THE EXECUTIONER - #840

Consider it a black comedy “meet cute.” José Luis (Nino Manfredi, I Knew Her Well [review]) is an undertaker charged with transporting the bodies of men killed on death row to the funeral home. After the aged executioner Amedeo (José Isbert) leaves his tools in José Luis’ truck, the undertaker has to chase the old man to his apartment to return them. There, he meets Amedeo’s daughter Carmen (Emma Penella, E amor brujo [review]). The two share an attraction, and bond over their similar predicaments. No one wants to date her because she’s the executioner’s daughter, and women are turned off by him because he’s an undertaker. Love doesn’t exactly blossom, but still, there’s something.

The Executioner is a 1963 feature from Spanish director Luis García Berlanga. Reminiscent of Italian films of the period--and, indeed, featuring a nod to Michelangelo Antonioni, alongside Ingmar Bergman, as if Berlanga wanted to state his influences outright (though I’m thinking more Pietro Germi)--The Executioner is one-part comedy of errors, one part family drama, and then something wholly unique unto itself. Though at first turned off by the little man who would become his father-in-law, José eventually falls completely under Amedeo’s sway. Even the marriage between José and Carmen seems orchestrated by the talkative death merchant. It’s less like they fall in love, and more like they want to make sure not to disappoint Amedeo--or at the very least get him out of their hair.

Our trio is a band of outsiders in Spanish society. No one looks upon Amedeo’s profession fondly. It’s not that there is a political debate anywhere in The Executioner, it’s more that people treat Amedeo as a bad omen. His hands have caused much death, and thus it follows him around. In terms of a family business, José could do worse than to have his father-in-law at one end of the supply chain, but as he’ll soon find out, there’s a lot more bureaucracy to be reckoned with than lives to be taken. When Amedeo’s impending retirement threatens to keep the new family out of a swank two-bedroom apartment, Amedeo pushes José into becoming his successor. The final third of the film is all about José’s reluctant acceptance of the job and his fear that he will actually have to perform his duties. How long can he skate by on pardons and happenstance before he has to kill a man for real?

Much of the humor here is situational, with José serving as the classic straight man pushed into situations far beyond his capacity to handle. What’s interesting about Berlanga’s pairing, however, is how neither José nor Amedeo are played to the extreme. They are both almost straight men. Manfredi never succumbs to hysterics, and though Isbert can be annoying, he doesn’t push it to comic excess. This is not, say, a Bill Murray-style pest whose persistence is both frustrating and charming. The stooped Amedeo is just undeniable. Not exactly bullish, maybe more like a billy goat. He won’t be dissuaded.

This makes for more quiet chuckles than huge guffaws, but that’s okay. The Executioner has a pleasant pace and finds its humor in how deeply the screws get turned on José’s life. Berlanga has a keen eye for character moments--the book signing where the other famous directors are namedropped or the scene where the prison warden casually counsels a panicked José have a sharp satirical age--that cause you to root for each character to turn against their own self-interests. It’s weird, because in a way, that ends up being a kind of support. Call it tough love. Or tough laughter. You’ve got to like a movie with a dark enough sense of humor to have a title song called “The Executioner Twist.” Its use serves as a good indicator of how far apart our core cast is from everyone else--something we also see via the stray details of more normal, frivolous lives going on in the background. The two things come together at the end with the well-dressed young people dancing on a sailboat as they head out to sea, and José Luis departs in the other direction, off to settle into the life that he is now unable to extricate himself from.

The Executioner was shot by Tonino Delli Colli, who also worked with Raffaello Matarazzo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and later LouisMalle. His black-and-white work for Berlanga is clean and expressive, observant in a Neorealist fashion, but also appropriately tuned in to the humor. For instance, staging the scene where José and his fellow undertaker pick up their paychecks while wearing tri-corner hats and 18th-century uniforms from inside the accountant’s booth allows for a more visual gag. Both of them peeking through the tiny windows trying to charm the paymaster to hand over their checks makes them look simultaneously like strange intruders and also relics mounted on a wall. The costumes inspire further humor in the next scene when a nervous José tries to calm a fight out of fear one of the squabblers will get killed--and he’ll have to execute his killer.

