MOVIES
Gillo Pontecorvo: An Early Document From a True Radical
By BILL DESOWITZ
HERE was a time, back in the 60's, when ideology mattered. Not just in politics, but in movies, too. And no filmmaker was more ideological than the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo, who left little doubt about his sympathies when he depicted the 1954 Algerian uprising against the French in "The Battle of Algiers" (1966) and a slave revolt on a Portuguese-held sugar island in "Burn!" (1969).
People still marvel at "Algiers," which earned Mr. Pontecorvo the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. A landmark film that spoke to the radicalism of the times, it combined fictional characters with documentary techniques to give what was then recent history the punch of an action thriller. And "Burn!," which starred Marlon Brando as a 19th-century English agent provocateur in the Caribbean, was even more belligerent in its condemnation of the European colonial adventure.
With Mr. Pontecorvo a hero of the left for his politics - "The Battle of Algiers" was reportedly a favorite among the Black Panthers - and of the critics for his Rossellini-meets-Eisenstein filmmaking, the movies were staples of the 60's and early-70's art-house circuit. So it's odd that Mr. Pontecorvo's debut feature, "The Wide Blue Road" (1957), has never been released theatrically in the United States - this despite the presence in the cast of two established foreign-film stars, Yves Montand and Alida Valli, and a gripping story about a politically torn fishing village in Italy.
A valentine to Roberto Rossellini and the whole Italian neorealist movement, "The Wide Blue Road" was overlooked until 1999, when the Film Society of Lincoln Center showed it as part of a retrospective honoring Mr. Pontecorvo, who made his last feature film, "Ogro," in 1979. One person in the audience was the Oscar-winning director of "The Silence of the Lambs," Jonathan Demme, and his efforts on behalf of the film have resulted in its belated theatrical premiere, on Wednesday at Film Forum.
"On the surface, it's a simple story about a fishing village," Mr. Demme said by telephone from Paris, where he is shooting "The Truth About Charlie" (a reworking of "Charade"). "But the use of locations and the acting is extraordinary. This is no curio; this is a great, great tragic story. It brought me to tears. And what can you say about Yves? He was such an ultra- testosterone romantic male. I just couldn't believe it when I heard that the film had never been distributed in the U.S. It was shocking, and I was compelled to do something about it."
Mr. Pontecorvo, 81, speaking by telephone from Rome, where he lives, said he was pleased at the turn of events, even though he originally hated the film because of the commercial concessions he had to make to get it produced. "I was so sad that it didn't turn out the way I wanted," he said. "I wanted to shoot it in black and white, and I felt Alida was too exquisite to play the wife of a fisherman, and I felt it had too much melodrama. But Rossellini told me: `Don't be stupid! This is only your first film. It's not that bad. There will be more.' "
In a powerful performance, Montand plays an outlaw fisherman torn between his aspirations and his commitment to his struggling community. Himself the son of Italian immigrants to France, Montand seems right at home as a working-class maverick who uses illegal bombs instead of nets to catch fish. Why use nets, he argues, when you can make a more secure living with dynamite?
For Mr. Pontecorvo, a steadfast Communist, the appropriate solution to this conflict between the individual and the collective is clear. But he gives both points of view their due. He provides everyone a sympathetic or vulnerable moment or two, while pushing Montand's bomb-throwing antics to dangerous extremes.
"I knew photography and I had done documentaries, but I was far from the approach I would use later," Mr. Pontecorvo said. "It was very natural for me to try to tell the true sentiments of simple people. Socially and on a personal level, I try to show what is most progressive and right."
Mr. Pontecorvo grew up in Pisa, Italy, one of 10 children of a wealthy Jewish industrialist. He fled the anti-Semitism of his country in the 30's during Mussolini's reign and moved to France, where he continued his music studies (he has helped to compose most of his film scores, though not that of "The Wide Blue Road") while pursuing a career in journalism. As a Paris correspondent for a few Italian newspapers, he met Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky and Jean-Paul Sartre, a writer whose politics pushed him further to the left.
