16: Europa ’51 (a.k.a. The Greatest Love – English language market title)

            While not a great film, Roberto Rossellini’s Europa ’51 (1952) is valuable in that it highlights the distinction in how actors were used by the neorealist directors.  Ingrid Bergman, (Rossellini’s wife) was well known as both a film star and a beauty by the time she made this movie.  She’d become an international star by going to Hollywood for Casablanca (1942), and had spent much of the subsequent ten years making quality studio pictures.  Any good review of Casablanca notes how DP Arthur Edeson and Director Michael Curtiz filmed Bergman’s eyes.  They seem to sparkle, but not like Judy Garland’s.  She seems always to be two breaths away from tears, but with stylized lighting she looks not unlike an angel.  That’s how Hollywood wanted her to look.

            Here, Rossellini wasn’t interested in her angelic qualities (at least not on screen).  Is she beautiful in this film? Yes, but it’s a colder, sharper beauty.  His lighting is harsher.  There’s no sparkle.  Holding a still of a Bergman close-up from both films next to one another would be all the juxtaposition necessary to explain neorealism, and might also present a strong case for why both lighting and makeup are Oscar categories. 

            From a career standpoint, Europa ’51 was a bridge for Rossellini.  He was beginning to move away from the harder, rubble in the streets of Rome films that had defined the early neorealism movement.  With Bergman, he had made Stromboli (1950) two years before, which had centered on the harsh lives of a Mediterranean fishing village.  But that same year he’d also made the period piece The Flowers of St. Francis (also 1950), and he was interested in seeing how the emotional realism which he’d focused on in that film would play in a contemporary setting.  He decided that the best approach would be allegorical, and so he chose to focus on a character who much like St. Francis, was initially shielded from the sad realities of the world.  He also chose to make the character a woman.

            Bergman is Irene, a married mother who appears to spend much of her life concerned with upcoming social functions.  She loves her husband, George (Alexander Knox), and her son, Michele (Sandro Franchina), but she doesn’t seem to have time for them.  She is particularly neglectful of Michele as she prepares to host a dinner party in the film’s first act.  However, when the boy suffers a fall down the open stairwell of their apartment building, her attentions return to him.  She vows to be a better mother, and to never leave his bedside while he recovers at the hospital.  Though an initial diagnosis seems to indicate that Michele will survive the fall, speculation arises about whether he intended to commit suicide.  Then he develops a blood clot and suddenly dies. 

            Irene is devastated.  She is bedridden with grief.  She eventually tries to face the world, but she finds herself more interested now in alleviating the suffering of others than with her previous selfish concerns.  She walks through the poorest districts of Rome, and is surprised to see kids laughing.  She meets a woman with six children, and marvels at how she manages them all.  She saves a prostitute who is suffering from tuberculosis, acting as her Good Samaritan guardian.  She gets the mother of six a factory job, and is then shocked when she sees the working conditions.  Her actions begin to drive a wedge between her and her husband, especially when he begins to suspect that she’s developed a relationship with a communist friend.

            Irene’s acts of goodness bring her genuine comfort.  She feels at last as though she were living a life of meaning.  She appears to make peace with God about Michele’s death.  She helps a boy who is running from the police after a robbery, but encourages him to turn himself in.  She’s arrested as an accomplice.  Like St. Francis, her righteousness is misunderstood. 

            Rossellini was often drawn toward characters that were trapped in situations beyond their control.  WWII gave him all of the material he needed to tell such stories, and his best film, Paisan (1946), is a collection of them.  By 1951 the war was over, and the cleanup of Europe was in full swing.  He knew that the world was changing and that cinema would change with it, and he didn’t want to continue making the same film again and again.  Irene’s decision to move on from the tragic death of her son is his decision to let the tragedies of the war lie.  He would move forward into his embrace of emotional realism over social realism with his next collaboration with Bergman, Voyage in Italy (1954; # 18).

            With Europa ’51 Rossellini gives us a film that is less than the sum of its parts.  Bergman’s performance is central to the movie, and it is good, but her Italian voiceover by Lydia Simoneschi (her regular) leaves out the possibility of genuine emotion.  (I’d probably have enjoyed the film much more if Bergman’s original English had been included in the version available online.  I suspect however that whatever company holds the rights to the US distribution version would have released it by now if they imagined it would be profitable.)  Bergman also seems perhaps too detached at the film’s outset for us to believe her transition.  The picture is at its best when she’s wandering the streets and gutters, and is lacking when Irene is confined to her apartment.  Obviously this is the point, she’s alive again when she takes to the streets, but there’s something a bit off about Rossellini’s tone in both the early and late dialogue sequences.  As such, the film feels like a collection of well-structured scenes bookended by mediocre, almost soap opera-esque melodrama.      

Language: Italian (dubbed; limited scenes available in English on TCM.com) NST

Runtime: 113 Minutes

Available @Youtube.com

Grade: 2 Hats off