Which he’ll eventually become comfortable with doing. All of Berlanga’s characters in The Executioner serve their roles, be it to society or to family, and the greater message here is to suggest we can’t help but be who we are, even when others might not be so keen on it. In the end, José and Carmen and Amedeo and the new baby make a solid unit that supports one another and gets by as best they can. It’s just that sometimes José needs a little more coaxing to get with the program.

This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

THREE FILMS BY ROBERTO ROSSELLINI STARRING INGRID BERGMAN: EUROPE '51 - #674

Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman reteamed the year after Stromboli [review] for a more conventional melodrama, though one that also had a strong role for a female lead and a message that is both spiritual and political. Released in 1952, Europe '51 (sometimes also known as Europa '51) is easier terrain than Stromboli, as Rossellini continues to massage the ragged edges of Neorealism to fit inside the boundaries of more traditional cinema.

Once again Bergman plays an immigrant living in Italy, the wife of an ambassador who has been in country since before the war. Irene Girard and husband George (Alexander Knox) are wealthy and run in society circles, and perhaps are better off now than they were before WWII--though of a status not wholly unearned. George fought on the front lines, leaving Irene to raise their young son (Sandro Franchina) on her own. This has caused mother and child to have an uncommon bond, perhaps too close. He is a sensitive child who can't stand time away from her or share her attentions.

The youngster's clinginess provides Europe '51's inciting incident. When his mother is dismissive of him before a dinner party, the boy disrupts the event by throwing himself down the stairs. Whether he intended to kill himself or not is never clear, but the child succeeds regardless. Irene's world becomes unmoored, and she sees no purpose in carrying on. That is, until her leftist friend, Andrea (Ettore Giannini), a journalist, introduces her to a family who is too poor to buy their child life-saving medicine. Unwilling to allow another mother lose her baby, Irene gives them the money they need, and she finds some satisfaction in this charitable work. Seeing how the family lives--in a tenement, where the sense of community transcends finances--the sheltered wife is awakened to the struggles of her countrymen. She begins to help out other people, including finding a gregarious single mother of six (the great Giulieta Masina, La strada [review]) a factory job and then filling in for the woman so she doesn't lose it. This brief yet overwhleming assembly line experience would be enough to push just about anyone toward Communism, no matter how much it is frowned upon by friends, family, and society at large. It's Irene's first taste of real labor, and she doesn't care for the flavor.

Irene's metamorphosis is not just political, however, nor is it achieved lightly. Rossellini walks a fine line connecting Marxist philosophy to early Christianity and Jesus' role as a liberator of slaves and champion of the poor. Europe '51 suggests a moral and religious justification for Communism, and reminds us that the defense of the least amongst us is the greatest of virtues. In the most obvious parallel to New Testament parables, Irene cares for an ailing prostitute, defending the woman against doubts and aspersions cast by her neighbors. There is no promise of reward for doing so, the motivation is simply that it's the right thing to do.

Bergman gives a sensitive performance as Irene, avoiding any histrionics or showboating. There are no big monologues here. The stronger emotion comes from what she keeps in reserve, in how little she telegraphs Irene's interior pain. Even in the movie's third act, which bears no small resemblance to the metaphysical melodramatics of Douglas Sirk (Magnificent Obsession [review], for instance), Irene is unflappable when faced with disbelief. Rossellini, it would seem, is transferring lessons learned from his cinematic interpretation of St. Francis of Assisi two years earlier: the more opposition Irene faces, the more courageous her convictions. Her devotion is challenged for real when her husband and mother have her committed to a mental institution. Even there, she becomes an angel of mercy. (Is it crazy that Raffaello Matarazzo's The White Angel [review] comes to mind?)

As with Stromboli where Rossellini juxtaposed Bergman's star-quality with the non-professional actors that rounded out the cast, here the director uses the ostentatious apartments of the rich, and the illusion of movie wealth, to illuminate the other side of life. Shooting on location in real slums, and capturing actual laborers at work, he shows the conditions that the class system creates for those on its lowest levels. It's an indictment of upper-class excess, but in a nod to his Neorealist roots, Rossellini is also questioning the accepted representation of the high life in popular cinema. Most of us don't live like Irene, but our movie watching has made her wealth seem practically normal; at the same time, the majority of us are (hopefully) still shocked by images of the working poor. Real life is far less familiar to a movie screen than fantasy.