But politics were suddenly eclipsed when Mr. Pontecorvo saw Rossellini's "Paisan" (1946) back in Italy after the war. Thunderstruck, he immediately went out and bought a 16-millimeter camera and started shooting documentaries. Of the influence of Rossellini, he said: "To see his films is to be nearer to the truth. That's what I've always strived for."
While "The Wide Blue Road" honors Mr. Pontecorvo's roots in neorealism, its dark social and political overtones point the way to the New Wave that would soon follow in France and Italy. The fisherman is mired in a harsh life, trying to make it a little more comfortable for his wife and children (including a daughter played by Federica Ranchi). There is little joy in Montand's angst-ridden face, except when he is at sea with his two sons. The actor's charismatic charm is submerged in the fisherman's fear, his obsession with failure.
Although Montand had already created a stir a few years earlier, when he played the cocky demolitions expert in "The Wages of Fear" (1953), that performance doesn't quite prepare one for his depth in "The Wide Blue Road." The character may seem to have stepped out of one film into the other without missing a beat, what with his facility for handling explosives. But Montand's face has that haunted, pained expression of melancholy that would only become familiar later, in films like "Z" (1969), "Vincent, Francois, Paul and the Others" (1974) and "Manon of the Spring" (1986).
Although the glamorous Ms. Valli was forced on him, Mr. Pontecorvo had to persuade his producer, Maleno Malenotti, to cast the up-and-coming Montand, who was also a cabaret star but not well known in Italy. "Yves was such a showman," Mr. Pontecorvo remembered. "He was not only very patient with me, but he served as my assistant. He would do anything you asked. He couldn't swim and was afraid at first, but we attached a rope to him and he made it look so easy with that graceful body of his."
Mr. Pontecorvo, who recently watched "The Wide Blue Road" for the first time in 20 years, has softened his initial objections to the film. It's not hard to see why. While black and white would have undoubtedly brought him closer to the gritty neorealism he adores, his use of color is often striking, as in a chilling underwater scene. Having been forced to sink his boat in order to elude the Coast Guard commander (Peter Carsten) who is obsessed with his capture, the fisherman later returns to retrieve his valuable red motor. Bleeding from the extreme depths and nearly out of breath, Montand finally manages to remove the motor and attach a rope to raise it from the sea.
As for the title, Mr. Pontecorvo suggests that it refers to the "image of a boat, in late afternoon, drawing a line in the sea, a trail." But the sea is often green rather than blue, and it can be serene or it can be lonely, depending on the fisherman's state of mind.
Mr. Pontecorvo has resigned himself to the film's melodrama, which extends to two romances and multigenerational conflicts among the fishermen as well as the ramifications of Montand's unorthodox harvesting technique for his own family. When it was pointed out to Mr. Pontecorvo that even his idol, Rossellini, resorted to melodrama in "Open City," he admitted that it has its place. "It's a difficult balance between melodrama and reality," he said. "As long as you honestly communicate the emotions underneath."
IT was, Mr. Demme said, the humanism of Mr. Pontecorvo's approach and the sheer cinematic beauty of the imagery that so deeply moved him when he first saw the film. He went hunting for a United States distributor who would take on "The Wide Blue Road" and found Milestone Films, a haven for orphaned movies that had recently reissued "The Sorrow and the Pity."
Mr. Demme's involvement didn't stop there. He lent his name to the reissue, along with Dustin Hoffman, a friend of Mr. Pontecorvo's since the 60's, thus providing the prestige to help ensure a proper preservation and rejuvenation of the Ferraniacolor film by Studio Cine in Italy (financed by Milestone and partially underwritten by Turner Classic Movies).
"I've always considered Gillo one of the great deities of film, and was so knocked out by `The Wide Blue Road,' " Mr. Demme said. "It deserves to be seen, even if it's nearly 50 years overdue."