp on the back identifies the date this print was received by the agency was 22 June 1970.

But their collaborations are what Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina are best remembered and celebrated for, with Filmmaker magazine describing their movies together as “arguably the most influential body of work in the history of cinema.” In an interview years later, Anna says: “He was and will remain the greatest love of my life.” As for J-L, his feelings for her remain inscrutable behind those dark glasses.

Anna Karina walks away
1966. Anna Karina walks away from a poster advertising Jacques Rivette’s film La Religieuse in which she plays the lead role.

Want to know more about Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard?

If you’re seriously interested, head right over to new wave film.com, which has extensive information on French new-wave cinema as well as Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina. For lots more photos, take a look at Rose’s Anna Karina fansite. IMDb has a comprehensive listing of Jean-Luc Godard’s and Anna Karina’s filmographies.

In her 70s, Anna Karina did a series of interviews with, among others, The Guardian , New York Times and Vogue (all 2016), and with CR (2018). Jean-Luc Godard has written so much about cinema it’s impossible to know where to start. You could take a look at Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews edited by David Sterritt. Or, for something a whole lot more digestible, Jean-Luc Godard: The Rolling Stone Interview (1969).

Other topics you may be interested in…

The paparazzi – shock horror birth of a monster
The sixties – sex, drugs, rock and roll and a whole lot more
Veruschka and Rubartelli – a fashion legend

Filed Under: Crew, Films, Stars Tagged With: À Bout de Souffle, Alphaville, Anna Karina, Bande à Part, Brigitte Bardot, Jean-Claude Brialy, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Paul Belmondo, La Religieuse, Le Mépris, Le Petit Soldat, Pierrot Le Fou, Une Femme Est Une Femme

Shooting for the stars – insights from four leading Hollywood cinematographers

Four leading cinematographers talk about their work and the stars they’ve filmed in this article published in the February 1941 issue of Modern Screen.

Here, then, in their own words are some revealing insights into how they see their work, observations of some of the stars they’ve filmed and revelations of tricks of the trade. And an opportunity to showcase a series of behind-the-scenes images of various cinematographers and crew at work.

Jack Cardiff
1950. Jack Cardiff, one of the great 20th century cinematographers, on the set of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.

But first a brief introduction to the cinematographers themselves:

  • Gregg Toland. Orson Welles once said that Gregg taught him everything he knew about the art of photography. Before filming Citizen Kane, Gregg spent a weekend giving him a crash course on lens and camera positions. Orson would never lose his admiration for Gregg, saying on many occasions, “Not only was he the greatest cameraman I ever worked with, he was also the fastest.” Gregg’s advice to aspiring cameramen was simple: “Forget the camera. The nature of the story determines the photographic style. Understand the story and make the most out of it. If the audience is conscious of tricks and effects, the cameraman’s genius, no matter how great it is, is wasted.”
  • James Wong Howe. In the 53 years he spent developing and perfecting his craft, “Jimmy” Howe was nominated for 16 Academy Awards and won two Oscars. In his ongoing quest for realism, he strove to make all his sources of light absolutely naturalistic and developed various filming techniques. For example, to get the audience as close as possible to John Garfield in a boxing scene in Body and Soul, he got up into the ring on roller skates and scooted about the fighters to capture the most evocative shots of their struggle.
  • Rudolph Maté. Rudy worked in Europe with Carl Theodor Dreyer on both The Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr before migrating to the US in 1934. During the 1940s he received five consecutive Academy Award nominations for Best Cinematography, the last of them for the Rita Hayworth vehicle, Cover Girl. He also worked with her on Gilda and (uncredited) The Lady from Shanghai. He went on to direct a series of movies including DOA.
  • Ernest Haller. Ernie is best known for his Oscar-winning work on Gone With The Wind (over the years he had six other Oscar nominations). He was admired within the industry for his expert location shooting and his ability to balance make-up and lighting to bring out actors’ best features. He shot 14 of Bette Davis’ movies and was her favourite lensman. During the 1930s and ’40s, he worked at Warner Bros. His later movies included Rebel Without a Cause and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Shooting for the Stars by William Roberts

They make fat stars thin and old stars young! Who? Those magnificent Merlins of Movietown – the unsung cameramen.

These fellows are pretty tough, believe me. They’re banded together in a secret organization called the ASC, and it’s not that they try to be secret but just that no one knows much about them outside of Hollywood. Movie stars dread them and, privately, call them super-assassins.

The leaders of the ASC have committed many drastic deeds. They have literally taken flesh off Myrna Loy’s legs. They have flattened Brenda Marshall’s nose. They have removed pieces of Madeleine Carroll’s cheeks They’ve reduced Priscilla Lane’s mouth, narrowed Zorina’s forehead and changed Vivien Leigh’s blue eyes to pure green. And for committing these atrocities they have been paid as much as $1,500 per week.

However, if truth will out, the secret organization referred to is actually a staid labor union, the American Society of Cinematographers. The members, merchants of mayhem, are the very expert and very well-paid cameramen of Movieland who, with thick ground glass and well-placed kliegs, have made ordinary faces beautiful and have converted terrible defects into gorgeous assets.

Enlarge
Ava Gardner filming Singapore

John Brahm and Maury Gertsman shoot a scene for Singapore

1947. Perched above a courtyard entrance, director John Brahm and cinematographer Maury Gertsman prepare to shoot a scene for Singapore. The writing on the clapperboard reads

SINGAPORE
1540
DIRECTOR BRAHM
CAMERA GERTSMAN
SET DRESSER EMERT
PROP MAN BLACKIE
SET NO. 10 SCENE 29

Enlarge
Rita Hayworth filming Affair in Trinidad

Rita Hayworth films a scene for Affair in Trinidad

1952. Cinematographers go flat out to get the right angle. Here the glamorous focus of attention is Rita Hayworth. A caption on the back of the photo reads:

RITA’S BACK – Rita Hayworth does a torrid dance in a night club scene on her first day before the cameras for Columbia’s “Affair in Trinidad,” a Beckworth Production in which she co-stars with Glenn Ford.