The impact of the movie comes not from the tears shed, however, but from the way the director uses one specific experience and spreads it out to show the impact the individual can have on the world around her. The film is called Europe '51 because what Irene sees, despite being confined to one neighborhood, represents the problems that plagued the entire continent. By extension, she is a citizen without borders, her example serving as a lesson to all. If she can change, why not the rest of us?

Europa '51 plays Saturday, July 6, at 6:30pm, and again on Sunday, July 7, at 5:45pm, as part of the NW Film Center's presentation of "The Solitude Trilogy." View the full schedule here.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI'S TRILOGY OF LIFE (Blu-Ray) - #631

Pier Paolo Pasolini was a notorious author and activist before he became a filmmaker. As a self-described homosexual Marxist Catholic, his viewpoint was, to say the least, unique and his chosen means of expression often abrasive. He began his cinema career as a screenwriter and became a protégé of Fellini--though the two had a falling out when Pasolini struck out on his own to make his 1961 debut, Accatone, the story of a pimp in the Italian slums.

After a decade of increasingly pessimistic movies, Pasolini decided to adopt a new outlook on life. Turning to classic literature, he chose to helm a Trilogy of Life: three films adapting famous books that themselves were a collection of short stories and fables. Working with material by Boccaccio, Chaucer, and tales from One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, jumping from Italy to England and then to the Middle East, the filmmaker embraced the ribald and the sensual, turning these well-known parables into a celebration of mankind's pleasures, devotions, and freedoms. Politics and religion were mocked--sometimes lovingly, other times sharply--with Pasolini ultimately letting the human condition--and the human comedy--dictate a narrative free of all expected restrictions (and predictably censored for the same).

It's a surprisingly good fit for the director, even if his newfound blithe spirit was not to last. Shortly after completing the Trilogy of Life, Pasolini rejected the work, claiming that he had succumbed to a particularly thin, knee-jerk liberalism. His next, and sadly last, film turned out to be his most misanthropic and controversial yet. Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom is still one of the more discussed and disturbing pieces of cinema [you can read my review here], both reviled and revered in counterbalancing measures. It's kind of bizarre to consider how Pasolini jumped one to the other. If you saw Salo separately from The Trilogy of Life and had no idea who had made either, I doubt you'd guess it was the same man.

I keep a copy of Boccaccio's The Decameron next to my bed, where I can occasionally grab it and read one of the stories. (Also, to let the ladies know I am edumacated and/or a would-be pretentious intellectual.) The 14th-century tome is credited with having originated the art form of the novella (which is not just a short novel, but that's a discussion for another time). It's basically a collection of short stories, 100 in all, told by ten travelers to pass the time. They are alternately funny, philosophical, dirty, and magical. Despite the book's considerable age, it doesn't read like an antiquated relic. It's lively and bawdy and quite entertaining.

For his 1971 adaptation of the book, Pasolini quite understandably whittles the text down from 100 to about a dozen entries or so (including at least one that is told, rather than performed). His version of The Decameron (111 minutes) also jettisons the framing sequence, instead letting the stories flow naturally one into the other. A few characters connect from one to the next, sometimes stumbling into the neighboring scenario just to kickstart the next tale and send the narrative on its way. For the first half of the film, there is a recurring character of a con man and a thief (played by Pasolini regular Franco Citti; he's in all the films in this set and also in Mamma Roma); for the second half, there is a painter who is struggling to complete a fresco in a church. He is played by the director himself, and so no surprise that the painter's vision gives The Decameron its most fantastical images, including a living painting re-creating classic religious iconography. He also gets to utter the movie's last line, "Why complete a work when it's so beautiful just to dream it."

