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Ervell E. Menezes on European stars who lit up the Hollywood firmament with their class and culture
Cinema Paradiso, that 1989 Best Foreign Film Oscar winner, amply illustrates the Hollywood influence on Italian cinema as it recounts that little boy’s influence with that projectionist. But it also shows how much Italian personalities have influenced Hollywood. That Anna number takes one back to the 1950s and Tengo, gana….. and the mercurial Silvano Mangano doing the honours. Chica dondevas, chica dondevas, el baiyo, the words of Anna, kept repeating in my ear right through the day. Which reminded me of the other Italian women who sang in Hollywood films. Sophia Loren sang with "ultima gusto" that catchy number Big Bang Bong in Houseboat or Gina Lollobrigida in Bueno Sera, Mrs Campbell. And Claudia Cardinale in the Pink Panther series with Peter Sellers and the Doctor I’m in Trouble song. How they provided zing and bounce to those films with their native earthiness. Loren was a good foil to the rather propah Cary Grant and Lollobrigida kept her three male stars, Telly Savalas, Peter Lawford and Phil Silvers, on their toes in Bueno Sera… Not that the Italian men were any less potent. There was Raf Vallone and Vittorio Gassman, both excellent specimens of manhood in Anna and therefore in Cinema Paradiso. We only get fleeting glances of them. They could be missed within the blink of an eye. Then there was Rozanno Brazzi with Some Enchanted Evening in South Pacific. What about Marcello Mastroianni and the numerous films he made with Sophia Loren, including Yesterday, Today, Tomorow and The Priest’s Wife when in the 1970s the Church was making a case for priests to marry. But there was a flood of Italian sirens in the 1950s. There was the impeccable Rosana Podesta with Kirk Douglas and Silvana Mangano in Ulysses (1954) and Helen of Troy (1955), again with Kirk Douglas. But among the earliest really intimate sex scenes in Hollywood is linked inextricably with Simone Signoret (wife of Yves Montand) in Room at the Top, based on a novel by John Baine. Halliwall’s Film & Video Guide 1998 describes it as the "first British film to take sex seriously." Then there was Anna Magnani, another vivacious woman whose love scenes with Anthony Quinn in Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969) are as much remembered as the wine-growing subject it dealt with. Hollywood used Quinn again, this time as a grandpa in a wine-growing drama with Brad Pitt called A Walk in the Clouds. Who can forget Sophia Loren’s sterling performance in Two Women which graphically records the plight of a woman and her daughter (played by Eleanor Brown) in war-torn Europe. And Florinda Bolkan and Rosanna Schifino in brief measures.
More recently, we had Greta Sacchi of Heat and Dust fame and later Joe Pesci and Marissa Tomei who were so good in My Cousin Vinny in the 1990s but the Italian connection isn’t as strong as it was in the 1950s and 1960s when they were churning Italian women almost on an assembly line. The 1970s also saw the rise of Virna Lisi but she vanished as quickly as she appeared. May be then it was the French invasion with Jacqueline Bisset and Michelle Pfeiffer who holding centrestage for nearly two decades. Catherine Deneuve was there earlier along with sex bomb Bridget Bardot or BB as she was known, and the evergreen Jeanne Moreau. There were the French studs like Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo to say nothing of the more mature Yves Montand and those golden oldies, Maurice Chevalier and Charles Boyer. They may have started young but were better known in their twilight years, especially when they were together in films like Fanny, which brought Leslie Caron into the limelight. One musn’t forget Anouk Aimee whose most memorable role was in Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman in the mid-1960s and more recently Genevieve Bujold who gave Anne of A Thousand Days the thrust it so richly deserved. There is Romy Schneider of The Swimming Pool fame who was also in Bertrand Tavernier’s Deathwatch where she is the victim of the media alongside Harvey Kietel. And the other Schneider, Maria, who shot to fame with Marlon Brando in that steamy The Last Tango in Paris. Among the men there is Gerard Depardieu, France’s leading star of the 1980s. Coming to the Germans, there was that blonde, leggy beauty, Marlene Dietrich, famous for those war films. One can still picture her in that beer-mugs thumping scene in Judgment at Nuremberg. She was Hollywood’s most famous German siren. Elke Sommer came a distant second and one has to think hard for more. In contrast, the men were quite a few, like Curt Jurgens, Hardy Kruger, Anton Deffring. The Latinos made quite a splash at this year’s Oscars night when the Spanish song, Al Otro Del Rio (The Other Side of the River from Motorcycle Diaries —Che Guevara’s travels in South America) won the Best Song Oscar. It was sung by that Spanish stud, Antonio Banderas, with Carlos Santana on the guitar and two comely Spanish women at the mike, Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz. Banderas acted in The Count of Monte Cristo and is much sought after as are Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz who was excellent opposite Richard Gere in the recent Shall We Dance, which is about all you wanted to know about ballroom dancing and didn’t know where to ask. The Spanish film, The Sea Inside, on one’s legal right to die, won the Best Foreign Film Oscar (like Cinema Paradiso did in 1989) so it was a memorable Oscars’ night for the biggest colonisers. How can we forget that screen goddess, the Swedish Greta Garbo, who was wrapped in mystique and her reclusive latter years that made her even more elusive. She was one of a kind, no doubt, but it was the paparazzi that contributed much to that image. But these Europeans surely gave Hollywood the character and body it so richly deserved. One can argue about the superiority of European cinema, be it the French New Wave or the Italian neo-realists or the East European masters over Hollywood and there will not be many detractors. After all, European cinema was about life, not mere entertainment, and the closest Hollywood came to them was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the so-called Decade of Change when the moon-landing, flower power and student protests gave it a new dimension altogether and bred directors of the calibre of Mike Nichols, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola and George Roy Hill who could rub shoulders with the best of the Eurpeans like Vittorio de Sica or Francois Truffaut or Ingmar Bergman. True, Hollywood money was the greatest attraction and for that reason British cinema was almost hijacked by the Americans but these European artistes more than pulled their weight in the Hollywood firmament. |