Photo by Irving Lippman.

Enlarge
Ann Sheridan and Sidney Hickox on the set of Silver River

Sidney Hickox chats with Ann Sheridan on the set of Silver River

1948. Cinematographer Sidney Hickox was brilliant at shooting gritty, moody crime films and melodramas for Warner Bros. His movies included three Lauren Bacall vehicles – To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946) and Dark Passage (1947). A caption on the back of the photo reads:

Ann Sheridan and cameraman Sid Hickox chat between scenes on the set of “SILVER RIVER,” Ann’s current picture with Errol Flynn for Warner Bros. Star is pictured here at the Warner Bros. ranch near Calabasas, California, where extensive exterior sets of Nevada’s sliver mining town were reproduced for the picture.

Enlarge
Grace Kelly at ease

Grace Kelly at ease

1956. Aspiring cinematographer Grace Kelly strikes a pose, as the caption on the back of the photo points out:

ACTRESS AT EASE....It’s Grace Kelly perched on the camera boom between scenes on the set of M-G-M’s “The Swan”.

If any one class of worker in Hollywood does not get credit where credit is due, if any one class of laborer is hidden behind the star-bright glare of publicity, obscure, unsung, unknown – it is the cinema cameraman.

“It’s this way with us,” Gregg Toland told me. “They’ve got us wrong, entirely wrong, everywhere. They think cameramen are low-grade mechanical morons, wearing overalls and stupid grins, existing on starvation wages and merely grinding 35 mm. toys. Well, maybe. Only we don’t like that impression. Maybe we are technicians. Nothing wrong with that. But sakes alive, man, tell ’em we’re creative artists, too!”

And so, I’m telling you. They’re creative artists, too. They’re makers and breakers of thespians and pictures. They’re the Merlins behind the movies.

Take that fellow Gregg Toland who just had the floor. A lean little man in brown clothes – cultured, brilliant and active. Twenty-one years ago he obtained a job during a summer vacation as an office boy at the old Fox Studios. The film stars on the lot didn’t impress him, but the intent cameramen, cranking their black-sheathed boxes, hypnotized him. He decided to skip school and become a photographer. The result? Well, the last I heard, he had prepared for canning such products as “The Grapes of Wrath,” “The Long Voyage Home” and “Citizen Kane.”

I talked with Toland in the comfortable study of his sprawling Benedict Canyon home. He downed a long beer with a practiced gulp and explained the qualifications and duties of the cameraman.

“A first-rate cameraman must realize,” said Toland, “that while some scenes of a film might be shot much, much better, much more artistically, those scenes are worth neither the extra time nor extra cash investment. The cameraman must have a strain of the economist in him, and get speed into his picture without sacrificing quality. After all, time becomes a paramount item when you realize that a single day on a certain picture may run to $22,000 in expenses!

Merle Oberon and Turham Bey filming Night in Paradise
1945. William H Greene, director of color photography, does a last-minute check on the set of Night in Paradise prior to filming a scene starring Merle Oberon and Turham Bey.

“As photographer on a major movie, my first job is to manage my camera crew. I have a special crew of seven men. All specialists. I take them with me wherever I go. There’s an operator and two assistants. There’s a grip, a gaffer or electrician, a standby painter and a microphone boy. But that’s only the beginning of my job. I must see that there is efficiency. Speed, again. And, with things as they are, I must practice economy by being artistic with one eye on the production budget. These days a cameraman is actually a producer, director, photographer, actor and electrician. The out-and-out old-fashioned photographer who just had to maneuver a camera is as extinct as the dodo bird.”

With two decades behind a Hollywood camera, I wondered just which particular feminine face Gregg Toland considered the best he had ever brought into focus.

His answer, like his personality and his pictures, was direct.

“Anna Sten,” he replied. “She was by far the most photogenic woman I ever shot. She didn’t have an insipid baby doll face, you know the type. She had a face full of good bones and character. Her cheeks caught the lights well, and her nose was so tilted as to place attractive shadows beneath. Frances Farmer was another face I enjoyed working on and, of course, if you want to go way back into ancient history, there was no one like the incomparable Gloria Swanson.

“On the other hand, an actress like Merle Oberon gives the photographer a good deal of work. Her countenance can only be photographed from certain angles. And as to clothes, her body requires that she wear either fluffy dresses or evening gowns to show her up to advantage. Jean Arthur, a dear friend of mine, won’t mind my mentioning that her face is also a lighting job, but, when it comes to attire, she is perfectly photogenic in anything from a cowboy costume to a bathing suit.

Ingrid Bergman filming a scene for Arch of Triumph
1946. Ingrid Bergman filming a scene for Arch of Triumph.

“Thinking back on personalities, I recall that I had difficulties with Ingrid Bergman when I worked on ‘Intermezzo.’ Ingrid is really two persons. Shoot her from one side and she’s breath-takingly beautiful. Shoot her from the other, and she’s average.”

Toland paused for punctuation, then smiled.

“Of course,” he said cheerfully, “I’d rather photograph girls like June Lang and Arleen Whelan with their pretty little faces, than any. Because they’re no work at all. You set your camera and your lights anywhere, and they still look cute. If I shot them constantly, though, I’d become far too lazy.”

Now he spoke of the stronger sex.

“The most photogenic male is Gary Cooper. But he looks best when he isn’t photographed well! Here’s what I mean. If he’s shot casually and naturally, without frills or fuss, he has plenty of femme appeal. He doesn’t have to be dolled up like the juvenile leads. If you don’t believe me, just take a gander at him in ‘The Westerner.’ He’s grand in it and without special lighting or any make-up.