Pasolini's focus tends to be on stories with either a sexual or religious base, often both, as well as tales that are generally derailed by one person's greed or folly. While much of what we see borders on the blasphemous--a convent full of nuns taking advantage of a man they believe to be mentally deficient; the robbing of a Bishop's grave, etc.--Pasolini is only tweaking the nose of the church playfully. He is creating a connection between earthly and heavenly pleasures, suggesting that each exists in concert with the other. Hence, the penultimate story of the man who literally screws himself to death. He returns from the afterlife to reveal that sex is considered to be a virtue, not a sin, and his punishment will be for other wicked deeds. Granted, he is in Hell, so we don't really know how God and his minions feel about the matter, but the message here is, hey, regardless of the outcome, its worth it.

Pasolini's depiction of medieval living is neither romanticized nor prettied up. The buildings and clothes are shabby, the people are dirty. There are so many rotting teeth in The Decameron, my own mouth started to hurt after a while. Director of photography Tonino Delli Colli, who also collaborated with Raffaello Matarazzo and Louis Malle, shoots without much added light, preferring the natural look of sunlight and shadows--however musty some of those shadows might be. Likewise, Pasolini doesn't push his rather large cast--which is made up in large part of non-actors, in the Italian Neorealist tradition--toward big acting. He plays the comedy for what it is, but mostly let's the rest of the behavior just be. It makes for a surprisingly lithe anthology picture, one that sets the tone for its sibling films.

The set-up for 1972's The Canterbury Tales (111 mins.) more closely mirrors the frame of the Geoffrey Chaucer book: travelers on the road to Canterbury in medieval England agree to swap stories to pass the time--though who is telling the tale and where is never really addressed again. Instead, the thread that runs through the movie is that of Chaucer himself, another winking role for Pasolini, sitting at his desk and writing his book. He says little, instead mostly just looking up from his work to smile at a clever punchline or two.

Pasolini has chosen eight stories from the original text, once again favoring ribald anecdotes and morality plays that involve human greed and betrayal. The sections range from the humorous (a wife and her lover trick her husband into locking himself away while they make love, only for her previous lover to show up looking for action) to the more dire and serious (Franco Citti plays the devil come to Earth to observe human misery; three young boys plot against each other after finding treasure). Some of the sequences lack the punch or the narrative flow that made The Decameron more riveting. Laura Betti (1900 [review]) plays the Wife of Bath in a short vignette that comes to very little, and outside of some familiar settings, not much leads the viewer from one story to the next.

Still, The Canterbury Tales has two superior segments that alternately surprise, delight, and in the case of the second one, horrify. First is Ninetto Davoli, who played a swindled bumpkin in The Decameron, returning here as a shiftless teenager making merry and causing trouble in both work and play. The scenario is Pasolini's tribute to silent cinema, with Davoli doing an imitation of Chaplin's Tramp. The slapstick is funny and the homage loving, with the modern director juxtaposing the "innocence" of the early motion pictures with Chaucer's not-so-innocent characters. (Another Chaplin connection: the revered auteur's daughter Josephine plays the lovely girl May in the opening story.)

The second sequence is essentially the film's big finish. It features a materialistic clergyman being visited by a youthful angel who spirits him away to Hell to take a glimpse at what happens when men of God betray their vows. Pasolini builds a large outdoor set on an English wasteland, with naked demons painted head to toe in garish colors and grotesque scenes of torture and punishment. It's at once both disturbing and hilarious. The director's rudimentary special effects, depicting giant Satanic buttocks releasing wicked priests back into the sulfurous landscape, succeed on sheer audacity. It's hard to laugh when you feel so queasy!

As with The Decameron, perhaps the best element to recommend The Canterbury Tales is the art direction. Pasolini's unique take on ancient living, embracing all the stink and filth, is so vivid, he successfully erases all trace of modernity and creates an alternate world that is believable and intriguing. Even if the movie doesn't gel in terms of narrative, it still looks remarkable. It also seems had Pasolini chosen a better way to end the film, he might have turned what is a very good effort into something great. Sure, the trip to Hell is remarkable, but The Canterbury Tales lacks any final message. There is no summation a la the painted fresco, nor do we get something akin to the libertine's moral that we are privileged to receive at the end of The Decameron (or even the closed circle of The Arabian Nights). Instead, The Canterbury Tales just stops. Ironic for a film about a journey that it kind of doesn't end up anywhere.

