At the time, 1958 must have seemed like a rather uninspiring year for Italian cinema. For one thing, none of the big name directors – your Fellini, Antonioni, Rossellini, De Sica or Visconti – had any releases in the year. Instead, the most anticipated films were those from equally important, but sometimes less respected figures: Alberto Lattuada, Pietro Germi, Antonio Pietrangeli, Gianni Puccini etc. And in all honesty even these turned out to be among the lesser works of the directors concerned.
Instead, the field was open to a different breed of filmmakers, and they seized the opportunity with both hands. The biggest artistic success was Mario Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street, which won a best foreign language Oscar nomination. While Monicelli was of the same generation as Fellini and Antonioni, he was very much grounded in the comedy genre, and although his films had previously been lauded, his work feels lighter and less weighty than the other directors (I mean this in a wholly positive way). La sfida, meanwhile, which won several local and festival awards, marked the arrival of Francesco Rosi; it wasn’t his first film, but it was the one that really announced his entrance to the field. Elsewhere, it’s notable that a number of directors who would go on to become heavyweights of the future – Dino Risi, Luigi Comencini, Franco Zefirelli, Franco Rossi – were also making either their debuts or perfecting their trade.
But possibly the most important film was one that nobody would have bet on at the beginning of the year: Pietro Francisci’s Hercules, which became a huge success around the world. Hercules was a wholly populist film, and while Italy had produced crowd-pleasers for many years, most of them – the melodramas, comedies and musicals – had been focused more on domestic audiences than those abroad. Over the following years, though, this would shift as producers saw the potential of raking in huge amounts of cash from international distribution. The legacy of Hercules, it could be argued, went beyond kick-starting the peplum genre, it also marked a shift in attitude as the industry (or the lower budget parts of the industry) began looking outward. One example of this is in the swashbucklers, or cape and sword films, that had already been being made for some years in Italy: with some notable exceptions, they’d previously been rather staid, dialogue heavy affairs, lacking action and with a somewhat stagey feel. Over the next few years, though, this would become less and less acceptable, while choreography and spectacle would become increasingly important. It’s almost as though, seeing the potential of competing with American films (in particular), the industry had to match them in terms of production values and style.
This was a slow process, though, and in 1958 Hercules was still unusual, with much of the cinema being produced remaining similar to that of the years preceding it.
Genres
- Comedy: 55
- Drama: 27
- Historical Adventure: 10
- Documentary: 7
- Science Fiction and Fantasy: 4
- Adventure: 4
- Peplum: 3
- Musicals: 2
- Giallo / Thriller: 1
(We’ll work through these as we work through the films. I’ve included ‘Sentimental’ films in drama (there were 4 of them)).
Co-productions
There were 59 international co-productions (which counts for just over half the films made), of which 28 were majority Italian productions. Italian involvement in the other 32 was often minimal. It’s interesting that German and French co-productions were likely to have less Italian involvement than Spanish co-productions, which were often more Italian than Spanish.
- Co-productions with France: 39 (of which 15 were majority Italian)
- Co-productions with Spain 16 (of which 13 were majority Italian)
- Co-productions with Germany (of which 2 were majority Italian)