“Henry Fonda is another I enjoy working with. He also doesn’t require makeup. And he’s so damn intelligent. Understands props, stage business, electricity. You know, Fonda’s main hobby is photography, and on ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ he spent half his time looking through my camera, which, of course, gave him a better understanding of what I was after.”

I inquired about Toland’s most recent and celebrated patient, Orson Welles.

Orson Welles directing Carl Frank and Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai
A caption on the back of the photo reads: MENACE .. This is the picture you won’t see on the screen. It shows Orson Welles, his usual mug of steaming coffee in hand, directing Carl Frank and Rita Hayworth in a dramatic courtroom cross-examination scene for Columbia Pictures’ “The Lady from Shanghai.” Orson is producer, writer, director and co-star with Rita in “The Lady from Shanghai.” Frank plays the role of a tough district attorney. Photo by Eddie Cronenweth.

“Shot ‘Citizen Kane’ in sixteen weeks,” explained Toland. “It’s an unusual picture. For example, we worked with no beams or parallels (to hold spots) for the first time in Hollywood history. All sets were given natural ceilings, which made bright lighting difficult but also made for realism.

“Orson Welles was an interesting type to shoot, especially his characterization, changing from a lad of twenty-five to an old man of seventy, and wearing, in old age, blood-shot glass-caps over his eyes.

“His problem, today, will depend on whether audiences prefer him as a character actor or as himself. I like one quality in his acting and direction. Stubbornness. He would bitterly fight every technical problem that came up. Never say die. Never.”

Gregg Toland confessed that the one defect he’d found in most actors and actresses was discoloration and lines or wrinkles under their eyes. “Were we to leave them natural, it would make them appear tired and haggard on the screen, especially since they are amplified so greatly. So, I place bright spotlights directly in their faces, which wash out these lines and make their faces smoother.”

Then Toland began discussing technical problems in a very untechnical manner. It was a liberal education in cinema craft. He spoke fondly of “The Grapes of Wrath.” Said he enjoyed much of it because he was able to shoot his favorite type of scene – building somber moods through shadowy low-keyed lighting, such as the opening candlelight scene in that classic of the soil. “We slaved, Jack Ford and I, to make that picture real,” Toland revealed. “We sent the cast out to acquire good healthy sunburns. We threw away soft diffusion lenses. We shot the whole thing candid-camera style, like a newsreel. That’s the trend today in Hollywood. Realism.”

“Of course,” he added, “sometimes realism is attained only through complete trickery. Remember the third or fourth shot in the beginning of ‘The Long Voyage Home?’ The scene of the ship floating and rocking on the water? Here’s how that was done. I had the studio build half a miniature boat, set it on a dry stage. Then I took a pan full of plain water, placed it on a level with my lens – and shot my scene over this pan of water, catching the boat and giving the perfect illusion of its being in the water. But I better not tell you too much of that. Trade secrets, you know. You better have another beer …”

Enlarge
Mervyn Leroy and Harold Rosson filming a scene for Johnny Eager

Mervyn Leroy and Harold Rosson filming a scene for Johnny Eager

1941. Director Mervyn Leroy, crouching, oversees the shooting of a scene for Johnny Eager.

...
Read more
Enlarge
Douglas Sirk conferring with Hazel Brooks

Douglas Sirk conferring with Hazel Brooks

1947. Director Douglas Sirk briefs Hazel Brooks prior to filming a scene for Sleep,...

Read more
Enlarge
Ava Gardner filming The Angel Wore Red

Ava Gardner filming The Angel Wore Red

1960. Ava Gardner seems to enjoy being the centre of attention as she emerges...

Read more
Enlarge
George Cukor filming Marilyn Monroe

George Cukor filming Marilyn Monroe

1962. A bird's eye view of George Cukor directing Marilyn on the set of...

Read more

But, instead of another beer, I indulged in something equally stimulating. I saw another ace cameraman. I left Toland, drove out into the Valley north of Hollywood and halted before an intimate Oriental restaurant bearing a blinking neon that read “Ching How.”

This restaurant was the hobby and hide-out of the cherubic Chinese cameraman, James Wong Howe, the place where he came in the evening, to chat with old friends or supervise a steaming chow mein after a hard and tiresome day with Ann Sheridan, Rita Hayworth, Hedy Lamarr or Loretta Young!

Bette Davis as Margo Channing in All About Eve
1950. Bette Davis as Margo Channing in All About Eve.

Looking at Jimmy Howe, you’d never know what he’s been through and what his keen eyes have seen. Not because he has the “inscrutable” yellow man’s face of fiction, the traditional face that hides feelings and emotions, but because he is so cheerful, so friendly, so disarmingly sincere.

You wouldn’t know that he once fought gory battles in the fistic arena for ten bucks a knockout, or that he got his first job in Hollywood as a camera assistant at that same price. But you would know, immediately, that Jimmy Howe is as American as you or I, born in Pasco, Washington, of a farmer father; and you would know, too, immediately, that he understands more about Hollywood stars than any photographer alive.

I found Jimmy Howe a little interview shy when it came to discussing personalities. That was because he’d been burned once. Recently, a reporter asked him about Bette Davis, and Howe told the reporter that Bette’s enormous eyes were her finest feature, and that they must be emphasized by lighting, whereas her long thin neck must be shadowed. The reporter misquoted him as stating that Bette was badly pop-eyed. Ever since, Howe has been afraid to explain the truth to Bette – and if she reads this – well, hell, Bette, the guy thinks you’re the greatest actress on earth!

Over a delicious dish of aged Chinese eggs, bamboo shoots and other Far Eastern delicacies, in a nook of his popular eatery, Jimmy Howe softened sufficiently to discuss the women he had captured for celluloid.

He digressed on the subject of glamour gals.