Pasolini all but abandons the collected story structuring for 1974's The Arabian Nights (130 mins.), even going so far as to drop the frame from the original source material. Likewise, he steps comfortably away from any overriding religion, instead embracing a more freeform narrative line where man determines his own fate, with only happenstance and our own foolishness to get in the way.

If there is any throughline in The Arabian Nights, it's the clever slave Zumurrud (Ines Pellegrini), who arranges for her own sale to the handsome young Nuredin (Franco Meril). When her "master" refuses to heed her advice, she is kidnapped and they are separated. Thanks to her wiliness, Zumurrud escapes again, and her flight from capture eventually lands her in a city in search of a king. Mistaking her for a man, and following an ancient tradition, the ruling powers put her on the throne. Meanwhile, a properly shamed Nuredin goes searching for his lost inamorata.

As in The Decameron, one aspect of the script tumbles into the next, with Zumurrud's enemies criss-crossing over plot lines and also getting their comeuppance. Pasolini shot the exteriors of the film in the Middle East, with the interior sex scenes taking place on an Italian soundstage--meaning he also foregoes local actors when away from Italy, presumably because actors willing to get nude for his camera would have been harder to find in Muslim countries (as they apparently were not in England; you ever wanted to see Doctor Who's Tom Baker getting' busy? Me neither!). Even so, The Arabian Nights appears even less like studio-based constructions than the preceding films. The legitimate sights serve the production well.

Midway through the picture, when Nuredin has been taken in by a trio of horny sisters who read to him from, one presumes, One Thousand and One Nights, Pasolini diverges from the path and dives down a rabbit hole into more stories. Ninetto Davoli returns as Aziz, who has lost all he has known in the world, including his love and manhood. He is found in the desert by Taj (Francesco Paolo Governale), and the wandering Prince listens as Aziz relates the circumstances by which he came to be so dejected. This leads to Taj forming a new plan to pursue love on his own, and as he puts his scheme into motion, he gathers the histories of those he recruits in aiding him. These stories end up being the most outrightly mystical of any of the tales in all three movies in the Trilogy of Life, suggesting the happy outcome that is soon to come is more fated than the participants realize.

Unfettered as it is from Catholic judgment and any governing morality, The Arabian Nights is the only film where indulgence in our most natural impulses is not punished. Sexuality morphs freely, basically creating an idealized world where all could act as they pleased, the only price that had to be paid was involvement. Aziz has bad things happen because he doesn't govern his own fate, and Nuredin loses Zumurrud when he does not heed her advice. Yet, those who embrace life are rewarded. Even Nuredin eventually. Perhaps this is what soured Pasolini so, he knew his vividly realized fantasy was not to be. There are couple of key scenes of brutal violence in The Arabian Nights, at least one of which (a castration) is shocking enough to be in Salo. One could argue that maybe Pasolini's disillusionment was quite possibly born from the fact that even in an invented world where everyone was free to frolic and love as they saw fit, such attacks were necessary, because otherwise we might take our free will for granted.

The Canterbury Tales also has an English dub that was overseen by Pasolini. Though I generally shy away from dubs, this one makes sense, as the film was shot in England and features plenty of British actors. The Cockney accents fit the material. Additionally, though they don't play within the movie, there is a supplement with the English inserts Pasolini created for the written elements, like letters and Chaucer's book, seen in the film.

Each disc has its own handful of extras, with the lead bonus on The Decameron, Patrick Rumple's 25-minute visual essay "On The Decameron" being essential viewing early on. I kind of wish that I had watched it before watching the movie, because it both lays the groundwork for how Pasolini built his career up to the point of taking on Trilogy of Life, but also gives some insight into how The Decameron is structured and points out Pasolini's influences from the world of cinema and painting, including the material he borrowed from Giotto, the painter whose work becomes the tableau vivant in the last portion of the film.

This vivacious detour by Pier Paolo Pasolini makes for an interesting, albeit tragically brief, third act in an accomplished film career. Trilogy of Life is an anthology of anthologies, three movies based on famous collections of stories from classic literature: Boccaccio's The Decameron, Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, and the more mystical The Arabian Nights. Over the three films, Pasolini dissects human desire and our capacity for error, examining sin, indulgence, and punishment, building toward a morality where all would be free to love as they choose. The tales collected are funny, sensual, and sometimes poignant, all composed stylishly. Sure, the message doesn't always gel, and some sequences are clunky, but overall, Trilogy of Life is exactly the enjoyable life-affirming experience Pasolini set out for it to be, regardless of his own eventual disappointment in its thematic qualities.

