Sophia Loren

Pauline Small

Description

In films from Houseboat to The Millionairess to Two Women, Sophia Loren established herself as an actress whose stardom spanned Italy, Europe, and finally Hollywood. Hers was a highly original rise to fame for a European film actress, and in Sophia Loren, Pauline Small highlights a unique career which transcended Italian film culture.

            Sophia Loren is the first book to explore in detail the transfer of Loren’s stardom from Italy to Hollywood and the reasons for her American success, particularly during the 1960s. Looking individually at Loren’s major films and drawing on rare archival materials in Italy, Small provides a thorough exploration of the commercial and cultural forces that combined to ensure Loren’s enduring star status.

Perfect for scholars and aficionados of 1960s Italian and American film, Sophia Loren is a fascinating look at one of the major personalities of modern cinema.

Sujets

• Women
• Película fotográfica
• Biography
• Screenwriting
• General officer
• Woman
• Cinema of Italy
• The Women
• General
• Autobiography
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 06 septembre 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841503288
• Langue: English

Extrait

Sophia Loren
Moulding the Star
Sophia Loren
Moulding the Star
Pauline Small
First published in the UK in 2009 by Intellect Books, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2009 by Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2009 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Holly Rose Copy-editor: Rebecca Vaughn-Williams
Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire
ISBN 978-1-84150-234-2 EISBN 978-1-84150-328-8
Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.
C ONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1 Why Sophia?
Chapter 2 Loren and Ponti
Chapter 3 Loren and Hollywood
Chapter 4 Loren and De Sica
Chapter 5 Loren and Mastroianni
References
Appendices
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I have been assisted in writing this book in a number of ways. I acknowledge the financial support of the British Academy, the University of London Central Research Fund, the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film and the Film Department of Queen Mary University of London. My research was greatly facilitated by the expertise of Sean Delaney and all the staff of the British Film Institute Library in London, Elisabetta Chiarotti of the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome, and the staff of the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome. I am most grateful to Mary Wood, Brian Richardson, Chris Wagstaff, Adalgisa Giorgio and Judith Bryce for their support and advice on my work, and my colleagues at Queen Mary, with whom it is such a pleasure to work. I wish to thank specifically Peter Evans, for reading and suggesting amendments to preliminary drafts of the manuscript; Mina Fabbri, for giving me access to her superb private collection of Sophia Loren materials, and for the warm hospitality she and her family gave me in their home; Pier Luigi Raffaelli, who patiently initiated me into the labyrinth of Italian government film archives; and to my family, for living with me (and Sophia) through the long period of preparing and writing the book. Without them, it would never have been completed successfully. Thanks are also due to Intellect Books who took on the publishing of this project and brought it to fruition. Naturally, any errors the book contains are mine alone.
NOTE : Sophia or Sofia ? As explained in Chapter Two, Sofia Scicolone at first took the professional name Sofia Lazzaro, then changed it again, still at an early stage in her career, to Sophia Loren. In general Italian contributors, including De Sica, Giuseppe Marotta and Gian Luigi Rondi, repeatedly persist in using the form Sofia . When quoting from their writings, I have retained the version they used of the actress s name. This confusion is also not helped by the fact that Loren plays key roles in two of her major films ( The Gold of Naples and Scandal in Sorrento ) as characters with the name of Donna Sofia . Thus the shifting between Sophia and Sofia , found throughout the book, is attributable to the variations present in the range of sources consulted on Sophia Loren s career. All translations from Italian are by the author.

Sophia as Nives, the Woman of the River . Stills Department, Cineteca Nazionale, Rome.