“Hedy Lamarr has more glamour than anyone in Hollywood. Her jet black hair and fine light complexion, marvelously contrasting, requires no faking soft diffusion lens. But, like all glamour ladies, she must be aided by the cameraman. First of all, I took attention away from her lack of full breasts by playing up her eyes and lips. With a bright light I created a shadow to make you forget her weak chin. Then, I really went to town! I planted an arc on a level with her eyes, shadowing her forehead and blending it and her hair into a dark background. Now, all attention was focused on her eyes. Remember her first meeting with Boyer in ‘Algiers?’ Her eyes got away with lines that would never have passed Mr. Hays.

Portrait of Myrna Loy by Clarence Sinclair Bull
1936. Myrna Loy by Clarence Sinclair Bull.

“It’s an old glamour trick. The average girl should learn it. For example, when you wear a hat with a low brim, and then have to peer out from under the brim, it makes you more interesting, centers attention on your orbs. When you sport a half-veil, you have to look from behind it and thus become an exciting and intriguing person. There’s no question about it. The eyes certainly have it.

“Now Ann Sheridan. Her gorgeous throat and shoulders, and those lips. I light them up and disguise the fact that her nose is irregular and her cheeks overly plump. Incidentally, to correct her nose, which curves slightly to the left, I put kliegs full on the left side of her face, pushing her nose perfectly straight. Once, on ‘Torrid Zone,’ when Annie arrived on the set with a pimple on her chin, I had the make-up man convert it into a beauty mark, and then viewing her through the camera, realized that this concentrated attention on her full lips, which made her even more glamorous!

“Each actress, no matter how beautiful, becomes a problem. Madeleine Carroll has a good and bad side to her face, like so many others. I always shoot her threequarters, because it thins her out. A full face shot makes her too fleshy. With Myrna Loy, there must not be white around her neck, because it’s too contrasting to her complexion. Moreover, lights must be low, shooting upward, to reduce the size of her underpinnings.

“Zorina, off-screen, relaxing, is an ordinary woman, with a good-sized healthy body. But, the minute she dances before the camera, her true personality grows. Her face turns from good looking to gorgeous. Her body becomes smaller and willowy. She’s easy to work with, except that an enthusiastic uncle of hers, a doctor, gave her four vaccination marks when she was young, and we have to get rid of them with make-up and special lights.

Vera Zorina on the set of On Your Toes
1938. Vera Zorina on the set of On Your Toes. Photo by Madison Lacy

“But you want to know the most photogenic lady I ever set my lens upon? Priscilla Lane. An absolutely eye-soothing face, despite a generous mouth. A fine skin texture. A rounded facial structure. Mmm. Lovely to look at.

“There is no perfect camera face, Confucius say. Not even Loretta Young, who is reputed to have a camera-proof face. Why, she wouldn’t want a perfect face and neither would any other actress. A perfect face, without irregular features, would be monotonous and tiresome to observe. Of course, a well-balanced face is another thing. Oh, I’ve seen so-called perfect faces – those composite photographs showing Lamarr’s eyes, Leigh’s nose, Dietrich’s lips – but the result is always surprisingly vacant!

“Most women must be photographed with flat lights, shooting down from a forty-five degree angle, because this lighting washes out any defects. Whereas, a cross-lighting from either side, while it makes the face natural and round and real, also accentuates wrinkles, blemishes and bad lines. There are exceptions. Flat lighting would wash Joan Crawford’s face clean to the point of blankness. Crosslighting chisels her beautifully. But others can’t stand up as well.

“I’m not telling you these inside items on the stars to give you a sensational story. I’m trying to point out this – that while the Chinese author, Lin Yutang, wrote a book called ‘The Importance of Living,’ I should like to write one called, ‘The Importance of Lighting.’ It’s all-important. Take a look at the way celebrities appear in a newsreel, without careful kliegs adjusted to them. They seem messy.

“Why, the only newsreel personages I ever saw who looked decent without expert work on them, and who were, in fact, once offered a million dollars to come to Hollywood, were the Windsors. Now Wally Simpson is a bit too thin in the face and has some blemishes. But this could be corrected by shooting her three-quarters, the lights flat against her. She should never be shot in profile. As to the Duke, Edward himself, well, while he often appears a bit weary and haggard, he would have to be kept that way in Hollywood. It’s part of his adult charm. We wouldn’t want to wash that out with faked brightness.”

Enlarge
Esther Williams filming Jupiter's Darling

Esther Williams filming Jupiter’s Darling

1955. Well, here's a different cinematographic challenge – underwater filming for Jupiter's Darling, a Roman...

Read more
Enlarge
Dorothy Lamour on a location shoot

Dorothy Lamour on a location shoot

Around 1940. Most Hollywood movies made in the forties and fifties were shot in the...

Read more
Enlarge
Shooting a scene for A Matter of Life and Death

Shooting a scene for A Matter of Life and Death

1946. A Matter of Life and Death, a Powell and Pressburger production, was shot primarily...

Read more
Enlarge
Joseph Ruttenberg filming Ava Gardner

Joseph Ruttenberg filming Ava Gardner

1948. Joseph Ruttenberg homes in on Ava Gardner in this scene for The Bribe. Another...

Read more

Now the little man expounded on picture-making. He told exactly the way pictures should be made. Here’s Howe:

“My theory of picture -making is that a movie must run true. It must be real. You must not feel that it is obviously a movie. A big fault is that photographers often try to make their photography stand out. That is bad. If you go away raving about the photography of certain scenes, you’ve seen a bad photographic job.

“When I was a beginner, way back, I had that common failing. I never gave a damn about the actor. All I wanted was to get those fat beautiful clouds in, so people would say, ‘Some shot. Some photographer.’ But now I know that’s not professional.”

There was one more thing. I had a hunch a lot of photographers, like producers, were repressed actors at heart. Did James Wong Howe ever aspire to histrionics?

