{"id":2046,"date":"2010-05-14T15:32:29","date_gmt":"2010-05-14T15:32:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2046"},"modified":"2010-05-14T15:32:29","modified_gmt":"2010-05-14T15:32:29","slug":"gelosia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/reviews\/gelosia\/","title":{"rendered":"Gelosia"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Gelosia\"
Gelosia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

1953
\nOriginal running time: 90 mins
\nItaly
\nBased on the novel ‘Il marchese Roccaverdina’ by Luigi Capuana (1901)
\nAn Exelsa Film production
\nDirector: Pietro Germi
\nStory & screenplay: Giuseppe Berto, Pietro Germi, Giuseppe Mangione
\nCinematography: Leonida Barboni
\nMusic: Carlo Rustichelli
\nEditor: Rolando Benedetti
\nArt director: Carlo Egidi
\nCast: Marisa Belli (Agrippina<\/em>), Erno Crisa (Antonio, the Marquis of Roccaverdina<\/em>), Alessandro Fersen (don Silvio<\/em>), Liliana Gerace (Countess Zosima<\/em>), Vincenzo Musolino (Rocco Criscione<\/em>), Grazia Spadaro (Mamma Graziam the housekeeper<\/em>), Maresa Gall (Santa<\/em>), Gustavo de Nardo (Neli Casaccio<\/em>), Amedeo Trilli (the Marshall<\/em>), Loriana Varoli (Cristina<\/em>), Gustavo Serena (the doctor<\/em>), Giovanni Martella (Salvatore<\/em>), Assunta Radico (Aggripina’s mother<\/em>), Pasquale Martino (the Commissioner<\/em>), Paola Borboni (the Baroness, Antonio’s Aunt<\/em>)<\/p>\n

Pietro Germi’s 1953 film Gelosia <\/strong>isn’t perhaps one of his best known or even more accomplished works, but it’s still a well constructed and extremely moving production that stands head and tails above much of the Italian cinema being made at the time.\u00a0 \u00a0Based on Luigi Capuana’s novel Marchesa di Roccaverdina, an established classic which had previously been filmed by Ferdinando Maria Poggioli in 1942, it’s a heady mix of melodrama and murder, not a million miles away from Germi’s extremely successful In nome della legge <\/strong>(48), which also dealt with the complex relationships between the landed gentry and the impoverished tenant farmers in Sicily.<\/p>\n

When former ladies-man Rocco Criscione (Vincenzo Musolino) is murdered on his wedding day, the most likely suspect is Neli Casaccio (Gustavo De Nardo), a peasant who had a previous history with of arguing with the dead man.\u00a0 After a protracted court case, Casaccio is found guilty and sentenced to 30 years in jail, but the truth is that he he’s an innocent man.\u00a0 The true killer is a local aristocrat, the Marquis of Roccaverdina (Erno Crisa), who had been having a tempestuous affair with Rocco’s new wife, Agrippina (Marisa Belli) and, consumed by jealousy at the prospect of losing her, had been driven to commit the crime.<\/p>\n

\"Erno
Erno Crisa starts feeling guilty in Gelosia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The narrative then breaks into a lengthy flashback, told as the Marquis confesses his guilt to a priest, Don Silvio (Alessandro Fersen).\u00a0 It recounts the story of how he met Agrippina – she had come with her poor family to help with the olive harvest – and how the two of them fell in love.\u00a0 Naturally, it turns out to be a relationship which meets with disapproval from both his wealthy associates and her fellow workers.\u00a0 So the Marquis comes up with a plan that will ensure they can still be together but also quell all the gossip: she must marry Rocco, his trusted right hand man, but it will be a marriage in name only and she’ll be free to continue as his lover.\u00a0 Unfortunately, he then begins suspecting that the two of them might, really, be falling in love, and his scheming begins to unravel.<\/p>\n

This is a much more feverish affair than most of Germi’s films, and with its story of doomed love and protagonists who are attempting to escape their own, inevitable fate, it does feel rather as though it was a deliberate attempt to tie into the immensely popular melodrama genre of the time.\u00a0 As a result, it can be somewhat hard to stomach for those who incline towards more subtle colour palettes; the passion is ratcheted up to the max in a singularly Italian fashion, giving it all a very operatic feel that isn’t lessened any by the extraordinarily lush soundtrack by Carlo Rustichelli.\u00a0 By the time the final credits roll one protagonist has gone mad and died, the other has been isolated from their family and left heartbroken, and all but the most unresponsive of viewers is left feeling as though they’ve been put through some kind of emotional ringer.<\/p>\n

Germi is often lumped in with the neo-realists, mainly because of his interest in the contemporary and the use of authentic locations and extras.\u00a0 Although this has a historical setting, it doesn’t feel too far removed from the Sicily of the 1950s, and a lot of the social concerns – the exploitation of the peasants by the aristocracy, the intractability of social conventions, the conservatism of rural Italy – were thoroughly contemporary.\u00a0 It’s interesting that Capuana was one of the leading lights in the Verist movement of the late 1800s, a group of writers who advocated modern as opposed to classical stories and the use of everyday language and simple narratives, which doesn’t seem all that removed from the arguments of the neo-realists when it comes down to it.<\/p>\n

\"Marisa
Marisa Bella in Gelosia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

From a technical point of view, it’s all very accomplished.\u00a0 The locations are very well shot and it all feels a million miles removed from the sometimes shaky look of Italian films of only five years previously.\u00a0 Certain moments have an almost gothic tinge to them, especially once the Marquis, losing his mind with guilt, begins hearing voices and staring fixedly out of the window. (Curiously, this actually revolves aroung a kind of ‘crumbling vernerable family reaching the end of their line’ narrative that also featured in many gothic novels and films, not least Mario Bava’s La maschera del demonio <\/strong>(61)<\/p>\n

Among the cast are two actors who died young: Erno Crisa and Vincenzo Musolino.\u00a0 Crisa was a graduate of the fotoromanzi who flirted with stardom in the fifties and died in 1968, Musolino a character actor who later directed a couple of not-bad spaghetti westerns (Chiedi perdono a Dio… non a me<\/strong> (68) and Quintana<\/strong> (69)) before dying at the age of just 39 in 1969.\u00a0 Marisa Belli, the female lead, is a very striking if not exactly beautiful lady, and she does an OK job, but her film career never really amounted to anything much.\u00a0 Curiously, she also appeared in another adaptation of Marchesa di Roccaverdina, made for Italian TV in 1972.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pietro Germi’s 1953 film Gelosia isn’t perhaps one of his best known or even more accomplished works, but it’s still a well constructed and extremely moving production that stands head and tails above much of the Italian cinema being made at the time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[781,780,782,779],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2046"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2046"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2050,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2046\/revisions\/2050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}