Sophia as Cesira, the antithesis of the pin-up. Stills Department, Cineteca Nazionale, Rome.
1
W HY S OPHIA?
Why Sophia? A study of the career of Sophia Loren has intrinsic interest - she is after all the nearest the nation has to an Italian icon (Gundle 1995: 367) - but it is also important for the insights it affords into the era in which her image was forged. Hers is a career full of contradictions. She came from the poorest and most humble origins, yet came to be associated with glamour and great elegance. In much of her early career she made comedies, yet in her international career few of her films fit that category. Although considered an international star, a retrospective film season of the films of Sophia Loren is virtually unheard of. While the international reputation of postwar Italian cinema is largely based on arthouse productions, Loren s Italian output is wholly defined by the popular genres of comedy and melodrama. Although now seen as highly popular, there were periods of her career when she was vilified, particularly in the Italian press, for her marriage to Carlo Ponti and for the difficulties they later encountered with the Italian tax authorities. And finally, although she is rightly judged to be the one Italian actor of the postwar generation who made a success of her Hollywood career, few of the films that she made in Hollywood had box-office success either in Italy or in the international market. Like any artist, there are two dimensions to her story, the personal and the professional. Loren is generally thought of as a star well known to her public. The bibliography of this book lists numerous biographies of her, as well as books she has authored on beauty, cooking and fashion. From earliest years Loren has fed information about her life to the press, regularly offering individual and syndicated interviews to tell her story. At the same time there has always been huge media coverage of her public image highlighting her many appearances at film festivals in Cannes and Berlin, on-set reports on her films in Hollywood and on location in London, the Oscar successes, and major events in what was supposedly her private life - marriage to the producer Carlo Ponti, and the birth of her two children. It is a type of coverage that has largely neglected to focus on the very considerable importance of her professional career, to the extent that it seems as if she has not merited serious consideration as an artist. This book sets to redress the balance, to fill a major gap in our understanding of Italy s most prominent and enduring star by uncovering and analysing a wealth of information about how she achieved that stardom. It is a book that studies the films of Sophia Loren, but the films are taken also as a means of assessing the context - cultural, historical, industrial - within which her career emerged, the years 1950-64, when the star image of Sophia Loren was moulded.
Sophia Loren is not the only European film artist whose star image has been largely neglected. Indeed, a range of critics have noted the more general absence of a sustained body of analytical work on European stars. Ginette Vincendeau terms star studies in European cinema a forgotten category (1998: 445), while Andy Willis points out that the concentration [on Hollywood performers] has overshadowed the operation of stardom within other markets (2004: 3-4). The hegemony of Hollywood in the film industry itself in turn gives a certain logic to the domination in critical and biographical analysis of Hollywood stars. It also has to be acknowledged that the star system began as one of the major strategies in the marketing of films in early Hollywood (Butler 1998: 345) and as such to a degree remains anchored in the Hollywood system. Italian film-making, particularly in the world market, has built its reputation on arthouse cinema: as a result, in critical terms, much greater importance has been afforded to film directors as the defining presence. One could even argue that critics have given the star treatment to directors of the calibre of Fellini, Visconti and Antonioni rather than to the actors who appeared in their films. In relation to British cinema Bruce Babington argues in a vein similar to Willis and Vincendeau that on indigenous stars there is strangely little significant writing (2001: 3). Babington notes that in Stars (1979), the work of Richard Dyer that gave fresh impetus to the field of star studies, Dyer himself addresses, briefly, the problematics of applying a theory based on Hollywood stars to other cinemas (1979: 4). Babington continues:
[Dyer] writes that he believed that the theorising and methodology underpinning his book are broadly applicable to stars of other cinemas, provided that the specificities of these other places where stars are to be found would always have to be respected (Dyer 1979: 4). In other words, the institutions of film stardom exhibit major constants running across different film cultures, but each national cinema produces different inflections of them. (Babington 2001: 4)
One of the main aims of this book will be to analyse the career of Sophia Loren in relation to the inflection that was the Italian star system of the 1950s, when her career began; and, by clarifying the distinctiveness of that system, to reach an understanding of Loren s career through a focus on the film industry from which her career emerged. In keeping with other European stars, Loren s place in the national film industry - her Italian stardom - derives from a set of structures radically different from those of classical Hollywood. Industrial patterns in the European film market have always been much less stable and much less straightforward to summarize than the Hollywood model. Ginette Vincendeau characterizes European production in general as small-scale, fragmented and disorganised (1998: 442) while Barbara Corsi describes the Italian film industry as a random mix of high-minded projects and improvised adventures, developed in the spirit of a game of chance, as if filmmaking was the equivalent of playing roulette (2001: 10). As a consequence, the study of the career of an individual European star requires close reference to the frequently shifting economic conditions that prevailed at the time of production. As we shall see, in the era following the Second World War the Italian film industry itself evolved with remarkable rapidity and at the same time was modified sub