For a complete rundown on the special features, read the full review at DVD Talk. Images here were taken from promotional materials and were not taken from the Blu-Ray under review.

RAFFAELLO MATARAZZO'S RUNAWAY MELODRAMAS - ECLIPSE SERIES 27

When Criterion was releasing their most recent Eclipse set, Raffaelo Matarazzo's Runaway Melodramas, a fellow Portland-based film critic, Shawn Levy, was wondering aloud about this relatively obscure filmmaker. Shawn tweeted, "Matarazzo gets one sentence each in Shipman's 'Story of Cinema' and Bondanella's 'Italian Cinema,' and four paragraphs in Liehm's 'Passion and Defiance.'" The implication is that, in all of cinema history, Matarazzo is little more than a footnote. Neither this assessment nor Shawn's posting is a dismissal, but a curious inquiry. Who was this mid-century Italian director that we were all about to be (re)introduced to?

According to the liner notes that accompany the set, Matarazzo was a journeyman filmmaker with a long line of mid-range studio pictures under his belt but little by way of mainstream success when he shifted gears in the late 1940s. Following the Neorealist remodel, Matarazzo dismantled and rebuilt his approach, marrying old-school sensibilities with new-school technique. Having helmed a lot of literary adaptations prior, the director decided to take the stuffy strictures of traditional melodrama and shoot them in the more naturalistic manner that De Sica and Rossellini were popularizing in post-War Italy.

How this all turned out is...well, it's interesting. Some of the tell-tale signs of the Neorealist style are immediately apparent, but so are the tropes and traditions of the dramatic format, including all the narrative coincidences and overwrought emotions that practically made "melodrama" a dirty word in the last couple of decades. Matarazzo's films work both sides of the class divide, and he shoots the upper classes and the lower in the same light. Sure, the rich stepmother in Tormento may live in a large apartment, but in keeping with the modern aesthetic, the director doesn't dress it up further, using instead the space as it is. He works out in the open, which allows him to circle and photograph life from its varying angles. He takes no real allegiance with one side or another, at least not as determined by social standing. His characters are more clearly defined by actions: good is good, and bad is bad.

The watershed movie for Matarazzo was 1949's Chains (Catene) (94 mins.) , which teamed him with the Titanus studios and actors Yvonne Sanson and Amedeo Nazzari. Sanson in particular was a revelation, a new find whose sensuality and beauty is immediately striking, and yet who fits easily into the roles of mother and devoted wife. In Chains, she plays Rosa, and Nazzari is her husband Guglielmo, a mechanic who owns his own shop and is looking to expand. They have two children, a young daughter named Angelina (Rosalia Randazzo) and a growing boy eager to be a man, Tonino (Gianfranco Magalotti). They are the typical working class nuclear family, the core unit of the decade to come.

Things change for the worse for them overnight, however, and the clan finds themselves stuck in a plot straight out of a pulp magazine. A car thief having engine trouble parks in Guglielmo's garage. His partner Emilio (Aldo Nicodemi) turns out to be Rosa's former fiancé, who went to war and as far as she knew, never came back. Seeing each other again awakens old feelings, and Emilio sticks around, insinuating himself into Guglielmo's business in hopes of getting Rosa back in his arms.

Matarazzo reveals himself master of the slow burn in Chains. Emotions simmer before they boil, and though his pacing is perhaps too languid at times, it does have its payoffs. A particularly powerful scene comes midway when Tonino sees hands clasped under a table and realizes that maybe his mother is up to no good. Matarazzo doesn't crank the emotion here, he just lets it settle. The boy watches, the reality of the scenario sinks in, the feeling takes root. The director uses "live" music to underscore this scene, as he does throughout the film. Neapolitan ballads are full of stories of lost love and pain, and Matarazzo isn't afraid to choose a number with obvious parallels to his story. Later in Chains, after Guglielmo has found himself in legal hot water, a Christmas Eve crooner hits the fugitive father right in the heart with his overwrought lyrics.

