155: Senso (a.k.a. The Wanton Countess)

I’m starting to believe that Luchino Visconti is much more talented than I initially suspected.  The first film of his that I saw was Il Gattopardo (a.k.a. The Leopard; 1963).  I was prompted to it by Ebert’s “Great Movies” series, but must confess that I found it to be anything but what he claimed.  Thinking back I suppose I was distracted by the presence of Burt Lancaster as an Italian Count, a performances a la Richard Harris in Red Desert (1964; # 157) as far as out of place actors go – ostensibly at least.  There appears to be a similar miscast English-speaking actor in Visconti’s Senso (1954), the Hitchcock favorite Farley Granger (who passed away earlier this year), but after his solid (though clearly dubbed) performance I’m inclined to reevaluate Lancaster’s work.  The Count he played in The Leopard was the role Visconti, a descendant of Italian royalty, was born to direct.  He cast Lancaster to secure financial backing for the picture, but I suspect his regal screen presence offers more to the role than I’d been willing to grant on that first viewing. 

            Now, having viewed Senso, I feel as though I’ve seen the feminine side of Visconti’s work.  As I was watching I couldn’t help thinking that this effort could easily be described as “the Italian Gone with the Wind.”  Its period and subject matter are certainly similar at least.  Livia Sepieri (Alida Valli) is the wife of a Venetian Count at the outset of the Italian expulsion of the Austrian occupying forces in the 1860s.  She is a supporter of the fight for independence, and is loyal to her cousin, a leader in the rebellion.  However, almost against her will, she falls madly in love with an Austrian cavalry officer (Granger).  Their love challenges her beliefs in country, family, and loyalty in general, and forces her to make choices she’d never imagined.  Fittingly, this film begins with a lengthy scene at an opera house; a better setting for melodrama than any other.  The heroine ironically remarks to the officer on their first meeting, “I like opera very much, but not when it happens off-stage” before she is thrown into the torrid affair.

Now most of my readers are likely to have noted my general distaste for melodrama.  Here, however, I am consumed, washed over by the beauty of this story – certainly more so than with the oft-cited “American masterpiece” to which I compared it.  This is everything costume dramas should be and more.  The emotion of these characters and the ways in which they deceive each other and ultimately themselves is engrossing.  Granger has a scene that would have been a career-maker had this been an English-language first release. 

I’ve been talking lately with my fellow movie blogger Jake (whose work you can view at http://filmadventhrough.blogspot.com/) about a factor that most non-critics base their entire opinion of films on: watchability.  Watchability is the only criteria by which any of the X-men movies could ever surpass anything by D.W. Griffith, and yet this is the element that most people think about when choosing to pop in a DVD; “Is this going to be an enjoyable experience” they think.  Admittedly, even we amateur critics ask this exact same question when we begin a film, but we can still be satisfied by a movie that does not fulfill this idiom.  Because we are self-righteous nerds we can marvel at the emptiness conveyed by L’Advventura (1960) almost as much as we delight in the excitement conveyed by Rio Bravo (1959).  We like this criteria of watchability as much as the average filmgoer, we just don’t need it in the way that causes them to turn off Citizen Kane (1941) twenty minutes in because they “don’t want to watch a movie about newspapers.”              

After seeing Senso as well as the brilliant Rocco and His Brothers (1960) I’m starting to see the watchability factor of Visconti going up.  His films are genuinely enjoyable experiences, and his humanity is more vast than The Leopard lead me to believe.

Grade: 3.5 Hats Off