“Oh, once I almost became an actor. The late Richard Boleslavsky wanted me to play with Greta Garbo in ‘The Painted Veil.’ Just a bit part. I refused. My place is behind the big machine, not in front of it. Besides I’d be scared stiff. Me, Wong Howe, an actor? Hell, the boys would rib the pants off me!”

To continue my scientific study of the lads behind the lenses, I went to a party of General Service Studios. There, on the lavish set of “Lady Hamilton,” Vivien Leigh was passing out cake to celebrate her birthday, and a stocky, dark-haired handsome man named Rudolph Mate was celebrating his first year as a full-fledged American citizen.

Rudolph Maté on the set of Gilda
1945. Rudolph Maté on the set of Gilda with Rita Hayworth and Russ Vincent.

Rudolph Mate, born in Poland, student of philosophy, lover of fine paintings, was the cameraman on the newest Leigh-Olivier vehicle. His previous pictures had been movie milestones – “Love Affair,” “Foreign Correspondent” and “Seven Sinners.”

I asked Mate about the ingredients that make a tip-top photographer, and he answered very slowly and very precisely. He spoke slowly to prevent becoming mixed in the languages he knows – French, German, Hungarian, Russian, Polish, English and pinochle – all of which he speaks fluently.

“To become a good photographer, one must have a complete knowledge of the technical end,” stated Mate. He pointed toward his $15,000 movable camera. “One must make everything about that instrument a habit, a second nature, as natural and uncomplicated as walking. This complete technical knowledge gives one time, on the set, to think in terms of the story being shot. A photographer must be creative, imaginative. Above all, he must have a talent for continuity.

“What do I mean by continuity? The celluloid mustn’t be scatterbrained. For example, every day a cameraman looks at the daily rushes of the footage he’s shot. Some photographers have excellent daily rushes, excellent separate scenes – but, when the film is cut, patched together, it’s mediocre and without full meaning because the cameraman had no feel of harmony, no sense of continuity. “A cameraman must be thorough. I study a script page by page and solve each problem as I study it. Also, on the side, I study oil paintings and works of art. In fact, I have a big collection of my own, because this study gives a cameraman knowledge of composition and color.”

Rudolph Mate was ecstatic about Vivien Leigh as Lady Hamilton.

“A marvelous subject. Cool. Positive. The certain beauty of a steel dagger. No bad facial angles. And an actress in her head and in her heart. Laurence Olivier is fine for me to shoot, too. His face is so expressive. It has so much character.”

Marlene Dietrich as Jamilla in Kismet
1944. Marlene Dietrich as Jamilla in Kismet.

Mate admitted that he had enjoyed toiling with Marlene Dietrich on “Seven Sinners,” and that he was scheduled to do her next opus at Universal.

“She has a wonderful head. I mean both brains and shape. Furthermore, like no other actress, she understands lighting problems and angles, and takes all suggestions without a fight. She is cooperative despite the nonsense you read. She will pose for fifty different takes if need be. The reason she knows so much is that she acquired her photographic education from Josef Von Sternberg, her first director, who still has the best pictorial mind in the cinema business.”

Mate, I understood, was a master magician at trickery. He could make anything real. In “Lady Hamilton,” you’ll see the Battle of Trafalgar, when Olivier as Lord Nelson is killed. It’ll be a terrific scene, realistic as war and death – but remember, it was made with miniature boats, only five feet tall, costing $1,000 each, and the cannon balls were tiny marbles shot into thin balsa wood.

Remember, too, that Mate can – and often has – made mob scenes involving thousands of people with just a half dozen extras. This he has accomplished with a special “button lens,” one with 220 separate openings for images, thus multiplying anything it is focused upon.

Rudolph Mate had a date with Vivien Leigh, in front of the camera, and I had one, at Warner Brothers Studio, with a gentleman named Ernie Haller, a studious architect who wound up by becoming the genius to put that little tidbit labeled “Gone With the Wind” on celluloid.

Good-natured, bespectacled Ernie Haller didn’t waste words. “The cameraman’s main duty is to tell a story with lighting. Next, he must have a thorough understanding or feeling for composition; you know, how to group and balance people and objects properly. It’s like salesmanship – you create a point of interest, and you try to sell the fans a star or an idea by subtly focusing attention on this point of interest.”

Haller referred to a few tangible points of interest.

Ann Sheridan filming Nora Prentiss
1946. Ann Sheridan filming Nora Prentiss.

“I’m not merely being loyal to Warners when I tell you Ann Sheridan is the most photogenic female in this town today. Her features are well proportioned and take lighting easily. The most photogenic man is Errol Flynn. His oval face stands up from any angle or under any lighting condition.

“But, as you know, we have our sticklers, too. There’s Clark Gable. I always shoot him three-quarters, so that you see only one of his ears. If you saw both at once, they’d look like mine do – stick out like the arms of a loving cup.

“Brenda Marshall, whom I’m working with at present, is a fine actress. Her only defects are a slightly crooked nose and eyes set too closely together. I light up one side of her face more fully to straighten the nose, and push inkies square into Brenda’s face to spread her eyes.

“When I shot GWTW, I found Vivien Leigh ideal for Technicolor. But I learned too much light was extremely bad for her. Her face was delicate and small, and full brightness would wash out her features and spoil the modeling of her countenance. Another thing. She has blue eyes. David Selznick wanted them green. So I set up a baby spot with amber gelatine, placed it under my lens, and Scarlett wound up with green eyes.

Franz Planer preparing to shoot a dancing scene starring Ava Gardner and Robert Walker
1948. A rare behind-the-scenes shot of cinematographer Franz Planer preparing to shoot a dancing scene starring Ava Gardner and Robert Walker. Director William A Seiter looks on.

“Listen, they all have handicaps that we have to correct. Most have square jaws, which must be softened and rounded. Some have prominent noses, which requires a low light set at the knees to push up their noses. Some actresses have thin legs. We plant spots right at their feet to fill ’em out.