Music serves a similar role in Matarazzo's follow-up film, Tormento (1950; 98 minutes). In this feature, Roberto Murolo plays a singer who re-enters the heroine's life midway through the story, and his songs unknowingly detail every heartbreak and sacrifice she has to make in the film. Yvonne Sanson stars again, this time as Anna, a loving daughter and mother who has been victimized for years by her cartoonishly evil stepmother (Tina Lattanzi). After her husband-to-be (Nazzari again) is falsely convicted of a crime, Anna must take care of their child on her own. On his deathbed, her father (Annibale Betrone) makes his wife swear to take care of his granddaughter, but the mean old witch will only do so if Anna locks herself away in a home for wayward women. Like her husband, Anna is innocent of any sin, much less a crime--she doesn't even cheat with the musician, and loses her job because she won't bend over for her boss (Nicodemi)--but the young girl's failing health takes precedence over her reputation.

A theme of compromised piety and female sacrifice emerges in Matarazzo's work in both of these films. In Chains, Sanson's character can save her husband by accepting charges of adultery; in Tormento, she acquiesces to the stepmother's lies to give her daughter a better life. Matarazzo's technique, it seems, is to bring his heroine as low as he can, letting the audience suffer with her and testing our expectations, seeing how far he can strain our belief that things will turn out all right in the end. This, of course, only increases the relief when they do. It's a move that works better in the earlier film; the back half of Chains is full of predictable, yet tantalizing, plot machinations, whereas Tormento is more plodding, full of hand wringing and cruel proclamations. The coincidences pile on one after the other, including a well-timed heart attack that strikes like lightning. It's the kind of storytelling that can be delicious fun when given a more feverish tone, but Tormento is too restrained. When the dirty deeds are slowed down this much, it's hard not to note how overdone it all is. Tormento borders on self-parody.

Things move from the city to the country in 1952's Nobody's Children (I figli di nessuno) (96 mins.), and it's best to know going in that it and the last film in Runaway Melodramas, 1955's The White Angel (100 mins.), form a two-part epic of misery and heartbreak. This helps some of the storytelling leaps in Nobody's Children make sense--though others really are just jumpy moves from one plot point to the next without much in between. Of the quartet presented in this box, Nobody's Children has the choppiest third act.

Nobody's Children is set in a quarry owned by the Canali family. Countess Elisabeth (Francoise Rosay) has been running the family business since becoming a widow, though her son Count Guido (Nazzari) will take over one day. Not soon enough for him. He wants to change the poor conditions and replace the outmoded equipment, but the foreman Anselmo (Folco Lulli) is in the way. To keep his hold on everything, Anselmo interferes with more than just business life: he rats out Guido for having a love affair with Luisa (Sanson), the daughter of the quarry's security guard. Behind-the-scenes scheming to separate them works, and on the Countess' orders, Anselmo even kidnaps the baby that Guido knows nothing about--only for the house Luisa was hiding in to burn down, too, and compel Luisa to think the child died. Oh, and did I also mention that she has already faked her own suicide? Following the child's death, she becomes a nun, one cruelly assigned to serve in the town where her life went so wrong.

This is the most fevered set-up so far, and Nazzari and Sanson slip comfortably into their expected roles: he is arch and unyielding, she is constantly at her wit's end. The quarry backdrop makes the human foibles on display seem all the more primitive, though some of the interior sets look fake compared to the craggy exteriors. Folco Lulli makes for a particularly slimy villain, giving Matarazzo his most believable threat so far. Anselmo's greed even transcends class barriers: he inadvertently provides the link between the trod-upon miners and the benevolent boss, because as the middle man, Anselmo does the trodding. It's bizarre social commentary. We could all get together, regardless of position, but the rats among us keep us separated.

The second half of the film focuses on Bruno (Enrico Olivieri), the kidnapped child. Guido's mother has been paying for his boarding school tuition. As Bruno gets older, he begins to wonder about his past; the headmaster tells him he's an orphan, but the other kids tease him for being a bastard, and he wants to know who his secret benefactor is. He runs away to find Anselmo after discovering the crook's address and starts working in the quarry, right under his real family's nose. And since this is Matarazzo, his journey to his hometown is soundtracked by a troubadour with a guitar!