“There’s no limit to what we have to do. We keep middle-aged actresses young by using special diffusing lenses that make faces mellow, hazy, soft, foggy, ethereal. We use these lenses on mood scenes, too, thus enabling us to create cold, crisp mornings on hot, sultry days.

“In my time, I’ve put them all in my black box. Some who were difficult and some who were easy, ranging from Mae Murray and Norma Talmadge to Dick Barthelmess and Bette Davis. I’ve never had trouble because I knew sculpturing, knew the basic foundation of the human face and was able to become, literally, a plastic surgeon with lights.”

Says Haller:

“Most trick stuff is in the hands of the Optical Printing Department of any studio. This is conducted by specialized cameramen and special effects men who manufacture 75% of the mechanical trick scenes. Most impossible scenes are done in miniature, caught by a camera that blows them eight times normal.”

Ernie Haller, with an eye for the unusual, summarized some of the crazy paradoxes he’d run into during his many semesters in the movie village. He said that big banquet scenes were always filmed right after lunch, because the extras weren’t so hungry then and wouldn’t eat so much expensive food! Moonlit night scenes were taken in the daytime with a filter, because real moonlight was not photogenic. Faked fights photographed better than real ones, because real ones appeared too silly. Sequences on an ocean liner had to be faked on dry land, because an honest-to-goodness boat pitched and heaved too much for the average camera. Blank cartridges recorded better on the sound track. Real ones were too high-pitched.

“In barroom sequences,” concluded Haller, “cold tea is better than whiskey, not because it photographs better but because actors have to drink a lot of it – and tea, sir, keeps them sober!”

So there. You’ve met some of the boys from the ASC. Now paste Gregg Toland’s classical outburst into your hat –

“Tell ’em we’re not low-grade mechanical morons, we cameramen. Tell ’em we’re creative artists, by God!”

And, by God, they certainly are!

Other topics you may be interested in…

George Hoyningen-Huene – from film to fashion and back again
Perc Westmore – makeup king of Hollywood
Barbara Stanwyck in The Two Mrs Carrolls
Unsafe sex – the starlet’s dilemma

Filed Under: Behind the scenes, Crew, Stars Tagged With: Ann Sheridan, Ava Gardner, Bette Davis, Carl Frank, Clarence Sinclair Bull, Douglas Sirk, Eddie Cronenweth, Ernest Haller, Franz Planer, G B Poletto, George Cukor, Giuseppe Rotunno, Grace Kelly, Gregg Toland, Harold Rosson, Hazel Brooks, Ingrid Bergman, Jack Cardiff, James Wong Howe, John Brahm, Joseph A Valentine, Joseph Ruttenberg, Lana Turner, Madison Lacy, Marlene Dietrich, Maury Gertsman, Merle Oberon, Mervyn Leroy, Myrna Loy, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, Robert Sterling, Robert Taylor, Rudolph Maté, Russ Vincent, Sidney Hickox, Turham Bey, Vera Zorina, William A Seiter, William H Greene

Sex and power – Nazism in 1970s cinema

Tasteless, gratuitous smut or challenging cult classics? In the late-1960s and 1970s a clutch of art-house films by Italian directors found new, confrontational ways to explore the rise of fascism.

The stage was set by Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), followed a year later by Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970). 1974 saw the release of Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter and Lina Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties, with Pier Paulo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1976) bringing down the curtain.

Luchino Visconti directing Charlotte Rampling and Reinhard Kolldehoff on the set of The Damned
1969. Luchino Visconti directing Charlotte Rampling and Reinhard Kolldehoff on the set of The Damned.

Sex and power – sex as a metaphor for tyranny

These are great, if controversial, films with intriguing plots, extravagant drama, superb actors, gorgeous sets and stylish costumes. But their tone is dark and pessimistic, their subject matter grim, transgressive and voyeuristic. They make for thrillingly uncomfortable viewing.

They portray the Nazi regime as evil incarnate. Against a broader historical backdrop, they chart its ascendancy and consequences for individuals, relationships and the body politic. The underlying narrative seems to run something like this…

  • Capitalism is corrupt and corrupting.
  • It leads inexorably to power plays, tyranny and repression at every level of society, from the family to the state.
  • Along with all of this come a range of other perverse behaviours such as duplicity, betrayal and sexual deviance.
  • Capitalism, tyranny and perversion create a death spiral of paranoia and destruction from which escape, let alone redemption, is all but impossible.
  • This toxic cocktail finds its ultimate expression in the sado-masochistic excesses of Nazism.

The most striking characteristic of these films is that they equate sexual deviance with tyranny, or “totalitarianism”, to use a word that was much in vogue at the time. Sexual domination is a metaphor for political domination; non-heterosexual desires are a symptom of political depravity. This is troubling, not least for a contemporary audience with a less binary attitude towards sexuality.

Show more
The Damned

1969. The Damned

Luchino Visconti's The Damned is a magnificent failure, an example of a great director working at the peak of his ability and somehow creating almost nothing at all. Surely no one else could have made this film; surely no one at all should have. It is one of the most impenetrable films ever made.
Roger Ebert, 5 February 1970

Luchino Visconti's The Damned may be the chef d'oeuvre  of the great Italian director – a spectacle of such greedy passion, such uncompromising sensation, and such obscene shock that it makes you realize how small and safe and ordinary most movies are. Experiencing it is like taking a whiff of ammonia—it's not conventionally pleasant, but it makes you see the outlines of everything around you with just a little more clarity.
Vincent Canby, The New York Times, 19 December 1969

Visconti has always been a master of melodrama, often working with large, operatic gestures (his Senso, in fact begins with an opera), and The Damned, with its numerous early singspiels and cabaret performances (particularly the memorable drag number of actor Helmut Berger [as Martin Essenbeck] impersonating Marlene Dietrich) are often outrageously theatrical.
Douglas Messerli, World Cinema Review, 23 September 2013

Show more
The Conformist

1970. The Conformist

The Conformist, an adaptation of the novel by Alberto Moravia, is a superior chronicle film that equates the rise and fall of Italian Fascism, from the early 1920s until 1943, with the short, dreadful, very romantic life of Marcello, a young man for whom conformity becomes a kind of obsession after a traumatic homosexual encounter in his youth.
Vincent Canby, The New York Times, 19 September 1970

A beautifully imagined portrait of moral and political cowardice, it stars Jean-Louis Trintignant as Clerici, a Mussolini-era aristocrat who is so bent on appearing “normal” that he volunteers to spy on his old university tutor for the secret police.
Anthony Quinn, The Independent, 29 February 2008

Bernardo Bertolucci's expressionist masterpiece of 1970, The Conformist, is the movie that plugs postwar Italian cinema firmly and directly into the emerging 1970s renaissance in Hollywood film-making.
Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian, 20 October 2010

Show more
the night porter 1

1974. The Night Porter

If you don't love pain, you won't find The Night Porter erotic—and by now, even painbuffs may be satiated with Nazi decadence. The movie reunites a former SS officer (Dirk Bogarde) and a young woman (Charlotte Rampling) who was raped by him during her adolescence in a concentration camp.
Nora Sayre, The New York Times, 2 October 1974

The Night Porter is as nasty as it is lubricious, a despicable attempt to titillate us by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering. It is (I know how obscene this sounds) Nazi chic.
Roger Ebert, 10 February 1975

The movie is a splinter torn from a wave of so-called “Nazi chic” that swept across world cinema in the early 1970s, mostly in the hands of directors out of Germany and Italy. I suspect there was a need for movies of this nature at that time, mostly as a therapy to their filmmakers; the fascism that ran rampant through both countries during World War II caused considerable atrocity, and film was used by conflicted auteurs as a way to defuse the past and give it finality, and meaning.
David M Keyes, Cinemaphile, 15 July 2013

Show more
salo

1976. Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom

For all of Mr. Pasolini's desire to make "Salo" an abstract statement, one cannot look at images of people being scalped, whipped, gouged, slashed, covered with excrement and sometimes eating it and react abstractedly unless one shares the director's obsessions.
Vincent Canby, The New York Times, 1 October 1977

Through a panoply of the unspeakable – blood, excrement, torture and murder – Salò comments on the exercise of power, and on a consumer culture where a limitless choice of gratifications disguises an absence of all choice and all resistance.
Gary Indiana, The Guardian, 22 September 2000

Pasolini’s radical political insights regarding Sade, Fascism, and the violence at the heart of all culture came through brilliantly, but the scenes of torture were agony to watch, and, back out on the street after the sun had set, the world itself seemed spoiled upon contact with them. I wondered, literally, how I’d go on living withsuch knowledge.
Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 11 May 2010

Sex and power – products of their time

These films are palpably products of their time and in their own way feel just as dated now as the films noir of the 1940s and the musicals of the 1950s.

They emerged from a period of social and political turmoil in Italy that ran from the late-1960s to the early-1980s and was marked by a wave of left-wing and right-wing terrorist incidents. During the period, nearly 2,000 murders were attributed to political violence in the form of bombings, assassinations and street warfare between rival militant factions.

The films’ political message is rooted in the socialist / communist ideology that had gained currency (particularly in academic and artistic circles) during the 1960s and had erupted on the streets of Paris in 1968 but was increasingly questioned during the 1970s. The Nazis provide the protagonists, costumes and settings for restaging and exploring in the present the historical failure of democracy.

Bear in mind too that for many in 1970 the end of World War II was recent history, just 25 years away – the equivalent for us would be looking back at the 1990s. Visconti, Cavani, Wertmüller and Pasolini had all lived through the war (Bertolucci was born during it) and their films may well have been in part at least a way of coming to terms with events they had witnessed. At the same time a new generation was coming of age who had not themselves lived through the war and its immediate aftermath.

Anita Strindberg and Florinda Bolkan in a scene from A Lizard in a Woman's Skin
1971. Anita Strindberg and Florinda Bolkan in a scene from A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, a highly regarded giallo. Photo by Antonio Benetti.

At the same time, the permissiveness of the 1960s had loosened the moral code and opened the door for more explicit on-screen sex, torture and other forms of bad behaviour. A parallel development was that of the giallo, a genre of Italian pulp movie nicely characterized by Cheryl Eddie for Gizmodo:

Nearly all [the films] contain gushing gore, erotic themes, a heavy emphasis on visuals (with things like script coherence often taking a back seat), questionable / campy English dubbing, characters gripped by paranoia, gorgeous women in peril, and ruthlessly brutal masked killers fond of sharp objects, rope, and black leather gloves.

Significantly, it was in the mid-1970s that Susan Sontag published a piece on Fascinating Fascism. in which she noted the renewed interest in Nazism and its eroticization. She also observed that “Courses dealing with the history of fascism are, along with those on the occult (including vampirism), among the best attended these days on college campuses.” So clearly something was in the air.

Perhaps these films about the rise of fascism were also a reaction to the camp frivolity churned out of Cinecittà during the latter half of the 1960s – movies like Barbarella (1968) and Danger: Diabolik (1968).

Whatever the influences, this clutch of films was made possible commercially by the emergence during the 1960s of European art-house cinema as a force to be reckoned with thanks to work by the likes of Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky.

Ingrid Thulin as Baroness Sophie Von Essenbeck in The Damned
1969. Ingrid Thulin as Baroness Sophie Von Essenbeck in The Damned.

Sex and power – the actresses

These films showcase the talents of some of the leading European actresses of the period. In fact a number of them keep reappearing in these and related films of the period.