The script for Nobody's Children grows pretty convoluted, though the protracted, tense climax more than makes up for it. It's true cinema cliché: Bruno rushes to stop some dynamite from detonating while Anselmo and Guido wrestle in the dirt down below. It adds a ticking-clock element to Matarazzo's work that we haven't seen before, while also setting him up for the weepy sickbed scenes he loves so much. The concluding scenes are also a bit of a curveball, as they don't deliver what we might usually expect from this kind of picture. Then again, there is a sequel...

Note: It's pretty much impossible to write about the next film without giving away at least something about what happens in Nobody's Children. If you are the type that gets queasy and/or senstivie about spoilers, you might want to go pour yourself some milk and come back later.

The White Angel picks up the story by repeating the final scene of Nobody's Children. Distraught over Bruno's tragic fate, Luisa has transferred to another convent, leaving no forwarding address, while Guido is angry about the role his wife (Enrica Dyrell) played in the deception. Wanting to erase all reminders of the past, Guido dissolves his marriage and is about to get rid of the quarry, too, when another tragic twist forces him to get himself back together. While away on business, he spots a woman in the train across from his and runs to meet her. She is a showgirl named Lina, and she is a dead ringer for Luisa. (She should be, she's also played by Yvonne Sanson.) Guido strikes up a tenuous relationship with her, and narrowly avoids being conned by the girl and her rotten boyfriend (Philippe Hersent).

The plot takes a surprising turn when Lina is sent to prison for holding on to her boyfriend's counterfeit money. In jail, she has a pretty bad time of it, especially after she runs afoul of the sexy head prisoner (Flora Lillo). Matarazzo isn't above a little behind-bars lady fighting. Lina begins to see the light after her beatdown, and it's revealed she is pregnant with Guido's baby. Adding to the weirdness, the doctor who comes to take care of her works in the same church as Luisa and is taken aback by the resemblance. Knowing this is why Guido liked her, Lina asks to see her twin so that she can tell the nun her story.

The White Angel is probably the best movie in the box, and it provides the set with the appropriate closure. Not only does it circle back to the beginning by embracing the same pulpy plot style as Chains, but it provides the most believable transformation and sets things right in Guido and Luisa's world. Throughout the Runaway Melodramas set, Yvonne Sanson's characters have been striving for atonement, often seeking it through religious conversion and an affirmation of family. Though The White Angel would make no sense if its lovers came back together in the finale--Luisa is a nun, after all--where they end up is perfectly logical and also extremely satisfying. One could even interpret the situation as the man finally having to accept responsibility for his sins and do the right thing. The women no longer need to carry the burden unfairly.

It probably doesn't hurt that Matarazzo goes for broke in this last entry, either. He has shed most of the Neorealist clothes he had put on previously, and The White Angel is at his most "Hollywood." Brooding lovers, flamboyant criminals, heavy consequences, and a tone of swelling, heaving orchestration to carry it along. Speedboats crash in brutal storms, fires get started during daring prison escapes, and despite all the talk of God and Catholicism, yet another infant is born out of wedlock. (For four movies that lack any onscreen sex, there sure are a lot of babies!) It's still not as great as, say, a Douglas Sirk or Vincent Minnelli movie, but few are, really. Raffaelo Matarazzo's Runaway Melodramas ends better than it starts, and that in itself is its own kind of atonement.

Raffaello Matarazzo's Runaway Melodramas, the 27th entry in Criterion's long-running Eclipse series, gives us four obscure, little-seen films from a six-year span in one Italian director's career. Though the movies here sometimes suffer from convenient plotting and other shaky storytelling choices, the presence of two strong lead actors, and in particular Yvonne Sanson, keeps the drama riding high. In fact, keeping a core team throughout means we get to watch the filmmakers build something, honing their craft until they get it exactly right. The set particularly gets good the more scandalous the scripting, and fans of overwrought love stories will dig seeing these well-made Runaway Melodramas hit the familiar genre buttons.

For a complete rundown on the special features, read the full review at DVDTalk.