Foremost among them is Charlotte Rampling, an English actress, who plays the female lead opposite Dirk Bogarde in The Night Porter as well as having an important and very different role in The Damned. She worked as a model before capturing the attention of cinemagoers with her performance in Georgy Girl (1966). She continues to appear in films (not least François Ozon’s Swimming Pool), on TV and on the stage. Outside of the movie world, she features, posing naked on a table at the Hotel Nord Pinus in Arles, in one of Helmut Newton’s most celebrated photographs.

Alongside Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman, Ingrid Thulin is regarded by many as Sweden’s female contribution to international cinema. She was one of Ingmar Bergman’s muses and appeared in seven of his films, beginning with Wild Strawberries (1957), for which she won best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival the following year. In The Damned, she is the cold-blooded Baroness Sophie Von Essenbeck, a cross between a latter-day Lady Macbeth and Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. She also appears in Tinto Brass’s proto-Nazisploitation film, Salon Kitty (1976).

French actress Dominique Sanda was 18 years old when Bernardo Bertolucci asked her to play the part of Anna in The Conformist. The same year Vittorio De Sica cast her as Micòl Finzi Contini in his movie about the fate of a Jewish family in 1938 Italy, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970). She was subsequently recruited by Luchino Visconti for an uncredited role in Conversation Piece (1974) and again by Bertolucci to play the ill-fated Ada in 1900. She won the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for her performance in The Inheritance (1976).

Bernardo Bertolucci cast Stefania Sandrelli in the two great historical films about Italy that he made in the 1970s: The Conformist and 1900. Her breakthrough film was Divorce Italian Style (1961) – she was just 15 years old at the time. In the 1970s she worked with director Ettore Scola as well as Bernardo Bertolucci before, in the 1980s, making a name for herself as an erotic actress in Tinto Brass’s The Key (1983).

You must set a portfolio id.

Sex and power – the reception

When these films were released, the savagery of the Nazi regime and the horrors of the Holocaust were still fresh in people’s minds, so the subject matter was always going to be controversial.

The Damned opened to worldwide acclaim and was the tenth most popular movie at the French box office in 1970. It received an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay and was named Best Foreign Film by the National Board of Review, with Helmut Berger was singled out for particular praise.

Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter
1974. Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter.

The Conformist dropped quickly from sight after rave receptions at several film festivals. It got only a very, very limited run in the US after the likes of Francis Ford Coppola urged Paramount to release it. Nor was it a big hit in Italy because it provided audiences with an uncomfortable reminder of fascism’s comparatively recent popularity. It is now something of a cult movie and regarded by many as a masterpiece.

The Night Porter provoked mixed responses. Liliana Cavani was praised by some for having the courage to deal with the theme of sexual transgression but many couldn’t accept the Holocaust setting. Elite-critic Roger Ebert was far from alone when he called it “as nasty as it is lubricious, a despicable attempt to titillate us by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering.”

Seven Beauties upset many with its graphic depiction of Nazi concentration camps as the context for a sick joke about its leading character’s survival. In spite of that, it did well in the US and was nominated for four Oscars, including best director.

Not surprisingly given its graphic portrayals of rape, torture, and murder, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom was widely regarded as obscene and banned in several countries. In some the ban remains to this day. The film has never reached a mass audience but many critics now see it as an important work and required viewing for serious cinephiles.

Sex and power – the legacy

In the political arena, the message of these movies about the Nazis failed to make an impact. By the late-1970s / early-1980s the dominant ideologies were those of the free-marketeers (as personified by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan) and the anarchists (as embodied by the punks).

Around 1980. Das Schwimmbad – Nazi chic by Bob Carlos Clarke.

Perhaps for all their sensationalism these films failed to appeal to a broad enough audience. More likely, they turned out to be a late flowering of 1960s thinking, and by the time they were released the pendulum had already begun to swing in another direction.

Ironically, in the cultural / artistic arena these films ended up spawning a whole sub-genre of exploitation movies – Nazisploitation. Nazisploitation films appropriated the lavish decadence of The Damned, the psychodrama of The Night Porter or the S&M of Salò to create a sensationalist cocktail of sex and violence. The most celebrated product of the genre is Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975). But there was clearly something in the air – Love Camp 7 (1969) was released the same year as The Damned.

In mainstream cinema, the most obvious progeny of these films about the Nazis is Cabaret (1972). In stills photography, Nazi chic is implicit or explicit in the work of Helmut Newton, Chris von Wangenheim and Bob Carlos Clarke. And, by extension, is it going to too far to discern a link between these films and the broad-shouldered, power dressing that took the fashion world by storm in the late-’70s?

Want to know more about sex and power?

A good starting point is Samm Deighan’s article for Diabolique magazine: Post-War Perversion in Italian Cinema: From Visconti to Pasolini, Part One and Part Two. To go deeper, take a look at Screen Nazis: Cinema, History, and Democracy by Sabine Hake or Nazisploitation!: The Nazi Image in Low-Brow Cinema and Culture by Elizabeth Bridges.

Other topics you may be interested in…

Donyale Luna – the fashion world’s wayward moon-child
Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford in a passionate embrace
Gilda – the movie that made Rita Hayworth into a bombshell
Barbara Stanwyck in The Two Mrs Carrolls
Unsafe sex – the starlet’s dilemma

Filed Under: Crew, Films, Stars Tagged With: Bernardo Bertolucci, Bob Carlos Clarke, Charlotte Rampling, Dominique Sanda, Ingrid Thulin, Liliana Cavani, Lina Wertmüller, Luchino Visconti, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Pier Paulo Pasolini, Salò, Seven Beauties, Stefania Sandrelli, The Conformist, The Damned, The Night Porter

  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to Next Page »

© 2022 - aenigma some rights reserved under a creative commons attribution-noderivs 3.0 unported license